Lew Rockwell Institute

Donald Trump is a strong believer in protective tariffs, and this is very bad news for those of us who support the free market. In Trump’s opinion, tariffs are a great idea. Here is what he said about them in an interview last month: “Trump has proposed a 10 percent across-the-board tariff on all imports and 60 percent on goods from China. During Tuesday’s remarks, he singled out imported cars for higher trade duties, saying he would slap a100, 200 or 300 percent tariff on cars made in Mexico. He also floated imposing 50 percent tariffs on goods to force companies to relocate operations to the U.S. to avoid the penalty.

‘First of all, 10 percent when you collect it is hundreds of billions of dollars … all reducing our deficit,’ he said. ‘But really, so there’s two ways of looking at a tariff. You can do it as a money-making instrument, or you can do it as something to get the companies. Now, if you want the companies to come in, the tariff has to be a lot higher than 10 percent because 10 percent is not enough. Guys, they’re not going to do it for 10, but you make a 50 percent tariff, they’re going to come in.’”

Trump discusses tariffs as if they were a way of improving the free market. In fact, though, as the great economist Murray Rothbard points out in Power and Market, tariffs directly attack the essence of the free market, namely that people gain through mutually advantageous trade. Rothbard proves this by a brilliant reductio ad absurdum argument: “The absurdity of the pro-tariff arguments can be seen when we carry the idea of a tariff to its logical conclusion—let us say, the case of two individuals, Jones and Smith.”

You might think that Rothbard has gone too far— aren’t individuals very different from nations? Isn’t a discussion of two-person trade irrelevant? But Rothbard has a convincing response. Often a very simple example. reveals the principle that underlies a much more complicated case. As he explains:

“This is a valid use of the reductio ad absurdum because the same qualitative effects take place when a tariff is levied on a whole nation as when it is levied on one or two people; the difference is merely one of degree. Suppose that Jones has a farm, ‘Jones’ Acres,’ and Smith works for him. Having become steeped in pro-tariff ideas, Jones exhorts Smith to ‘buy Jones’ Acres.’ ‘Keep the money in Jones’ Acres,’ ‘don’t be exploited by the flood of products from the cheap labor of foreigners outside Jones’ Acres,’ and similar maxims become the watchword of the two men. To make sure that their aim is accomplished, Jones levies a 1,000-percent tariff on the imports of all goods and services from ‘abroad,’ i.e., from outside the farm. As a result, Jones and Smith see their leisure, or ‘problems of unemployment,’ disappear as they work from dawn to dusk trying to eke out the production of all the goods they desire. Many they cannot raise at all; others they can, given centuries of effort. It is true that they reap the promise of the protectionists: ‘self-sufficiency,’ although the ‘sufficiency’ is bare subsistence instead of a comfortable standard of living.”

Rothbard next addresses a central point of pro-tariffs defenders like Trump, the alleged need to keep money at home.

“Money is ‘kept at home,’ and they can pay each other very high nominal wages and prices, but the men find that the real value of their wages, in terms of goods, plummets drastically. Truly we are now back in the situation of the isolated or barter economies of Crusoe and Friday. And that is effectively what the tariff principle amounts to. This principle is an attack on the market, and its logical goal is the self-sufficiency of individual producers; it is a goal that, if realized, would spell poverty for all, and death for most, of the present world population. It would be a regression from civilization to barbarism. A mild tariff over a wider area is perhaps only a push in that direction, but it is a push, and the arguments used to justify the tariff apply equally well to a return to the ‘self-sufficiency’ of the jungle.”

Trump said in his interview that high tariffs will encourage foreign firms to relocate to the United States, so that they can avoid paying the tariffs. What this argument ignores is that there is no benefit to American consumers in having firms located here rather than in foreign countries. What matters to consumers is getting the lowest price for the goods and services they want; and if the firm that offers the lowest price is in China rather than America, so what? Trump might counter this by claiming that locating in America opens up jobs for Americans, but this contention presupposes that a substantial number of American workers are unable to find jobs. What is the basis for this assumption? None is offered. Further, any gains that workers could get from new jobs are likely to be erased by the higher prices the tariffs will bring about. As the great economic journalist Henry Hazlitt said: “And this brings us to the real effect of a tariff wall. It is not merely that all its visible gains are offset by less obvious but no less real losses. It results, in fact, in a net loss to the country. For contrary to centuries of interested propaganda and disinterested confusion, the tariff reduces the American level of wages. Let us observe more clearly how it does this. We have seen that the added amount which consumers pay for a tariff-protected article leaves them just that much less with which to buy all other articles.

There is here no net gain to industry as a whole. But as a result of the artificial barrier erected against foreign goods, American labor, capital and land are deflected from what they can do more efficiently to what they do less efficiently. Therefore, as a result of the tariff wall, the average productivity of American labor and capital is reduced. If we look at it now from the consumer’s point of view, we find that he can buy less with his money. Because he has to pay more for sweaters and other protected goods, he can buy less of everything else. The general purchasing power of his income has therefore been reduced. Whether the net effect of the tariff is to lower money wages or to raise money prices will depend upon the monetary policies that are followed. But what is clear is that the tariff—though it may increase wages above what they would have been in the protected industries— must on net balance, when all occupations are considered, reduce real wages.

Only minds corrupted by generations of misleading propaganda can regard this conclusion as paradoxical. What other result could we expect from a policy of deliberately using our resources of capital and manpower in less efficient ways than we know how to use them? What other result could we expect from deliberately erecting artificial obstacles to trade and transportation?

For the erection of tariff walls has the same effect as the erection of real walls. It is significant that the protectionists habitually use the language of warfare. They talk of ‘repelling an invasion’ of foreign products. And the means they suggest in the fiscal field are like those of the battlefield. The tariff barriers that are put up to repel this invasion are like the tank traps, trenches, and barbed-wire entanglements created to repel or slow down attempted invasion by a foreign army.”

Let’s do everything we can to oppose tariffs. They make us all poorer.

The post The Menace of Tariffs appeared first on LewRockwell.

[Editor’s note: In this article, originally published in October 1984, Murray Rothbard critiques a problem with the economics of Republicans and conservatives. Namely, its proponents think they can have it both ways by cutting tax rates and increasing government spending, while somehow not running up huge deficits. Much of this is based on the so-called Laffer curve idea, which Rothbard regards with skepticism. Moreover, Rothbard notes that when most conservatives speak of “the gold standard” they mean a government regulated standard which is an ersatz version of the real thing. At the core of it all is a refusal to do anything at all about the enormous American welfare state. At the time, this sort of thing was called “supply-side economics.” Unfortunately, we find that today’s MAGA economics is in many ways a retread of the failed supply-side economics of old, and Rothbard’s critique remains important reading.]

Establishment historians of economic thought—they of the Smith-Marx-Marshall variety—have a compelling need to end their saga with a chapter on the latest Great Man, the latest savior and final culmination of economic science. The last consensus choice was, of course, John Maynard Keynes, but his General Theory is now a half-century old, and economists have for some time been looking around for a new candidate for that final chapter.

For a while, Joseph Schumpeter had a brief run, but his problem was that his work was largely written before the General Theory. Milton Friedman and monetarism lasted a bit longer, but suffered from two grave defects: (1) the lack of anything resembling a great, integrative work; and (2) the fact that monetarism and Chicago School Economics is really only a gloss on theories that had been hammered out before the Keynesian Era by Irving Fisher and by Frank Knight and his colleagues at the University of Chicago.

Was there nothing new to write about since Keynes?

Since the mid-1970s, a school of thought has made its mark that at least gives the impression of something brand new. And since economists, like the Supreme Court, follow the election returns, “supply-side economics” has become noteworthy.

Supply-side economics has been hampered among students of contemporary economics in lacking anything like a grand treatise, or even a single major leader, and there is scarcely unanimity among its practitioners. But it has been able to take 40 Making Economic Sense First published in October 1984. shrewd advantage of highly placed converts in the media and easy access to politicians and think tanks. Already it has begun to make its way into last chapters of works on economic thought.

A central theme of the supply-side school is that a sharp cut in marginal income-tax rates will increase incentives to work and save, and therefore investment and production. That way, few people could take exception. But there are other problems involved. For, at least in the land of the famous Laffer Curve, income tax cuts were treated as the panacea for deficits; drastic cuts would so increase stated revenue as allegedly to yield a balanced budget.

Yet there was no evidence whatever for this claim, and indeed, the likelihood is quite the other way. It is true that if income-tax rates were 98 percent and were cut to 90 percent, there would probably be an increase in revenue; but at the far lower tax levels we have been at, there is no warrant for this assumption. In fact, historically, increases in tax rates have been followed by increases in revenue and vice versa.

But there is a deeper problem with supply-side than the inflated claims of the Laffer Curve. Common to all supplysiders is nonchalance about total government spending and therefore deficits. The supply-siders do not care that tight government spending takes resources that would have gone into the private sector and diverts them to the public sector.

They care only about taxes. Indeed, their attitude toward deficits approaches the old Keynesian “we only owe it to ourselves.” Worse than that: the supply-siders want to maintain the current swollen levels of federal spending. As professed “populists,” their basic argument is that the people want the current level of spending and the people should not be denied.

Even more curious than the supply-sider attitude toward spending is their viewpoint on money. On the one hand, they say they are for hard money and an end to inflation by going back to the “gold standard.” On the other hand, they have consistently attacked the Paul Volcker Federal Reserve, not for Making Economic Sense 41 being too inflationist, but for imposing “too tight” money and thereby “crippling economic growth.”

