Lew Rockwell Institute

Natural law is often regarded with suspicion by social scientists because they conceptualize human nature, and increasingly even the nature of animals, as a social construct. In their view there is no essential human nature by reference to which we can decide what is in the best interests of society. They argue that we must instead adopt an aspirational approach, by constructing a better and fairer world for the planet, and by discovering what is best for society through a process of scientific experimentation. From that perspective notions of “right” and “wrong” are nothing more than majority opinions ascertained through democratic debate and agreement, and it would be hopelessly arbitrary and subjective to decide right and wrong by reference to some “higher” law called the law of nature.

In The Ethics of Liberty, Murray Rothbard rejects these perspectives, arguing that the skepticism with which natural law is generally regarded is entirely misguided. Rothbard observes that,

Among intellectuals who consider themselves “scientific,” the phrase “the nature of man” is apt to have the effect of a red flag on a bull. “Man has no nature!” is the modern rallying cry and typical of the sentiment of political philosophers today was the assertion of a distinguished political theorist some years ago before a meeting of the American Political Science Association that “man’s nature” is a purely theological concept that must be dismissed from any scientific discussion.

Legal positivists are particularly keen to extinguish the idea that law is based on moral principles. Similarly, many utilitarians evaluate law based on its consequences for society, not based on morality. The debate in the UK about decriminalizing “assisted suicide” is an example of the desire to avoid theological or moral influences in debating law reform. It is no longer a crime in the UK to commit or attempt to commit suicide, so there is no law to prevent anyone committing suicide should they wish, but anyone assisting another to commit suicide risks being prosecuted for the crime of “encouraging or assisting suicide” under the Suicide Act 1961 or even, in serious cases, the crime of homicide. Thus, decriminalizing assisted suicide would establish that it is not unlawful to assist suicide, and supporters of assisted suicide argue that “moral” considerations should not enter the decriminalization debate.

The biblical edict, “Thou shalt not commit murder,” for centuries sufficed for many people as an explanation of why murder is forbidden. It has therefore long been assumed that any argument that murder is “wrong” in the moral sense must necessarily be a religious principle. This explains why any attempt to introduce “moral” arguments into the assisted suicide debate is then treated as an inappropriate attempt to introduce theology into the law. Religious principles are, of course, only binding on their own followers, therefore, in a secular age, it is deemed preferable to say that murder is illegal and that the reason one must not commit murder is that the law prohibits it.

In this example, reformers in favor of decriminalization dismiss their opponents’ arguments as “moral” arguments, insisting that only arguments that can be justified without stating that assisted suicide would be “wrong” in the moral sense would constitute a valid objection to their proposals. But the strongest arguments against legalizing assisted suicide that are advanced by disability groups and by professional bodies including the World Medical Association are moral arguments, even though they are patently not religious. Moreover, supporters of legalization themselves use moral arguments to support their case, chiefly that we ought to respect an autonomous choice to kill oneself and obtain assistance to do so, and that society has a moral duty to end suffering. Hence, the former Lord Chief Justice, Lord Judge, observed that whether to decriminalize assisted suicide is the “the great moral and legal problem of our times.”

Conflating morality with religion, in an attempt to exclude moral arguments from public debate, is therefore mistaken. The view that something is “morally wrong” is not, in itself, a religious view. The fact that many people are religious and may base their personal moral principles on their religion does not mean that all moral principles are based on religion. Nor does it mean that secular moral principles should be understood as a Dawkinsian-style “cultural religion,” in which religious views are adopted for cultural reasons with the deity conveniently excised. After all, one need not be religious to embrace the Christian edicts, “Thou shalt not steal” or “Thou shalt not commit murder,” and it is this sense that Richard Dawkins could, without contradicting himself, express his admiration for Christian principles despite being an atheist:

“Perhaps to the surprise of many, Richard Dawkins, famed “New Atheist” of yesteryear, in a recent radio interview called himself a “cultural Christian.” He was quick to clarify that he is “not a believer” in the actual teachings of Christianity, but nonetheless told the interviewer “I love hymns and Christmas carols, and I sort of feel at home in the Christian ethos. I feel that we are a Christian country in that sense.”

This leads many wrongly to assume that reference to moral principles is some sort of “cultural theology” in which divine principles are adopted without explicit reference to the divine. They fail to appreciate the clear analytical distinction between moral principles and religious edicts.

Against that background, Rothbard’s analysis of natural law may be understood as part of a natural law tradition that attempts to identify principles of natural law based purely on reason, entirely distinct from principles derived from “divine law.” Rothbard rejects the idea that “natural law and theology are inextricably intertwined.” In his view, natural law based on reason is not a set of subjective religious or ideological opinions, but a set of objective principles derived from human nature.

Nor is natural law a set of cultural norms comprising religious principles with the deity conveniently expunged in the Dawkinsian sense. Rothbard rejects the claim that, through the natural law, “God and mysticism are being slipped in by the back door.” He is clear that natural law, in the tradition he draws upon, is “purely rationalistic and non-theological” and he insists on the “absolute independence of natural law from the question of the existence of God.”

The principles of natural law are not derived in any way from theological principles, but by an independent process of “reason and rational inquiry.” Natural law in this tradition emphasizes “the ability of man’s reason to understand and arrive at the laws, physical and ethical, of the natural order.” Rothbard explains that “the instrument by which man apprehends such law is his reason – not faith, or intuition, or grace, revelation, or anything else.”

The natural order, in which human nature must be understood and contended with, is therefore central to Rothbard’s account of the natural law. Natural law is based on reality, including the reality of human nature, and rejects the modern social-scientist notion that reality is a social construct which can be anything people choose it to be. Rothbard quotes Thomas E. Davitt:

If the word “natural” means anything at all, it refers to the nature of a man, and when used with “law,” “natural” must refer to an ordering that is manifested in the inclinations of a man’s nature and to nothing else.

Rothbard emphasizes that nature is by no means a “mystical” or “supernatural” idea, but refers to the attributes of things that can be identified by observing cause and effect: “The observable behavior of each of these entities is the law of their natures, and this law includes what happens as a result of the interactions” – referring here to the interactions that occur “when these various things meet and interact.” In that sense, being manifested in human nature, the principles of natural law are universal and objective.

The fact that natural law is universal matters greatly. It explains why human beings from different tribes and nations can learn from one another and avoid each other’s mistakes. By reference to the principles of natural law, derived through reason and rationality, we can ascertain what is objectively good or objectively bad for society. Natural law principles do not reflect the nature of a particular man, or a particular group, nation, culture, or race of men, nor anybody’s subjective opinions and preferences, but reflect the essential nature of human beings. As Rothbard puts it, “Man’s reason is objective, i.e., it can be employed by all men to yield truths about the world.”

Rothbard’s aim in drawing upon the natural law is to formulate a coherent theory of liberty based on private property. But there is more – he also sheds light on the steps people must take to choose which ends to pursue and how they can achieve good and morally just outcomes. As Rothbard explains, “For the ends themselves are selected by the use of reason; and ‘right reason’ dictates to man his proper ends as well as the means for their attainment.”

The post Natural Law and Rothbardian Liberty appeared first on LewRockwell.

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. launched his campaign for President of the United States in April 2023 as a Democrat, like both his uncle, President John F. Kennedy, and his father. Shunned by President Joe Biden and the Democratic National Committee (DNC), he opted to quit (in October) the Democratic Party and campaign as an Independent. Then last week he gave a speech to the media titled “RFK Jr. Address to the Nation: Full Disclosure,” where he announced his decision to stop his campaign and support Donald Trump in his campaign for a second term as President of the United States.

In his moving 6,150-word address, RFK Jr. explains why he left the Democratic Party:

“I left that Party in October because it had departed so dramatically from the core values that I grew up with. It had become the Party of war, censorship, corruption, big pharma, big tech, big AG, and big money.”

He laments the fact that “democracy… has become little more than a slogan for our political institutions, for our media, and for our government, and most sadly at all, for me, for the Democratic Party.” He says:

“My uncle and my father both relished debate. They prided themselves on their capacity to go toe to toe with any opponent in a battle of ideas. They would be astonished to learn of a Democratic Party presidential nominee who, like Vice President Harris, has not appeared in a single interview or an unscripted encounter with voters for 35 days. This is profoundly undemocratic. How are people to judge when they don’t know whom they are choosing? And how can this look to the rest of the world?”

RFK Jr. considers the DNC’s pick of Vice President Kamala Harris a poor choice to succeed an enfeebled Joe Biden. He views her as an especially poor role model for advancing democratic processes and being the leader of the free world, saying:

“The DNC and its media organs engineered a surge of popularity for Vice President Kamala Harris based on nothing. No policies, no interviews, no debates, only smoke and mirrors and balloons in a highly-produced circus… [And] there in Chicago a string of Democratic speakers mentioned Donald Trump 147 times just on the first day. Who needs a policy when you have Trump to hate? In contrast, at the RNC convention, President Biden was mentioned only twice in four days.”

In the speech, Robert Kennedy tells us that three great causes drove him to enter the presidential race, which then persuaded him to leave the Democratic Party and run as an Independent, and finally to switch his support to President Trump! They are: 1) free speech; 2) the war in Ukraine; and 3) the war on our children.

Free speech in America is being greatly threatened by the “government’s censorship industrial complex,” as RFK Jr. puts it. For the representatives of the media networks attending his speech, he tells them:

“Your institutions and media made themselves government mouthpieces and stenographers for the organs of power.”

Robert Kennedy and Donald Trump view the war in Ukraine the same way: They see, as RFK Jr. puts it that: “Ukraine is a proxy in a geopolitical struggle initiated by the ambitions of the US neocons for American global hegemony.” And furthermore:

“The reckless neocon project of extending NATO to encircle Russia is a hostile act. The credulous media rarely explain to Americans that we unilaterally walked away from two intermediate nuclear weapons treaties with Russia and then put nuclear missile systems in Romania and Poland.”

He also points out that President Biden has stated that “his objective in the war was regime change in Russia.” Instead, “our moral authority and our economy are in shambles, and the war gave rise to the emergence of BRICS, which now threatens to replace the dollar as a global reserve currency.”

RFK Jr. makes this telling point:

Last summer, it looked like no candidate was willing [1] to negotiate a quick end to the Ukraine war, [2] to tackle the chronic disease epidemic, [3] to protect free speech and our constitutional freedoms, [4] clean corporate influence out of our government, or [5]  defy the neocons and their agenda of endless military adventurism. But now one of the two candidates [Harris and Trump] has adopted these issues as his own, to the point where he has asked to enlist me in his administration. I’m speaking, of course, of Donald Trump.

He is not overstating the problem when he says that America’s chronic disease epidemic has become far worse than most Americans realize, as these facts show:

→ The U.S. is 79th in health outcomes, behind even Costa Rica, Nicaragua, and Mongolia.

→ Two-thirds of American adults and children now suffer from chronic health issues, whereas 50  years ago that number was less than1 percent.

→Now 74 percent of Americans are overweight or obese, including 50 percent of our children.

→Half of Americans have prediabetes or type two diabetes, and pediatricians find that now 1/3rd of children they see are diabetic or prediabetic.

→The CDC says that autism rates in children is now 1 in 36 (it is 1 in 22 in California!),

whereas the autism rate 70 years ago was 1 in 10,000!

→Now 18 percent of American teens have fatty liver disease, which used to affect only late-stage alcoholics.

→Cancer rates are skyrocketing in both the young and old.

RFK Jr. cites these findings to show how bad America’s chronic disease epidemic has become, findings that Casey Means, M.D. and her brother Colley Means corroborate in their bestselling book Good Energy: The Surprising Connection Between Metabolism and Limitless Health (2024). This book, written by two widely respected food safety advocates and published May 13, 2024, is a best seller. And it turns out that both Donald Trump and  Robert Kennedy had each independently sought advice from Collen Means for dealing with America’s chronic disease epidemic before Kennedy and Trump considered forming a political partnership.

So what is causing such widespread suffering? RFK Jr. names two culprits: ultra-processed foods and toxic chemicals in our food, medicines, and the environment, which include Pesticides; food additives; pharmaceutical drugs, like Ozempic–for obesity and costs $1,500 a month, and toxic waste. Speaking for both Donald Trump and him, Kennedy says:

“We’re going to bring healthy food back to school lunches. We’re going to stop subsidizing the worst foods with our agricultural subsidies. We’re going to get toxic chemicals out of our food. We’re going to reform the entire food system. And for that, we need new leadership in Washington. Because unfortunately, both the Democrats and the Republican parties are in cahoots with the big food producers, Big Pharma and Big AG, which are among the DNC’s major donors.”

RJK Jr. has announced that he will be on the campaign trail helping Donald Trump get reelected for a second term as President of the United States.

Notes:

A transcript of this speech by Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., “RFK Jr. Address to the Nation: Full Disclosure,” given on August 23, 2024, in Phoenix, AZ, is available Here.

A 12-minute Video of RFK Jr. voicing his support for Donald Trump, given at a Trump rally later that day in Glendale, AZ, is available Here.

My article, “Trump: Our Only Hope for Escaping World War III,” published March 9, 2016, on LewRockwell.com, is available Here.

My article, “Facing Nuclear War,” published April 6, 2024, on LewRockwell.com, is available Here.

The post RFK Jr. and Donald Trump: a Good Fit appeared first on LewRockwell.

Friends,

Fifty years later this remains one of, if not the most, insightful presentation on the Israeli and Jewish soul and heart as manipulated, sabotaged, disfigured and murdered by Zionist’s evil. Do take the time to read it, ponder it. I know of no piece authored by anyone in the Church in 2024 that matches it spiritual profundity, historically validate prophetic power and courageous truth telling.

Emmanuel Charles McCarthy

A TRAGEDY BEYOND CALCULATING:

The State of Israel Has Become The Tomb of The Jewish Soul.

A talk given by Daniel Berrigan, S.J on Oct. 19, 1973, shortly after he completed his parole in a federal sentence for acts of nonviolent resistance against the Vietnam war. The speech was printed that month in American Report, a publication of Clergy and Laity Concerned, the anti-Vietnam War Organization.

