Lew Rockwell Institute

Whenever I get the infrequent opportunity to walk the wild deserted Cape Cod outer Atlantic beach in the early morning, I exult in the sea’s silent roar. It extinguishes the cacophonous dreck that fills the air of everyday life in a society whose depravity accelerates faster than shore birds can fly.

This morning, because there was a little rain and rough surf the beach was deserted except for the usual assortment of birds. So we sauntered the long strand for an hour until we finally encountered a person as the sun flashed from behind the clouds. Inside the cocoon of the crashing waves and the whistling of the wind, with the clouds blowing fast, the seals just voiceless heads bobbing in the shallow water, and the birds hushed by the waves’ wild roar, a strange silence settled over me. I felt cloistered in a place of peace, similar to William Butler Yeats’ sentiment in his poem, The Lake Isle of Innisfree: “And I shall have some peace there, for peace comes dropping slow,/ Dropping from the veils of the morning . . . .”

Silence. Without it, we are bereft of meaningful words and end up talking repetitive gibberish, small talk. There are many people who can’t shut up; their jabbering is a disease. Tranquilized with trivia, they lose their ability to communicate.

Silence is a word gravid with multiple meanings: for many a threat; for others a nostalgic evocation of a time rendered obsolete by technology; for others still a sentence to boredom; and for some, devotees of the ancient arts of reading, writing, and contemplation, a word of profound, even sacred importance. As the ancient Greeks knew so well, musing is the music of the artist’s heart.

Writing is at first, like an imaginary friend, a silent companion. Conceived by its author in silence, it asks to be received in the same spirit. And silence – contrary to the popular notion that it, like nothing, is nothing, a void, a lack of something – is the receptive spirit that encompasses all the meanings words can give. That silence is golden is an aphorism we have all heard but rarely heed. Nevertheless, it is out of that great unknown that words are born; great writing is the child of silence.

So too reading should be a venture into that unknown, an adventure upon which one embarks with eyes and ears wide open and the constant chatter of one’s private “thoughts” silenced.

But silence, like so much else in today’s world, including human beings, is on the endangered-species list . Another rare bird of flamboyant plumage and very like a black swan – “Rara avis in terris nigroque similima cyno” in Juvenal’s words – is slowly disappearing from our midst. The poison of noise is killing it.

And out of this lack of silence comes the silence of lack, the inability to use words to communicate meaningfully. As sung so wonderfully by Simon and Garfunkel in The Sounds of Silence:

And in the naked light, I saw
Ten thousand people, maybe more
People talking without speaking
People hearing without listening
People writing songs that voices never shared
No one dared
Disturb the sound of silence

Ironically, as books have become more plentiful, silence has become scarcer. Most books now arrive with the clatter and bombast of the same advertising hype used to sell laxatives and pain-killing drugs. And they are received in the same spirit, often producing similar results. These loud arrivals often make the so-called best seller lists (as if number seven on that list could be the “best” seller along with number one), a curious place where quality is measured by quantity and the noise of publicity pays off handsomely. Many of these books are what D. H. Lawrence called “printed toys,” loud little devices that spin and spin and always seem to end up where they started – nowhere.

When I speak of noise I am not primarily speaking of the din we associate with city life: cars, trucks, sirens, etc. Such noise, alas, is heard even in small towns where birdsong often disappears behind the grinding of gears. That kind of noise is hard to completely avoid and it is in any case the least disruptive of the silence I have in mind. There is another kind of noise that is self-imposed, and whose purpose, consciously or not, is to make sure one is not “caught” by silence. That, as those who flee from silence know, can be dangerous to one’s reigning assumptions about self and the world. They prefer the comfort of noise because it silences the imagination, and imagination, as William Blake has told us, is the world of eternity, and to the eyes of the person of imagination, nature is imagination itself. It is only through the eyes of imagination that one can slip away and hope to break loose from the mind-forg’d manacles of convention and propaganda that society places on us all from birth.

Just this morning, very early, I read an essay that brought this home to me once again. In “Psychic Treason,” Curtis White begins by telling us that he is living in a world that no longer exists, a sentiment that should ring true for most people in this chaos of everything world. He tells us how his world changed:

I once lived in a vital world whose only limit was no-limit, ‘free frame of reference,’ as the Haight Street Diggers thought. It was a world of beatniks, Buddhists, hippies, free-jazz poets, pacifists, wandering guitar soloists, postmodern fabulists, soulful anarchists, and collaborative maunderers. It was also a world of close readers, deconstructors, and afficionados of the beautiful, all performing in the heady atmosphere of refusal, a general strike of the Imagination.

This world and its open assumptions about possibility slowly dissipated over a thirty-year period. As the late Sly Stone put it, ‘The possibility of possibility was leaking out.’ It seemed quite dead by the millennium, our collective mind aspirated into glass pipettes by techno-oligarchs and assorted others who bore us no love. We were left with Data World, the Great American Smartphone Society. We have been priced out of cities, so there are no avenues to barricade, no ‘scenes’ where artists and musicians can hang out, and our universities are in ruin, occupied by ‘ indentured students,’ in Elizabeth Tandy Shermer’s telling phrase, studying only what the boss wants. And what the boss wants has nothing to do with poets. Even at Canterbury’s Christ Church University, the destination for Chaucer’s pilgrims in The Canterbury Tales, poetry is ‘no longer viable in the current climate.’

White’s world is not the world everyone once inhabited, as others can attest. Everyone’s world of yesterday is somewhat different, but each contains nostalgic images that not just draw us back but forward – an imaginative nostalgia for a future that sustains the heart, even when the past one remembers never existed in pure form. White writes:

Happily, it will always be possible to create stories that liberate us from the stories of our masters. This is what William Blake called for when he wrote in Jerusalem (1815), ‘I must create a system or be enslaved by another man’s; I will not reason and compare: my business is to create.’

. . . . Blake’s quote is “heavy,” as hippies used to say, because it asks, as Tolstoy put it, “What is to be done?” The answer to that question might simply be “tell better stories.” Live through better stories. Live through stories that will be understood in an as yet unimagined world, just past the next bend in the river, where the Imagination lives in all its inherited riches. So, let us be Nietzschean, all too Nietzschean, without fear or giddiness, and seek liberation for ourselves and others.

We all know people who go from morning till night, day in and day out without ever pausing to enter the sounds of silence. One doesn’t have to look for them; technology has made them the rule. They move like techno-ghosts up and down the lanes and byways, seashells stuck in their ears (“And in her ears the little Seashells, the thimble radios tamped tight, and an electronic ocean of sound, of music and talk and music and talk coming in, coming in on the shore of her unsleeping mind,” Ray Bradbury writes in Fahrenheit 451, published in 1953) or rectangular vibrators sticking out of their back pockets, proud symbols of the manacles that hold them captive to their minds’ bedlam. They drift through their lives in the cocoon of technological noise  They are informed, with it, tuned in – to everything but the life of their own souls. The real world passes them by. Always ready to photograph something that they do not see, they ignore that rare bird of flamboyant plumage that sits on their heads, singing plaintively. They may even read books, those candy-colored non-book books filled with millions of meaningless words, distracting little noises that allow them to avoid the silence that might force then to confront self-knowledge that is the stuff of great books, true art.

For the art of writing implies the art of reading. The writer creates and the reader recreates; both demand silence, the cessation of all noise that serves to prevent true thought. The machines must be turned off. “Our inventions,” Thoreau noted, “are wont to be pretty toys, which distract our attention from serious things.”

It is not hard to turn a switch or pull a plug; the hard part is wanting to. Harder still, but equally necessary, is the quieting of the mind, the silencing of the incessant internal chatterboxes that accompany us everywhere and prevent us from experiencing the world.

For in the end one cannot hear or see the world or the penetrating truths of great writing unless, like the artists who create in silence, we turn off the noise of the social world and enter the silence. Only then, will one’s imaginary silent companion begin to sing.

In her bittersweet memoir A Freewheelin’ Time, Suze Rotolo, Bob Dylan’s girlfriend in Greenwich Village in the early 1960s, echoes Curtis White’s point about how the past is as much about the imagination and the future as the past. Her book is equally about the plight of young women in those days and the vibrancy of the Village’s creative community as about her relationship with Dylan. Writing in the early 2000s before her untimely death, she notes:

Greenwich Village bohemia exists no more. It was the public square of the twentieth century for the outsiders, the mad ones, and the misfits. Today all that remains are the posters, fliers, and signs preserved on the walls as a reminder of that bygone era when rents were cheap and New York replaced Paris as the destination for the creative crowd.

Those who feel they are not part of the mainstream are always somewhere, however. Greenwich Village is a calling. Though it is now priced out of its physical space, as a state of mind, it will never be out of bounds. . . . The creative spirit finds a way.

That way is found whenever and wherever one enters the cocoon of silence to hear the rare bird of flamboyant plumage sing. It is then we can live through better stories as we tell them.

Reprinted with the author’s permission.

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The U.S. federal debt has now passed $37 trillion and is growing at the rate of $1 trillion every five months. Interest on the debt exceeds $1 trillion annually, second only to Social Security in the federal budget. The military outlay is also close to $1 trillion, consuming nearly half of the discretionary budget.

As a sovereign nation, the United States could avoid debt altogether by simply paying for the budget deficit with Treasury-issued “Greenbacks,” as Abraham Lincoln’s government did. But I have written on that before (see here and here), so this article will focus on that other elephant in the room, the Department of Defense.