In short, these self-styled “conservative populists” begin to sound like old-fashioned populists in their devotion to inflation and cheap money. But how square that with their championing of the gold standard?

In the answer to this question lies the key to the heart of the seeming contradictions of the new supply-side economics. For the “gold standard” they want provides only the illusion of a gold standard without the substance. The banks would not have to redeem in gold coin, and the Fed would have the right to change the definition of the gold dollar at will, as a device to fine-tune the economy. In short, what the supply-siders want is not the old hard-money gold standard, but the phony “gold standard” of the Bretton Woods era, which collapsed under the bows of inflation and money management by the Fed.

The heart of supply-side doctrine is revealed in its best-selling philosophic manifesto, The Way the World Works, by Jude Wanniski. Wanniski’s view is that the people, the masses, are always right, and have always been right through history.

In economics, he claims, the masses want a massive welfare state, drastic income-tax cuts, and a balanced budget. How can these contradictory aims be achieved? By the legerdemain of the Laffer Curve. And in the monetary sphere, we might add, what the masses seem to want is inflation and cheap money along with a return to the gold standard. Hence, fueled by the axiom that the public is always right, the supply-siders propose to give the public what they want by giving them an inflationary, cheap-money Fed plus the illusion of stability through a phony gold standard.

The supply-side aim is therefore “democratically” to give the public what they want, and in this case the best definition of “democracy” is that of H.L. Mencken: “Democracy is the view that the people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard.”

Note: The views expressed on Mises.org are not necessarily those of the Mises Institute.

The post A Walk on the Supply Side appeared first on LewRockwell.

When I first announced that I was moving to Indonesia in late 2007, one friend looked puzzled. “Indonesia…is that in Bali?” he asked. Interestingly, living in Jakarta is a lot like Houston, without the Cajun food.

I stepped off the plane onto the tarmax on 14 February 2008, having boarded on a crisp winter’s monring in Houston, and into a swampy moldy morning in Jakarta. The arrival area was thick with clove cigarette smoke, and I didn’t encounter air conditioning — such as it was — until I was deep inside the terminal.

I fumbled my way to baggage claim, and after collectng my only bag, I turned to find 10 tiny brown men in blue shirts ready to usher my burden on their carts. Seeing that I would not escape unschathed, I selected one to take my bag.

On the way out, I stopped to exchange two of my six one-hundred dollar bills — my only surviving savings. The exchange rate was 10,000 rupiah to the US dollar, and I became an instant millionaire. The problem was that my new-found fortune was all in 100,000 rupiah notes, and most Indonesians had never even seen one, much less could make change for one.

At that time, there were few Indonesians who had travelled outside their home town, much less out of the counrty. The average day wage was $2, and a fresh college grad could expect to make $300 a month. There were a very select few in the upper class (earning more than $4,000/month), and everyone else was among the working poor.

Over the next 10 years, I watched the economy explode. Almost overnight, there was a vibrant middle class. People were buying their first cars. Younger generations were buying their own homes, leaving the previous two or three generations in the ancient family homestead. Foreign franchises, like Burger King, Subway, 7-11, Carrefour, and many others, were opening on a weekly basis.

Suddenly, Indonesians were travelling overseas and parents were sending their brood to univeristy in Australia, England, Taiwan, and the US. The city centre was on a building spree, the likes of which I hadn’t seen since the 1970s oil boom in Houston. New suburbs of semi-detached Euro-style housing were appearing everywhere, complete with (gasp) yards front and rear.

The government, giddy with the boom, started increasing taxes on everything, mostly to make up for all the losses due to corruption in the state-owned enterprises (SOEs). Indonesia dropped out of OPEC the year I got here, primarily due to the government demanding more and more slices of the oil and gas pie. There is no local oil industry, and the big internationals left rather than put up with the ever-increasing greed of the political types, and the constantly shifting regulatory quagmire.

Meanwhile, the rupiah had been sliding against the dollar, standing at about 15,000 and change to $1. That’s a 50% depreciation in less than 20 years. Prices began ballooning, after the government succumbed to IMF pressure to cut fuel subsidies. Taxes kept rising to pay for the loss of foreign investment compoumded by cancerous corruption and gross mismanagement in the SOEs.

NGOs were pushing the government to install more mass transit systems — high-speed trains, busways, MRT/LRT, etc., — primarily for the benefit of Chinese and European companies and “development” banks. The Indonesian sense of inadequacy and inferiority, inflamed by boundless political greed and corruption, led to outlandish borrowing to build the showroom transit systems that had no master plan or purpose, other than to look shiny and new for political photo ops.

Ultimately, this Me Too building boom culminated the last president declaring he would build a new capital city in the jungles of Borneo — all shiny, and spiffy, and “green,” and outrageously expensive (and riddled with corruption).

And then the Frankenvirus hit.

Read the Whole Article

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Western NGOs have sent the Georgian opposition political parties that they finance into the streets to protest the Georgian Dream Party’s sweep of the legislative elections. The Georgian Dream Party favors pragmatic relations with Russia, whereas the collection of small parties financed by the West want to create another Maidan Revolution to open a second front for Washington against Russia. See this.

Russia’s Foreign Minister Lavrov says that there is no reason to doubt that the West is trying to push Georgia into war with Russia. See this.

Putin-the-Unready rejects claims that Russia interfered in the Georgian election. Putin still hasn’t learned that the role of good democrat makes no impression on the West. Will Putin’s toleration of hostile actions against Russia lead to the opening of a second front against Russia?

The US Defense Department Inspector General has reported that Congress has appropriated $182 billion for Ukraine since February 2022, $43.84 billion of which went for governance and development. “Governance and development” could mean bribes paid to Ukrainians to support military conflict with Russia.

Ukraine has been fighting Russia with Western weapons and targeting information for close to three years. But Putin doesn’t count this as the West being at war with Russia. Drones hitting deep into Russia also don’t count as the West being at war with Russia. The war doesn’t start until Washington begins firing missiles into Russia. Apparently, some weapons are war weapons and some are not.

Standing aside from Washington’s destabilization and overthrow of the Ukrainian government in 2014 has left Putin with an ever-widening war that will be difficult to end without Putin making concessions. What will these concessions be?  Washington now has a stake in the outcome, and Trump cannot stand an agreement the media can turn into a Trump defeat from giving in to Putin. The media and Democrats will say that it proves Trump was a Putin agent after all.

The tense situation between Russia and the West cannot be resolved until the conflict in Ukraine is resolved. This dilemma and the huge expense in lives and money associated with the three year war could all have been avoided if Putin had not come up with such an impractical course of action as a limited military operation that allowed Kiev to continue the war.  We would have a better situation today if Putin had struck hard enough to bring the conflict to a quick end before the West could get involved with its prestige committed.

Putin’s dilly-dallying has made Russia look weak, and it has given Washington time to stir up new fronts for Russia in Georgia and Abkhazia. There will be a price to be paid for this dilly-dallying.

Meanwhile the US Democrat Party has revived the “Russian agent” hoax. This time the targets are Elon Musk and Tulsi Gabbard.

See this, this, and this.

The post Will Washington Succeed in Opening More War Fronts for Russia? appeared first on LewRockwell.

Obama continued and expanded Bush’s most evil policies. Trump continued and expanded Obama’s most evil policies. Biden continued and expanded Trump’s most evil policies. Now Trump is preparing to keep the streak going. The face at the front desk changes, but the corporation stays the same.

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Trump’s insanely pro-Israel cabinet of bloodthirsty Iran hawks suggests that Trump is going to expand the evils of the Biden administration in the middle east. This is a great example of the point I often make that the empire uses Democrats and Republicans the way a boxer uses the jab-cross combo to set up knockout blows.

Democrats and Republicans are different from one another, not in the ways they claim to be different, but in the same way the jab and the cross are used differently in boxing. The jab, thrown with the left hand for an orthodox fighter, is used as a range-finding weapon which can stun or blind the opponent to open them up for a crushing power blow from the right hand. That power blow is called a cross, which is often set up by the jab in the classic “one-two” combination you learn on day one in boxing.

The two parties are not the same, but they are used in conjunction with one another toward the same end, and, most importantly, they are both being used by the same boxer to punch you right in the fucking face. You’ll hear people try to argue that Democrats are better because it sometimes hurts less when they’re in office, but that’s exactly the same as saying it’s a good boxing strategy to let your opponent jab you in the face because it hurts less than the cross. You can’t understand boxing if you see your opponent’s fists as two opposing forces and think you can side with one against the other. You can’t understand US politics in that way for the exact same reason.

Any decent boxer will tell you they’d rather fight an opponent with a powerful cross than a masterful jab, because an opponent with a great jab will stifle your offense while allowing their offense to be much more effective — including their cross. The two-armed monster of the US oligarchy will keep using both fists to punch you in the face until you stop staring at its hands and trying to calculate which one you’d rather be smashed by, and start focusing on knocking that motherfucker’s head off.

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Israel regularly bombs buildings full of civilians and then sends sniper drones to go pick off the survivors, including children.

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It’s the most liberal thing ever how Democrats who’ve been completely ignoring Gaza are pointing to the news of Israeli plans to annex the West Bank and going “HAHAHA see what happens when you stupid Muslims and leftists refuse to support Kamala??”

Like, the West Bank is already an occupied territory. West Bank annexation would have been very escalatory a couple of years ago, but compared to everything that’s happened in the last thirteen months it’s barely a blip. The way these Democratic Party loyalists spent months frantically telling everyone to shut up about an active genocide are now going “Are you happy now?? Israel’s gonna CHANGE THE PAPERWORK on the West Bank!” says so much about their worldview.