I come before you this evening, as a non-expert in every field of human expertise, including the subject you have invited me to explore. I wish to include also in my field of inexpertise my own religious tradition; I am a non-expert Christian, by any conceivable standard.

This admission is in the interests of both clarity of mind and of moral conduct. I am interested, as a Christian, in one thing only; in so simple a thing as sane conduct in the world. The experts in my tradition, the theologians, the biblical scholars, and by and large, the hierarchy, go in another direction than mine. “Sane conduct” (whatever that means) is taken for granted; what really counts is the jot and tittle of the tradition, or its worldly prospering, or its honorable reception among peoples. Sane conduct is taken for granted; are not Christians by definition sane, in touch with the truth, destined to share infallibly in their reward?

I say no. The exemplary conduct of expert Christians, as indeed of most experts in human disciplines is to fiddle while the world burns. Hardly sane! A kind of lethal fatalism, looks equably upon combustible human flesh, shrugs its shoulders the better to nestle the violin, and coax from its entrails the immortal (and irrelevant) stroke.

Sane conduct in the world. Let me explain. I do not believe it is the destiny of human flesh to burn; and for that I am in trouble, as are my friends, to this day. I do not believe that a violin concerto, however immortal in execution, is the proper comfort to offer a napalmed child. I believe that the fiddler should come down from the roof, put his violin aside, take up his extinguisher, raise a cry of alarm, break down the intervening door. I believe that he should on occasion of crisis destroy property in favor of human life.

You see, I am a heretic in a consuming and killing culture, as well as in a complicity church.

These are troublesome statements; but do not call them naïve, or shrug them off as generally accepted by the civilized; or, in the presence of scholar, as irrelevant. Do not say: it is of course the generals who light fires, we deplore that. I answer: Most scholars, most priests, most Jews, most Arabs, while they wo Telegram Founder Pavl Durov Arrested – unCensored Speech
By Helena Glassuld prefer some less horrendous sight than the burning flesh of children, are not seriously shaken in their style of mind, their taxpaying, their consumerism, their spiritual, economic, or political complicity, by such “incidents.”

I begin in so odious a way because I do not wish to narrow our question so sharply as to exclude ourselves from its orbit. I do not wish to take us off the hook, even while I wish to say something unequivocal about one instance of cruelty, racism, murder, as political tools.

It is of course scarcely possible to open the moral question of Israeli or Arab conduct today, without exciting the most lively passion, and risking the most serious charges. A war is underway. We are assured by the Israelis, and by most of the Jewish community throughout the world, that the war is a war of survival. We are assured just as vehemently by the Arabs that the war is one of expansion and aggression by Israel.

Moreover, the interests of the super powers are deeply imbedded in Near Eastern soil. Those interests include western oil contracts, and, East and West, an impalpable element of outreach, something hard to define, a cold war afflatus perhaps, something called an “ideological sphere of influence.” In any case, both East and West are shoring up their interests with that most concrete and bloody proof devotion: arms, and more arms.

Certainly these facts must be respected, if this evening and the days to follow are to be more than an exercise in national or racial or religious frenzy. A ceasefire has been offered by Egypt; something unprecedented in the history of this conflict. Moreover, the terms of the ceasefire seem reasonable and clear of Arab arms-rattling. The offering includes a declaration of de facto respect for the existence of Israel, a de facto state; it asks for a return to the boundary lines which existed before the 1967 War, and some justice for the Palestinian people.

Suicidal Adventure

In the seriousness and sanity of the ceasefire offer, therefore, I believe that events themselves are helping set the stage for a fruitful study. In supporting the Egyptian proposal, I hope to answer those who would make the present war into an Israeli spasm of survival. Nothing of the sort. Or those who would make the critics of this war, into proponents of Israeli extinction. Nothing of the kind. Or those who would make critics of the united states, into supporters of the Soviet Union; nothing of the sort.

In calling attention to this proposal I am simply urging that attention be paid to the first sane option that has arisen in the course of this suicidal adventure. Indeed there are no sides worth talking about tonight. There are indeed immense numbers of people whose lives and rights are being violated, degraded and denied. Any real solution will take into account these peoples: the Palestinians—a people without a country; the Israelis—a people in danger; the Arab nations—a people invaded. How carefully one must proceed on these matters if he is not to worsen an already tortured situation. I endorse the Egyptian ceasefire proposal while opposing many aspects of the Egyptian regime, and of the Sheikhdoms, and of Jordan and Syria. We must take into account their capacity for deception, which is remarkable even for our world. We must take into account their contempt for their own poor, a contempt that would be called legendary if it were not horrifyingly modern. We must take into account their willingness to oil the war machinery of the superpowers making them accomplices of the American war criminals. We must take into account their cupidity masked only by their monumental indifference to the facts of their world. no, I offer no apologia tonight for the Arab states any more than I do for Israel.

I do not wish to begin by “taking sides”; nor indeed to end by “taking sides.” I am sick of “sides”; which is to say, I am sick of war; of wars hot and cold; and all their approximations and metaphors and deceits and ideological ruses. I am sick of the betrayal of the mind and the failure of compassion and the neglect of the poor. I am sick of foreign ministers and all their works and pomps. I am sick of torture and secret police and the apparatus of fascists and the rhetoric of leftists. Like Lazarus, staggering from his grave, or the ghost of Trotsky I can only groan: “We have had enough of that, we have been through all that.”

Thus this evening, and my presence here. When I received the invitation some months ago, I winced. Another crisis? If the nerve ends of Israelis and Arabs were raw, so were mine. More; why should I enter their back yard on a cleanup project when my own, America, was a moral shantytown? And the war broke; and I winced again; and very nearly begged off. Then a better, second thought occurred; something like this. If it was important to speak up while the peace, at least a relative peace, held—then why not when a war broke? Indeed, did not the need for dispassionate and reasonable courage increase, while the guns were cutting down whatever rational exchange remained alive? If the first casualty of war was the truth, might it not be important to prevent, at least on one scene, that mortal casualty from occurring?

Human Community

I do not wish to heap conflict upon conflict. If I seem to concentrate upon the conduct of Israel, it is for reasons, which to me at least, are profound, of long pondering and finally inescapable. It is not merely because my government, which has brought endless suffering to the world, is supporting Israel. It is not merely because American Jews, as well as Israelis, have in the main given their acquiescence or their support to the Nixon ethos. The reasons go deeper, and strike harder; they are lodged in my soul, in my conception of faith and the transcendent, in the vision Jews have taught me, of human conduct in a human community.

I am (to put the matter as simply as I know how), I am paying an old debt tonight. It is a debt of love; more properly, a debt of outraged love. I am a western Christian, in resistance against my government and my church. That position, as I read it, makes me something very like a Jew. It is of that uneasy circle, ever changing, widening, contracting, including, excluding, that I wish to speak. I am a Catholic priest, in resistance against Rome. I am an American, in resistance against Nixon, and I am a Jew, in resistance against Israel. But let me begin.

A common assumption exists in the West, buttressed by massive historical and religious argument, to the effect that Israel is exempt from moral criticism. Her people have passed through the gentile furnace; how then shall the goy judge the suffering servant? And is not the holocaust the definitive argument for the righteousness of this people, heroically determined to begin again, in a promised land, that experiment in survival which so nearly went awry, so often, under such constant assault at our hands?

Mean of Love

In such a way, bad history is mightily reinforced by bad faith. The persecutor is a poor critic. His history weighs on him; like a bad parent, he alternates between cruelty and indulgence, without ever striking the mean of love.

In such a way, Christians yield to Israel the right to her myths; to indulge them, to enlarge them, to live by them, even to call them biblical truth. If the Jews are indeed the people of promise, and Israel the land of promise; then it must follow that God has willed the two to coincide. The means? They are swallowed up in the end, they disappear into glory. And if the means include domestic repression, deception, cruelty, militarism? And if the classic refugee people is now creating huge numbers of refugees? And if technological warfare has become the instrument of expansion, and pre-emptive warfare the instrument of so called peace? And if this people, so proud, so endowed with intelligence, so purified by suffering, sends its military missioners into every part of the world where minority people are bleeding under the heel of jackboots? Israeli military advisers in Iran, Israeli military advisers in Ethiopia? And if these advisers (that cruel euphemism under whose guise America kindled the Viet Nam holocaust) are sought and hired because Israelis have become as skilled in the fashioning of espionage and violence as ever were their oppressors? Are such means as these swallowed in glory? Or do they stick in the throat of those who believe, as Judaism taught the world to believe, “Thou shalt not kill”?

I started to say something about my own church, and I proceed to talk about Israel. I did so advisedly. I did so because today my church has helped Israel exegete her own texts—wrongly, harmfully, as I believe. My church has helped Israel in that project of the settler state—whether of South Africa or Israel or the United State—which is to seek a biblical justification for crimes against humanity.

For a Christian who is trying to understand and live by his own tradition, the confusion of bible and imperialism in Israel represents an altogether unique tragedy. We in the U.S.A. learned to bear the filthy weight of South African religious violence, even while we abominated it. We learned to survive the filthy weight of American religious violence, even while we abominated it. In both cases, we tried to separate out the corrupt cultural elements from the truth of a tradition, and to live by the latter. We learned to do this, because we knew at least something of the history of Christianity, in both its criminal and saintly aspects.

But you must understand our horror, our sense of impoverishment, almost our sense of amputation. For while we had known criminal Christian communities, and suffered at the hand of our own renegades, and seen Viet Nam assaulted in the name of Christian civilization—we had never known a criminal Jewish community. We had known Jewish communities that were a light to the gentiles, that were persecuted, all but erased, that remained merciful, eloquent, prophetic.

But something new was occurring before our eyes… the Jews arose from the holocaust, a cause of universal joy, but the Jews arose like warriors, armed to the teeth. They took possession of a land, they exiled and destroyed old Arab communities, they (a minority) made outsiders of those who were in fact, the majority of citizens. Then, they flexed their muscles; like the goyim, the idolaters, the “inhabitants of this earth,” like Babylon and Egypt and Assyria; like those kingdoms which Israel’s own prophets summoned to judgment, Israel entered the imperial adventure. She took up the imperial weapons, she spread abroad the imperial deceptions.

In the space of 25 years, this metamorphosis took place. The wandering Jew became the settler Jew; the settler ethos became the imperial adventure. More, the thought of Nietzsche, of Camus and Fanon was vindicated; the slave became master, and created slaves. The slave master created a “shadowy other.” Israel had emerged from the historical shadows determined to take her place in the company of nations; an ambition no decent conscience could object to. But the price of her emergence was bitter and heavy; and it continues. That price indeed, neither Israel nor ourselves have yet counted up. But we do know a few of the human items who have been placed on the block of Israeli hegemony. They include some one and a half million refugees, whom Israel has created in the process of creating herself.

Coinage of Israel

And let us not hesitate to state the price in Israeli coinage. Something like this; not only a dismal fate for foreign and indigenous victims, but the failure to create new forms of political and social life for her own citizens. The coinage of Israel is stamped with the imperialist faces whose favor she has courted; the creation of an elite of millionaires, generals and entrepreneurs. And the price is being paid by Israel’s Oriental Jews, the poor, the excluded, prisoners. Do we seek, analogies for this “sublime adventure of return”? They are not hard to come by. But they do not exist, alas, in the dreams of Zionist rhetoricians; they exist rather in the real world, where Zionist violence and repression joins the violence and repression of the great (and little) powers; a common method, a common dead end.

It is entirely logical for instance, that Russia, which crushed the Czechs, is now in the process of crushing the Ukrainians, and bottling the brains of political dissidents on the shelves of psychiatric morgues. It is entirely logical that the U.S., which determined to crush the Vietnamese, also spent a considerable part of the ‘60’s “mopping up” political dissidents at home. Imperialism has no favorites; it freezes all it touches. It is thus not to be wondered at that torture has been applied to Israeli citizens as well as to suspect Palestinian terrorists. It is logical that Israeli workers are exploited, even while the indigenous peasants are rooted out and their villages destroyed. Logical too, that racist ideology which brought the destruction of the Jewish communities at the hands of the Nazis should now be employed by the state of Israeli, fostering the myth of the “barbarian Arab,” and of Israel the “sublime expression of the liberation of the Jewish people.”

If only a people could know itself! If only a people could stand back from the welter of claim, the barrage of propaganda, the blood myths of divine election, the rhetoric which assures it that its case before history is unique and virtuous and in fact unassailable! If that could happen, Israel would see, as indeed some of her own resisters, some of her own victims, some of her own friends, do see; that she is rapidly evolving into the image of her ancient adversaries. That her historic adventure, which gave her the unassailable right to “judge the nations,” has veered off into an imperial misadventure; that she carries in the world, the stigmata of the settler nation; that she is ranged not at the side of those she once stood with, and succored and protected from extinction; the poor, the despised, the victims of the powers of this world.

Sacred Books

No. she has closed those books, her sacred books. Her prophets shed no light upon her politics. Or more exactly to the point, she has not passed from a dispossessed people to a democratic state, as she would claim; she has passed from a dispossessed people to an imperial entity. And this (I say it with a sinking heart) is to the loss of all the world; to her own loss, and to the loss of Palestinians, and Americans, and Jews in the diaspora, and Jews in Russia, and the Pope in the Vatican, and Vietnamese, and Cambodians, and South Africans, and Chileans. For it is of moment to us all (I almost said of supreme moment) that Jews retain their own soul, their own books, their own vivid sense of alternate paths to the light, so that Jews might be the arbiter and advocate of the downtrodden of the earth.

On the scales of the spirit, as the nations are finally judged, it is a tragedy beyond calculating, that the State of Israel should become the repository, and finally the tomb, of the Jewish soul. That in place of Jewish compassion, Israel should legislate armaments and yet more armaments. That in place of Jewish compassion for the poor and forgotten, Israel should legislate evictions, uprootings, destruction of goods, imprisonment, terrorism. That in place of Jewish peaceableness, Israel should legislate a law of expanding violence. That in place of Jewish prophetic wisdom, Israel should launch an Orwellian nightmare of double talk, racism, fifth-rate sociological jargon, aimed at proving its racial superiority to the people it has crushed. My sense of loss here is something more than academic.