Under the Constitution, the military budget should not be paid at all, because the Pentagon has never passed an audit. Expenditures of public funds without a public accounting violate Article 1, Section 9, Clause 7of the Constitution, which provides:

No Money shall be drawn from the Treasury, but in Consequence of Appropriations made by Law; and a regular Statement and Account of the Receipts and Expenditures of all public Money shall be published from time to time.

The Pentagon failed its seventh financial audit in 2024, with 63% of its $4.1 trillion in assets—approximately $2.58 trillion—untracked. From 1998 to 2015, it failed to account for $21 trillion in spending.

As concerning today as the financial burden is the wielding of secret power. Pres. Dwight Eisenhower warned in his 1961 farewell address, “In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.”

Pres. John F. Kennedy echoed that concern, warning in 1961 that “secret societies” and excessive secrecy are “repugnant in a free and open society,” threatening democracy by withholding truth from the public. He warned that excessive concealment, even for national security, undermines democracy by denying citizens the facts needed to hold power accountable. “No expenditure is questioned, no rumor is printed, no secret is revealed,” he said.  If untracked billions fund classified programs, citizens are left powerless, governed by a shadow entity answerable to no one.

Those concerns persist today. On Aug. 13, 2025, Joe Rogan interviewed U.S. Representative Anna Paulina Luna, who leads a House Oversight Committee focused on government transparency regarding various topics, including UAPs (Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena, formerly UFOs). Luna said the committee had been formed after she and two other congressmen were denied access at Eglin Air Force Base to information on UAPs provided by whistleblowers. The problem, she said, was that Congress was supposed to represent the public and be an investigative body for it, “and you have unelected people operating basically in secrecy. … I think this goes all the way back even to JFK, with how they basically have operated outside of the purview of Congress and basically… have gone rogue ….”

A Behemoth Without Oversight

The Department of Defense’s $885.7 billion budget for 2025, approved by the House of Representatives, dwarfs the military spending of China ($296 billion), Russia ($84 billion), and the next eight nations combined. Managing $4.1 trillion in assets—from aircraft carriers to secret drones—along with $4.3 trillion in liabilities (e.g. personnel costs and pensions), the federal government’s largest agency oversees a military empire spanning over 4,790 sites worldwide. Yet it operates with minimal oversight.

The Chief Financial Officers Act of 1990 mandated audits for all federal agencies, but the National Defense Authorization Act of 2018 delayed the Pentagon’s first department-wide audit to 2018 due to its unwieldy size, its decentralized systems, and its outdated software. The DOD has failed every audit since that time. In 2024, it could not account for its $824 billion FY 2024 budget, with 2,500 new audit issues identified. Of 24 reporting entities, only nine received clean opinions, while 15 received disclaimers due to insufficient data. In fact the Government Accountability Office (GAO) has flagged DoD financial management as high-risk for waste, fraud, and abuse ever since 1995.

As observed in a January 2019 article in Rolling Stone by Matt Taibbi, openly secret budgets were first legalized in 1949 with the passage of the Central Intelligence Agency Act, which exempted that newly created agency from public financial disclosure. The Act stated, “The sums made available to the Agency may be expended without regard to the provisions of law and regulations related to the expenditure of Government funds.”

The aim of the Chief Financial Officers Act of 1990 was to curb billions of dollars said to be lost each year through fraud, waste, abuse, and mismanagement of public budgets. Despite the mandated audits for all federal agencies, the DoD – the only major agency without a clean audit – has received $3.9 trillion in congressionally approved funding since 2018. “Every year that members of Congress vote to boost Pentagon spending with no strings attached,” observed federal budgeting expert Lindsay Kosgharian, “they choose to spend untold billions on weapons and war with no accountability.”

The Audit the Pentagon Act of 2023, backed by Sens. Bernie Sanders and Chuck Grassley, proposes docking 0.5–1% of budgets for audit failures, but the measure has not received a vote.

The Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), launched with promises to strip waste, fraud, and abuse from federal agencies, has conspicuously sidestepped the Pentagon. A June 2025 article titled “Why DOGE Was Always Doomed: The Pentagon Problem,” points out that the DOGE mission was seriously hampered by the Pentagon’s exemption from auditing:

In FY 2024, total discretionary spending was about $1.6 trillion. Of that, the Pentagon alone received $842 billion. In other words, it got more funding than all other departments combined. You read that right: one (very special) department received more than all the rest put together.

Funds that are not accounted for divert resources from critical needs like troop readiness, healthcare, and infrastructure. Overbilling by contractors enriches corporations while taxpayers foot the bill. And the lack of transparency erodes public confidence, as Americans struggle with domestic priorities.

The Missing $21 Trillion: Fraud, Waste or Something Worse?

The Pentagon’s audit failures mask not just inefficiency and waste but pervasive fraud and corruption. Between 1998 and 2015, Inspector General reports show that the DoD could not account for $21 trillion in spending—65% of federal spending during that period. For perspective, the entire U.S. GDP in 2015 was $18.2 trillion. In 2023, the agency failed to document 63% of its $3.8 trillion in assets, up from 61% the prior year. A 2015 DoD report identifying $125 billion in administrative waste was suppressed to protect budget increases.

There is plenty of verified waste to support the case for mismanagement. Military contractors, who receive over half of the Pentagon’s budget, are a major culprit. The F-35 program, managed by Lockheed Martin, was reported in 2021 to be $165 billion over budget, with $220 billion in spare parts poorly tracked. A 2023 CBS News investigation found that contractors routinely overcharged by 40–50%, with some markups reaching 4,451%. A 2016 report in the Nation highlighted $640 for a toilet seat and $7,600 for a coffee pot.

It is no longer even necessary to cover up fraud and corruption by wildly inflated prices. In 2017, former HUD official Catherine Austin Fitts collaborated with Mark Skidmore, an economics professor at Michigan State University, to document the missing $21 trillion in unsupported journal voucher adjustments at the DoD and HUD. In a June 2025 article published in Fitts’ journal The Solari Report titled “Should We Care about Secrecy in Financial Reporting?,” Dr. Skidmore discussed how the government responded to the publication of his research with Fitts. Its response was to immediately eliminate the paper trail leading to its covert financial operations. In particular, “Pentagon officials turned to the Federal Accounting Standards Advisory Board (FASAB) for advice. Several months later, FASAB posted a new document (FASAB 56), which recommended that the government be allowed to misstate and move funds to conceal expenditures if it is deemed necessary to protect national security interests.”

Fitts remarked, “The White House and Congress just opened a pipeline into the back of the US Treasury, and announced to every private army, mercenary and thug in the world that we are open for business.”

Speculation Run Rampant

In a widely-viewed interview by Tucker Carlson on April 28, 2025, Fitts expressed her belief that the missing trillions had been funneled into classified projects involving advanced technologies, including massive underground bunkers to protect elites from a “near-extinction event;” and that they were using advanced energy systems and hidden transit networks possibly linked to extraterrestrial tech. She discussed “interdimensional intelligence” and a secret space program linked to a “breakaway civilization.” The latter term was coined by UFO researcher Richard Dolan and is defined by Google as “a theoretical, hidden society that operates outside of mainstream civilization with advanced technology, often linked to UFO phenomena and secret space programs.”

In a Danny Jones interview in May 2025, Fitts alluded to Deep Underground Military Bases (“DUMBs”), perhaps used for “advanced technology or off-world operations.” Existence of these bases was confirmed two decades earlier by whistleblower Philip Schneider, a U.S. government geologist and engineer involved in their construction. In his last presentation in 1995, Schneider said there were 131 of these cities connected underground by mag-lev rail, built at a cost of $17-26 billion each. According to his biographer, Schneider was assassinated in 1996 by a U.S. intelligence agency for disclosing the government cover-up of UFOs and aliens.

Too over the top? Perhaps, but the Pentagon is so secretive that the public is left to speculate. Are we dealing with a scenario like that in such Hollywood movies as the 1997 film Men in Black, in which hidden forces—human or alien—control our fate?

The Pentagon’s All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO) contends that no verifiable evidence supports extraterrestrial activity. But other prominent figures support the UFO/UAP narrative. In 2017, the New York Times exposed the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program (AATIP), said to be a $22 million DoD initiative run by Luis Elizondo investigating UAPs from 2007–2012.

According to BBC News, Haim Eshed, former head of Israel’s space security program, claimed in a 2020 interview with the Yediot Aharonot newspaper that the U.S. government has an “agreement” with a “Galactic Federation” of extraterrestrials. He alleged aliens have been in contact with the U.S. and Israel, with secret underground bases where they collaborate on experiments. Eshed claimed the United States was on the verge of disclosing this under President Trump but withheld it to avoid “mass hysteria.” The claims were unverified but provocative.

In recent years, Congress has increased its focus on UAPs, with high-profile hearings in 2022, 2023, and 2024. In 2023, whistleblower David Grusch, a former intelligence officer, testified that the U.S. possesses “non-human origin” craft and “dead pilots,” based on classified briefings. On November 13, 2024, the House Oversight Committee’s hearing, “Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena: Exposing the Truth,” featured testimony from Luis Elizondo, retired Navy Rear Admiral Tim Gallaudet, journalist Michael Shellenberger, and former NASA official Michael Gold, who claimed the U.S. possesses UAP technologies and has harmed personnel in secret retrieval programs. Shellenberger alleged that a covert “Immaculate Constellation” program hides UAP data from Congress.