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The only intellectually honest reason to support Trump is because you’re a garden variety Republican and you support standard Republican agendas like lower taxes on the rich and low tolerance for human diversity. There is no honest basis to support Trump on antiwar grounds, or because you want the swamp of corruption to be drained from Washington. This was obvious to anyone who paid attention the last time he was president, but it is glaringly obvious now from all the warmongering swamp monsters he’s been packing his cabinet with.

This narrative so-called “MAGA Republicans” have about themselves as some new special breed of Republican who are meaningfully different from the Republicans of the past simply is not born out by any kind of material evidence. They’re not draining the swamp. They’re not fighting the deep state. They’re not ending the wars. They’re doing all the gross stuff Republicans have always tried to do while LARPing as brave rebels.

I despise the entirety of the Republican Party; it’s one of the most evil things humanity has ever produced. But in a sense I actually respect the Republicans who don’t pretend to be anything different from what they’ve always been more than I respect the frauds who pretend they’re waging some kind of populist insurgency against the establishment. At least the Ben Shapiros and the Fox News weird hair pundits are honest about who they are and what they’re doing.

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Trump supporters tell me, “At least Trump might end the Ukraine war!”

Trump probably will end the Ukraine war eventually; if he doesn’t the next president will. Ukraine has already lost and the US needs its resources to prepare for war with China over Taiwan, so it’s only a matter of time before the proxy war is brought to a conclusion. The empire was always going to leave Ukraine a smoldering wreck after a senseless, stupid, insanely dangerous war that could easily have been avoided with a few low-cost concessions and a little diplomacy.

Trumpers have been fixated on Ukraine because it’s one of the wars that can be pinned more on the other party (even though Trump himself played a major role in paving the way to that war while he was president), but what matters is what happens after that war ends. Everything about Trump’s foreign policy cabinet picks indicates all that war machinery will be redirected toward Iran, China, and who knows where else once Washington stops pretending it’s going to help the Ukrainians kick Putin in the balls and retake all their territory. Stop looking for excuses to paint this warmongering empire goon as some kind of antiwar hero and watch what the war machine actually does.

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The western empire behaves irrationally because it is ultimately run by irrational forces.

The gears of capitalism are turned by the blind pursuit of profit.

Plutocrats and interest groups lobby and bribe in the blind pursuit of power and control.

Empire managers blindly continue the policies and agendas of the previous generation of empire managers, moving war machinery and control mechanisms around the world pursuing planetary domination for its own sake.

And all the individuals running this operation are deeply unconscious people — more unconscious even than the average human — whipped about by forces within themselves that they’re not at all aware of like unresolved trauma and maladaptive coping mechanisms.

The empire is flying blind, which is why it looks like it’s flying blind. It’s why it’s doing completely irrational things like destroying the biosphere we all depend on for survival, continuing to work toward global hegemony despite all the evidence that this will fail, continuing to make life harder and harder for the people who live under it despite growing discontent and revolutionary sentiment swelling in the background, and preparing for an unwinnable and self-destructive war with China.

The empire is behaving illogically because it is illogical. The gears are turning themselves. There is ultimately no man behind the curtain, no scheming manipulators unleashing all these evils to advance some grand plot which will benefit them. They’re more like bacteria in a petri dish mindlessly consuming the food scientists placed there without slowing down as supplies begin to dwindle. They might have elaborate rationales and narratives to justify why they’re doing what they’re doing, but ultimately they don’t know. They are doing it because they are swept up in the momentum of forces which they do not understand, both internally and externally.

The challenge facing us is to become a conscious species. A species that is responsive rather than reactive, driven not by primitive unconscious impulses and habit but by an alert and truth-based relationship with reality. That’s what’s being asked of us here in this slice of spacetime. That is the existential hurdle we must find some way to get past. And the western empire is the largest and most concrete manifestation of that obstacle.

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The post The Face at the Front Desk Changes, the Corporation Remains the Same appeared first on LewRockwell.

Referring to Judge Napolitano discussion with Col Lawrence Wilkerson about Trump and the Defense Department (video) English Outsider writes:

“Yes, the man all hoped would give the quietus to the neocons seems to be appointing neocons himself.

Mercouris has made some valuable preliminary observations on the subject of Trump’s appointees so far. Risking paraphrasing him (the reference is to his video of a couple of days back), he considers that these appointments are made mainly to ensure Trump has in place those loyal to him, that consideration over-riding any question of whatever foreign policy stance the prospective nominees may hold.

As said, these are preliminary or tentative conclusions arrived at by Mercouris but I believe they make very good sense. Following on from Mercouris’ conclusions are I believe further conclusions on the subject of these somewhat hawkish proposed nominees.

1. It no longer matters what US foreign policy is with respect to Ukraine and maybe with respect to the ME.

The Russians are going to get their “demilitarisation and denazification” in Ukraine whatever the West does or attempts. That has long been apparent and is now apparent to all. So the views of the Trump nominees on Ukraine, and the views of Trump himself on Ukraine, no longer matter when it comes to changing facts on the ground.

Similarly in the ME, whether the appointees are Israel Firsters or not also no longer matters. It looks as if Israel is heading for defeat, but whether it is so or not the outcome can’t be altered by the US. Neither Biden nor Trump are going to authorise open and declared war on behalf of Israel and if they did, it’s doubtful that American military power is sufficient to change that outcome.

In addition, open and active war against Iran, for instance, would lead to an increase in oil prices and to significant damage to American ships and bases. That is not something Biden has been prepared to risk so far and Trump even less: it would damage his credibility were he to open his Presidency with a major war having given the impression, in his election campaign, that he was opposed to one.

So there’s nothing much the US or the West as a whole can do to alter the outcome either of the Ukrainian war or of the conflict in the ME. I haven’t read “The Art of the Deal” but I’m sure that Trump recognises that when you sit down to play, the first priority is to recognise the strength of your own hand. Whatever the US hawks may believe, the Pentagon will know that in either case we in the West hold no aces.

2. Given that military impotence the US politicians can follow the example of the Europeans. They can make what threats they please knowing they will not risk putting those threats into practice. We’ve seen Macron threatening French boots on the ground knowing he’s never going to declare war on Russia. We see Scholz and Starmer still impeccably resolute, knowing they will never be at risk of having to back up words with deeds. Now we will see US politicians – have in fact been seeing them for some time – doing the same.

But it’s not all sound and fury signifying nothing. In the case of the ME the American politicians have to bear in mind the strength of the voting bloc made up of the Evangelicals, Christian Zionists, Mormons and the various religious sects for who Israel First is an article of faith. That voting bloc is large, in the tens of millions. It was not one Biden wished to offend. It was a necessary component in the portion of the electorate that carried Trump to victory. They need the rhetoric even if the reality falls short of their expectations. By proposing Israel Firsters, and vociferous Israel Firsters at that, Trump has given them that rhetoric.

3. After the defeat in Ukraine, and what looks very likely to be defeat in the ME, the first priority of the politicians will be to save face.

The UK politicians, as we see have seen in the UK press, have their alibi ready for Ukraine. “We would have won had the Americans not let us down. They should have permitted deep strikes. They should have put boots on the ground. They should have threatened nuclear”. That alibi ignores the fact that none of those courses would have been practicable. But it will probably serve and most of the UK electorate will be content with it.

No doubt such alibis will be coming out of Europe. It is essential for Trump to have a similar alibi. None can say whether the war will end before Trump’s inauguration but if it doesn’t, if it’s the Trump administration that has to confess defeat, the Democrats will undoubtedly attempt to lay the blame for that defeat at his door. By proposing hawks and thus adopting hawkish rhetoric, Trump will be able to avoid that reproach.

…………………

Are those fair conclusions to draw from Mercouris’ observation? Pretty squalid conclusions, if so, but then that’s politics. But for me, my judgement of the success of the Trump Presidency will be on quite other grounds. I stated that judgement on Colonel Lang’s old site and state it here:

This final stage of the Ukrainian war is leading to quite appalling casualties. The genocide in the ME is not only a tragedy for those suffering. It is an ineradicable stain on Western civilisation and future generations will look back in horror at what we supported and often encouraged.

Trump’s Presidency will be judged not by the success of his internal reforms. It will be judged by the extent to which he managed, even before his inauguration, to bring these horrors to an end.”

Reprinted with permission from Moon of Alabama.

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According to an article in the Wall Street Journal, “The Trump transition team is considering a draft executive order that establishes a ‘warrior board’ of retired senior military personnel with the power to review three- and four-star officers and to recommend removals of any deemed unfit for leadership.” The article cites Trump’s vow to fire “woke generals” — that is, generals who are reputed to be promoting “diversity” in the military at the expense of readiness.

There is another possibility, however, one that is much more discomforting — that Trump is consolidating his power as president and knows that a loyal military establishment will solidify and reinforce that consolidation of power.

According to an October 22, 2024, article in The Atlantic, in a private conversation in the White House heard by two people, Trump stated, “I need the kind of generals that Hitler had. People who were totally loyal to him, that follow orders.” The same article, however, points out that a Trump spokesman named Alex Pfeiffer denied that Trump ever said that. “This is absolutely false,” Pfeiffer declared.

However, regardless of whether Trump made the statement or not, the sentiment expressed in the statement is consistent with Trump’s mindset and modus. Trump is a man who demands absolute loyalty from his acolytes and will not brook opposition or dissent.

Trump learned the importance of having the national-security establishment on his side after he lost the 2020 presidential election to Joe Biden. Unwilling to acknowledge that he had been defeated fair and square, Trump insisted that the election had been “stolen” from him. It is a claim, of course, that he and his acolytes make to this very day. Given that conviction, it was clear that the last thing that Trump wanted to do was vacate the office of the presidency in 2021. After all, if he was certain he won the election, why wouldn’t he insist on staying in office?