Let me say this; when an American is resisting the murder of the Vietnamese people, one of his chief sources of strength is the conviction that around the world, there exists a spiritual network of those who have put their lives to the same resistance. A network of conscience. One is joined in this way, to Blacks and Cubans and Brazilians and Chileans and so many others, who have made it their life’s work to create a better method than murder for dealing with human conflict. Now at any moment of my struggle, in the underground or in prison, did resisters such as I take comfort from the conduct of the state of Israel? Could we believe the rhetoric that she was packaging and huckstering in the world? I must answer no, in the name of all. Rather than being comforted, I was tempered and sobered. I knew that I must take into account two bitter facts about Israel: 1) that if I were a conscientious Jew in Israel I would have to live as I was living in America; that is, in resistance against the state. And 2) the reaction of Israel to my conscience would be exactly the reaction of the United States; that is to say, I would either be hunted by the police, or in prison.

Which brings me to a reflection nearer home; the American Jewish community and the Viet Nam war: by and large, that community’s leadership, I stress leadership, fervent in support of Israel, was also fervent in support of Nixon. It was a massive support indeed; and it did not gather in a political vacuum. Nixon is a political manipulator of great astuteness; religion and religious interests are part of the fulcrum he exerts on world events. So he was able to mute the horrific facts of the Viet Nam war in light of Jewish concern for the wellbeing of Israel. The plain fact was that Mrs. Meir wanted Phantom jets and Nixon wanted re-election. Another fact was also plain, if of less moment to either party; in Nixon’s first term alone some six million Southeast Asians had been maimed, bombed, displaced, tortured, imprisoned or killed. This was one of those peculiar facts which must be called free-floating; it was a statistic, it did not signify. To put the matter brutally, many American Jewish leaders were capable of ignoring the Asian holocaust in favor of economic and military aid to Israel.

Those of us who resisted the war had to live with that fact. The fate of the Vietnamese was as unimportant to the Zionists in our midst as was the state of the Palestinians. But I venture to suggest that it is not merely we, nor the Vietnamese who must live with that fact. So must Israel. So must the American Jews.

If there is an ultimate hope in all this one must, of course, pay tribute to the great majority of the Jewish community which refused the bait offered by Nixon, and peddled by their own leaders. Their acute and legitimate concern for Israel never became a weapon against Vietnamese survival. They refused that immoral choice offered them by a leader who would make a price of the safety of one people, the extinction of another. As you may recall, the American Jewish community rejected that choice, and for that we must honor them.

Ceaseless Rage

I cannot but reflect how strong is the irony of this occasion; a Jesuit priest speaking of the sins of Israel. A member of the classic oppressor church calls to account the historic victims of Christian persecution. History has spun us about, a game of blind man’s bluff. In America, in my church, I am a Jew. I am scarcely granted a place to teach, a place to worship, a place to announce the truths I live by. I stand in front of St. Patrick’s Cathedral to pray for the victims of our ceaseless rage, I stand in front of the White House. And a question arises from both powers; how shall we deal with this troublesome Jew?

How does a Jesuit, a member of the church elite, come to such trouble? How does the son of the oppressor come to be oppressed? Even while the oppressed, the Zionist, the state of Israel, becomes the oppressor? I can offer only the clumsiest of clues.

The power of the Jew, as indeed the power of the priest, arises from the questions which his life raises. It comes from no other source. It cannot come from adherence to the power of this world. When the priest becomes the civil servant of the Papal State, he loses his true dignity, he becomes a secular nonentity. His passion for justice is blunted, his sense of the sufferings of the world grows dim and abstract. And the same holds for the Jew.

And I venture, for the Arab. Human life today, if it means anything, is meant to raise a cry against legitimated murder. Our lives are meant to be a question mark before humanity, whether we are Arab, Jew, or Christian. When a Zionist or American Catholic or an Arab Apologist loses that momentous dignity, he becomes a zero, his soul is torn in two. Let Amos Kenan, the Israeli writer, speak the bitter truth: “I believe that Zionism came to establish a shelter for a persecuted people, and not to persecute other people. Even when facts strike me in the face and prove to me ex post facto that Zionism was nothing but a useful tool to deprive the Palestinian Arab people of their homeland, I will stick to the lie.”

Let him stick to the lie. But let him also know, the lie sticks to him. It sticks in the throat, it sticks to the very soul. To the point where a Christian must continue to ask of Israel those questions which Israel proscribes, ignores, fears. Where indeed are your men of wisdom? Where are your peacemakers? Where are your prophets? Who among you speaks the truth to power? Where are the voices that abhor militarism, torture, bombing, degrading alliances with the great powers? Israel knows the answers. She has dealt with “this people,” who are her truest people. Her peacemakers, her men of truth and wisdom, are dispensed with, are disposed of. They have neither power nor voice in the affairs of the Israeli state. Many of them are in prison, or hounded from the scene, living in exile. They are equivalent to Palestinians; no voice, no vote; non-persons.

Savage Triumph

These are among the most sorrowful facts of the world we live in. Israel, that millennial dream, belonged not only to Jews, but to all of mankind—it belonged to me. But the dream has become a nightmare; Israel has not abolished poverty and misery; rather, she manufactures human waste, the byproducts of her entrepreneurs, her military-industrial complex. Israel has not written justice into law; she has turned the law of nature to a mockery, creating ghettoes, disenfranchised peoples, exiles, hopeless minorities, cheap labor forces, Palestinian migrant workers. Israel has not freed the captives; she has expanded the prison system, perfected her espionage, exported on the world market that expensive blood ridden commodity, the savage triumph of the technologized West; violence and the tools of violence.

In Israel, military might is increasingly both the method and the goal of political existence. Her absurd generals, her military junk, are paraded on national holidays before the narcoticized public. The model is not the kingdom of peace, it is an Orwellian transplant, taken bodily from Big Brother’s bloody heart. In Israel, the democratic formula is twisted out of all recognition; the citizens exist for the well-being of the state; it follows, as the imperialist corollary, that that measure of terrorism and violence and murder is applied to dissidents, as shall guarantee the “well-being of the state,” as the ominous phrase is understood by those in power.

Who will save us from such saviors? I venture to say; neither Egypt nor Libya nor Syria nor Al Fatah nor Golda Meir nor General Dayan; neither Migs nor Phantom jets nor nuclear skills. After such saviors do the gentiles lust.

The present course, I suggest, leads to the same dead end for both sides. The settler state and the long settled state, both are in mortal danger, daily increasing, of metamorphosing into slave states, clients of the fascist super powers. At home, a slave mentality is progressively created; the reduction of rights of citizens, slave labor forces, slave wages, the domination of slave masters, politicized police, the militarization of national goals and policies.

Then the same process is in internationalized. Such a nation inevitably becomes the instrument of great-power politics. It serves as a foreign military for one or another of the world powers, to that purpose everything is mobilized, including the truth itself. To demobilize the truth may be one useful way of putting our task. Other terms occur; to demilitarize the truth, to demythologize it. In any case, to snatch the truth from its betrayers and belittlers. I wish you well in the task.

Dear Friends, my concluding words are addressed especially to the Arab peoples. My argument with you is also made in a spirit of love and even deep concern. You have suffered greatly from colonialism and colonization and your demand for justice and self-determination deserved more attention than it has received.  Yet my central argument with you is ultimately my argument with the Jewish people, in the sense that both of you have ignored your own symbols and history. But in different ways. Israel has betrayed her exodus by turning it into military conquests. And the Arabs have often betrayed their resistance to rhetorical violence and blind terrorism. The question of the weekend is: What else can we do?

Some two or  three years ago Eqbal Ahmed suggested, I believe, at one of these meetings, a massive and worldwide reversal of symbols on the part of the Palestinian people. If I understand him correctly he was saying something like this: What if the Arabs throughout the world would raise a great cry and implement their cry after the manner of Gandhi and Martin Luther King and Cesar Chavez? What if your cry became “let my people go?”

The post Violent Zionism – The Tomb of Jewish Souls appeared first on LewRockwell.

German equipment visible in Kursk has raised old ghosts, and consolidated awareness of the hostile western intentions toward Russia. “Never again” is the unspoken riposte.

War propaganda and feint are as old as the hills. Nothing new. But what is new is that infowar is no longer the adjunct to wider war objectives – but has become an end in and of itself.

The West has come to view ‘owning’ the winning narrative – and presenting the Other’s as clunky, dissonant, and extremist – as being more important than facing facts-on-the ground. Owning the winning narrative is to win, in this view. Virtual ‘victory’ thus trumps ‘real’ reality.

So, war becomes rather the setting for imposing ideological alignment across a wide global alliance and enforcing it via compliant media.

This objective enjoys a higher priority than, say, ensuring a manufacturing capacity sufficient to sustain military objectives. Crafting an imagined ‘reality’ has taken precedence over shaping the ground reality.

The point here is that this approach – being a function of whole of society alignment (both at home and abroad) – creates entrapments into false realities, false expectations, from which an exit (when such becomes necessary), turns near impossible, precisely because imposed alignment has ossified public sentiment. The possibility for a State to change course as events unfold becomes curtailed or lost, and the accurate reading of facts on the ground veers toward the politically correct and away from reality.

The cumulative effect of ‘a winning virtual narrative’ holds the risk nonetheless, of sliding incrementally toward inadvertent ‘real war’.

Take, for example, the NATO-orchestrated and equipped incursion into the symbolically significant Kursk Oblast. In terms of a ‘winning narrative’, its appeal to the West is obvious: Ukraine ‘takes the war to into Russia’.

Had the Ukrainian forces succeeded in capturing the Kursk Nuclear Power Station, they then would have had a significant bargaining chip, and might well have syphoned away Russian forces from the steadily collapsing Ukrainian ‘Line’ in Donbas.

And to top it off, (in infowar terms), the western media was prepped and aligned to show President Putin as “frozen” by the surprise incursion, and “wobbling” with anxiety that the Russian public would turn against him in their anger at the humiliation.

Bill Burns, head of CIA, opined that “Russia would offer no concessions on Ukraine, until Putin’s over-confidence was challenged, and Ukraine could show strength”. Other U.S. officials added that the Kursk incursion – in itself – would not bring Russia to the negotiating table; It would be necessary to build on the Kursk operation with other daring operations (to shake Moscow’s sang froid).

Of course, the overall aim was to show Russia as fragile and vulnerable, in line with the narrative that, at any moment Russia, could crack apart and scatter to the wind, in fragments. Leaving the West as winner, of course.

In fact, the Kursk incursion was a huge NATO gamble: It involved mortgaging Ukraine’s military reserves and armour, as chips on the roulette table, as a bet that an ephemeral success in Kursk would upend the strategic balance. The bet was lost, and the chips forfeit.

Plainly put, this Kursk affair exemplifies the West’s problem with ‘winning narratives’: Their inherent flaw is that they are grounded in emotivism and eschew argumentation. Inevitably, they are simplistic. They are simply intended to fuel a ‘whole of society’ common alignment. Which is to say that across MSM; business, federal agencies, NGOs and the security sector, all should adhere to opposing all ‘extremisms’ threatening ‘our democracy’.

This aim, of itself, dictates that the narrative be undemanding and relatively uncontentious: ‘Our Democracy, Our Values and Our Consensus’. The Democratic National Convention, for example, embraces ‘Joy’ (repeated endlessly), ‘moving Forward’ and ‘opposing weirdness’ as key statements. They are banal, however, these memes are given their energy and momentum, not by content so much, as by the deliberate Hollywood setting lending them razzamatazz and glamour.

It is not hard to see how this one-dimensional zeitgeist may have contributed to the U.S. and its allies’ misreading the impact of today’s Kursk ‘daring adventure’ on ordinary Russians.

‘Kursk’ has history. In 1943, Germany invaded Russia in Kursk to divert from its own losses, with Germany ultimately defeated at the Battle of Kursk. The return of German military equipment to the environs of Kursk must have left many gaping; the current battlefield around the town of Sudzha is precisely the spot where, in 1943, the Soviet 38th and 40th armies coiled for a counteroffensive against the German 4th Army.

Over the centuries, Russia has been variously attacked on its vulnerable flank from the West. And more recently by Napoleon and Hitler. Unsurprisingly, Russians are acutely sensitive to this bloody history. Did Bill Burns et al think this through? Did they imagine that NATO invading Russia itself would make Putin feel ‘challenged’, and that with one further shove, he would fold, and agree to a ‘frozen’ outcome in Ukraine – with the latter entering NATO? Maybe they did.

Ultimately the message that western services sent was that the West (NATO) is coming for Russia. This is the meaning of deliberately choosing Kursk. Reading the runes of Bill Burns message says prepare for war with NATO.

Just to be clear, this genre of ‘winning narrative’ surrounding Kursk is neither deceit nor feint. The Minsk Accords were examples of deceit, but they were deceits grounded in rational strategy (i.e. they were historically normal). The Minsk deceits were intended to buy the West time to further Ukraine’s militarisation – before attacking the Donbas. The deceit worked, but only at the price of a rupture of trust between Russia and the West. The Minsk deceits however, also accelerated an end to the 200-year era of the westification of Russia.

Kursk rather, is a different ‘fish’. It is grounded in the notions of western exceptionalism. The West perceives itself as tacking to ‘the right side of History’. ‘Winning narratives’ essentially assert – in secular format – the inevitability of the western eschatological Mission for global redemption and convergence. In this new narrative context, facts-on-the-ground become mere irritants, and not realities that must be taken into account.

This their Achilles’ Heel.

The DNC convention in Chicago however, underscored a further concern:

Just as the hegemonic West arose out of the Cold War era shaped and invigorated through dialectic opposition to communism (in the western mythology), so we see today, a (claimed) totalising ‘extremism’ (whether of MAGA mode; or of the external variety: Iran, Russia, etc.) – posed in Chicago in a similar Hegelian dialectic opposition to the former capitalism versus communism; but in today’s case, it is “extremism” in conflict with “Our Democracy”.

The DNC Chicago narrative-thesis is itself a tautology of identity differentiation posing as ‘togetherness’ under a diversity banner and in conflict with ‘whiteness’ and ‘extremism’. ‘Extremism’ effectively plainly is being set up as the successor to the former Cold War antithesis – communism.