Some lawmakers, including Rep. Luna and Rep. Tim Burchett, continue to criticize Pentagon secrecy and to push for transparency. In May 2024, Burchett introduced the UAP Transparency Act, requiring the declassification of all UAP-related documents within 270 days. He stated:

This bill isn’t all about finding little green men or flying saucers, it’s about forcing the Pentagon and federal agencies to be transparent with the American people. I’m sick of hearing bureaucrats telling me these things don’t exist while we’ve spent millions of taxpayer dollars on studying them for decades.

Secrecy Undermines Democracy

With $21 trillion unaccounted for historically, $165 billion in F-35 overruns, and $125 billion in buried waste, the DoD’s financial mismanagement needs urgent reform. Congress is primarily responsible for overseeing the DoD budget, exercising its constitutional “power of the purse” under Article 1 of the U.S. Constitution. So why isn’t it enforcing this mandate?

The chief excuse given is the need for secrecy for security reasons, but a congressional committee could be given access to the Pentagon’s financial data in closed session in order to exercise public oversight and enforce accountability. Other factors are obviously at play, including political influence, lobbying, campaign contributions from the defense sector, and a lack of penalties for noncompliance.

To restore accountability, Congress needs to enforce the Audit the Pentagon Act, modernize DoD systems, and investigate contractors profiting from lax oversight. UAP transparency is also critical, whether to debunk myths or uncover truths.

As taxpayers footing the bill, we are entitled to know not only where our money is being spent but who is really in charge of our government. The Pentagon’s secrecy and lack of accountability could be shielding anything from contractor fraud to UAP programs and alien alliances. If there is information so secret that even our elected representatives don’t have access to it, who does have access? Is there a secret government above the government we know? Without fiscal transparency and accountability, we can no longer call ourselves a democracy, as JFK warned.

This article was originally published on ScheerPost.com.

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“Why declare that things shall not be done which there is no power to do?” — Alexander Hamilton, Federalist No. 84, writing on his opposition to the inclusion of a Bill of Rights in the Constitution

“The Bill of Rights would never have been necessary . . . if so much power had not been granted to the central government by the constitution of 1787 in the first place.” —  Ryan McMaken

History tells us that a condition for ratifying the Constitution was a section detailing how the proposed document would protect people from government aggression.  Even New York, with a Bill of Rights existing as a statute and not part of its constitution, found their absence unsettling in a federal constitution.  Along with Virginia and Massachusetts, New York’s delegates wanted an explicit statement of rights the newly-expanded government could never trample.

Article 1, Section 8 of the Constitution wherein Congress would have the power “To lay and collect Taxes, Duties, Imposts and Excises, to pay the Debts and provide for the common Defence and general Welfare of the United States” established individual rights as contingent rather than inalienable — contingent on the decisions of government.  Those who supported the Constitution, especially Federalist writers Hamilton and Madison, essentially said that money is needed to run any government effectively and asking for it was unreliable.  Revenue was to be extorted from those who had it, made legitimate by the concurrence of state delegates and made tolerable by “the prudence and firmness of the people,” as Hamilton wrote in Federalist 31.

The government was picking a fight with those under its jurisdiction.  How would these people fight back?

Since taking property from another person without their permission is theft, the victims might start by engaging in verbal or written protests.  If government had the legal power to restrict or forbid such protests, the people could not express their “prudence or firmness” without penalty.  From this caveat and the desire on the part of nationalists to get the Constitution ratified, James Madison proposed a Bill of Rights consisting of 17, then 12, then finally 10 amendments, the first one stating, in part:

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press . . .

The Bill of Rights was ratified on December 15, 1791.

Rock covers paper

Benjamin Franklin had died the previous year in Philadelphia at age 84.  Earlier, the polymath Franklin and his common-law wife, Deborah Read, had two children, one of whom was Sally Franklin, born in 1743, who eventually married Richard Bache (“Beech”).  Bache had a son, Benjamin Franklin Bache, who “followed in the journalistic footsteps of his famous grandfather.”  As a youngster Bache traveled with his grandfather to France, where he learned French and the printing trade.

Upon returning to the United States in 1785, Bache worked as a printer in his grandfather’s shop in Philadelphia. After Franklin’s death in 1790, Bache inherited the printing house. The same year, he established the General Advertiser (later the Aurora), becoming an active participant in the partisan journalism common during the early years of the nation.

Sixty years earlier, in 1731, Franklin, editor of the Pennsylvania Gazette, wrote:  “. . . when Truth and Error have fair Play, the former is always an overmatch for the latter . . . That if all Printers were determin’d not to print anything till they were sure it would offend nobody, there would be very little printed.”

His grandson took those words to heart.  He printed articles saying George Washington wasn’t really the “father of his country.”  Benjamin Franklin was the rightful father, being the only one to have signed the Declaration of Independence (1776), the Treaty of Alliance with France (1778), the Treaty of Paris (1783), and the federal Constitution (1787).  Without France’s aid, Bache claimed, we would still be British colonies.

In continuing to hammer away at the Federalist takeover of government and the president’s near-religious stature, Bache published a long Thomas Paine philippic called “Letter to George Washington” (July 1796).  Paine had been in Paris awaiting execution under Robespierre and had expected the intervention of Ambassador Gouverneur Morris for his release, but after seven months of incarceration he decided his fate was a reflection of Washington’s indifference.

Keep in mind Paine was one of the most recognized and reviled authors in the Western world.  His popularity with commoners was so strong governments feared prosecuting him.  His words, whatever their merit, carried far and wide.:

And as to you, sir, [Paine wrote] treacherous in private friendship (for so you have been to me, and that in the day of danger) and a hypocrite in public life, the world will be puzzled to decide, whether you are an apostate or an impostor; whether you have abandoned good principles, or whether you ever had any.

Federalists took note of Paine’s letter — as if they could avoid it.  The federal government itself was in Philadelphia, with both Congress and the Executive House of the President within walking distance of Bache’s Aurora, along with two Federalist newspapers defending the administration and attacking Bache.  William Corbett, federalist editor of the Porcupine Political Censor, declared: “Your brutal attempt to blacken this character [GW’s] was all that was wanted to crown his honour and your infamy.”

In a letter to his wife Abigail, Vice President John Adams, who regarded Paine as no more than an effective propagandist and who increasingly hated Paine the longer he lived, wrote:

I think, of all Paines Productions it is the weakest and at the Sametime the most malicious.—The Man appears to me to be mad—not drunk—He has the Vanity of the Lunatick who believed himself to be Jupiter the Father of Gods & Men.

The Sedition Act of 1798

Bache applauded the victory of John Adams in the election of 1796, with Adams’s opponent Thomas Jefferson becoming Vice President.  He viewed Washington’s decision not to run for a third term coming from “a consciousness that he would not be re-elected” and “to save himself the mortification and disgrace of being superceded.”  Adams was a “professed aristocrat” only in theory, Bache wrote, while “Washington was one in practice.”

His appraisal did an abrupt one-eighty when Adams condemned the French for raiding American shipping in a special session of Congress, while ignoring British “depredations.”   The three-man commission (the XYZ Affair) Adams sent to France to work out a diplomatic solution was rejected by the corrupt Talleyrand, the French Foreign Minister.

In June 1798, ten days after publishing a letter from Talleyrand, Bache was arrested under the yet-to-be passed Sedition Act of July 14 and was released on bail on 29 June with a trial scheduled for October.  The Aurora editor had been accused of libeling the president and the Executive Government “in a manner tending to excite sedition and opposition to the laws, by sundry publication and re-publications.”   The charge of libel came from Bache’s depiction of Adams as “blind, bald, crippled, toothless, and querulous.”  Bache, though, died from yellow fever at age 29 before his trial began.

Others were prosecuted under the Sedition Act, including Democratic-Republican congressman from Vermont, Mathew Lyon, who wrote an essay in 1800 accusing Adams of “an unbounded thirst for ridiculous pomp, foolish adulation, and selfish avarice.”

Luther Baldwin, national hero

On a sunny day in July of 1798, after passage of the Sedition Act, John and Abigail Adams were returning to Massachusetts when they stopped in Newark, New Jersey for a celebration in his honor that included a 16-gun cannon salute.

Men were drinking at a tavern nearby.  One of them was the pilot of a garbage scow and a former member of the Continental army, Luther Baldwin.  Allegedly drunk, Luther uttered something to the effect that he didn’t care if they fired the cannon up Adams’s “arse.”  The tavern owner heard the remark and reported him.  “Baldwin was indicted and convicted in federal court for speaking ‘seditious words’ that defamed President Adams. He was fined $150, assessed court costs, and jailed until he paid the fine and fees.”

His arrest became a turning point in American politics.  Arresting journalists and politicians was bad enough, but throwing everyday citizens in jail for an offhand remark was intolerable.  His plight became the focus of articles published throughout the country, and the influence on public opinion helped elect Jefferson to the presidency a year and a half later.

The Sedition Act expired on March 3, 1801, the last day of Adams’s term. One of Jefferson’s first acts upon taking office on March 4 was to pardon Luther Baldwin and others imprisoned under the law.  Included with the pardons was an apology and the canceling of any imposed fines.

Conclusion

Parchments are no match for illicit government acts unless people get behind them, as they did for Luther.