That’s obviously why he sat back and simply watched while his protesting supporters were barnstorming the Capitol on January 6. He was clearly hoping that their protests would result in a final certification that Trump had won the election. That was also clearly why he was pressuring officials in various states to certify him as the winner of the election.

It was the national-security establishment, however, that ultimately put the quietus to Trump’s hope to remain as president after the 2020 election. On Tuesday, January 12, 2021— six days after the January 6 protests — the Joint Chiefs of Staff issued a phenomenal memorandum denouncing the Capitol protests and declaring Biden to the winner of the election.

I wrote about this remarkable memorandum on January 13, 2021, in an article entitled “The Pentagon Speaks.” Once the JCS issued that memo, Trump knew that his goose was cooked. In my opinion, it was at that point that Trump decided to throw in the towel and relinquish power to Biden.

What would have happened, however, if the Joint Chiefs of Staff had ruled otherwise? What if the JCS had decreed that the 2020 election had, in fact, been stolen from Trump and declared him to be the winner?

In that case, in my opinion, there is little doubt that Trump, not Biden, would have been president from 2020-2024. After all, who would have been able to stand against the Pentagon and the rest of the national-security establishment? The Supreme Court? The Congress? Joe Biden and the Democratic Party? Don’t make me laugh. They wouldn’t have dared. When it comes to sheer power, no one is any match for the national-security branch of the federal government.

Thus, Trump, who threw in the towel after the issuance of that remarkable memorandum and ended up vacating power, surely learned a valuable lesson from that experience: A ruler who has the support of his national-security establishment will easily be able to accomplish whatever he wants to accomplish, especially if his actions are constitutionally dubious.

It’s also worth noting that once Trump surrounds himself with generals who are loyal to him, everyone else within the military, the CIA, and the NSA will fall into line. The fact is that soldiers obey orders. Despite the fact that they all take an oath to support and defend the Constitution, the military believes that when they obey the orders of their commander in chief, they are simultaneously supporting and defending the Constitution. That’s why, for example, every soldier, from top to bottom, obeyed President George W. Bush’s order to invade Iraq, notwithstanding the lack of the constitutionally required congressional declaration of war and, at the same time, convinced themselves that they were supporting and defending the Constitution. The fact that this time around there is no question that Trump was legitimately elected president will solidify that mindset of loyalty and “patriotism” within the military. Make no mistake about it: The military-intelligence establishment will fall into line and obey whatever orders Trump issues.

Given Trump’s authoritarian and dictatorial proclivities, and given his intention to declare “national emergencies” to justify his exercise of extraordinary “emergency” powers, and given his desire to punish his enemies, and given his obvious intention to politicize the Justice Department to go after political opponents, and given his campaign promise to ferret out and deport more than 10 million illegal immigrants, and given the fact that he doesn’t brook criticism or dissent, it is not difficult to see why Trump would want to secure the loyalty of the national-security establishment as part of an effort to consolidate power.

Do you see why America’s Founding Fathers were strongly opposed to a large, permanent military establishment because of the dangers it poses to freedom, why President Eisenhower focused our attention on the threat to our freedom and well-being posed by the “military-industrial complex,” and why President Kennedy went to war against the national-security establishment? We can’t say we haven’t been warned.

Reprinted with permission from The Future of Freedom Foundation.

The post Why Trump Wants His Own Generals appeared first on LewRockwell.

Earlier this week, Peter joined Rachel Lee on her show, The Corner Office, for an interview on President-elect Trump’s campaign strategies, the nation’s debt-driven economy, and Peter’s predictions for the future of precious metals. They also discuss Trump’s inconsistent views on crypto, the hidden costs of tariffs, and the fate of the dollar, cautioning that its decline could sharply impact the American standard of living.

Peter drops the painful truth early in the interview, pointing out that we are quite far from a healthy economy. We can’t even see the light at the end of the tunnel:

It’s going to get worse before it gets even worse. I mean, we’re not at the point where it’s going to get worse before it gets better yet, because we haven’t actually done anything to bring about the kind of constructive pain that would eventually lead to long-term gain.

Of course, Trump’s second term will probably make things relatively better than they would be under a Democratic president. But that doesn’t mean it’ll be good:

The pretend great economy that Trump had, by comparison to the pretend great economy that Biden has, wasn’t as bad. So, it looks good by comparison. People would prefer to go back to where it was four years ago. Unfortunately, we can’t. We have a lot more debt than we had four years ago. The economy is far more screwed up now than it was four years ago, and Trump’s policies won’t address those underlying problems.

Rachel and Peter spend much of the interview discussing Bitcoin, which has recently surged following the election. Peter cautions listeners to avoid the cryptocurrency:

Don’t get distracted by the sideshow in Bitcoin. I know a lot of people in the Bitcoin community are trying to fool people into buying Bitcoin under the pretense that it’s some digital version of gold that’s better than gold. But that’s just a bunch of hype. Yes, it’s gone up a lot because people have bought into this nonsense. That’s the dynamic of any kind of pyramid scheme, which is really what it is.

He also calls out Trump’s inconsistent rhetoric on cryptocurrency, noting that his recent courting of Bitcoiners is probably just politics:

It’s a no-lose deal for Trump because if you want to know what Trump actually thinks, look at what he said about it [Bitcoin] when he was president the first time. He said it was a scam and had no value. He said the same things that I say. And now he’s trying to claim, ‘Well, I’m educated.’ He’s not educated. He flip-flopped only to get votes. That’s what politicians do. They say what they need to say.

Bitcoin’s original promise was in its anti-establishment, anti-Wall Street, and anti-government applications. The cryptocurrency has fallen far from these hopes, as it’s now embraced by big banks looking to make a buck on a highly speculative asset:

You’re not a contrarian when you buy Bitcoin. You go to any financial station– look at CNBC– you’ll hear all about Bitcoin. …You got all the biggest brokerage firms out showing Bitcoin because they’re getting paid to babysit your coins in these ETFs. … If you want to be a contrarian, don’t buy Bitcoin. If you just want to jump on the bandwagon, that’s who’s in Bitcoin.

The duo ends the interview discussing the future of the dollar. As it declines, it’ll impoverish Americans and sharply reduce our ability to trade internationally:

The end game for the dollar is that it goes much lower against not just gold, but against its fiat counterparts, all the other currencies. And that’s going to severely diminish the living standard of Americans, because right now we rely on overvalued dollars to buy the goods that we don’t produce. But when the dollar crashes, we won’t be able to afford those goods. We don’t produce them ourselves, and we won’t be able to afford to buy the ones that are produced by the rest of the world.

If you missed it, be sure to watch Peter’s other recent interview with David Lin.

This originally appeared on SchiffGold.com.

The post Bitcoin Is a Sideshow appeared first on LewRockwell.

Like a spigot that gets turned on – and off – there has been very little in the “news” about Keeeeevvvvv since the election. Nor, for that matter, about the ongoing slaughter in Gaza.

This constitutes what you might call a tell. About the nature of the “news.”  More finely, about the control over what is presented as the “news” by those who control it. Who are these controllers? More like what are these controllers. They are a handful – about half a dozen – interlocking corporate cartels. Together, they own the outlets that broadcast and publish (print and online) what is called the “news.”

They control the flow of what you’re allowed to know. By letting you know what they want you to know – and ignoring what they would like for you to not know. For example – as regards the latter – what is going on in Western North Carolina? Does anyone who is not actually there know? How could they? The “news” turned the spigot off weeks ago. It is thus as if there was no “news” to know. Before the handful of corporate cartels acquired control over the outlets that broadcast the “news” – or don’t broadcast it – there would have been ongoing coverage of the news coming out of Western North Carolina and the adjacent areas of Tennessee – where catastrophic damage was done, first by the hurricane and then by the malevolent inaction (and suppression of private action) of the federal government.

Because that sort of thing used to be news.

Keeeevvvvvvv was in the “news” almost non-stop for years, after the sketchy election back in 2020 – which the “news” assured everyone was legitimate, notwithstanding circumstances that suggested it might not have been. When the news was not controlled, newspeople – a term that once meant journalists – were employed to check into such things, because it might have been news. That being the business of the news, once.

Now you can hardly find a peep in the “news” about Keeeevvvvv. It is as if the war over there had been cancelled. One can surmise various reasons for the cartels turning off the spigot of “news” about Keeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeevvvvvv – but the most likely one is that things are not going to plan in Keeeeeeeeevvvvvv.

Or maybe they are.

How would we know?

It is the same in the Unholy Land, where all-of-a-sudden there is next to no “news” about the holocaust going on there. Perhaps because the roles have been reversed – and because the ones doing the stormtrooping are also aligned with the ones who control the cartels that control what is broadcast – or not – on the “news.”

In prior times, both of these things – Keeeeeeeeeeeeevvvvv and the ongoing holocaust in Gaza – would have been pretty much all of the news. Because such things as regional canker sores that could flare up into a world war involving nuclear armed powers – and the indiscriminate, mass slaughter of civilians – used to be understood to be news.

Instead, we gets “news” about the possible sexual errata of Matt Gaetz and Pete Hegseth. We “learn” – a word advertisers like to use – about the things they want us to know about and find out nothing about the things they’d prefer we not know about. They know that they can control what we think about by controlling the “story,” which they can do by not telling it.

Meanwhile, the situation in Keeeeeeeeeeeevvvvv percolates. The holocaust continues. But it’s easy not to worry about it when you don’t have to think about it.