The Chicago ‘back-room’ may be imagining that a confrontation with extremism – writ widely – will again, as it did in the post-Cold War era, yield an American rejuvenation. Which is to say that a conflict with Iran, Russia, and China (in a different way) may come onto the agenda. The telltale signs are there (plus the West’s need for a re-set of its economy, which war regularly provides).

The Kursk ploy no doubt seemed clever and audacious to London and Washington. Yet with what result? It achieved neither objective of taking Kursk NPP, nor of syphoning Russian troops from the Contact Line. The Ukrainian presence in the Kursk Oblast will be eliminated.

What it did do, however, is put an end to all prospects of an eventual negotiated settlement in Ukraine. Distrust of the U.S. in Russia is now absolute. It has made Moscow more determined to prosecute the special operation to conclusion. German equipment visible in Kursk has raised old ghosts, and consolidated awareness of the hostile western intentions toward Russia. ‘Never again’ is the unspoken riposte.

The views of individual contributors do not necessarily represent those of the Strategic Culture Foundation.

The post The Western Way of War – Owning the Narrative Trumps Reality appeared first on LewRockwell.

For months, we have been discussing the concerted effort of Democrats to bar challengers to President Joe Biden from primary ballots and block third-party candidates like Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. and Cornel West from appearing on the November ballots. As both Joe Biden and Kamala Harris insisted that “Democracy is on the ballot,” their allies sought to deny the ability of voters to cast their ballots for other candidates. Now, a state judge has issued a stinging denial of the effort of Democratic officials to block West from the Michigan ballots.

Democratic Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson helped lead the effort to prevent citizens from being able to vote for West in Michigan.

Judge James Robert Redford issued the ruling days after West was kicked off the ballot due to technical issues.

West issued a statement: “Victory in Michigan! We brought thousands of voices to the table, and the court listened, rejecting the Democrats’ technical challenges. This is a win for democracy and for every person fighting for truth, justice, and love. Onward!” He is running with Black Lives Matter co-founder Melina Abdullah.

Democrats are still pushing to strip them from the ballots in other states to prevent voters from having a choice in the election.

Another such effort failed in Maine recently.

The press and pundits have been largely silent about this effort despite the glaring contradiction with the campaign rhetoric of the DNC on saving democracy from imminent destruction.

The media does not appear at all alarmed or critical of the effort to limit democratic choice. The Washington Post stated clinically “Democrats are taking third-party threats seriously this time.” Taking it seriously appears to mean using legal means to keep them from the ballots.

It is true that the main political parties have challenged qualification signatures and paperwork in the past. However, the reports indicate a systemic effort geared toward reducing the choices for voters. What is striking is that this is coming from democratic groups and the DNC, which are raising money on the “save democracy” narrative.

The contradiction is spellbinding. On the same sites promising to oppose the third party candidates, the DNC and other groups push the narrative that only the Democrats are working to protect the right to vote.

The Post reports that Democrats have studied the Hillary Clinton campaign and vowed not to allow third party candidates to drain away millions of voters as they did in 2016.

This well-funded campaign to block other candidates is continuing. It was cited by Kennedy as one of the reasons that he pulled out of the race and endorsed former president Donald Trump.

West is now a threat with independents looking for an alternative to Trump and Harris. West has long been a charismatic figure in academia. Decades ago, I was his editor on what may have been his first law review publication as a young, rising divinity professor at Princeton.

One does not have to support Trump, West, or the other third-party opponents to find this effort repulsive. While some of us have challenged that hyperbolic claim that this “may be our last election,” the one thing that may not be on the ballot is choice, if the self-appointed defenders of Democracy have anything to say about it.

Reprinted with permission from JonathanTurley.org.

The post Democrats Lose Effort to Block Cornel West from Michigan Ballot appeared first on LewRockwell.

This article was written by Brandon Smith and originally published at Prepper All Naturals

As most people are aware, this month there was a sweeping internet outage across the US which led to a failure in roughly 8.5 million Microsoft Windows devices. Disruptions included banks, airline networks, emergency call centers, online retailers and numerous corporate networks. The outage is estimated to have caused at least $5.4 billion in profit losses and it only lasted about a day.

The alleged cause of the breakdown was Crowdstrike, a cyber-security company that uses large scale data updates to Microsoft Windows networks to counter cyber threats. Instead, the company uploaded bugged code and caused a cascading outage. Mac and Linux machines were not affected.

The scale of the shutdown was immense – Over 25% of Fortune 500 companies were frozen. Travel essentially stopped. Business transactions for many companies ceased. Some banks including Bank of America, Capital One, Chase, TD Bank and Wells Fargo could not function and customers could not access their accounts.

The event reminded me of the panic surrounding the Y2K scare 25 years ago. Of course, that was all nonsense; US systems were definitely not digitized to an extent great enough to cause a disaster should there be an internet crash or a software crash. But today things are very different. Nearly every sector of the American (and European) economy and many utilities are directly dependent on a functioning internet.

The fear that prevailed during Y2K was unrealistic in 1999. Now, it makes perfect sense.

I often hear preppers talk about the impending danger of an EMP leading to a grid down scenario. However, this kind of attack is highly overblown. Even major solar storms have not caused the kind of electrical breakdown that theorists suggest might happen. Instead, I would recommend worrying a lot more about cyber threats. I believe these events will become far more common in the next few years for a number of reasons.

First and foremost, there is the potential for random error like the Crowdstrike incident. Then there’s the potential for a foreign attack on US and European digital infrastructure. Then, there’s the potential for a false flag event BLAMED on random error or a foreign government in order to foment war or economic collapse.

In 2021 in my article ‘Cyber Polygon: Will The Next Globalist War Game Lead To Another Convenient Catastrophe?’ I warned that if the pandemic crisis failed to achieve the centralization goals of the World Economic Forum and other globalist institutions, they may use a cyber crisis instead. WEF head Klaus Schwab incessantly compared the idea of a “Cyber Pandemic” to the covid pandemic. He suggested that governments would have to respond to both in a similar fashion (i.e. lockdowns and extensive controls on individual freedoms).

In the past I have mentioned a very interesting event that was barely covered by the corporate media called the “Fastly Outage.” I examined the implications of this and more in my article ‘Obama’s Weird New Movie And America’s Extreme Vulnerability To Cyber Attack’.

In June of 2021 there was an internet outage that led to large swaths of the web going completely dark, including a number of mainstream news sites, Amazon, eBay, Twitch, Reddit, etc. A host of government websites also went down. All this happened when content delivery network (CDN) company Fastly experienced a “bug.” Although Amazon had its website back online within 20 minutes, the brief outage cost the company over $5.5 million in sales.

A content delivery network is a geographically distributed network of proxy servers and their data centers. They make up what is known as the “backbone” of the internet. Only a handful of these company’s support a vast majority of internet activity. All it would take is for a few to go down, and the internet goes down, taking our economy with it.

The recent Crowdstrike situation is perhaps the worst web disruption of all time, and that was just a bug in a software update. Imagine if someone wanted to deliberately damage internet functions for an extended period of time? The results would be catastrophic.

With supply chains completely dependent on “just-in-time” freight deliveries and those deliveries dependent on efficient digital communications and payments between retailers and manufacturers, a web-down scenario for more than a few days would cause an immediate loss of consumer goods. Stores would empty within hours should the public realize that new shipments might not arrive for a long time.

Keep in mind, I’m not even accounting for payment processing between customers and retailers. If that shuts down, then ALL sales shut down. Then, whatever food you have left in your pantry or in storage is what you will have to live on until the problem is fixed. If it is ever fixed…

Network attacks are difficult to independently trace, which means anyone can initiate them and anyone can be blamed afterwards. With the increasing tensions between western and eastern nations the chances of an attack are high. And corrupt government officials could also trigger an internet crisis and blame it on foreign enemies – Either to convince the public to go to war, or to convince the public to accept greater authoritarianism.

I believe a cyber attack is the next most likely global disaster. We weathered covid and defeated the draconian mandates. The economy is in the midst of a stagflation crisis but the system is still operating. But what if the next ploy is a complete shutdown of the web and a fast moving financial collapse?

Figuring out who triggered the breakdown would be nearly impossible. We could suspect, but proving who did it is another matter. In the meantime, western officials controlled by globalist interests could lock down internet traffic and eliminate alternative media platforms they don’t like, giving the public access to corporate news sources only.

There are millions of Americans out there ready for a systemic collapse. According to surveys around 30% of adult Americans now consider themselves preppers. But that leaves 70% of the population in a daze, unaware and panicking should the supply chain break. Will they care who was behind the attack? Probably not. They’ll be far more concerned with simple survival.

What are the most practical solutions to this? As always we can store necessities to protect our families and friends. To protect data, I recommend shutting OFF Windows Updates to prevent something like a Crowdstrike error from affecting your devices. You can also set up a Linux-based device with all your important data storage secured.

You can purchase an exterior hard drive and clone your computer data, then throw it in a closet or a waterproof case. Then there is the option of building a completely offline device (a computer that has never and will never connect to the internet).

These options protect you and your valuable files, but there’s not much that can be done to prevent a national scale cyber attack and the damage that one could cause. Organizing for inevitable chaos and violence is all you can do.

With a cyber-event there is the distinct danger of communications disruptions – No cell phones, no email, no social media, nothing. So, having knowledge in ham radio and radio communications is a must. I’m a general class ham and I’m still finding there’s more to learn, but a basic knowledge of radios, frequency bands and repeaters will help you to at least listen in on chatter and get important information outside of controlled news networks.

The people who used to claim it’s “doom mongering” to examine the threat of cyber attacks have been proven utterly wrong this past month. We just witnessed one of the worst internet implosions of all time and more are on the way. Prepare accordingly and remember that technological dependency is a double-edged sword. Use your tech wisely and don’t let it run your life.

Reprinted with permission from Alt-Market.us.

The post Recent Events Prove Western Nations Are Highly Vulnerable to Cyber Calamity appeared first on LewRockwell.

While our government currently has no problem with making fiscally irresponsible decisions, when it finally does come around to deciding that “you know what, pennies aren’t worth it” – or any other form of cash for that matter – there will be nobody that will argue against them.- by Aden Tate

The cashless society is almost here and it could lead to chaos and violence. Furthermore, many Americans could soon have no way to pay for necessities like food.

Poor people could have no way to buy food because they have no credit cards or smartphones. To elaborate, Big Retail is planning to get rid of cash registers and cashiers to save money.

In fact, Amazon is already operating 10 Go automated convenience stores that have no cash registers or cashiers. Instead of cash, customers pay with digital wallets such as Apple Pay or Google Pay at Amazon Go.

Big Retail Wants The Cashless Society

Big Retail wants the cashless society because it reduces expenses. For instance, Amazon does not pay cashiers at their Go stores.

In addition, Amazon needs less security at Go because there is no cash for armed robbers to take. Big Retail can also eliminate the expense of counting, storing, and hauling cash. After all, no safe, armored car, or armed guards are necessary when a store refuses to accept cash.

All in all, most of us are already living in a cashless society. For example, Americans used cash for only 30% of their transactions in 2024, The Federal Reserve estimates.

Additionally, people who do not use cash spend more. In particular, the average cash transaction was under $25 while the average credit card transaction was $67 in 2023, The Federal Reserve calculates. As a result, big retailers are readily embracing the cashless society because it increases their income while lowering their expenses.

We Are Not Prepared For The Cashless Society

Even though the cashless society is nearly here, most of us are still not ready for it.

Notably, the British government has no plan to cope with a cashless economy, Quartz reports. However, cash use is falling faster in the United Kingdom than in other countries. Specifically, the level of cash transactions in the UK could fall to 10% within 15 years.

The number of places where Britons can get cash is dwindling fast. Particularly, 70 bank branches are closing each month in the UK. Likewise, banks remove up to 300 ATMs each month in Britain.

How Cyberwarfare Threatens The Cashless Society

Ultimately, Britons could have no way to get cash if cyberwarfare or an electromagnetic pulse destroys electronic payment systems. So, most of Britain’s population would have no way to buy food after a cyber attack.

Notably, U.S. banks are already preparing for an apocalyptic cyber attack. In fact, bank executives fear a cyber attack could wipe out up to 400 million bank accounts. For this reason, a cyber attack may devastate America’s cashless society.

Desperate mobs could roam cities and the countryside looking for food or gasoline. Furthermore, businesses and the government would shut down if employees are unpaid.

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I am more convinced than ever that we are headed for nuclear Armageddon

As readers know, I admire Russian President Putin, but the reasons I admire him make him a failed war leader.

Putin is a product of an old conception of foreign affairs as a rational enterprise conducted by gentlemen who relied on agreement rather than on the imposition of power. Consequently, when faced with non-gentlemen, Putin finds he played his cards wrong and lacks power.

By this I mean conventional power. He went to war in Donbas without an army, and he still doesn’t have one. Therefore, the defense of Russia now resides in tactical nuclear weapons. Once they are used, it goes full scale.

Putin failed to understand that the conflict in Ukraine provoked by Washington had to be quickly won. He has failed to comprehend reality since 2014 when Washington overthrew, while Putin did nothing, the Ukrainian government. He still hasn’t built the massive Russian Army that would cause second thoughts among Washington’s NATO puppets.

How a leader of Putin’s quality fails in this way is beyond my understanding. Perhaps Putin is a Western liberal created by decades of Voice of America and Radio Free Europe propaganda beamed into the Soviet Union. So many Russian intellectuals, known as Atlanticist Integrationists, are a product of Washington propaganda and thus a threat to Russia.

Putin has never enforced any of his red lines. Consequently, every one has been crossed with zero consequences to the West. The latest Western audacity was the American led invasion of Kursk. Putin said the attackers would be held accountable, but the very limited strikes on some Ukrainian military and civilian infrastructure hardly count as acts of war.

If we turn to the Middle East, we see the same inability to recognize reality. Israel used the moronic George W. Bush (really Dick Cheney) Regime to eliminate the countries opposing Israel’s expansion in the Middle East–Iraq, Syria, Iran. Washington knocked off Iraq for Israel, pretending it was a “war on terror” and “weapons of mass destruction,” and the dumbshit Americans fell for it. But before the Obama Regime could deliver its attack on Syria, Russia was there, thus saving the country.