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Last week Donald J Trump declared that as president of the United States, he believes he has the “right to do anything I want to do.” The assertion explains a lot in terms of how an unhinged Trump regards himself and his office and it should serve as a warning that more ego driven inanity is yet to come. Trump’s most heinous crimes are related to foreign policy, most particularly his complicity in Israel’s genocide of the Palestinians as well as his continued arming of Ukraine to prolong the slaughter in its war with Russia. It now appears that Trump might be arranging to arm Kiev with US manufactured “extended range” cruise missiles capable of hitting targets deep inside Russia, to include both Moscow and St Petersburg. In a typically bizarre outburst Trump has opined that Ukraine is losing because it has been on “defense” and needs to shift its thinking of taking the “offensive” which the US will apparently assist. And Trump continues to throw threats about sanctions and military action at virtually everyone in the world that he encounters. Can World War 3 be creeping ever nearer, replete with nuclear weapons on the front line?

And then there is stink of unprovoked aggression elsewhere in world, to include the bombing of Iran and the recent dispatch of three warships toward Venezuela. Has either country threatened the United States? And relations with India and Brazil have also taken a dive due to pressure and insults from Washington. And there is always arch competitor China waiting in the wings for a shift of US military might in its direction while even little Greenland is not safe as Trump has stated that he is seeking to acquire it. Last week the Danish Foreign Ministry called in the US Ambassador to complain about Washington’s efforts to destabilize Greenland, which is a Danish possession. How utterly appropriate is it that Trump wants to rename the Defense Department, calling it by its old name the War Department!

Given Trump’s track record, astonishingly, while speaking at a Cabinet meeting, Trump’s special envoy and business associate Steve Witkoff actually said to the president and those assembled with regards to the upcoming Nobel Peace Prize: “There’s only one thing I wish for—that the Nobel committee finally gets its act together and realizes that you are the single finest candidate since this Nobel award was ever talked about. Your success is game-changing out in the world today, and I hope everybody wakes up and realizes that.”

Good point Steve, so why stop there in your flattering of a lunkhead? Why not expand that accolade for the Trump War Department to go along with the already suggested renaming of the Kennedy Center in his honor as well as Dulles International Airport. And the Smithsonian is under the gun from Trump as it has displays on slavery that he disapproves of. Why not rename that too? President Trump does not seem aware that these are all public institutions and he has no right to slap his name on them to enhance his own ego. And look at the White House, where the Oval Office has been gilded, reflecting Trump’s bad and extremely tacky taste, turning it into a version of Mar-a-Lago. The portraits of preceding presidents have even been removed from sight to be replaced by even worse bad taste painting showing a warlike and aggressive President Trump in all his glory. Federal buildings in Washington also now feature huge banners hanging from their facades featuring Donald Trump’s scowling face. And he has further messed with the so-called People’s House, where he is a temporary resident at best, by destroying the Rose Garden and building a $300 million dollar ballroom monstrosity that will dwarf the size of the original historic White House building.

To be sure, Donald J Trump is an ignorant monster who will do his best to shred the US Constitution and destroy our republic before he is finished. Yes, he can do anything, including sending federal troops to occupy our cities on the pretext that there is too much crime going on.

There is only one exception to the general impression that Trump is running around Washington and the country, when he is not playing golf with his business buddies, with a chain saw prepared to tear down and cut to pieces everything in his path. That exception is how he treats Israel, deferring constantly to the interests of the Jewish state and to the domestic exhortations by the Israel Lobby. The flow of US supplies weapons to Israel has been constant while Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu carries out a genocide that seeks nothing less than the extermination of the Palestinian people. Last week, Israel slaughtered five international journalists and fifteen medical workers in a phased attack on a hospital that was one of the few health facilities remaining in Gaza. Trump and his choice ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee did nothing in response. Huckabee in fact has made it clear that he believes that Jews are “Chosen by God” and are free to do whatever they want to the helpless Palestinians. Once upon a time, US Ambassadors were chosen based on their ability to represent American interests. No longer under Donald Trump!

Another recent ambassador tale linked personally to Trump comes from France, where Trump appointed his son-in-law’s father Charles Kushner to the ambassadorial post in Paris. Kushner is a convicted felon with only one thing in his favor, which is, of course, that he is inevitably Jewish and an Israel Firster in his political orientation. It is clear that Kushner shouldn’t even have this job to begin with—he spent two years in jail for tax evasion, illegal campaign donations to the Democratic Party, and witness tampering. He even attacked his own sister—who was a cooperating witness against him—by paying a sex worker to seduce her husband and film it for blackmail material. Former New Jersey Governor Chris Christie investigated Charles Kushner as district attorney and described the case as “one of the most loathsome, disgusting crimes” he’d ever encountered. Kushner was pardoned by Trump in 2020.

Last week Ambassador Kushner outraged the French government by publicly denouncing what he chose to describe as the surging antisemitism in France. Kushner published “A Letter to Emmanuel Macron” in The Wall Street Journal on August 24th. It included “I write out of deep concern over the dramatic rise of antisemitism in France and the lack of sufficient action by your government to confront it. Antisemitism has long scarred French life, but it has exploded since Hamas’s barbaric assault on Oct. 7, 2023. Since then, pro-Hamas extremists and radical activists have waged a campaign of intimidation and violence across Europe. In France, not a day passes without Jews assaulted in the street, synagogues or schools defaced, or Jewish-owned businesses vandalized. In today’s world, anti-Zionism is antisemitism—plain and simple. President Trump and I have Jewish children and share Jewish grandchildren. I know how he feels about antisemitism, as do all Americans…. I urge you to act decisively: enforce hate-crime laws without exception; ensure the safety of Jewish schools, synagogues and businesses, prosecute offenders to the fullest extent; and abandon steps that give legitimacy to Hamas and its allies.”

Perhaps not surprisingly, Kushner’s letter appeared a few days after Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu wrote something similar to Macron, condemning him for declaring that France would recognize Palestinian statehood. France refuted Kushner’s allegations immediately and summoned him to appear before Macron and the French foreign ministry, but he did not show up and refused to apologize. “France firmly refutes these latest allegations,” the foreign ministry had stated adding that “The Ambassador’s allegations are unacceptable.”

Donald Trump and the US Senate, which approved the appointment of Kushner, might ask themselves why is the American ambassador to France more focused on lobbying on Israel’s behalf than protecting the interests of the United States? It is a question that needs to be asked regarding both Kushner and Huckabee in Israel.

A final story hopefully will make many readers upset over new evidence of just how deep the Israeli hooks are into the US government and all that pertains to it. Several American soldiers have gone on record reporting how they have been harassed and punished for sharing their views with friends criticizing the hideous slaughter of the Palestinians taking place in Gaza. It has been observed that First Amendment free speech only exists in the United States as long as one is not criticizing Israel, but it is disgusting to see that soldiers who have sworn an oath to uphold the Constitution are themselves being denied fundamental civil rights.

One of the soldiers, Jonathan Estridge, an army sergeant with twenty years of service, was summoned into an officer’s room and advised that he was being investigated as a threat to national security because he had posted on social media criticism of Israel. As he observed, he was being denied the right to criticize a foreign nation’s policies solely because that nation happens to be Israel. A second soldier who has been subjected to punishment was a Green Beret who is part of the elite Special Forces parachute team. He described how he was phone called by an officer and told that he could no longer be a member of the group because he had spoken out against Israel. He was interviewed regarding his claims by Greyzone journalist Max Blumenthal.

And if that is not enough to shock you, how about the latest news from a Federal Judge Trevor McFadden here in the Land of the Free and the Home of the Brave. McFadden, who presides over a Washington DC court, has ruled that burning a US flag is free speech but burning an Israeli flag is “racial discrimination” which is a “hate crime.” The judge declared that the Star of David on Israel’s flag represents a “racial heritage,” elevating a political symbol of a foreign state into a sacred racial identity — putting it on the same level as America’s civil rights laws. The decision means that what would normally be political protest against Israel can now be branded as racism in the United States and made illegal, free speech and the First Amendment be damned. Ironically, Donald Trump has just signed an executive order making conviction for US flag burning a crime that automatically mandates one year in prison. It seems the various components of the US government just cannot agree on anything beyond protecting Israel and its estimable Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

Reprinted with permission from Unz Review.

The post Trump Makes Israel Great appeared first on LewRockwell.

Since RFK Jr. became H.H.S. Secretary, my contacts have shared that the CDC (one branch of the H.H.S.) has been the primary government agency sabotaging attempts to Make America Healthy Again. In July, I thus wrote an article on the CDC’s pervasive corruption that highlighted the CDC’s scientific misconduct at a recent ACIP meeting to help create support for controversial changes RFK Jr. would need to enact at the CDC.

Yesterday, that all came to a head as the CDC’s director was fired a month into her job, briefly refused to leave, four other top CDC officials resigned (which coupled with five earlier retirements in March comprised a loss of about a quarter of the CDC’s senior leadership). These actions prompted a media uproar and a hearing to “hold RFK accountable” has already been scheduled for next week.

This is a pivotal moment where RFK needs the public’s support for restoring America’s health, so I believe it is critical to understand the complete context behind what happened, particularly since many of these CDC holdouts have been directly responsible for the mass gaslighting against the vaccine-injured.

The Roots of Evil

One of my major questions in life is if the bad things that happen are a result of a secretive group of bad actors or are simply a naturally emergent phenomenon that would occur regardless of which group was in power behind the scenes.

On one hand, I frequently see policies be enacted in a coordinated fashion that lead to a clear outcome, and then watch as the years play out, that every institution works in unison to ensure that outcome eventually comes to pass. As such, given how repetitive (and hence predictable) this process is, I tend to suspect each one is a deliberate “conspiracy” by a specific group of bad actors.