This originally appeared on Eric Peters Autos.

The post Where’s Keeeevvv? appeared first on LewRockwell.

Donald Trump’s appointment of Tulsi Gabbard (a former U.S. Representative, whose focus had been to end the control over the U.S. Government by America’s armaments manufacturers) as his Director of National Intelligence, is being treated by America’s main media as being traitorous, because she has pointed out many of the war-promoting lies in the news media about heads-of-state that the U.S. Government has been and is trying to replace, such as Bashar al-Assad in Syria, and Vladimir Putin in Russia.

For example, the U.S. Public Broadcasting System (PBS) “Newshour” evening ‘news’ progam on November 14th had a segment, “Why Trump’s nomination of Gabbard for national intelligence director is controversial”, which presented her as supporting dictators and as a conspiracy-theorist who is too loyal to Trump and who is suspiciously supportive of America’s enemies (that is, of the heads-of-state in countries whose Governments the U.S. Government spends billions in propaganda and otherwise, in order to get overthrown). Here is part of that (alleged) “news” report (which is actually instead purely an undocumented opinion-piece or ‘news’-commentary to get Americans to oppose this nomination and thus make easier for a Senator to vote against her):

3:31

John Bolton said she should not

3:35

even sit for a senate

3:35

confirmation hearing until the

3:37

FBI investigates her because he

3:40

said she presents a national

3:41

security threat.

3:42

Is that a concern you share?

3:44

Michael [Leiter, former director of the U.S. National Counterterrorism Center, part of the U.S. Government]: I am very concerned

3:47

with anyone in any position who

3:54

is not thinking very critically

3:56

and questioning what enemies of

3:59

the United States like Vladimir

4:01

Putin and Bashar al-Assad say to

4:03

them.

On November 15th, the rabidly neoconservative Democratic Party organ, The Daily Beast, headlined “Dem Rep. Says Tulsi Gabbard Is ‘Likely a Russian Asset’”, which is also what the Democratic Party’s U.S. Presidential candidate, Hillary Clinton, called her in 2016 when Gabbard endorsed Bernie Sanders for that nomination instead of Clinton. The article opened:

Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz said that Tulsi Gabbard, Donald Trump’s controversial pick for director of national intelligence, “is likely a Russian asset.”

Asked in a Friday MSNBC appearance about Gabbard’s prospective nomination to a position that would come with extensive access to classified information, the Florida Democrat did not mince words.

“Tulsi Gabbard is someone who has met with war criminals, violated the Department of State’s guidance and secretly, clandestinely went to Syria and met with [Syrian President Bashar al-]Assad, who gassed and attacked his own people with chemical weapons,” she said. “She’s considered to be, essentially, by most assessments, a Russian asset.”

Pressed on her own view of Gabbard, Wasserman Schultz doubled down. “I consider her someone who is likely a Russian asset,” the congresswomen said.

Aaron Rupar

@atrupar

Debbie Wasserman Schultz on Tulsi Gabbard: “There’s no question I consider her someone who is likely a Russian asset.”

Watch on X

4:48 PM · Nov 15, 2024

She railed against the “irresponsibility” of Trump’s recent slew of administration appointments, some of which—like Matt Gaetz for attorney general and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as head of Health and Human Services—have dropped jaws on both sides of the political aisle.

She must have the armaments manufacturers terrified. They (their owners) control Washington and the ‘news’-media.

This originally appeared on Eric’s Substack.

The post U.S. Media Pile On Against Tulsi Gabbard as a ‘Russian Agent’ appeared first on LewRockwell.

From Nebraska, from Arkansas,
Central inland race are we, from Missouri, with the continental blood intervein’d,
All the hands of comrades clasping, all the Southern, all the Northern,
Pioneers! O pioneers!

—Walt Whitman

Walt Whitman’s poem, inspired by the adventurous spirits who formed the vanguard of the westward expansion of the United States, was itself the inspiration for the title of Willa Cather’s novel O Pioneers!, a romance of life on the western prairies at the turn of the twentieth century.

In a similar vein, Cather’s novel Death Comes for the Archbishop tells the story of two pioneering priests in the “wild west” of New Mexico. Ostensibly a work of historical fiction, the novel is based on the lives of Fathers Jean-Baptiste Lamy and Joseph Projectus Machebeuf, the former of whom would become the first archbishop of Santa Fe and the latter the first bishop of Denver.

Fr. Lamy was born in the mountainous Auvergne region of France in 1814. Ordained to the priesthood in 1838, he arrived in the United States in the following year to serve as a missionary in the virgin west of the expanding New World. Having served in parishes in Ohio and Kentucky, he was appointed by Pope Pius IX to be the first bishop of the newly created Apostolic Vicariate of New Mexico in 1851.

The journey from the Midwest to the “wild west,” in the days before the railroad, necessitated months of arduous travel. In Willa Cather’s fictionalized account, the journey would take almost a year, beginning with a riverboat down the Mississippi to the Gulf of Mexico, a shipwreck at Galveston, and finally a long overland trek to New Mexico. This retelling of the real-life journey enables us to appreciate the hardships faced by the newly consecrated bishop. Having set out early in the new year, he didn’t finally arrive in Santa Fe until August 1851. Two years later, the Vicariate of New Mexico became the Diocese of Santa Fe.

Bishop Lamy set about building churches and establishing new parishes and schools, and he instigated and oversaw the construction of the Cathedral Basilica of St. Francis of Assisi. When the Diocese of Santa Fe was elevated to an archdiocese in 1875, Lamy became the first archbishop, serving for a further ten years until his retirement. He died of pneumonia in 1888, at the age of seventy-three, a good and faithful servant who had served the Church in the United States for almost fifty years.

Fr. Joseph Projectus Machebeuf, the inspiration for the other priest protagonist in Death Comes for the Archbishop, was a lifelong friend of Fr. Lamy. Two years older than Fr. Lamy and born in the same area of the Auvergne, he accompanied his friend to the United States as a missionary priest in 1839 and served in parishes in Ohio until 1851, at which point he accompanied the newly-consecrated Bishop Lamy on his arduous journey to New Mexico. After serving as a pastor in Albuquerque and Santa Fe, he was transferred to Colorado in 1860. Thrown from his carriage on a spur of the Rocky Mountains, he was left lame for the rest of his life.

By 1868, when he was appointed Vicar Apostolic of Colorado and Utah, he had built eighteen churches, including the first-ever church in Denver. He would build a school, a convent and a hospital, as well as the College of the Sacred Heart, which is now subsumed within Regis University. By the time he was consecrated as the first bishop of the newly-created Diocese of Denver in 1887, the Catholic population of Colorado had grown to over 50,000. He died two years later, at the age of seventy-six.

Read the Whole Article

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Executive summary

The New Hampshire House of Representatives is about to publish a 38-page report created by a bipartisan committee of NH state legislators entitled, “Special Committee on Covid Response Efficacy: Report of Findings.”

I got an advance copy that I can share with you.

It’s glorious.

In this article I summarize the highlights.

In a nutshell:

1. If you worked for the state or federal government, everything was done right.
2. If you didn’t work for the government, everything was a disaster.

It was an interesting seeing how different people can view the same evidence in totally opposite ways.

Also, all the Republicans on the committee thought the response was a disaster.

All the Democrats saw nothing wrong. The Minority Report is the exact opposite of the Majority report.

You can’t make this stuff up. You really can’t.

The majority report

Here is the 38-page majority report.

The minority report

Here is the minority report. It’s only really one page (with a large attachment).

They basically disagreed, but didn’t cite any specific thing(s) wrong with how the majority report interpreted the testimony that was presented. They give us no clue as to how the Republicans misinterpreted the testimony.

So they are saying that they disagreed on everything? They think 6 foot rule worked? That masks worked? That the vaccines saved lives?

I just got off the phone with Stephen Petty who testified on masks. He said the Democrats were in the room, but mostly fiddling with their cell phones. They didn’t ask Petty a single question.

I also asked John Beaudoin about his testimony in front of the special committee. He told me also that NONE of the Democrats asked a single question. There were at most 2 Democrats in the room at any time.

Furthermore, the Democrats were allowed to call witnesses, but chose not to do so. This is stunning! Call no experts, ask no questions, and expect the public to believe you??

I suspect the reason they called no witnesses is that witnesses can be questioned by the committee and witnesses on this matter don’t like to answer any hard questions.

NH government link

Both majority and minority reports will be made publicly available soon on the official government site, likely on Nov. 18.

VSRF call Nov 21, 2024: BOTH sides are invited to appear

I have invited all the people on the committee to the Thursday VSRF call.

I want to talk about the data and how two groups of people can have completely different perceptions of the same data.

Press coverage of the report

I predict that there will be a worldwide media blackout of the report.

Key messages of the 38-page report

Here are some of the key messages in the Summary of Findings section.

I quote the key statement and then provide a handy English translation to make it easier for you to understand what they are saying.

My personal favorite is #12.

1. Page 5: “The first major goal identified by the committee was to halt the widespread transmission of the SARS-COV-2 virus. In other words, stop the virus from spreading amongst the population and prevent the virus from becoming endemic. This objective led to guidance and recommendations regarding the wearing of various forms of personal protective equipment, masking, and social distancing. At the state level, such guidance was provided by the state epidemiologist, though it appears that there was often a reliance on the guidance being offered by the federal agencies. In many cases, New Hampshire simply followed the federal guidance.Analysis on the efficacy of the response as it pertains to this goal must begin with the fact that despite all measures implemented the spread of the virus was not halted.”Translation: “Masks and social distancing didn’t do shit.”
2. Page 6: “Indeed, no testimony or documents were received by the committee indicating that the mitigation strategies were effective.”Translation: “All these measures didn’t do shit.”
3. Page 7: “However, statistical and graphical analysis of this R0 value over time provided no obvious indication that the spread of SARS-COV-2 was mitigated at all by the cumulative measures implemented.”
   