Now Israel has Washington focused on Iran. Why? Because Iran finances and arms the Hezbollah militia in Lebanon, which has successfully defeated two Israeli invasions. If Israel can get Washington to get rid of Iran, Israel can grab southern Lebanon and perhaps the entire country.

Once Israel’s forces were committed to Gaza, it was a perfect time for Syria to retake the Golan Heights and for Hezbollah to overrun northern Israel. Iran could have knocked out the Iron Dome and destroyed Israeli air bases and military sites.

But nothing happened.

Seeing nothing but indecision and weakness, Israel began a campaign of attacking Syria, Hezbollah, and assassinating people in Iran.

Following an assassination in the Iranian capital, the Iranian leader said he was going to teach Israel a lesson. But he didn’t. All Iran did was to reveal to Israel that it had the capability to breach the Iron Dome and bring destruction to Israel, but Iran brought no destruction. Instead, Iran stupidly revealed its capability, thus in an act of total stupidity put Israel on alert.

Syria, allegedly, has the Russian S-300 air defense system. Either it doesn’t work or the Russians won’t let Syria use it to deter Israeli and US air attacks on Syria, which continue unabated. Makes one wonder why Russia bothered to intervene..

One can’t help but wonder if Putin and the almost equally unrealistic Chinese leader are sitting on Iran and Hezbollah, thinking that they are preventing an outbreak of a larger war. To the contrary, they are contributing to the outbreak of wider war.

From all indications, neither the Russian, Chinese, or Iranian governments have sufficient awareness of the situation to understand that a lack of effective response to aggression leads to more and worse aggression.

There are on the Iranian scene two of Washington’s carrier task force groups, US soldiers, and US jet fighters. Why are they there? Certainly not to rescue Israel from Gazans.

What does this tell us?

There are no Russian or Chinese forces in the area.

What does this tell us?

Just as there is no effective response to Israel’s genocide of the Palestinians, there is no effective response to Washington’s aggression against Russia, China, and Iran.

It would be so easy to stop this dangerous aggression. Only one simple thing is needed–a public statement by Russia, China, and Iran that the three countries have signed a mutual defense treaty, and an attack on one is an attack on all.

That would end the Middle East conflict, and it would end the otherwise certain increase of NATO attacks, if only with long range missiles, on mother Russia that, unless Putin surrenders, will result in nuclear World War 3.

Where is the necessary treaty that will stop the road to nuclear Armageddon? Why are the leaders of Russia, China, and Iran unable to act?

The post The World is Devoid of Intelligent Leadership appeared first on LewRockwell.

In my first year at Time Magazine, I was sitting in the Miami airport with my bf, who had had already a starry career, Moscow, Berlin, White House correspondent, and we were chatting away happily with a couple of women of indeterminate age. I had just escaped snowy London; the house in which I lived had no central heating because my landlady felt that “central heating kills a house”. So I was ebullient and finally, not cold.

“What do you two do?” one finally asked. “We work at Time magazine,” I chirruped like an idiot. I felt rather than saw a sharp recoil from said boyfriend and within a second their attitudes had shifted. It was like Kennedys had dropped from heaven into their lives. They were in awe of us; it was awful.

Today, the attitude would be of instant dislike and contempt, which would probably flare to anger. The only people who “like” the media are the ones who work in it and those languishing in some subsidized charmed circle of the obvious-to-them superior types. The rest of us?

We loathe the media. Loathe.

Why? For the next few days, I am going to run short – 1-3 minute reads – excerpts from a new book, Against the Corporate Media, 42 Ways the Media Hates You – a book of essays to which I contributed, along with forty-one others on just what happened. It will be published on September 10th. My purpose is that you come away from this somewhat enlightened as to what the hell happened, and how a once respectable profession became seedy and dishonest. The book provides a clear direction towards root and branch reform. And perhaps you will buy the book.

Checking the Fact Checkers

an excerpt from Against the Corporate Media, coming Sept. 10 from Bombardier Books. “Checking the ‘Fact-Checkers’,” by Mark Hemingway. 

Among the myriad of ways that America turned into a dystopian nightmare in 2020, the hysteria over Covid and Donald Trump’s possible re-election created an information landscape that Americans thought was unthinkable a decade ago: Powerful institutions have normalized widespread, Soviet-style political censorship. What’s more, the American media have been the biggest cheerleaders for singling out and punishing people for no other reason than they have departed from the enforced ideological consensus by being willing to state demonstrably true facts.

There’s much to be said about how we got to this place, but it’s worth zeroing in on two particular mechanisms responsible for this state of affairs. The first is the rise of politicized media “fact-checkers,” and the second is Facebook, the social media site. The fact that these two entities have now joined forces means that speaking freely online without an algorithm slapping a warning label on innocuous opinions is now impossible. The Facebook-owned site Instagram has actually run a “fact check” on a meme that criticized lawmakers who “spend trillions on bills they haven’t read, but want details on how you spend $600.” They also have algorithms psychoanalyzing the potential for extremism. People in Facebook groups dedicated to canning food have been receiving warnings that say, “Are you concerned that someone you know is becoming too prepared?”

While I confess that I didn’t see this censorship algorithms regime gaining power so quickly, as a reporter in D.C. for more than twenty years, I did see plenty of warning signs. One in particular was hard to ignore: In the summer of 2018, I was sitting in a staff meeting at the now-defunct magazine The Weekly Standard when an editor at the publication started yelling at me.

At the time of the argument, The Weekly Standard was four months away from being shuttered, and though no one in the meeting knew we were facing the axe, a profound sense of unease had descended on the place. A hardline opposition to Trump wasn’t universally shared by the magazine’s staff, but for the two years following his election, top editors at the magazine regularly lambasted Trump and indulged in some regrettably erroneous Russia-collusion reporting. This approach was not appreciated by our regular subscribers who had overwhelmingly voted for the president.

And the argument that led to me getting yelled at was another exhibit in prosecuting the case for how things at The Weekly Standard had gone wrong: We had gone from being an outlet that regularly published hard-hitting media criticism to enabling the worst media innovation in decades—so-called fact checking.

In 2017, editors above my paygrade decided that we were going to be one of a handful of media outlets that agreed to collaborate with Facebook for the social media giant’s “fact checking” program. In exchange for a few crumbs from a company with $700 billion, we would write “fact checks” taking politicians and pundits to task for spreading “disinformation” that Facebook would then use to make content-moderation decisions. In addition to writing fact check columns for our website, we would be hiring and employing an in-house fact checker whose salary was paid by Facebook. This fact checker would also be serving as a traditional in-house fact checker, going over magazine articles pre-publication to root out “errors.” The editors saw this as a win-win.

I was never consulted by the editors about this decision to work with Facebook for several obvious reasons. In 2016, I wrote a piece for the magazine’s website bluntly calling Facebook’s plan to collaborate with outside media organizations to fact check content on the platform “a terrible idea.” And years before that, in 2011, I had written a cover story for the magazine headlined “Lies, Damned Lies, and ‘Fact-Checking.’” It was the first major—and deeply critical—examination of media “fact checking” organizations, such as PolitiFact and The Washington Post Fact Checker. The article made a splash and I spent years afterwards writing tens of thousands of words inveighing against the dishonest tactics of corporate media “fact checkers” that were now working for Facebook.

Read the Whole Article

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Over the course of my relatively short career as an extraordinary proclaimer of the Word, my audience has responded with blank stares and occasional approving smiles. At least until this past Sunday, when I chose to read the longer version of the 2nd reading. St. Paul, who can sometimes be impenetrably obscure, is extremely and almost uncharacteristically blunt: “As the church is subordinate to Christ, so wives should be subordinate to their husbands in everything.”

As I paused to let this sink in, I caught an undisguised glare from a woman in a front row. Further back in the church, a child began questioning his parents. I can only assume he was asking what I could possibly mean by such a statement. Paul’s follow-up about how men should love their wives clearly did not quiet the congregation. As I stepped down from the lectern, I met an accusing stare from the pastor. Not only had I wasted time by not choosing the shortest available option, I had made his job as a pastor harder. The parish’s delusion was on trial.

I recognized the homily immediately, as it was the same homily he had given the previous week at a different Mass time. But when the good man had run through his script, he looked up and began explaining—or should I say mansplaining—away the reading.

He started off by informing the parish that “most of our lectors choose to read the shorter version of this passage” which does not include such a “hard teaching”—obliquely informing me that I had made the wrong choice. He went on to say that we have to take the “time and culture” into account, as women were “considered property.” Then he informed us that the passage was really directed at men, and Paul’s statement to “love your wives” was a “radical challenge” to men who had never conceived of such a unique idea.

There is so much wrong with these statements. First of all, the priest is strongly suggesting that some biblical teachings are “aged out” to the point of not just being irrelevant but wrong. Moreover, he equates a wife’s subordination in marriage with being a husband’s property. I wonder if my pastor sees himself as the property of his bishop, or if he thinks his vow of obedience is just as outdated as the Bible.

Who do you think knows how to construct a godly marriage: the middle-aged women who showed up for 11:30 Mass, or God Himself, speaking through His Word? Has God changed His mind and admitted that He only inspired Paul to write “wives be subordinate to your husbands” because He used to think women were property but now the feminists have reeducated Him?

Furthermore, it’s interesting to see how unafraid he is to proclaim that men are the problem, and Paul didn’t care half so much about women being obedient as he did about men being loving. While my reading, which suggested that wives ought to be obedient, was met with outrage, no one seemed to be bothered when he suggested that men are the real problem and that women should have “freedom.”

Yes, men are the problem. There is an uncontroversial statement if I’ve ever heard one. From the most conservative of websites down, all you hear is about how men are the problem. While I understand the impulse to want to “get the beam out of your own (sexes) eye before you point out the splinter in your sisters’,” that doesn’t mean when such a splinter clearly exists you should go all out to try to deny the truth of its existence.

Read the Whole Article

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Her acceptance speech on August 22nd gave no indication that she had any reservation about ANY of America’s numerous invasions ever since America invaded and destroyed (just to mention a few examples) Yugoslavia in 1994-2006, Haiti 1995-6, Iraq 2003-now, Libya 2011-now, Syria 2012-now (unlisted by CRS because U.S. was hiring Al Qaeda and Kurdish proxy-forces), Niger 2013-24, Ukraine 2014-now (U.S. Operation Atlantic Resolve against Russia), Poland and Lithuania in 2014 (NATO exercises against Russia), Kuwait in 2015, S. Korea in 2015 (against China), Yemen in 2016-now, Europe in 2017-now (permanent Operation Atlantic Resolve, against Russia), Honduras in 2017, and intensification of all of those in recent years. (That doesn’t even list any of the U.S.’s many coups, which likewise destroyed numerous countries, such as Ukraine 2014. So, at least after the Soviet Union ended in 1991, the U.S. Government has CLEARLY earned the title, “the Greatest Threat to Peace in the World Today”. No rational person can deny it, but the propaganda such as her speech can and does.)

Kamala Harris is, in fact, 100% a neoconservative (a supporter of extending the U.S. empire to include all countries) — a champion of the Military-Industrial Complex, and proponent of increasing U.S. ‘defense’ spending at the expense of all other Government-spending. At some point, America’s soaring $35 trillion Federal Government debt will have to be paid (by our children and grand-children), and unless the $1.5 trillion annually that this country is paying for its military (its 900 foreign military bases and all those weapons etc.) get severely reduced, the proportion of the federal budget that’s allocated each year to non-military purposes will decline even further than its current mere 47%.

As President, she will be a war-monger like the worst of the world’s imperialistic tyrants — Hitler, Hirohito, Mussolini, G.W. Bush, Obama, Biden — and all of those are even worse than Trump is (bad though that is). Furthermore, none of those tyrants had nuclear weapons, which explosions and after-effects in a war between superpowers would kill-off over half of the human population within just the first two years. So: that alone makes this overwhelmingly the most important single REAL issue in the U.S. Presidential election (though the electorate ignore it).

Here is her speech’s key passage about international relations, with links to the realities behind her rah-rah-rah neocon jingoism, added by me, documenting her outright lie or extreme mischaracterization at each one of those linked phrases — linking there directly to the evidence that she is trying (and apparently — to judge by the latest U.S. Presidential polls — succeeding) to deceive the public about:

31:40 (in the video):

TRANSCRIPT OF THIS KEY PASSAGE (starting at 31:40 in her speech):

https://archive.is/6NSw0#selection-1669.5-1717.32

  AUDIENCE:  USA!  USA!  USA!

     THE VICE PRESIDENT [Harris]:  I will make sure that we lead the world into the future on space and artificial intelligence; that America, not China, wins the competition for the 21st century; and that we strengthen, not abdicate, our global leadership. 

     Trump, on the other hand, threatened to abandon NATO.  He encouraged Putin to invade our allies.  Said Russia could, quote, “do whatever the hell they want.”

     AUDIENCE:  Booo —

     THE VICE PRESIDENT:  Five days before Russia attacked Ukraine, I met with President Zelenskyy to warn him about Russia’s plan to invade.  I helped mobilize a global response — over 50 countries — to defend against Putin’s aggression.  (Applause.)  And as president, I will stand strong with Ukraine and our NATO Allies.  (Applause.)

     With respect to the war in Gaza, President Biden and I are working around the clock, because now is the time to get a hostage deal and a ceasefire deal done.  (Applause.)

     And let me be clear.  And let me be clear.  I will always stand up for Israel’s right to defend itself — (applause) — and I will always ensure Israel has the ability to defend itself, because the people of Israel must never again face the horror that a terrorist organization called Hamas caused on October 7 — (applause) — including unspeakable sexual violence and the massacre of young people at a music festival.

     At the same time, what has happened in Gaza over the past 10 months is devastating.  So many innocent lives lost.  (Applause.)  Desperate, hungry people fleeing for safety, over and over again.  The scale of suffering is heartbreaking. [But, like an Israeli general admitted, “All of our missiles, the ammunition, the precision-guided bombs, all the airplanes and bombs, it’s all from the U.S. The minute they turn off the tap, you can’t keep fighting. You have no capability.” And Harris supports Biden’s Gaza-policy — the U.S. is co-equal with Israel for the blame in the ongoing genocide against the Gazans, but she says nothing against it. She just doesn’t want the voters to know about it, and says nothing about it.]