On the other hand, when I speak to the most informed people I know within the government, I hear things like this:

You can always point a finger at a specific agency or person, but the reality is that as the government gets bigger and bigger, more and more fiefdoms will emerge within it, and those groups will fight for their own interests at the expense of everyone else.

Note: many Federal agencies depend on obtaining congressional funding and, therefore, will engage in stunts to ensure that funding is allocated to them. For example, the CDC will routinely hype up inconsequential “pandemics” each year, as this nationwide drama allows them to obtain more funding. Beyond this motivating the CDC to lie, the need to maintain a guaranteed stream of public and private funding also boxes the CDC into repeating the same (risk-free) narratives ad-nauseam so they do not offend their sponsors. This tendency to habitually repeat industry canards (e.g., that water fluoridation is one of the greatest public health achievements besides vaccines, that chronic Lyme disease doesn’t exist, or that all vaccines are 1000% safe and effective) in turn explains why more and more people are tuning out the CDC.

CDC Corruption

The CDC has enormous credibility among physicians, in no small part because the agency is generally thought to be free of industry bias. Financial dealings with bio-pharmaceutical companies threaten that reputation.—Marcia Angell MD, former editor in chief of the New England Journal of Medicine

In reality, CDC corruption is so pervasive, it’s effectively been legalized. For example, a 1983 law authorized the CDC to accept gifts “made unconditionally…for the benefit of the [Public Health] Service or for the carrying out of any of its function,” and in 1992 Congress established A National CDC Foundation which was quickly incorporated to “mobilize philanthropic and private-sector resources.”

Note: other Federal agencies, including the CIA and the NIH, have similar “non-profit” foundations.1,2,3

Since inception, the CDC Foundation has been accused of egregious conduct and has received nearly 1 billion dollars from corporate “donors” (criticisms include a scathing editorial in one of the world’s top medical journals). For example, to quote a 2019 investigation:

In 2011….a firm that performs research for the pesticide industry, gave $60,000 to the CDC Foundation for a study to prove the safety of two pesticides. “We have a professional money-laundering facility at the CDC Foundation….They accept projects from anyone on the outside.”

Between 2010 and 2015, Coca-Cola contributed more than $1 million to the CDC Foundation. It also received significant benefits from the CDC, including collaborative meetings and advice from a top CDC staffer on how to lobby the World Health Organization to curtail its efforts to reduce consumption of added sugars.

The BMJ also reported on contributions from Roche to the CDC Foundation in support of the CDC’s Take 3 flu campaign, which encourages people to “take antiviral medicine if a doctor prescribes it.” Roche manufactures Tamiflu, an antiviral medication for the flu [for reference, Roche was able to convince governments around the world to stockpile hundreds of millions of dollars of Tamiflu (an ineffective drug that was never proven to work).

These “donations” in turn often shape the “impartial” guidelines we are expected to follow. For example, in 2010 the CDC foundation created a coalition which received over $26 million from major pharmaceutical companies producing hepatitis C treatments. Shortly after, a committee was created to create new CDC hepatitis C treatment recommendations, and an Inspector General report found many of its members had direct ties to those pharmaceutical companies.

Note: key funders of the CDC foundation (detailed here) include key Democratic political advocacy groups, vaccine organizations such as GAVI and the Gates Foundation, the major vaccine manufacturers (e.g., Pfizer, Moderna, Merck and J&J), and tech companies such as Facebook, Google, Microsoft, and PayPal.

In 2016 CDC employees anonymously complained about this corruption:

It appears that our mission is being influenced and shaped by outside parties and rogue interests…What concerns us most, is that it is becoming the norm and not the rare exception. Some senior management officials at CDC are clearly aware and even condone these behaviors. Others see it and turn the other way. Some staff are intimidated and pressed to do things they know are not right. We have representatives across the agency that witness this unacceptable behavior. It occurs at all levels and in all of our respective units.

Recently, the National Center for Chronic Disease Prevention and Health Promotion (NCCDPHP) has been implicated in a “cover up” of inaccurate screening data for the Wise Woman (WW) Program. There was a coordinated effort by that Center to “bury” the fact that screening numbers for the WW program were misrepresented in documents sent to Congress; screening numbers for 2014 and 2015 did not meet expectations despite a multi­million dollar investment; and definitions were changed and data “cooked” to make the results look better than they were. Data were clearly manipulated in irregular ways. An “internal review” that involved staff across CDC occurred and its findings were essentially suppressed so media and/or Congressional staff would not become aware of the problems.

Finally, most of the scientists at CDC operate with the utmost integrity and ethics. However, this “climate of disregard” puts many of us in difficult positions. We are often directed to do things we know are not right. For example, Congress has made it very clear that domestic funding for NCCDPHP (and other CIOs) should be used for domestic work and that the bulk of NCCDPHP funding should be allocated to program (not research).

Why in FY17 is NCCDPHP diverting money away from program priorities that directly benefit the public to support an expensive [global health] research that may not yield anything that benefits the [American] public?

In February 2019, two Democrat Congresswomen provided the evidence to request a formal investigation of CDC’s interactions with Coca-Cola and its broader corruption. Unfortunately, due to the politicization surrounding COVID, all of this was swept under the rug and forgotten.

Ideology or Corruption?

I also frequently wonder to what degree conduct I find reprehensible is due to corruption or simply ideological fixation.

In the case of vaccines, while clear financial conflicts of interest can be shown in certain cases (e.g., the CDC Foundation), I find the zealous adherence to all vaccines being “safe and effective” tends to be ideological in nature, as believing in vaccines has been instilled as a core belief of anyone affiliated with “science” or “medicine.”

Initially this can be quite subtle, but in time, that ideological bias quickly adds up. This is because most things aren’t clear cut, so depending on what one is biased to notice vs. filter out, one can rapidly be left with a world view where all “the evidence” supports their position, even if a great deal of it does not (which is a major reason why “rational” people can have such diametrically opposed belief systems).

This is a critical to understand as evaluating the actual risks and benefits of a routine vaccine requires you to assess:

• What percent of the unvaccinated population is likely to get the infection.
• What percent of those infected will have a moderate or severe illness.
• How effectively the vaccine prevents those vaccinated from catching the illness or developing moderate or severe complications from it.
• How long the vaccine’s effectiveness lasts.
• How long does it take the infection to become resistant to the vaccine (making it useless).
• What are the consequences of the vaccine triggering a population-wide mutation in the infection.
• Is there a viable alternative to vaccination?
• How likely the vaccine is to cause an acute moderate or acute severe reaction.
• How likely the vaccine is to cause a chronic moderate or chronic severe reaction.
• Who is at risk of having a more severe reaction to the vaccine?

Each of these, let alone all of them, is quite a task to figure out, and as a result most of the relevant points for each of the above simply are not taken into account when deciding upon a vaccine recommendation. Instead, a few marketable points are highlighted and the assessment of the vaccine’s risks and benefits are seen through their lens (e.g., “cervical cancer is deadly” and “the HPV vaccine prevents cervical cancer”), while pieces of evidence which challenge the predetermined conclusion (e.g., evidence of vaccine harm) are dismissed and filtered away.

As a result, many vaccines are on the market where their risks clearly and unambiguously outweigh their benefits, while in parallel, vaccines are viewed as a homogenous entity despite some (e.g., COVID or the HPV vaccines) being much more dangerous and unnecessary than many others. As many people have requested, I have provided a concise summary of the risks and benefits of each childhood vaccine here.

Note: while adherence to abhorrent policies is typically ideological, my sense is that as one goes higher in the hierarchy, the more leaders within the public health field (e.g., the CDC) are consciously aware of what they are complicit in, but nonetheless perpetuate it to protect their power base (whereas those lower in the power structure accede to the dominant narrative as doing anything else often ends careers).

Read the Whole Article

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Western civilization is not worth saving. I think that’s been pretty well established by now.

That’s one of the silliest things about the way rightists are always babbling about how we need to protect our way of life from immigrants or Islam or “the trans agenda” or whatever. They’re beginning with the assumption that this train wreck of a society is worth saving at all.

I am not saying that westerners should die. I am not saying that all the ideals and values that westerners purport to hold are worthless. I am saying that this civilization, as it actually exists, is an indefensible disaster. Clearly.

Our way of living on this planet. The way we treat one another. The way we treat people on other continents. All the systems and social structures that give rise to the way things are. These things should not exist. We should not be the way that we are.

This civilization is genocidal. Ecocidal. Omnicidal. Imperialist. Racist. Dehumanizing. Degrading. Dystopian. Emotionally stunted. Culturally vapid. Spiritually impoverished. Intellectually enslaved. Why would any sane person want this to continue?

We don’t need to rescue western civilization from outside forces, we need to rescue ourselves from western civilization.

If we listen to our hearts we can understand that the call isn’t to save western civilization from corruption by foreign cultures or new ways of thinking, but to radically transform it from the murderous, tyrannical and oppressive nightmare that it has always been.

The western way of life doesn’t need to be preserved, it needs to end. We cannot keep doing this. We cannot go on this way. We cannot keep poisoning our planet, our minds, our hearts and our souls with the McGenocide ideology of the western empire. We are headed somewhere dark, somewhere none of us want to go, and we need to turn around.