   Translation: “All these measures didn’t do shit.”
4. Page 8: “It is nonetheless the case that the cumulative effects of the measures taken by the state to slow the spread of the SARS-COV-2 virus were ineffectual. It is nonetheless the case that the cumulative effects of the measures taken by the state to slow the spread of the SARS-COV-2 virus were ineffectual. Little evidence has been presented to this committee credibly indicating that there would have been any increase in morbidity and mortality, or any strain of the New Hampshire healthcare system beyond capacity, in the absence of these measures cumulatively.”Translation: “All these measures didn’t do shit.”
5. Page 8: “Because of the limited availability and the required conditions for treatment, it is unclear what, if any, positive or negative effect this treatment made.”Translation: “All these monoclonal treatments didn’t do shit, as far as we can tell.”
6. Page 8: “Vaccinations … were initially advertised by relevant authorities as preventing the spread of the SARS-COV-2 virus. Clearly, this was unsubstantiated by any clinical evidence and was proven demonstrably false under real-world conditions.”Translation: “The CDC lied; people died.”
7. Page 9: “Therefore, it is not known what role the vaccines and boosters had in the downward trend of the disease, but this committee has seen no evidence that it was effective in reducing incidence of documented cases. Multiple expert testimonies were received regarding both ineffectiveness and the prevalence of serious adverse reactions associated with vaccination.”
   
   Translation: “The vaccines didn’t do shit as far as we can tell; they made things worse.”
8. Page 9: “Most worrisome here is the substantial testimony and documentation indicating that the relevant federal agencies overseeing safety abandoned the established standards for safe use of such products in humans.”Translation: “Safety protocols were ignored. The focus was on lives saved, not how many died.”
9. Page 10: “Given that our state’s actions did not have any meaningful, demonstrable impact on the course of the pandemic, it is recommended for further study, and we call upon the private sectors and academia to study and innovate, in the field of mitigation of biological agents.”
   Translation: “It would be good to have a sane plan for the next pandemic because this one was a total failure.”
10. Page 25: “… when indoors, the spread of a highly contagious, airborne pathogen is unlikely to be successfully mitigated simply by maintaining a three or six foot personal bubble. This is true to such an extent that it is unlikely that any member of this committee would have, independently, recommended such a strange action in the absence of the guidance promulgated by the federal and state Executive branches.”Translation: “The recommendations from the State and Federal experts were comical.”

Read the Whole Article

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The more I study science, and particularly medicine, the more I come to see how often fundamental facts end up being changed so that a profitable industry can be created. Recently I showed how this happened with blood pressure, as rather than causing arterial damage, high blood pressure is a response to arterial damage that ensures damaged arteries can still bring blood to the tissues and, in turn, rather than helping patients, aggressively lowering blood pressure can be quite harmful. In this article, I will look at the other half of the coin, the Great Cholesterol Scam—something that harms so many Americans it was recently discussed by Comedian Jimmy Dore.

Note: a link to the Dore’s segment can be found here.

Cholesterol and Heart Disease

Frequently, when an industry harms many people, it will create a scapegoat to get out of trouble. Once this happens, a variety of other sectors will jump on the bandwagon and create an unshakable societal dogma. For example, the health of a population (or if they are being poisoned by environmental toxins) determines how easily an infectious disease can sweep through a population and who is susceptible to it, but reframing infectious diseases as a “deficiency of vaccines” it both takes the (costly) onus off the industries to clean up the society and simultaneously allows them to get rich promoting the pharmaceutical products that “manage” each epidemic and the even larger epidemic of chronic diseases caused by those vaccines (discussed in detail here).

Note: the major decline in infectious illness that is credited to vaccines actually was a result of improved public sanitation, and when the data is examined (e.g., for smallpox) those early vaccination campaigns made things worse not better.

In the 1960s and 1970s, a debate emerged over what caused heart disease. On one side, John Yudkin effectively argued that the sugar being added to our food by the processed food industry was the chief culprit. On the other side, Ancel Keys (who attacked Yudkin’s work) argued that it was due to saturated fat and cholesterol.

Note: leaders in the field of natural medicine, like Dr. Mercola, have made a strong case this spike came from the mass adoption of seed oils (which thanks to our unprecedented political climate is at last being discussed on the mainstream news&). Likewise, some believe the advent of water chlorination was responsible for this increase.

Ancel Keys won, Yudkin’s work was largely dismissed, and Keys became nutritional dogma. A large part of Key’s victory was based on his study of seven countries (Italy, Greece, Former Yugoslavia, Netherlands, Finland, America, and Japan), which showed that as saturated fat consumption increased, heart disease increased in a linear fashion.

However, what many don’t know (as this study is still frequently cited) is that this result was simply a product of the countries Keys chose (e.g., if Finland, Israel, Netherlands, Germany, Switzerland, France, and Sweden had been chosen, the opposite would have been found).

Fortunately, it’s gradually become recognized that Keys did not accurately report his data For example, recently an unpublished 56 month randomized study of 9,423 adults living in state mental hospitals or a nursing home (which made it possible to rigidly control their diets) was unearthed. . This study, which Keys was the lead investigator of, found that replacing half of one’s animal (saturated) fats with seed oil (e.g., corn oil) lowered their cholesterol, but for every 30 points it dropped, their risk of death increased by 22 percent (which roughly translates to each 1% drop in cholesterol raising the risk of death by 1%).

Note: the author who unearthed that study also discovered another (unpublished) study from the 1970s of 458 Australians, which found that replacing some of their saturated fat with seed oils increased their risk of dying by 17.6%

Likewise, recently, one of the most prestigious medical journals in the world published internal sugar industry documents. They showed the sugar industry had used bribes to make scientists place the blame for heart disease on fat so Yudkin’s work would not threaten the sugar industry. In turn, it is now generally accepted that Yudkin was right, but nonetheless, our medical guidelines are still largely based on Key’s work.

However, despite a significant amount of data that now shows lowering cholesterol is not associated with a reduction in heart disease, (e.g., this study, this study, this study, this review, this review, and this review) the need to lower cholesterol is still a dogma within cardiology. For example, how many of you have heard of this 1986 study which was published in the Lancet which concluded:

During 10 years of follow-up from Dec 1, 1986, to Oct 1, 1996, a total of 642 participants died. Each 1 mmol/L increase in total cholesterol corresponded to a 15% decrease in mortality (risk ratio 0–85 [95% Cl 0·79–0·91]).

Statins Marketing

One of the consistent patterns I’ve observed within medicine is that once a drug is identified that can “beneficially” change a number, medical practice guidelines will gradually shift to prioritizing treating that number and before long, rationals will be created that require more and more of the population to be subject to that regimen. Consider for example the history of the (immensely harmful) blood pressure guidelines:

click to enlarge

In the case of statins, prior to their discovery, it was difficult to reliably lower cholesterol, but once they hit the market, research rapidly emerged arguing for a greater and greater need to lower cholesterol, which in turn led to more and more people being placed on statins.

As you would expect, similar increases also occurred within the USA. For example, in 2008-2009, 12% of Americans over 40 reported taking a statin, whereas in 2018-2019, that had increased to 35% of Americans.

Given how much these drugs are used, it then raises a simple question—how much benefit do they produce?

As it turns out, this is a remarkably difficult question to answer as the published studies use a variety of confusing metrics to obfuscate their data (which means that the published statin trials almost certainly inflate the benefits of statin therapy), and more importantly, virtually all of the data on statin therapy is kept by a “private” (industry-funded) research collaboration that consistently publishes glowing reviews of statins (and attacks anyone who claims otherwise) but simultaneously refuses to release their data to outside researchers, which has led to those researchers attempting to get this missing data from the drug regulators.
Note: as discussed in Dr. Malhotra’s interview below, this collaboration (which militantly insists less than 1% of statin users experience side effects) also created a test one could utilize to determine if one was genetically at risk for a statin injury—and in their marketing for the test said 29% of all statin users were likely to experience side effects (which they then removed once health activists publicized this hypocrisy).

Nonetheless, when independent researchers looked at the published trials (which almost certainly inflated the benefit of statin therapy) they found that taking a statin daily for approximately 5 years resulted in you living, on average, 3-4 days longer. Sadder still, large trials have found this minuscule “benefit” is only seen in men. In short, most of the benefit from statins is from creative ways to rearrange data and causes of death, not any actual benefit.

Note: this is very similar to Pfizer’s COVID vaccine trial which professed to be “95% effective” against COVID-19, but in reality only created a 0.8% reduction in minor symptoms of COVID (e.g., a sore throat) and a 0.037% reduction in severe symptoms of COVID (with “severe” never being defined by Pfizer). This in turn meant that you needed to vaccinate 119 people to prevent a minor (inconsequential) case of COVID-19, and 2711 to prevent a “severe” case of COVID-19. Worse still, a whistleblowers later revealed that these figures were greatly inflated as individuals in the (unblinded) vaccine group who developed COVID-19 like symptoms weren’t tested for COVID-19 and their vaccine injuries were never reported. Sadly, in most cases (e.g., the statin trials) we don’t have access to whistleblowers who can inform us of how unsafe and ineffective these drugs actually are.