 President Biden and I are working to end this war, such that Israel is secure, the hostages are released, the suffering in Gaza ends, and the Palestinian people can realize their right to dignity, security, freedom, and self-determination.  (Applause.)

     And know this: I will never hesitate to take whatever action is necessary to defend our forces and our interests against Iran and Iran-backed terrorists.  I will not cozy up to tyrants and dictators like Kim Jong Un, who are rooting for Trump — who are rooting for Trump.  (Applause.)

     Because, you know, they know — they know he is easy to manipulate with flattery and favors.  They know Trump won’t hold autocrats accountable because he wants to be an autocrat himself.  (Applause.)

     And as president, I will never waver in defense of America’s security and ideals, because in the enduring struggle between democracy and tyranny, I know where I stand and I know where the United States belongs.  (Applause.)

     AUDIENCE:  USA!  USA!  USA!

——

On August 20th, I headlined “Since Kamala Harris Won’t Reveal Her Record and Policies, I Will:” and reported and documented her actual policies, implemented at her initiative and by her as a public official, including not merely on international issues (which are so important to the billionaires who fund her political career) but also the many domestic issues (where her punishing of the poor has been more blatant).

Just because Trump is bad doesn’t mean that Harris is good. Both of them are such horrible candidates, so that at the Presidential line on November 5th, I shall be writing-in “Col. Douglas Macgregor”. (On 30 March 2022 I had nominated him for President, but no one seconded that; so, now, I shall write his name in, simply because both of the existing nominees are atrocious — and because Macgregor, both his record and his stated views, indicate that he would be a truly great President. I will never vote for a person who has enough of a record in public office to have made unequivocally clear that they are evil, which both Trump and especially Harris are. To vote for them is to vote for death.)

So, Kamala Harris’s jingoistic neocon acceptance speech makes clear that America’s weapons-makers will boom and the poor will rot under her presidency. There’s no reason to doubt it. All of the relevant evidence is for this conclusion. I have been closely following all of the U.S. Presidential candidates (or possible candidates) ever since at least 2022, well before any of them publicly announced, and this is my conclusion: the two major Parties are death-Parties, proven by the records of their respective nominees. This is no criticism of democracy, but of America’s lack of it. The facts must be faced, not hidden.

Reprinted with permission from Eric’s Substack.

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Socialists and other leftwingers support taxation of the income and wealth of the well off. They say that they want to promote “equality” and “social justice,” but in fact they are motivated by envy. They want what others have. They can’t stand the thought of other people’s having more money than they do.

Here is what Rob Larson, an economics professor at Tacoma Community College, says about certain very expensive apartments: “Besides the return of in-city mansions for the affluent and their cars, New York and London have also seen the growth of ‘poor doors.’ These are entrances to new luxury buildings, erected with a city requirement to include some affordable housing units for regular working people, in addition to ‘market rate’ units that sell for seven figures and up. The Guardian describes a luxury London development where the main door opens to luxury marble tiling and plush doors, and a sign on the wall alerts residents to the fact that the concierge is available. Round the back, the entrance to the affordable homes is a cream corridor, decorated only with grey mailboxes and a poster warning tenants that they are on CCTV and will be prosecuted if they cause any damage.

To me, this is an amazing passage. In Larson’s example, some “regular working people” are housed in some of the most luxurious apartments in the world. But Larson still objects because these people don’t get to use the fancier entrances made for the superrich who pay market rates. As you read Larson, you can feel his seething hatred for the rich: he would like to pull them down, just because they are able to afford things others cannot. He offers no evidence that the working people in the apartments are dissatisfied. If I had to guess, I would imagine them to be happy to be getting the windfall that results from the government’s interference with the free market on their behalf; but whether I am right does not in the present context matter. The point is simply to expose Larson’s emotion for what it is. As an analogy, consider someone who resents first-class air travel, not because he finds coach class uncomfortable, but just because others travel under better conditions than he does. And the case that envy and hatred are involved in Larson’s example is stronger than for the air travel case. Except for the entrance, the working people are getting the luxury good—but this is not enough for Larson.

A much more prominent economist than Larson illustrates the same attitude. Thomas Piketty’s central idea is that inequality is the supreme social sin and must be radically curtailed. He doesn’t deny that capitalism results in economic growth and an enhanced standard of living, but the income and wealth of the rich have grown far faster than those of the poor. You might ask why this matters, even granting his dubious statistics: Don’t people care about how well they are doing, much more than they resent the rich, if in fact they resent them at all?

To ask questions like this is, for Piketty, to look at society from the wrong perspective. For him, equality trumps prosperity. If another of his proposals, “greening” the economy in order to reduce carbon emissions, is adopted, most people will need to live with a lower amount of material goods. But, projecting his own egalitarian commitments onto others, he thinks people will be willing to make the sacrifice so long as the rich have to pay their “fair” share of the costs. “The considerable adjustment in lifestyles to deal with global warming will only be acceptable if a fair distribution of the effort is guaranteed. If the rich continue to pollute the planet with their SUVs and their yachts registered in Malta … then why should the poor accept the carbon tax, which is likely to be inevitable?”

Why do the egalitarians promote soaking the rich? As Walter Williams points out, “The strategy for want-to-be tyrants is to demonize people whose power they want to usurp. That’s the typical way tyrants gain power. They give the masses someone to hate. In 18th-century France, it was Maximilien Robespierre’s promoting hatred of the aristocracy that led to his acquiring dictatorial power. In the 20th century, the communists gained power by promoting public hatred of the czars and capitalists. In Germany, Adolf Hitler gained power by promoting hatred of Jews and Bolsheviks. I’m not equating America’s progressives and liberals with Robespierre, Josef Stalin and Hitler. I am saying that promoting jealousy, fear and hate is an effective strategy for leftist politicians and their followers to control and micromanage businesses. It’s not about the amount of money top executives earn. If it were, politicians and leftists would be promoting jealousy, fear and hatred toward multi-multimillionaire Hollywood actors, celebrities and sports stars.”

There is another reason the left promotes envy. As Friedrich Hayek says, by taking advantage of the envy people have for the rich, the government can get the masses to accept a heavy tax burden: “Not only is the revenue derived from the high rates levied on large incomes, particularly in the highest brackets, so small compared with the total revenue as to make hardly any difference to the burden borne by the rest; but for a long time . . . it was not the poorest who benefited from it but entirely the better-off working class and the lower strata of the middle class who provided the largest number of voters.

It would probably be true, on the other hand, to say that the illusion that by means of progressive taxation the burden can be shifted substantially onto the shoulders of the wealthy has been the chief reason why taxation has increased as fast as it has done and that, under the influence of this illusion, the masses have come to accept a much heavier load than they would have done otherwise. The only major result of the policy has been the severe limitation of the incomes that could be earned by the most successful and thereby gratification of the envy of the less-well-off.”

The politics of envy has in some cases led to bloody violence, when members of a minority group do better economically than those in the majority. The great authority on economic development Lord Peter Bauer says, “Envy of productive minority groups has been widespread and has often led to brutal outrages that slake popular passion at the expense of morality and economic progress. . . In Malaysia, for instance, Chinese economic performance has for many years been far superior to that of Malays in spite of long-standing discrimination against them. In recent years, indeed, attempts to combat by political means the results of their superior economic performance have become the cornerstone of official economic policy.”

Like Hayek, Bauer argues that the pursuit of equality leads necessarily to the growth of the state. Not equality, but tyranny of the government over the rest of us, arises from following the siren song of egalitarian justice.

Bauer places great stress on the contemporary importance of this point. “In an open society, attempts to eliminate, or even substantially to reduce, income differences extend coercive power, that is, inequality of power between rulers and ruled. This also implies politicization of economic life. . . Extensive politicization of life enhances the prizes of political power and thus the stakes in the fight for them. This in turn exacerbates political tension, at least until opposition is forcibly suppressed or effectively demoralized. Politicization of life, often pursued in the name of equality, has in many countries brought about a situation in which the question of who controls the government has become a matter of overriding importance, even a matter of life and death to millions.”

Let’s do everything we can to end confiscatory policies based on the politics of envy and instead defend the free market, following the teachings of Ludwig von Mises and Murray Rothbard.

The post The Politics of Envy appeared first on LewRockwell.

Given the ongoing war between the United States and Russia in Ukraine, it’s natural for Americans to conclude that Russia is our enemy. Not so. Our enemy is instead the U.S. national-security establishment — i.e., the Pentagon, the CIA, and the NSA — the entity that is responsible for the war in Ukraine and that is destroying our lives, liberties, and well-being here at home.

Our American ancestors would have understood this phenomenon. If the Constitution had called into existence a national-security state form of government, our ancestors would never have accepted it. That would have meant that the United States would have continued operating under the Articles of Confederation, a type of governmental structure without a standing army.

Our American ancestors loathed standing armies, which was the term they used to describe what we call today a national-security state. They understood that big, permanent military establishments are always the enemies of the citizenry. They understood that standing armies or national-security states end up destroying the lives, liberties, and prosperity of the citizenry.

That’s why the Constitution called into existence a limited-government republic, one whose powers were few and limited and that had only a relatively small, basic army. That’s why America lived without a national-security state for more than 150 years.

Today, things are totally inverted. Americans love the Pentagon, the CIA, and the NSA, which is, in actuality, one great big military-intelligence entity that is divided into three wings. Americans don’t see this enormous permanent entity as their enemy or as a grave threat to their lives, liberties, and well-being, as Americans did at the nation’s founding and for the next 150 years. Today’s Americans see the national-security state as their friend, ally, and protector that keeps them safe from all those scary creatures in the world.

But what today’s Americans don’t realize is that it is their very own national-security state that gins up those scary creatures in order to have Americans view their national-security state as their friend and protector.

Recall what the Pentagon, the CIA, and the NSA said after the 9/11 attacks — that the terrorists had attacked America out of hatred for our “freedom and values.” But it was lie, and they knew it was a lie. The truth was that the U.S. national-security establishment had ginned up the threat of anti-American terrorism by killing vast numbers of people in Iraq, especially children with the U.S. sanctions, knowing full well the depth of anger and rage the continuous death toll would produce among people in the Middle East.

Then came the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, which produced a continuous stream of new official enemies —terrorism, Islam, Muslims, and Sharia law, which many Americans were certain was coming to America. Our nation acquired a new cause — the “war on terrorism,” which replaced the now-outdated “war on communism.” The continuous death tolls in Afghanistan and Iraq brought into existence what I called the greatest terrorist-producing machine in history, one that kept the national-security state in high cotton because people were as afraid of the new official enemies as Americans had been of the old official enemies, communism and communists (and Cuba, North Vietnam, Red China, the Soviet Union, North Korea, etc.)

But the national-security establishment knew that there was a good possibility that its war on terrorism might fizzle out, especially if it was no longer killing vast numbers of people, including children, in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Thus, the Pentagon, the CIA, and the NSA hedged their bets by slowly but surely reviving Russia as an official enemy. That’s why the national-security establishment used NATO to move eastward by absorbing former members of the Warsaw Pact, with the ultimate aim of absorbing Ukraine, which would have enabled the national-security establishment to establish its troops, missiles, and tanks right on Russia’s border.

The Pentagon, the CIA, and the NSA knew that Russia would invade Ukraine to prevent that from happening. That would enable the U.S. national-security establishment to make Russia an official enemy once again. Equally important, it would enable the national-security establishment to wage war against Russia indirectly, by using U.S.-trained Ukrainian soldiers to fight the war using U.S.-supplied weapons. And with a continuous war against Russia, Americans could be kept agitated and afraid and motivated to continue heaping ever-increasing amounts of taxpayer-funded largess onto the national-security establishment.

It’s worth pointing out that in the process of keeping us “safe” and “secure,” the Pentagon, the CIA, and the NSA have acquired omnipotent powers, such as assassination, torture, indefinite detention, and secret surveillance, which are exercised not only against foreigners but also against Americans. It’s also worth mentioning that the national-security establishment is one of the critical factors leading America toward national bankruptcy. The federal government’s $35 trillion in debt comes to mind, not to mention the decade-after-decade debasement of the currency.

Ever since the conversion of the federal government to a national-security state, Americans have lived their lives under what amounts to perpetual war for perpetual peace. In the process, the Pentagon, the CIA, and the NSA have made life less safe for the American people while, at the same time, destroyed our liberty and our well-being. With “friends” like that, who needs enemies?

Reprinted with permission from The Future of Freedom Foundation.

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Resist “the instinct to bow down before the conqueror of the moment” – George Orwell, author of 1984

“Our presidential election choices are sizing up as a contest between VP Harris’ continued political incompetence, eventual economic collapse and continued hostility to my family and religious values by her donor class; or conversely Trump winning the race with China for (magical) ‘AI’ Technology and non-hostile indifference toward my values by Trump’s donor class. The election is ‘hostility versus indifference’ and I will take the indifference of Trump’s Pay Pal Mafia donors and their AI surveillance technology over Biden/Harris’ Soros donor class and their hostility to my working-class values. Elon Musk supposedly wants to put a chip in everyone’s brain. How will he do that?  They will line up for it” (paraphrased) – Pete Quinones, Podcast 1085 –Pete Quinones and Tom Luongo Talk About JD Vance and the Pay Pal Mafia, July 28, 2024.   Also see How the “PayPal Mafia” Paved Trump’s Way in Silicon Valley, Vanity Fair, August 1, 2024.

George Orwell once stated: ‘to see what is in front of one’s nose requires a constant struggle.”

What we are being led to turn a blind eye to today is a bizarre choreographed media drama of a presidential election race between an incumbent, but perhaps fake senile president Joe Biden, who is incoherent during debate but verbally skillful at a follow up speech the next day, and his replacement on the ballot by Kamela Harris, a hand-picked incompetent female vice president who had gained no primary election votes; and in Trump an opponent who has been portrayed as a victim of a series of kangaroo courts and a seemingly real assassination attempt which has garnered public sympathy, but who is competent and coherent.  We have been led to believe Trump willingly bankrupted his billion-dollar real estate fortune by fighting court judgments for tax evasion.