Nothing about our old way of doing things has worked out for us. Everything we were doing before wound up bringing us to this terrible point. We don’t need to go backwards, and we don’t need to stay still. We need to evolve.

Gaza is a mirror. It’s showing us what we are. What we have always been.

It’s time to be real about what we are seeing.

________________

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Transgenderism is not a civil rights movement; it’s a social engineering experiment. The LGBT movement is not a struggle for equal rights; it’s a covert war for political control. The agenda of the people involved in the spheres of trans-activism are radical zealots hellbent on the destruction of their enemies by any means necessary – And if you believe in logic, objective reality, biological science and moral imperative, then you are one of their enemies.

A prime strategy of the trans movement is the indoctrination of our children. They rarely have any children of their own and in order to perpetuate their numbers they must groom future generations to their cause. And, it has become clear that if they can’t indoctrinate our kids, they are perfectly willing to murder our kids.

There are a lot of “watchers on the wall” in the alternative media that have been fighting for decades against the adoption of woke (or politically correct) narratives in America and I think many of us have grown tired of playing games of logic and reason. Many conservatives and libertarians today put endless stock into the power of debate, but after fighting this fight for so long you start to realize that debate rarely changes the minds of zealots.

We can present an airtight case for our ideals to the public and hope for the best, and I think we have been successful in many regards. However, I would suggest that we are not changing people’s views so much as we are informing people who simply weren’t paying attention until now.

We are adding more and more of the fence-sitters to our side, but we are doing very little to solve the root problem. Some conflicts cannot be dealt with using reason. In the end, there is something to be said for brutality over debate.

For the past couple years I have been predicting that the political left was going to take a nose dive (globally) in terms of government influence, but I also predicted that they would grow increasingly unstable and revert to targeted violence over their loss of power. In my article from January titled “The Monkey Wrench Sabotage Of America Begs For An Authoritarian Response”, I noted:

“Leftists throughout modern history have a habit of engaging in destabilization efforts when they don’t get what they want. They view their motivations as sacrosanct and beyond criticism, be it “saving democracy” or “saving the planet” or “taking down capitalists and colonists”.

In every case where the political left had influence over social conditions and then lost that power, they revert to directed exponential disruption and violence from riots to assassination. They claim to care about the right of the majority to have their voices heard, but in reality they don’t care at all. When the majority goes against the leftist narrative, leftists go rogue…”

Damn, I hate being right about this stuff but the evidence speaks for itself.  The thing about the political left is that they are cowards at their core.  Their relationship with warfare is more subversive, avoiding a stand-up confrontation whenever possible and only targeting people who can’t defend themselves.

The latest attack involves a leftist transgender activist named “Robin Westman” (originally Robert Westman, a man pretending to be a woman) murdering two children and injuring 17 others at a Catholic school and church in Minneapolis, then killing himself.

The resulting anger against the greater trans movement makes perfect sense: Americans have transgender fatigue. We are fed up with these unhinged lunatics. We are done with them, and they’re not going to like what comes next.

First, I want to break down what pisses me off about this shooting, beyond the targeting of innocent children. Specifically, I want to address the responses by the corporate media, Democrats and the media in general.

Is It “Unfair” To Blame An Ideology?

Democrat leaders say that Westman’s actions are separate from his beliefs and that conservatives are “trying to make the shooting political”. Bullshit. Transgender activism is the core influence in these shootings.

Westman’s writings reveal his violent fantasies about killing children, including wanting to be the “scary horrible monster standing over those powerless kids.” Westman’s videos, posted hours before the shootings, also show the phrases “kill Donald Trump” and “for the children” scrawled on gun magazines. On one AR magazine he writes “I am the Woker, baby. Why so Queerious?”

It is the trans ideology that equipped Robert Westman with the excuses to rationalize the killing of helpless kids. His writings display a clear hatred of Christians, conservatives and Donald Trump. These expressions are normal within the transgender community; they argue in favor of violence against conservatives on a regular basis.

Their assertion? That conservatives stopping children from being pumped full of puberty blockers or having their body parts mutilated is akin to extermination. Remember, these people see your children as targets for indoctrination and conversion – This is how they reproduce their kind. So, in their twisted minds, our efforts to stop trans grooming is the same as genocide.

There are many cases of politically motivated violence against innocent people in which the act cannot be separated from the ideology that inspired it. The word for this is “terrorism”. Robert Westman’s attack was trans terrorism, pure and simple, and there are many others out there like him.

Was Westman Actually “Right Wing”?

This has been the go-to media narrative after almost every leftist act of violence; they try to distance themselves while still defending the person’s motives. In the case of Westman, his writings are clear; he’s a leftist. The media has latched onto two peripheral arguments to say otherwise:

First, Westman hated Jews. The media claims this makes him a “Neo-Nazi” and that automatically makes him a right-winger. Let’s be clear, leftists today are so antisemitic it’s enough to make the average Neo-Nazi blush. They hate Jews and they hate Israel and they’ve been courting Muslim groups for an alliance for the better part of a decade. Are there some right wing people that agree with Westman? Sure. But agreeing on a single issue doesn’t make him conservative.

Second, reports suggest that conservative/libertarian guntuber Brandon Herrera was mentioned in the shooter’s writings. Westman supposedly claims that he “met Herrera at SHOT Show in Las Vegas” and that they agreed on a number of topics. Herrera says he has no recollection of meeting Westman or any conversation with the trans lunatic.

He notes that a person like Westman would stand out like a sore thumb at an event like SHOT Show, which is generally restricted to industry professionals and the firearms media. SHOT Show has also put out a statement indicating that there is no record of Westman ever attending their conference.

My theory? I think the Herrera mentions have been planted as a way to distract from Westman’s full bore leftist cultism, offering the woke movement deniability. In other words, it’s a fake out that doesn’t match with any other evidence presented on the man’s background.

Transgender Ideology Is A Convenient Facade For The Mentally Ill

I am so tired of the mainstream media continuing to perpetuate the fallacy that people can choose their gender. Even in the case of a mass killer, they insist on “respecting the person’s pronouns”. This behavior is enabling these mentally ill bottom feeders to act the way they do.

Westman in his manifesto confesses that his transition efforts were a mistake and that he wished he had never “brainwashed himself”. He noted that he “wished he was a girl” but had accepted that it was impossible. He kept his hair long as the “last shred” of the facade of being transgender because he was afraid to cut it and admit “embarrassing defeat”.

This revelation supports what I have been saying for years – The vast majority of trans people are frauds. They are putting on an activist costume because they are rebels desperate for any cause to latch onto. People with legitimate gender dysphoria are exceedingly rare, but mental illness in general is common in America today.

The trans ideology was weaponized by globalists and governments over the course of the last decade. There’s a good reason why the number of people that identify as trans skyrocketed since 2018 – The level of propaganda aimed at children has been intense and the incentives to gain social approval are overwhelming.

The philosophy appeals to people with preexisting emotional disturbances and it is especially attractive to narcissists who gravitate to the moral and scientific relativism inherent in gender fluid thinking. In other words, it’s easy to tell which people are going to be a potential problem in any given community, just look for the trans flags and clown makeup.

In the wake of the shooting Democrats are trying to turn the event into a gun issue. It’s not. Millions of Americans have guns and almost no one decides to go shoot up a school filled with little kids. No, this is about an ideological cult that glorifies mental illness. This is about transgenderism. Trans activists and the people who enable them are the problem.

I want to be clear that I’m not talking about all people who dress up as the opposite gender (or sex, whatever you prefer). There are conservative trans people out there that disagree with the LGBT movement on most things. I’m talking about the leftist political militants. They need to go. There is no room for them in the US any longer.

I think the solution is obvious: It’s time to bring back the asylums and lock up the crazies. It’s not a novel idea, it’s become a mantra for many people in 2025. I discussed the advantages of asylums in my article “How To Solve Violence In The US? Remove Democrat Run Cities And Bring Back Asylums”, published in 2023.

During the peak of America’s asylum era crime plunged to all time lows. If asylums are coupled with extended prison time for repeat offenders, crime nearly disappears. There were trespasses and abuses within some hospitals that should be addressed, but I would argue that overall the use of asylums was an undeniable net positive for society. After we shut them down, crime skyrocketed. We’ve been trying to cope ever since using state prison systems.

The time for discourse is over. The time for compromise and compassion is over. The time for brutal ignominy is at hand. At the very least these people need to be laughed at, mocked and shamed out of existence. Every aspect of trans activism needs to be shunned and erased from our society. Those who express clear threats of violence need to be locked up as they would have been 70 years ago.

Over time the cancer of wokeness is going to disappear, but this long term cultural shift does not resolve the immediate threat. Either we throw them up in padded rooms or we boot them from the country, but letting these zealots continue to wreak havoc, or possibly regain political power one day, is not an option.

Reprinted with permission from Alt-Market.us.

The post Bring Back Asylums: It’s Time To Talk About Transgender Fatigue in America appeared first on LewRockwell.

Ivermectin has proved effective in saving the lives of stage four cancer patients.  Danielle Smith is trying to protect Big Pharma profits by prohibiting its use.  She even wants to criminalize the use of Ivermectin.

Will people who think they live in democracies ever understand that throughout the Western world government has been privatized.  A position in government is a road to serving private interests and becoming a multi-millionaire.

How do you think the Clintons ended up with $120,000,000?  From Hunter Biden’s laptop and other hard evidence we know all about Hunter and Joe Biden’s influence peddling schemes.  They know about it themselves which is the reason for the preemptive pardons.