In circumstances like these where an unsafe and ineffective but highly lucrative drug must be sold, the next step is typically to pay everyone off to promote it. For example: to quote Chapter 7 of Doctoring Data:

The National Cholesterol Education Programme (NCEP) has been tasked by the National Institutes of Health to develop guidelines [everyone uses] for treating cholesterol levels. Excluding the chair (who was by law prohibited from having financial conflicts of interest), the other 8 members on average were on the payroll of 6 statin manufacturers.

In 2004, NCEP reviewed 5 large statin trials and recommended: “Aggressive LDL lowering for high-risk patients [primary prevention] with lifestyle changes and statins.”

In 2005 a Canadian division of the Cochrane Collaboration [who were not paid off] reviewed 5 large statin trials (3 were the same as NCEP’s, while the other 2 had also reached a positive conclusion for statin therapy). That independent assessment instead concluded: “Statins have not been shown to provide an overall health benefit in primary prevention trials.”

Note: the primary reason no cure for COVID-19 was ever found was that the guideline panel for COVID-19 treatments was handpicked by Fauci and comprised of academics taking money from Remdesivir’s manufacturers. Not surprisingly, the panel always voted against recommending any of the non-patentable treatments for COVID-19, regardless of how much evidence there was for them.

Likewise, the American College of Cardiology made a calculator to determine your risk of developing a heart attack or stroke in the next ten years based on your age, blood pressure, cholesterol level, and smoking status. In turn, I’ve lost track of how many doctors I saw proudly punch their patient’s numbers into it and then inform them that they were at high risk of a stroke or heart attack and urgently needed to start a statin. Given that almost everyone ended up being “high risk” I was not surprised to learn that in 2016, Kaiser completed an extensive study which determined that this calculator overestimated the rate of these events by 600%. Sadly, that has not at all deterred the use of this calculator (e.g., medical students are still tested on it for their board examinations).

Note: one of the most unfair things about statins is that the healthcare system decided they are “essential” for your health, so doctors who don’t push them are financially penalized, and likewise patients who don’t take them are as well (e.g., through life insurance premiums).

So, despite the overwhelming evidence against their use, many physicians believe so deeply in the “profound” benefits of statins that they do things like periodically advocating for statins to be added to the drinking water supply.

Read the Whole Article

The post The Great Dangers of Statins appeared first on LewRockwell.

There is every reason to be thankful for the Harris no-go last week, but also absolutely no case to get giddy about the prospects for a second Trumpian term, either. At best, what lies ahead is a wasted four years on the policy front, as Washington is likely to become embroiled in an even more acrimonious melee between the TDS and MAGA polarities of American politics.

Indeed, contrary to the excitement currently extant in many quarters of Team Garbage it needs be recognized that what happened was not the vindication of Donald Trump. There was no mandate for MAGA or some grand political realignment or birth of a new era of governance under which the people have taken back their government.

Ironically, all the realignment chatter is actually rooted in the reason the election was more likely a one-off dead-end. Proponents cite exit polls showing that Trump “outperformed” among Hispanics, blacks, young people, urban, union and working class voters and other left behinds, thereby suggesting a new governing coalition has formed around the Orange Man. Some even imagine it’s a Republican 1933.

But that’s just not so. These backsliding Dem constituencies voted against the soaring cost of groceries and gasoline, not in favor of MAGA or DJT as the savior of the American Way of Life. The inflationary whirlwind that hit the US economy in 2021 to 2023 was such a powerful economic shock to everyday Dem households that on the margin it pushed a considerable slice of them out of their customary lane in the voting. In effect, they checked the GOP box in answer to Ronald Reagan’s call of 1980 under parallel circumstances, when he asked whether you are better off today than four years ago.

For instance, pump prices had been running about $2.00 per gallon thru almost the exact moment of J6, and then it was off to the races for the next 18 months. By June 2022 the national average gas price hit $5 per gallon. Given that the average US household consumes about 650 gallons of gas annually, that $3 per gallon shock drilled a $2,000 per year hole in family budgets.

Yes, prices have partially retraced, but the shock is still fresh and gasoline bills have remained upwards of $1,000 per year higher than before.

Likewise, grocery store prices after January 2021 shot upward like a bat out of hell, reaching a +11% annualized increase by June 2021 and +17% by March 2022. Again, the 20% cumulative gain through December 2022 amounted to $1,200 per year against an average household grocery bill of $6,000 per annum.

Needless to say, gas and groceries are purchased virtually every week by most households. The soaring green line above and the leaping purple line below caused millions of ordinarily Dem coalition households to scrimp, squeeze and sacrifice in the months immediately after they had already suffered through the disruptions and hysteria of the pandemic and lockdowns.

Accordingly, the economic trauma was too severe and too fresh to be extirpated by White House bromides about the alleged roaring success of Bidonomics. Yes, according to the crooked reports of the BLS the US economy was booming along at Full-Employment, but even a steady job did not pay for the soaring cost of everyday living in these backsliding electoral precincts.

In this context, one especially malodorous skunk on the woodpile was the Harris-Biden claim that they had cut the inflation rate by two thirds or more. But that’s Washington and Wall Street based Keynesian-speak.

Stated differently, main street households make no never mind about annualized monthly rates of change to the second decimal point on the various BLS indices. As it happens, those fractoids are not even relevant to the cause of sound money, but they are especially beside the point when it comes to making ends meet in household budgets.

In fact, when it comes to measuring inflation in the main street context, the Reagan question would more than suffice. To wit, do your gas and groceries cost more relative to your paycheck than they did four years ago?

Well, yes, they do. As shown below, since Q4 2020 average worker compensation is up by 17%, which trails the 23% rise in food costs (both at home and away) and 33% gain in energy costs (including gas and electric utilities).

In round dollar terms, the average household spent about $7,500 on food and $3,000 on gas and energy in Q4 2020. Today, the combined figure is about $14,000. What voters remember, therefore, is not that the rate of price change has slowed sharply from the double digit rates two years ago, but that today’s gas and grocery bills are nearly $4,000 per year higher than the were in 2020.

Even when you look at the entire market basket of CPI items, not just gas and groceries, the story remain much the same. The rise in the CPI during Trump’s four years was 1.94% per annum, which accelerated dramatically to 5.0% per annum during the Harris-Biden period.

As shown in the contrast between the red and green columns below, it wasn’t just gas and groceries alone that fueled the assault on main street living standards. Car insurance, for example, is up by 56.5% or  more than eight times the gain during the Trump period.

Inflation is caused by excessive government spending, borrowing and money printing and nothing else. Yet owing to his panicked response to the so-called pandemic, the Donald unleashed fiscal and monetary stimmies that were literally off the charts of history as shown in the chart below.

Government spending, which had been rising at a $200 to $400 billion year-over-year rate, thus accelerated to a $3.6 trillion Y/Y rate of gain in Q2 of 2020 and remained at these nose-bleed elevations through Q1 2021. And even the latter officially recorded on Joe Biden watch was mainly fueled by the Christmas Eve 2020 stimmy bill signed by the Donald and the balance of the $2,000 per capita check Trump advocated during the 2020 campaign.

To be sure, had the Fed not “accommodated” Trump’s fiscal madness, yields in the bond pits would have exploded higher and sent the economy tumbling into the recessionary drink. Subsequent to what would have been a deep and painful recession at the level of the Great Recession or worse, there would have been no fond memories of the Greatest Economy Ever under Donald Trump.

Of course, the Fed was run by Keynesians, including the Chairman appointed by the Donald. And so they unleashed the printing presses like never before, increasing the Fed’s balance sheet by $1.4 trillion in the month of April 2020 alone. That was more new fiat credit in 30 days than the Fed had printed during the first 95 years of its existence.

Needless to say, the monetary explosion shown below turned what would have been a roaring Trumpian recession into an explosive inflation. After all, how could it have been otherwise in the face of the massive flood of fiat credit depicted in the chart below?

In short, Donald Trump sowed the inflationary whirlwind with his massive economic disruptions and fiscal and monetary stimmies during 2020, while Harris-Biden reaped the whirlwind of 40-year high inflation a few months after the Donald reluctantly left town.

The chart below, which shows the annualized monthly rise in the 16% trimmed mean CPI, makes this proposition clear as a bell. It was running at a 1.5% per annum rate during the Donald’s last months, but then accelerated to 5% by May and 9% by October 2021.

In a word, Biden didn’t do that because policy simply doesn’t act that fast. What hit the main street economy with gale-force in 2021 was the massive spending and money printing forces unleashed on the Donald’s watch the prior year.

The historical truth, therefore, is that the Donald got damn lucky, tagging Harris/Biden with the “gas and groceries” inflation that caused historic Dem constituencies to cross-over on November 5. Unfortunately, the voters are not going to be as lucky in the four years ahead, as the myth of the Greatest Ever Trump economy comes a cropper.

Reprinted with permission from David Stockman’s Contra Corner.

The post How Gas and Grocery Prices Shaped the US Election Outcome appeared first on LewRockwell.

The first Trump term was notable for countless terrible appointments Trump made. This was true in terms of both politics and policy. On the political end, Trump appointed people who routinely sought to undermine him politically. Many of Trump’s own appointees would go on to campaign against Trump in 2020 and 2024. Trump’s more clueless followers assured us that this was all, somehow, 4-D chess. Of course, it wasn’t. The 4-D chess trope has always been, as the kids say, “copium.”

On the policy end, Trump’s appointments were even worse. Neocon warmongers like Nikki Haley, John Bolton, and Mike Pompeo—and countless lesser neocon junior bureaucrats—held prominent positions in the administration. Moreover, with their key positions in many federal departments, these advocates of the warfare state were able to protect members of the military who blatantly attempted to undermine the administration and promote war with Russia. The despicable militarist Alexander Vindman comes to mind.