The ongoing election spectacle is an old trick called the Bad Cop-Good Cop routine, the Mutt and Jeff technique, or the forced choice between a Carrot and a Stick. We should not fall for the script or plot of opposing political parties and candidates as a contest between “hostility versus indifference” to working class values or the lesser of two evils currently being piped into our TV’s and cell phones. The election is being framed as a referendum on for adoption of mass AI surveillance and information integration, including medical records, that the technocrats have been unable to get from congress or the courts.

At the experiential level, where this will lead is the TSA will be able to bounce you from an airplane flight if you do not have the requisite vaccinations, regardless of what both candidates and their apparatchiks say otherwise. AI would mark the end of a pluralistic economy of public and private sectors, the gig job subeconomy and independent contractors.

It does not matter if the intent of Trump’s Pay Pal donor class is benevolent or “indifferent”, once the infrastructure of mass surveillance is established it can and will eventually fall into the hands of malevolent actors. And AI technology is not intelligent but just a marketing term for automation that has already occurred in China. There is no Sputnik like space race between the US and China for AI, contrary to Pete Quinones and the Pay Pal Mafia.

It is almost beyond comprehension even that some of the seemingly most perceptive grass roots internet influencers of public opinion do not see the presidential election as no more than another contrived media hoax just as the:

• The false COVID Pandemic
• The Silicon Valley corporate subsidized BLM and Antifa destruction of small business districts in Blue states for fake racial justice,
• the contrived Transgender Crisis of plying anti-puberty drugs, gender-change surgeries, and mastectomies to thousands of adolescent girls, and
• the fake Hamas invasion of Israel for 7 hours that went unnoticed by one of the top intelligence agencies in the world.

If you don’t believe in the authenticity of any of the above hoaxes, then why do you believe in the false black and white dialectic of the upcoming election?  What is being manufactured in the 2024 election is called a “Zeitgeist”, which is defined as the spirit of the times. A Zeitgeist is a widespread belief that can pull a mass of people Parenthetically, a ‘predictive programming’* movie titled “Zeitgeist” was produced in 2007 as a propaganda film which targeted Christians by getting the audience to perceive 9/11 and the Federal Reserve Bank as elitist conspiracies and then pairing that with Christianity as a pagan religion. As one moviegoer commented: “That movie screwed me up for a long time, but once I realized that it uses carefully selected truths mixed with insidious lies to trick you falling into his viewpoint, it became easier to see that the whole thing is a psychologically manipulative propaganda piece”.  The trailer to the movie “Zeitgeist” is “there are people guiding your life and you don’t even know it”. (* Predictive programming is the use of movies before crisis events to get the public to accept it as something to be expected, and like a movie nothing bad really happened).

Sociologist Vilfredo Pareto called this type of changing of the guard election “the circulation of the elites” (see Mises Institute).  No election in a Capitalist Oligarchy is a revolution or democratization of politics from below but a struggle between two cabals of oligarchs at the top for dominant power and privilege. One cabal Pareto called “foxes” that rule by patronage, cooptation, and cunning, versus a cabal of “lions” who rule by centralized control but small bureaucracies. Regime change is when the pendulum moves from one cabal to the other.

Simply, both overreliance on either force or patronage results in social control problems. But with the resulting centralization of everything that AI technology would bring, there would likely be less reliance on patronage and the size of government bureaucracies could plausibly be reduced.  But I foresee there would be likely changes with even so-called voluntary organizations such as churches.

I expect that under the centralization and collectivization of everything that AI will bring that independent churches or religious cooperatives like the Amish would also likely have their tax exemptions cancelled, similar to the Sincization of the Catholic Church in China (“everything within the state, nothing outside the state, nothing against the state”- Benito Mussolini)). This takeover has already occurred in the U.S. with Evangelical Christian Churches being de facto Zionism (how did they convert the churches? They lined up for it, just like COVID).  For a Christian and libertarian antidote to this see Michael J. Sutton, Freedom From Fascism: A Christian Response to Mass Formation Psychosis, 2022 and Paul Pomerville, The Elephant in the Room: The Neglect of the New Testament Narrative and the Judaism – Gospel conflict story, 2020.

With the electorate being manipulated toward Trump by a Bad Cop-Good Cop scheme, how can AI be limited or squashed once his regime is in power?  This is the question for those who seek liberty, not whether one cabal is “hostile” and the other is “indifferent” to Catholic and working-class values.

To answer my own question: How will the Techno Elite Get Us to Vote for Mass Surveillance?  Apparently, we will vote for it.

“All political thinking for years past has been vitiated (destroyed) in the same way. People can foresee the future only when it coincides with their own wishes, and the most grossly obvious facts can be ignored when they are unwelcome . – George Orwell

The post How Will the Techno Elite Get Us To Vote for Mass Surveillance? The Bad-Cop/Good Cop Scheme appeared first on LewRockwell.

One of the key themes I’ve tried to illustrate in my writings is that chronic illness has vastly increased over the last 150 years. A major cause of this is the disruption of the natural rhythms essential for our body’s self-regulation and self-repair.

Modern Medicine (Allopathy) often overlooks this concept because it doesn’t recognize the innate health of the body. Allopathic treatments focus on stabilizing or altering the body (e.g., ICU care or surgery) and hoping it heals itself, unlike other medical systems that enhance the body’s natural recovery capacity.

Typically, Allopathy excels with acute conditions, while a health-augmenting approach is better for chronic illnesses, an area where Allopathy often falls short. Here are three reasons why the Allopathic model dominates:

1. Economic Incentives: The Allopathic model creates many expensive treatments and diagnostics, making it highly profitable and incentivizing its dominance in the medical market.
2. Cultural Psychology: Our culture’s need to control and understand everything leads to methods that dominate nature rather than work harmoniously with it, opposing the philosophy of trusting the body’s natural healing.
3. Research Bias: Medical research favors treatments that show immediate, observable changes (like lowering blood pressure) rather than those that promote gradual, long-term recovery, skewing the focus towards pharmaceutical interventions.

The Impact of Natural Rhythms on Health

The health of the body relies heavily on the normal functioning of self-regulating cycles:

• Breathing: Slow, smooth, nasal breathing profoundly impacts health and longevity by regulating many critical physiological functions.
• Sunlight: Regular exposure to sunlight is vital for health, and its absence doubles the risk of mortality and can lead to conditions like depression or cancer.
• Physical Activity: Regular exercise is crucial, and a sedentary lifestyle leads to significant health issues. Those who walk daily often experience dramatically improved longevity.
• Mental Rest: The mind needs to alternate between rest and activity, but modern life often forces constant thinking and stress.

In short, many of the natural rhythms our bodies rely upon for self-regulation are heavily disrupted in modern society, which in turn results in a variety of consistent derangements to normal physiology that are now seen throughout the population.

The Importance of Sleep

Throughout my career, I’ve met many integrative practitioners who emphasize normalizing their patient’s sleep as a crucial step in treating chronic illness. Sleep is a foundational process for restoring health, yet patients with chronic illnesses often suffer from disrupted sleep cycles, which can be challenging to correct.

Sleep is a tightly regulated cycle, highly responsive to environmental signals and essential for maintaining other critical body rhythms. During sleep, the body cycles through different phases, each with critical functions: deep NREM sleep heals the brain and drains toxins, while REM sleep consolidates memories and processes emotions.

A typical sleep cycle goes as follows:

Note: since REM sleep predominates later at night, not sleeping long enough disproportionately disrupts REM sleep. NREM sleep is responsible for eliminating unnecessary memories, whereas REM sleep processes the day’s experiences and reinforces them into long-term memory.

Matthew Walker is one of the world’s most vocal sleep researchers. In his book Why We Sleep, he argues that sleep serves several vital functions, including:

• Maintaining circulatory health and preventing heart attacks.
• Ensuring proper metabolic health (e.g., preventing hunger, diabetes, and weight gain).
• Supporting immune function (e.g., reducing susceptibility to the flu).
• Preventing cancer.
• Avoiding fatigue, brain fog, and serious accidents.
• Keeping you awake and alert.
• Healing and restoring the brain (e.g., reducing the risk of Alzheimer’s).
• Regulating hormonal function and maintaining fertility (e.g., sleep deprivation lowers testosterone levels).
• Processing emotional trauma (e.g., sleep is typically disrupted in PTSD, and PTSD often significantly improves once a drug is given which prevents PTSD from disrupting sleep).
• Interpreting emotional signals.
• Allowing rational control over impulses.
• Maintaining one’s sense of reality (e.g., prolonged sleep deprivation can trigger psychosis, and sleep is known to be disturbed in schizophrenic patients).
• Facilitating creativity (e.g., many paradigm-shifting discoveries came from dreams, Thomas Edison was well-known for using dreams to concoct his inventions, and when people are woken up from REM sleep, they often demonstrate a radically improved abstract problem solving capacity).
• Reducing one’s sensitivity to pain (whereas sleep deprivation increases it).
• Facilitating the long-term retention of memories.

Any individual, no matter what age, will exhibit physical ailments, mental health instability, reduced alertness, and impaired memory if their sleep is chronically disrupted.

Even when controlling for factors such as body mass index, gender, race, history of smoking, frequency of exercise, and medications, the lower an older individual’s sleep efficiency score, the higher their mortality risk, the worse their physical health, the more likely they are to suffer from depression, the less energy they report, and the lower their cognitive function, typified by forgetfulness.

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The post The FDA’s War Against Sleep appeared first on LewRockwell.

Kamala and Tim want joy
for every girl and boy.
That’s their dirty ploy.

JOY as the cost of living
goes ever higher and higher
because of the Kamala/Biden wars
which their puppet-masters desire.

JOY for the Palestinians
as we flatten their land
and bomb their women and children.
We’re sure they’ll understand.
Her bosom swells with pride
while she funds Netanyahu’s genocide.
(Kamala’s fake compassion is bland
as she poses with Katy and Ariana Grande.)

JOY for 30 million illegals
she let across the border.
She gives them free money and credit cards
so they’ll vote for the Democrats’ New World Order.

JOY for the hundreds of thousands of children
who DISAPPEARED in the border-crossing
into forced labor, sexual exploitation
under evil Kamala’s watch.
In bed she isn’t turning and tossing.

JOY for the Zionist warmongers
who control both houses of Congress
and both parties too…It’s rule by Jew,
AIPAC’s power is humungous.

JOY for the nazi thug Zelensky
who Kamala keeps on giving millions
in Washington’s senseless war against Russia
costing the taxpayer untold billions.

Tim and Kamala’s Call For Joy
is slicker than Obama’s “Hope And Change”.
That phony divisive racist is smoooth
though his wife, Big Mike, is certainly strange.

Tim’s wife liked the smell of burning tires
as Black Lives Matter destroyed her city.
Kamala helped bail out the rioters—
To punish them would be such a pity!

Tampon Tim with his wokeist trash
will help keep Kamala rolling in cash.
Send her back to India, please!
America doesn’t need this disease.

Tim and Kamala’s “Joy and Hope”
might fool the average American dope
who’s blind to their country being destroyed
and sinking into an immoral void.

Trump is a schlump and a hot-air balloon
whose ego is his top priority.
But even he’d be better than Kamala
though the Media’s trying to plaster over
her hollowness and inferiority.

“Joy to the World and Peace on Earth.”
Kamala’s non-stop lies
reveal her true colors—and her true worth.

The post Kamala’s Message of Joy appeared first on LewRockwell.

When I was a boy, an obese boy when obesity wasn’t cool, I never dreamed that one day we would all know the glory of paying for water. I would bring a thermos with ice water to baseball games. For basketball games, I drank out of the gym’s water fountain. I had no idea what was in that non-purified water.

Fluoride was first added to our water supply in 1945. But that was only in Grand Rapids, Michigan. One of the initial proponents of putting this known poison into our drinking water was Harold Hodge, who was part of the human radiation experiments taking place around the same time. You know, where they injected vulnerable “test subjects” with plutonium and uranium. I guess they anticipated something wonderful happening as a result. The “science” behind putting a deadly toxin in our water was provided by some of the largest corporations in the country; Alcoa, the American Petroleum Institute, Dupont, US Steel, among others. And as we learned during the COVID psyop, it is imperative that we all “trust the science.” If we don’t, then we become a “threat to democracy.”

Right-wing “extremists” were understandably upset when fluoridated water went nationwide by the early 1960s. Watch the scene in Dr. Strangelove where these sensible folks were not very subtly skewered. But capitalism- our corrupt, noncompetitive form of capitalism- benefited from this poisoning of the water supply. Two supplemental industries were born; the bottled water industry and the individual water filtration industry. Now, to a simple community college dropout like me, who barely passed high school chemistry, it would seem to make more sense to just have giant water filtration systems in every area, to do what Brita pitchers and the like do. And as for paying for bottles of water, there probably wasn’t a citizen on earth in 1960 that would have believed such a thing could ever become a booming business. They might have had little confidence in the collective intelligence of the people, but paying for water?

We now have billionaire “water barons,” which included the late George H.W. Bush, T. Boone Pickens, and familiar capitalist villains like Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan Chase, and the Blackstone Group, buying up water rights all over the world. At the same time, government has implemented tyrannical measures like outlawing the collection of rainwater by individuals. I’m assuming it’s okay for someone like Goldman Sachs to collect rainwater. When he died in 2019, Pickens owned more water rights than anyone in the world. Now this seems decidedly odd; how can someone “own” water? Can they shoot a thirsty homeless person for trying to get a drink of “their” water? How about an animal? That would be more likely to raise the ire of today’s Americans. If they could “buy” the air we breathe, you know they’d do it.

There are other supplemental industries, which exist solely because the cost of almost everything is beyond the means of ordinary people. Look at insurance. All forms of insurance. As Ambrose Bierce noted well over a century ago, the only way to “win” at life insurance is to die as quickly as possible. You’ll score a double indemnity if you can get someone to murder you. At least you’ll leave your blushing bride with an exciting new partner to help her spend all that money. Car insurance? You need that, because any significant repair is going to cost more than the amount of savings that 70 plus percent of the people have to their name. Home insurance? Same thing, but on a larger scale. And if you need another reason not to desire nuclear war, that particular catastrophe isn’t covered under homeowner policies. You can get “fliers” for water damage and the like, but to my knowledge not damage from nuclear war.