As of 2019, six years ago, there were 12 members of Congress with net worths ranging from $93,000.000 to $361,000,000, and another 38 members with net worths ranging from $11 million to $79 million.  Nancy Pelosi is up there with the Clintons with a net worth of $115,000,000.

The fact that governments serve private interest is the reason no problem can be fixed.  Problems are business opportunities. For example, poverty requires contractors to build public housing and provide food stamps that increase sales of food products.  A contrived “energy crisis” produced ethanol, a subsidy to agri-business.  Threats and conflicts require armaments.  The orchestrated “Russian threat” produces an annual trillion dollar military/security budget.  The list is endless.

Here is Dr. Makis describing the bought and paid for government of Alberta, Canada.

The post Who Is Paying Alberta, Canada, Premier Danielle Smith if Not Big Pharma? appeared first on LewRockwell.

Oh, to be in England, especially if you’re a Muslim, an African, or any minority. There’s freedom of speech in this here rainy place, the kind of free speech that gets you thrown in jail back home but not here. Britain is now the only place in the Western world where whites are careful what they say, shout, or put online. It’s called two-tier justice, with local whites judged harshly by woke white judges, and with heavy prison sentences doled out to those who dare insult illegal migrants who are of many colors but not white.

I never thought I’d see this in Europe, especially in a country like Britain, which day in, day out advertises the fact that Brits are free and proud citizens. Free to express their opinions they are not, and there are too many examples of how chained down they are to list in my brief message. Suffice to say that if a group is carrying British flags and mouthing slogans such as “Britain for the British,” rest assured the fuzz will break them up and arrest anyone who dares resist. On the other hand, any group carrying pictures of Muhammad is not only allowed to say and yell anything, but they are not arrested even if they damage statues or cause chaos to those trying to go to work. The Palestinians, ironically enough, are treated as whites, with “Palestine Action” deemed a terror group and anyone belonging to it a terrorist. It’s called British fair play, although the Netanyahu way would be more to the point.

“Free speech is now considered incitement to violence—when it suits the state, that is.”

More than 10,000 arrests every year for online comments take place in perfidious Albion, more than in Russia, and I hate to think how many other countries we don’t consider democratic. Free speech is now considered incitement to violence—when it suits the state, that is. If this is freedom, I’m that great intellectual Paris Hilton.

In fact it got so bad, the peerless JD Vance openly brought it up, but a hell of a lot of good it did. British journalists are so anti-American and anti–The Donald, they actually booed JD for saying it. Such are the joys of journalists the world over. What lefty hacks do not understand is that free speech means standing up for speech with which you disagree. Incitement should be defined narrowly. It means deliberately setting out to encourage violence. If, for example, some rapper says that the only good Republican is a dead one, will his listeners start killing people who voted for The Donald? Of course not. On the other hand, during the BLM riots five years ago, the Brit fuzz ignored the troublemakers, just as the American cops did, but exemplary punishment was reserved for right-wing demonstrators.

Again, if this is British and American justice, I’m a ripe banana. Mind you, The Donald has straightened things out in the six months he’s been top banana, but in rainy old England things are looking very gloomy indeed. The leftists in power are taxing those who create wealth in a manner not seen before in Britain. Council taxes, stamp duties, and now an annual wealth tax is threatened, this one not even contemplated by Lenin back in 1917. (Well, I really don’t mean that. The bald monster took everything outright and shot those who had it.) Yet if the annual wealth tax goes through, it will mean the abolition of private property. How? By turning property rights into lease-holding ones, as diabolical as it gets.

Just think about it: You slave away and buy a house for you and your future families and some politician decides you have to pay for it each and every year despite the fact that you own the bloody thing. The Brit left thinks it fair, but then the American left thought it fair that 20 million migrants were allowed into the States by Biden in order to cook the books as far as the census was concerned. The census decides lots of things, like increased representation in Congress and in the electoral college, as well as federal funding. If this is fair, I’m Pheidippides, the Greek runner who was sent to Sparta from Athens to seek help against the invading Persians and ran 150 kilometers, avoiding lions on the way. He then got credit for running to Athens from Marathon after the Athenians had won the battle against the Persians, and he warned the Athenians not to burn down the city as they were prepared to do in case of a Persian win. But generals do not run after a victory. A fat hoplite who had not done much fighting—that was done by aristocrats fighting in the front line—was dispatched and died after announcing victory. He was out of shape.

Now back to socialism and lack of free speech by the dastardly Brits and Democrat Americans. An unelected European bureaucrat, Thierry Breton, attempted to use his influence to censor American political speech by warning Elon Musk before Elon’s first interview with The Donald. It will offend Europeans and establish a dangerous precedent, said Breton. Elon ignored him, but he should have slugged him. Free speech is as American as apple pie, but the bums in the E.U. and in Britain want to limit it. We should do to them what the Greeks did to the invading Persians.

This article was originally published on Taki’s Magazine.

The post Speech, Speech! appeared first on LewRockwell.

What good are democracies when the outcome of elections bring the opposite of what voters wish?

In June 2016 the United Kingdom voted for Brexit:

The 2016 United Kingdom European Union membership referendum, commonly referred to as the EU referendum or the Brexit referendum, was a referendum that took place on 23 June 2016 in the United Kingdom (UK) and Gibraltar under the provisions of the European Union Referendum Act 2015 to ask the electorate whether the country should continue to remain a member of, or leave, the European Union (EU). The result was a vote in favour of leaving the EU, triggering calls to begin the process of the country’s withdrawal from the EU commonly termed “Brexit”.

A main public issue in the run-up to the vote was immigration:

The Brexit vote will be debated for years to come. But the story is straightforward. Propagated by an unlikely pair of effective messengers, Leave’s “Take Back Control” message harnessed the motive power of immigration, an emotionally charged issue that had been baked into British psychology long before the vote was called. These immigration fears, not abstract concerns about a “democratic deficit” that required rescuing UK sovereignty from Brussels bureaucrats, do much to explain why Britain voted for Brexit.

Demagogues like Nigel Farage played a key role in this:

The rise of Nigel Farage and the UK Independence Party (UKIP) also played an important role in cultivating this concern among economically left-behind voters. Between 2013 and 2015 UKIP began to mobilise these voters into politics, convincing them that the issues of immigration and the EU were deeply entwined. At the 2016 referendum the vote for Brexit was strongest in areas that had given UKIP strong support two years previously. Had these voters not been galvanised by UKIP then it is unlikely they would have turned out in the numbers that we saw on June 23rd, 2016. Indeed, we also find that if somebody felt anxious over the immigration issue, and economically left behind, they were significantly more likely to vote in the referendum.

It took three and a half years to finally executed the Brexit move. The results following it though were not what people had expected:

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As the Wall Street Journal writes (archived):

The Tories, despite repeatedly promising lower overall immigration levels, soon lost control of the system they designed, triggering the biggest influx of legal migration the country has ever seen. In just one job field, care aides who look after the infirm or elderly, one government forecast assumed some 6,000 migrants a year would come to work. In the space of four years, 679,900 carers and their families arrived, government figures show.

In total, 4.5 million people arrived in Britain between 2021 and 2024, primarily from India, Nigeria and China. One in every 25 people living in the U.K. today came during that four-year window.

In comparison, the U.S. typically averages about one million new lawful permanent residents, or green card holders, a year—to a country with a total population five times the size of Britain’s.

After Boris Johnson, who had campaigned for Brexit, had become Prime Minister he implemented an industry friendly,  extremely liberal immigration policy. Workers from Europe were shunned but everybody else was welcome:

Employers no longer had to try to hire workers from Britain before recruiting from abroad. To acquire a skilled-worker visa, foreign workers weren’t required to have a college degree, they just had to be offered a job with a minimum salary of £25,600, which at the time was 23% below the full-time U.K. median salary.

There were also carve-outs. Firms could sponsor visas in certain sectors, such as construction, where there was an acute shortage of workers, paying them as little as £20,400 a year. And students could come with their families for a one-year master’s course, and stay on for two years after completing their studies. Net migration from the EU went into reverse, and arrivals from elsewhere surged. In 2021, 93,000 people arrived from India. By 2024, that number was 240,000. The number of Nigerian migrants increased fivefold in the same period.

Many arrived with families in tow. In the 12 months ending March 2024, nearly half of all visas were issued to dependents, not workers.

It is thereby not astonishing to find that Farage is back:

This sudden demographic shift, which has come at a time of economic stagnation and piled pressure on Britain’s stretched public services, is roiling the country’s politics. Immigration is now voters’ top concern. Reform UK, which says it would freeze most migration and deport those who arrive illegally, got the most votes of any party in recent municipal elections. The Tories, having lost power last year to the Labour Party, are now a distant third in the polls.

The 61-year-old Farage, long dismissed in Westminster as influential but unelectable, is now being taken seriously as a possible prime minister, though national elections are unlikely before 2029.

I doubt that voting for Farage would change a thing.

Reprinted with permission from Moon of Alabama.

The post They Voted For Brexit To Stop Immigration Only To Get More of It appeared first on LewRockwell.

Bulldozing hundreds of established olive trees last week, and thousands since 1967, and unleashing feral pigs to destroy Palestinian fields and gardens are parts of Israel’s war on agriculture and the environment. These tactics are important to Israel’s national security project.  A country has a right to defend itself, after all. Targeting food and the ability to grow and produce food to defeat an enemy, as well as for domestic population control, is historically typical state methodology.

North American bison were all but eliminated in order to drive native Americans off their lands and hunting grounds. We watch historical dramas like Downton Abbey and marvel at how food defines and separates class, liberty and power.  Americans, as tenants of empires on the cusp of collapse will do, obsess over food, and their health.  Simultaneously the people who will build the new republics that will inherit this continent are studying how the state, especially the corporate state, uses food for profit and control – and we are discovering and building new ways to combat that.

The last thing the state wants to see is someone who can grow and produce his or her living, and share with their community via a marketplace, unhindered and untouched by the state.  There is a reason that there are so few local USDA inspected meat processing facilities serving small-holders – as this same federal entity banned all sales of non-USDA inspected processed meat, and other food items. Creative solutions, like farm shares, have become the only way that many people can access fresh and raw food and not be criminals in the eyes of the authorities.  Food icon and rebel Joel Salatin had to buy and refurbish his own processing facility in Harrisonburg in order to honestly serve his customers and live more freely.  His facility is, of course, USDA approved.  Government is so important, a real value add.

The US is blessed with natural abundance and a relatively sparse population, and Americans in general believe caring for land and producing food for the market are good things.  Farming and food production is hard work, sometimes impossible, and for many, not rewarding or even happiness-producing.  In this arena, the difficulty is compounded by hundreds of US state agencies and functions, and thousands of pages of regulatory controls.  These should all be altered or abolished – but in the meantime we’ll do just fine.  After all, USDA, FDA, Commerce Department and IRS agents aren’t armed and deputized, right?

The Visual Capitalist recently assessed countries in the world in terms of daily calorie consumption.  I’m pretty sure even all-you-can-eat Florida Congressman Randy Fine won’t be able to guess which country is Number 1!

It’s Belgium!  It’s sheer coincidence that Brussels is the “de facto” capitol of the European Union, filled with unelected bureaucrats and those getting wealthy on insider information and war.  No, it’s just expensive cheese and chocolate.

The number 2 country was a real surprise: Israel.  Number 3?  The US.  These runners-up come in at 3875 calories (US) and 3895 (Israel), only 20 calories separating them.  It’s almost like they are the same country!

There are a lot of jokes about “traditional Israeli” food, and obesity in America, but it’s no laughing matter.  Both countries face significant hunger, with 1 in 7 Americans not being well nourished.  In Israel, one in three children live below the poverty line, according to Yadezra, an Israeli charity oriented to feeding the hungry in Israel with their American partners.  Oh my!

The Visual Capitalist analysis just ranked the top 40 calorie consumers.  With a bit of digging, we can find how other populations are doing in the food races. I suspect that Gaza is near the bottom of the list, with a whopping 245 calories a day reported last year in northern Gaza, fourteen starving months before the UN backed body, the IPC, actually declared a famine there last month.  Wait – did I leave out a zero?  No, sorry, Gaza’s daily calories are in the low triple digits, far below the calories required for sustainment of life. Turns out, it’s a genocide after all, even according to key Israelis.

Curiously, the top three calorie consumers, where nutritious and high caloric food is most plentiful, have all worked really hard to continue the devastation being wreaked on Gaza’s mostly unarmed, unfed, unhoused and uncared for.  Belgium, in hosting the EU, is stuck with a unelected bureaucracy for Europe that is remarkably corrupt and out of touch.  The US consistently armed and subsidizes Israel, and vetoes UN statements of support for Gaza, and organizational attempts to feed people.  The US Ambassador to the UN denies that Israel is intentionally starving the remaining 1.7 million Gazans that our bombs and munitions haven’t killed or buried already.  Israel maintains that starvation and state murder is just national security, and as we all know by now, Israel has a right to defend itself.

Controlling human movement and access to food is how the state in extremis manages its population. Israeli weapons of crowd control, targeting-AI like “Where’s Daddy,” advanced population surveillance techniques, and drone warfare are all being tested and honed on a weakened, concentrated and largely dying Gazan population.  Also being tested are the weapons of lockdown, movement corridors, food dissemination and adulteration, water and environmental poisons.  The US government and its War Department are knee deep in all of it.

As we approach our Labor Day festivities, perhaps with a big meal together at the end of summer, we may ask each other if we are hungry yet, as we anticipate a satisfying meal.

After we eat, maybe we can begin to digest the deadly dangers of our own government, and its corrupt and warlike allies.  It has always been the state that salts the fields, starves the children, kills the livestock, crushes the cities, and corrals the people on a can of beans a day.

Like all states, in times of trouble, war and even in peace, the US exhibits totalitarian overreach.  Washington’s current domestic wars – on drugs, COVID, immigrants, the First, Second and Fourth amendments, dollar-based purchasing power, working class prosperity – are matched by an array of bristling global military outposts, threats of war, aid to wars in dozens of countries, and ongoing CIA regime change operations. The weapons the state now wields and trains on  – including some of what we are witnessing in Gaza today – will come home, not only to haunt us, but to destroy us.

The post Are We Hungry Yet? appeared first on LewRockwell.

Ever since 1913, the United States of America has been captive to an unconstitutional and immoral institution known as the Federal Reserve. The U.S. government is forbidden from counterfeiting money, so they outsourced it to a “private” cartel of banks. This is similar to how the government outsources censorship to “private” social media companies. Ever since 1913, the Fed has destroyed the value of the dollar, along with the U.S. economy; and it has financed endless wars and debts that cannot be honored. America can’t the “land of the free” as long as there’s a Federal Reserve.

The post End The Scandal Ridden Fed appeared first on LewRockwell.

Click here:

Eugyppius

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Writes Bill Madden:

This article will be good advice for our younger Americans after we correct our governance back to the Constitution.  It was published in: www.lewrockwell.com along with many other great articles.  If only good communication could help control our increasingly powerful central government and return some power back to the people.

Most of our country’s problems stem from unconstitutional agencies, legislation and activities but, unfortunately, those profiting from unconstitutional government are very willing to share some of the profits from unconstitutional governance with our politicians and bureaucrats.  Therein lies the problem.

The post Andrew’s Latest appeared first on LewRockwell.

David Martin wrote:

Such great timing with what they’re doing in Gaza.

See this.

The post Beverly Hills To Display Israeli Flags in Public Schools appeared first on LewRockwell.

Thanks, Ginny Garner.

The post Barbara Eden’s Interview With Bill Maher appeared first on LewRockwell.

Thanks, John Frahm.

Blaze Media

The post We finally have an idea why John Bolton is in hot water — and the factor that could bring things to a boil appeared first on LewRockwell.

Thanks. John Frahm.

Alpha News

The post Minnesota Dems belittle prayers in wake of shooting at Catholic church in Minneapolis appeared first on LewRockwell.

Extortion is the keystone of America’s Mafioso Economy.

And scene: here are the dons, each the ruthless head of their own vast organization, seated next to their wives in a show of bourgeois respectability, assembled by invitation to kiss the ring of the Godfather. This isn’t just fiction, of course; we’ve all seen the photo of America’s Big Tech dons, wives in tow, lined up in a display of billionaire obeisance.

We all know the drill: give the Godfather respect and his cut, and you can return to your extractive monopoly confident that nobody is going to interrupt your grift.

Welcome to America’s Mafioso Economy, where monopolies are free to extract vast fortunes via addiction (pharmaceuticals, social media, gaming, pornography, gambling, entertainment, etc.), predatory pricing (oops, I mean dynamic pricing), shoddy goods and services, shakedowns, and of course, extortion: offers you can’t refuse.

For example, that software you could buy and use for years until the Mafioso Monopoly obsoleted it? Now you have to rent it. It’s called a subscription service, which is like calling the addict’s next hit of smack a subscription service. You have a need, and the Mafioso Monopoly will service your need, but monthly. So what once cost $200 now extracts $1,000 from your earnings. Same product (or worse), but now it costs a lot more.

That’s America’s Mafioso Economy in a nutshell: same product or service, but now it costs more. And since the Mafioso Monopolies bought up all their competitors (an offer you can’t refuse), there’s no where else to turn, except perhaps another Mafioso member of a cartel.

It’s not just pay to play–you have to pay just to enter the auction of political favors. The Clinton Foundation set a new standard of Mafioso malignancy: “donate” to the foundation if you want access, then “donate” more if you want some actual action.

Extortion is the keystone of America’s Mafioso Economy. Apply a little pressure, make an offer they can’t refuse, and voila. Nice little business / institution you got there, too bad it’s about to be gutted by some new regulations or executive actions. There is a way to make it all go away, but it’s going to cost you.

Extortion pricing is Corporate America’s playbook. Since every corporation Mafia deploys the same algos and extractive exploitation strategies, our choice boils down to which paddock we enter to get sheared.

Our Stasi-style surveillance and AI-powered algos have detected you can pay more than your fellow debt-serfs, so the price of your airline seat, or grocery item, is higher than the other customers. It’s not extortion because you could go to another member of the Mafia cartel, but alas, they use the same dynamic pricing, so too bad you passed up that initial price, now it’s even higher.

Junk fees abound because we have no choice. Where else can you buy a ticket to that concert you absolutely must attend? How about switching electrical utilities to get a better deal? Monopolies abound because they’re the foundation of America’s Mafioso Economy.

Darth Vader understood the Empire is also a Mafioso structure. Once you gain power over supply and governance, then you’re free to alter the deal at will. I have altered the deal, pray I don’t alter it further.

This article was originally published on OfTwoMinds.com.

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