And if you defy all the odds, and live to a ripe old age, and avoid hospitals and “healthcare,” then you’ve paid an astronomical amount of both life and health insurance for….nothing. It’s not like they give you a refund because you were such a great customer, permitting them to buy and reap great profits from all that real estate and everything. As for car insurance, if you go decades without an accident, and then one happens because another driver was at fault, you will be very lucky not to have your rates rise. Some might even be cancelled by their insurance provider. When I became a pathfinder in the DWI movement in 1978, I was unable to afford insurance for two years. I had to opt for the uninsured motorist’s fee. It I’d been in an accident, I would have been financially destroyed. Good thing I didn’t know enough to worry. There are some advantages to being a happy-go-lucky partyer.

The most disgusting insurance is healthcare coverage. Of course, needless to say, without it, no one could afford to have cancer or any other debilitating disease. Medicare recipients, on top of paying an increasing monthly fee to get their own money back, which they paid into the system over the course of a working lifetime, also have to buy supplemental health insurance. This is because the Medicare Bernie Sanders is so infatuated with only covers 80 percent of medical costs. 20 percent of any medical bill can be financially devastating. But the oldsters are frightened into purchasing it. Without it, how could they afford the dozen different deadly products of Big Pharma they take daily?

When feminism and the leftist cultural push resulted in most women entering the workforce by the mid-1970s, a new problem arose, for a new supplemental industry to address. Most people were still interested in having kids in those twilight years of America 1.0. What would happen to them when they got off the school bus, and mom wasn’t waiting there for them with a smile as big as June Cleaver’s? She was too busy toiling away in a pointless job that somehow didn’t result in the family having a higher standard of living. How does two incomes not result in a net financial gain? And thus, daycare centers were born. Where the loving parents could entrust hours of daily care to complete strangers. But don’t worry; the “legitimate” ones were certified by the state. Trained and licensed. By the state. It’s not like the state is corrupt.

For those children not old enough to attend government run institutions of indoctrination, you had day long day care. So in some cases, the infant/toddler was spending more time with these well trained “care providers” than his/her own parents. I wonder if they ask the toddlers what their pronouns are in today’s day care centers? Just imagine the purple haired, multi-tattooed “Woke” monstrosities that “provide care” for the children of working parents today. Now anyone with enough money also entrusts the care of their children to strangers. They call them nannies. It’s an upward mobility thing, you wouldn’t understand. In almost every case, the nanny (as opposed to the daycare “provider”) doesn’t speak English. So this serves to ensure that the upper crust will become bilingual. After all, you need to speak Spanish fluently if you’re going to own your own company, and pay the day workers their pittance.

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The post Crony Capitalism: Everything Has a Price appeared first on LewRockwell.

Sixteen months ago, in April of 2023, I launched my campaign for President of the United States. I began this journey as a Democrat — the party of my father and my uncle, the party to which I pledged my allegiance long before I was old enough to vote.

I attended my first Democratic convention at age six in 1960. Back then, the Democrats were the champions of the Constitution, and civil rights. The Democrats stood against authoritarianism, against censorship, and against colonialism, imperialism, and unjust wars. We were the party of labor and the working class. The Democrats were the party of government transparency and the champion of the environment. Our party was the bulwark against Big Money interests and corporate power. True to its name, it was the party of democracy.

As you all know, I left that party last October because it had departed so dramatically from the core values I grew up with. It had become the party of war, censorship, corruption, Big Pharma, Big Tech, Big Ag, and Big Money. When it abandoned democracy by cancelling the primary to conceal the cognitive decline of the sitting President, I left the party to run as an independent.

The mainstream of American politics and journalism derided my decision. Conventional wisdom said it would be impossible even to get on the ballot as an independent, because each state poses a tangle of arbitrary rules for collecting signatures. I would need over a million of them, something no presidential candidate in history had ever achieved, and then I’d need a team of attorneys and millions of dollars to handle the legal challenges. The naysayers told us we were climbing a glass version of Mount Impossible.

So, the first thing I want to tell you is that we proved them wrong. We did it because beneath the radar of mainstream media organs, we inspired a massive independent political movement. More than a hundred thousand volunteers sprang into action, hopeful that they could reverse our nation’s decline. Many worked ten-hour days, sometimes in blizzards and blazing heat. They sacrificed family time, personal commitments, and sleep month after month, energized by a shared vision of a nation healed of its divisions. They set up tables at farmers’ markets. They canvassed door-to-door. In Utah and New Hampshire, volunteers collected signatures in snowstorms, convincing each supporter to stop in the frigid cold, take off their gloves, and sign legibly. During a heat wave in Nevada, I met a tall, athletic volunteer who cheerfully told me he had lost 25 pounds collecting signatures in 117-degree heat. To finance this effort, young Americans donated their lunch money, and senior citizens gave from their Social Security checks. Our 50-state organization collected those million signatures, and more. No presidential campaign in American political history has ever done that.

And so, I want to thank all of these dedicated volunteers, and congratulate all of the campaign staff who coordinated this enormous logistical feat. You accomplished the impossible. You carried me up that glass mountain. You pulled off a miracle. You achieved what all the pundits said could never be done. You have my deepest gratitude. I will never forget that — not just for what you did for my campaign, but for the sacrifices you made because of your love for our country. You showed everyone that democracy is still possible here. It continues to survive in the breasts and in the idealistic human energies that still thrive beneath the canvas of neglect and official and institutional corruption.

Today I am here to tell you that I WILL NOT ALLOW YOUR EFFORTS TO GO TO WASTE.

I am here today to tell you how I will leverage your tremendous accomplishment to serve the ideals we share, the ideals of peace, prosperity, freedom, and health that motivated our campaign. I am here today to describe the path forward that you have opened with your commitment and hard labors.

In an honest system, I believe I would have won this election. In a system of open, fair primaries, with regularly scheduled debates, with a truly independent media untainted by government propaganda and censorship, in a system of nonpartisan courts and election boards, everything would be different. After all, polls consistently showed me beating each of the other candidates in both favorability and in every head-to-head matchup.

But I’m sorry to say that while democracy may still be alive at the grass roots, it has become little more than a slogan for our political institutions, our media, and our government, and most sadly of all, for the Democratic Party.

In the name of saving democracy, the Democratic Party set itself to dismantling it. Lacking confidence that its candidate could win at the voting booth, the DNC waged continual legal warfare against both President Trump and myself. Each time our volunteers turned in those towering boxes of signatures needed to get on the ballot, the DNC dragged us into court state by state attempting to erase their work and to subvert the will of the voters who had signed. It deployed DNC-aligned judges to throw me — and other candidates — off the ballot and to throw President Trump in jail. It ran a sham of a primary, rigged to prevent any serious challenge to President Biden.

Then, when a predictably bungled debate performance precipitated the palace coup against President Biden, the same shadowy DNC operatives appointed his successor — also without an election. They installed a candidate who was so unpopular with voters that she dropped out in 2020 without winning a single delegate.

My uncles and my father both relished debate and prided themselves on their capacity to go toe-to-toe with any opponent in the battle over ideas. They would be astonished to learn of a Democratic Party presidential nominee who, like Vice President Harris, has not appeared for a single interview or unscripted encounter with voters in 35 days. This is profoundly undemocratic. How are the people to choose, when they don’t know whom they are choosing? And how can this look to the rest of the world?

My father and uncle were always conscious of America’s image because of our nation’s role as the template of democracy and the leader of the free world.

Instead of showing us her substance and character, the DNC and its media organs engineered a surge of popularity for Vice President Harris based upon, well, nothing. No policies, no interviews, no debates — only smoke and mirrors and balloons in a highly produced Chicago circus. There, a string of Democratic speakers mentioned Donald Trump 147 times on just the first day. Who needs policy when you have a Trump to hate? In contrast, at the RNC convention President Biden was mentioned twice in 4 days.

I do interviews every day. Some days, as many as 10. President Trump, who actually was nominated in an election, also does interviews daily. How did the Democratic Party choose a candidate that has never done an interview or debate during the entire election cycle? We know the answer. They did it by weaponizing the government and agencies. They did it by abandoning democracy. They did it by suing the opposition and by disenfranchising voters.

What most alarms me isn’t how the Democratic Party conducts its internal affairs or runs its candidates. What alarms me is the resort to censorship, media control, and weaponization of federal agencies. When a U.S. president colludes with — or outright coerces — media companies to censor political speech, it is an attack on our most sacred right of free expression, the very right upon which all of our other constitutional rights rest.

President Biden mocked Vladimir Putin’s 88% landslide in Russian elections, observing that Putin’s party controlled the Russian press, and that Putin prevented serious opponents from appearing on the ballot. But here in America, the DNC also prevented opponents from getting on the ballot and our television networks exposed themselves as Democratic Party organs. Over the course of more than a year, in a campaign where my poll numbers reached at times into the high 20s, the DNC-aligned mainstream networks maintained a near-total embargo on interviews with me. During his 10-month Presidential campaign in 1992, Ross Perot gave interviews 34 times on the mainstream networks. In contrast, during the 16 months since I declared, ABC, NBC, CBS, MSNBC, and CNN combined gave me only two live interviews. Those same networks instead ran a continuous deluge of hit pieces with inaccurate, often vile, pejorative, and defamatory smears. Some of those same networks then colluded with the DNC to keep me off the debate stage.

Representatives of these networks are in the room right now. I will take a moment to ask you to consider the many ways that you have abdicated your responsibility — the duty of a free press to safeguard democracy and challenge the party in power. Instead of maintaining a posture of fierce skepticism toward authority, you have made yourselves government mouthpieces and stenographers for the organs of power. You did not alone cause the devolution of America’s democracy, but you could have prevented it.

The Democratic Party’s censorship of social media was an even more naked exercise of executive power. This week a federal judge, Terry Doughty, upheld my injunction against President Biden, calling the White House censorship project “the most egregious violation of the First Amendment in the history of the United States of America.”

Doughty’s previous 155-page decision details how 37 hours after he took the oath of office swearing to uphold the constitution, President Biden’s White House opened up a portal and invited the CIA, FBI, CISA, DHS, IRS, and other agencies to censor me and other political dissidents. Even today, users who try to post my campaign videos to Facebook or YouTube get messages that “this content violates community standards.” Two days after Judge Doughty rendered his decision this week, Facebook was attaching warning labels to an online petition calling on ABC to include me in the upcoming debate.

The mainstream media, once the guardian of the First Amendment and democratic principles, has joined a systematic attack on democracy. It always justifies its censorship on the grounds of “combating misinformation,” but oppressors don’t fear lies. They fear the truth.

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The post Why I Am Suspending My Campaign for President appeared first on LewRockwell.

A salient feature of the last decade or so has been the steady rise of bizarre cults with legions of fervent true believers, even though we have virtually zero rational grounds for believing in the central tenets of these secular religions. The weirdest thing about these cults is the way in which their true believers ardently sacrifice the very things they claim they wish to save. Consider the following:

1). COVID-19 illness presents close to ZERO risk to healthy children, but this hasn’t stopped the Vaccine Cult from demanding that children receive the dangerous, experimental shots that are neither effective nor safe. The most spectacular irrational outcome is the high incidence of vaccine-induced myocarditis among young athletes for whom COVID-19 posed zero risk.

2). Wind turbines are extremely inefficient producers of electricity that kill hundreds of thousands of migratory birds, wreak havoc in the marine environment when they are placed offshore, and ruin the physical beauty of the landscape. Nevertheless, the bizarre Climate Cult insists that wind turbines are a key weapon in our arsenal for reducing carbon emissions, which the Climate Cult fervently believes to be causing a rise in the earth’s temperature. Destroy nature in order to save it!

3). A human male will obviously have an unfair advantage over a female in almost all competitive sports. And yet, in their fervent proselytization of the bizarre Transgender Cult, votaries have largely succeeded in destroying women’s sports and the dreams of the girls and women who train for them.

4). Importing legions of young men from Arab countries into European countries in which these young men struggle to integrate and find gainful employment has resulted in a marked reduction of public safety in European cities, especially for young women. Yesterday here in Vienna, I had lunch with the former chief of police, who told me that stabbings are indeed much higher in certain districts of Vienna than they ever were in the past. The perpetrators are almost always young males who came to Vienna during the 2015 European migrant crisis.

And yet, the Diversity Cult persists in its bizarre, fetishistic belief that racial diversity per se is necessarily a good thing. Yesterday evening, while pondering the irrationality of the Diversity Cult, I saw the news that a young, foreign-born man stabbed 11 people and killed three at the “Festival of Diversity” that was underway in Solingen, Germany. Diversity will purportedly strengthen and revitalize Germany in the 21st century, even when it results in mass homicide.

5). Already in the year 2015, I began to perceive that the oligarchs who run Ukraine were making a huge mistake by getting into bed with the oligarchs who run the U.S. intelligence agencies, military-industrial complex, and Biden Crime Family. Cozying up with the U.S. military and intel establishment would certainly frighten the Russian Bear and make him aggressive. Far better for the poor people of Ukraine to tone down the nationalism and seek friendly and cooperative relations with Russia.

Note that the exact same reasoning has applied to every country in the Western Hemisphere in their relations with the United States government since President Monroe announced his Monroe Doctrine. As the former Mexican President, Porfirio Diaz once lamented: “Poor Mexico—so far from God, and so close to the United States.”

Imagine if the government of Mexico had, in the year 2014, starting welcoming Russian military and intel agency guys to set up shop in Mexico near the U.S. border. While anyone with a shred of common sense could immediately recognize the folly of this, the bizarre Sacred Territory of Ukraine Cult insists that the poor Ukrainian people fight till the last cartridge is fired instead of negotiating with Russia. Again, destroy Ukraine in order to save it!

I could go on with other examples of “Destroying Villages in Order to Save Them,” but I reckon my readers get the point. At root of these bizarre secular cults seems to be misplaced religious yearning, a desire to feel good about oneself by subscribing to what are marketed as altruistic causes, a paucity of good information, and a lack of critical thinking skill.

This originally appeared on Courageous Discourse.

The post Destroying Villages in Order To Save Them appeared first on LewRockwell.