Now, Trump appears to be back to his old habits. Publicly, the administration has said it won’t make the same mistakes again, but incoming evidence suggests the opposite. Already, Trump has appointed Elise Stefanik as UN Ambassador and Michael Waltz as National Security Advisor.

Yet again, of course, we hear from the gullible wing of the Trump base that it’s all 4-D chess.

Sure.

Waltz is an acolyte of Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney, and in this video, Waltz praises Trump for his support of all the usual neocon talking points such as “breaking Iran,” “standing with Israel,” and “making China pay.” Waltz sings the praises of “standing with our allies,” which, presumably includes the Saudis who played Trump like a fiddle on his 2017 trip to Riyadh. Waltz is right about the State of Israel, of course. The Trump White House, was always Israeli-occupied territory. So much for “America First.”

Waltz has repeatedly called for escalation in Ukraine. In other words, he stands for the exact opposite of what Trump told his base throughout most of the campaign.

Stefanik’s career can be defined by her many years of work as a deep-state operative pushing pro-Israel NGOs and serving quintessential conservative establishment politicians like George W. Bush and Paul Ryan. As a reward for her service to the Foreign Policy Blob, Stefanik was immediately appointed to important committees on defense policy within months of arriving in Congress. She presents no danger whatsoever to the status quo in Washington.

It should surprise no one that both Stefanik and Waltz are also enemies of privacy and property rights:

The latest news on Trump appointments is that he plans to nominate Marco Rubio as Secretary of State. Perhaps Dick Cheney was unavailable. Rubio in the top tier of Washington Blob politicians who always and everywhere push for the continuation of global military intervention. Or, as Rand Paul put it “I see Hillary Clinton and Marco Rubio as being the same person.”

“I see Hillary Clinton and Marco Rubio as being the same person” — @RandPaul, the best Senator
pic.twitter.com/MGjZjvzRee

— Liam McCollum (@MLiamMcCollum) November 12, 2024

Is this the best Trump has to offer? So far, Trump has offered nothing for Tulsi Gabbard, who is qualified for a foreign policy role, and who campaigned hard for Trump. If she ends up with only a minor position in the administration, it will be emblematic of an administration that is rapidly revealing that Trump never had any intention of fundamentally changing how the American Empire functions.

On the other hand, Ben Shapiro is very happy:

Well…somebody is happy… https://t.co/0mWFX16ojQ

— Daniel McAdams (@DanielLMcAdams) November 12, 2024

Note: The views expressed on Mises.org are not necessarily those of the Mises Institute.

The post Here Come the Awful Neocon Trump Appointments appeared first on LewRockwell.

For a fourth time the Pentagon is ‘finding money’ outside of the budget that can be spend on Ukraine.

I had previously noticed three occasions in which the Pentagon, on order of the Biden administration, used some  or ‘accounting error’ gimmicks to ‘find’ more money for Ukraine.

Pentagon Again Applies Budget Lies To Deliver More Weapons To Ukraine –  Jul 26 2024, MoA

The piece referred to three relevant news reports:

Exclusive: Pentagon accounting error overvalued Ukraine weapons aid by $3 billion – May 19 2023, Reuters

Pentagon accounting error provides extra $6.2 billion for Ukraine military aid – June 20 2023, AP

Pentagon finds another $2 billion of accounting errors for Ukraine aid – July 14 2024, Reuters

From the last link:

The Pentagon has found $2 billion worth of additional errors in its calculations for ammunition, missiles and other equipment sent to Ukraine, increasing the improperly valued material to a total of $8.2 billion, a U.S. government report revealed on Thursday.

Here is now another, the fourth, incident of creative budget accounting in favor of money for war in Ukraine:

All reports previously indicated that there was $4.3 billion left in the Presidential Drawdown Authority account, which reimburses the U.S. armed forces for munitions and equipment sent to Ukraine.

Turns out, the number is actually $7.1 billion, thanks to some revised accounting the Pentagon has done, DOD officials tell your anchor. That extra $2.8 billion isn’t just found money. The way things work is that the Pentagon calculates how much buying replacement goods for what it sends Ukraine will cost. The number crunchers at the Pentagon ran through the lists and discovered that replacement for some items cost less than anticipated.

The plan is for the administration to spend down that whole $7.1 billion by Trump’s inauguration on Jan. 20 …

Luckily, not all of the money will reach Ukraine:

[Spending the money] is a pretty tall order given the cadence of aid packages being announced roughly every two weeks work between $200 million and $500 million. Those numbers are going to have to go way up, but even then deliveries of that equipment would continue well into the Trump administration, which could turn off the spigot at any time.

I bet that the lower ‘replacements costs’ the Pentagon has found to spend more on Ukraine, will themselves turn out to be ‘accounting errors’. The replacements will – unfortunately they will say – later require much higher outlays than anticipated today.

Creative accounting like this, i.e. faking the books, is a no-no for commercial entity as it might well end with time spent in jail.

I’ll repeat myself:

Any commercial company doing what the Pentagon is doing here would be asking for serious trouble.

One wonder if and when Congress will wake up to this.

Reprinted with permission from Moon of Alabama.

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I have had a horrible thought. Of all of Trump’s appointees, Matt Gaetz and Robert Kennedy will be the most difficult to get confirmed. And Gaetz has resigned from the House of Representatives where he is the most effective member against the ruling establishment. Was his appointment as Attorney General a trick to get him out of public life?

Robert Kennedy’s appointment was said to be in doubt because  he would be hard to confirm, but so would Gaetz. Gaetz’s high profile powerful position  scares to death the corrupt Justice (sic) Department, the corrupt FBI, the corrupt Democrats, and the corrupt ruling elites.

Perhaps the Senate will let Trump have his appointments without confirmation as recess appointments, so non-confirmation is not an issue.

It is revealing that there were no confirmation worries about Trump’s appointments of his Zionist war cabinet. Some claim that it is not a war cabinet, that Stefanik, Waltz, Rubio, and Hegseth have been cured of their Zionism by Israel’s massacre of Palestinians. Perhaps, but I have not heard a recantation from a single one of the “die-for-Israel” crowd. Certainly, Huckabee, sent by Trump as ambassador to Israel, and Witkoff, sent by Trump as his Special Envoy to the Middle East, will not take exception to Israel’s claim to title to Palestine. So how are they going to bring about any Israeli restraint? Isn’t it curious that Trump didn’t appoint anyone inclined to rein-in Israel?

That the Democrats stood down from stealing the presidency in 2024 doesn’t mean they didn’t steal House and Senate seats. The Republicans barely did well enough to change a thin Democrat Senate majority into a thin Republican majority, and it seems there was little, if any, change in the House. In contrast, when Reagan won in 1980 the Republicans captured 12 Democrat seats in the Senate. It is suspicious that Trump’s convincing win did not carry over into Congress.

Trump is taking Republican members of Congress as appointees into his administration. Republican governors can appoint replacements until the next election, but the appointed replacements might be vulnerable as they were not elected. Matt Gaetz was secure in his base. Will his appointed replacement be as secure?

We can be thankful that Trump has appointed some officials who fight for the correct causes.  We can keep hoping that Trump will make a difference.

The post Has Matt Gaetz Been Set-up for Eviction from Public Life? appeared first on LewRockwell.

Trump’s hawkish lineup is starting to look like a reunion for the worst of US interventionists. The man who said ‘no wars’ hired a cabinet that’s clearly thirsting for the next one. @ghida_fakhry

It’s not Trump’s pro-Israel cabinet. It’s Israel’s pseudo-American cabinet. Alon Mizrahi @alon_mizrahi

Awww ! It’s over before it even started! Nick@NickJ132388

If George W. Bush was elected to a third term in office, this is what his cabinet would look like. Rubio, Waltz, Stefanik, Hegseth. Not a peacenik among them. Not an antiwar candidate among them. Not even a non-interventionist among them. Every single pick is a hard-boiled, right-wing war-hawk that is committed to marching in lockstep with the world’s most notorious pariah-state, Israel.

Let’s start with Trump’s pick for Secretary of Defense, the man whose job it is to oversee the War Department and act as the principal defense policymaker and adviser. Trump chose Fox television host Pete Hegseth, “a decorated Army veteran who served in Iraq and Afghanistan as well as Guantanamo Bay.” Hegseth has no administrative skills or experience, but he is a Trump loyalist who shares the president’s views on “woke” policies in the military. More importantly, Hegseth is dyed-in-the-wool Israel aficionado who thinks the interests of the Jewish state are inextricably linked to those of the United States. Check out this short excerpt from Pete Hegseth’s book, “American Crusade, Our Fight to Stay Free” (2020) that was posted on Michael Tracey Twitter site:

“Simply put: if you don’t understand why Israel matters and why it is so central to the story of Western civilization—with America being its greatest manifestation—then you don’t live in history. America’s story is inextricably linked to Judeo-Christian history and the modern state of Israel. You can love America without loving Israel—but that tells me your knowledge of the Bible and Western civilization is woefully incomplete…..

If you love America, you should love Israel. We share history, we share faith, and we share freedom. We love free people, free expression, and free markets. And whereas America is blessed with two big, beautiful oceans to protect it, Israel is surrounded on all sides by countries that either used to seek, or still seek, to wipe the nation off the map.

The battle wages on Israeli soil as well. With each trip I take to Israel for FOX Nation, and on my personal time, I discover a new way in which Islamists and their leftist enablers seek to deny Jewish history and heritage. Today, Islamists in Jerusalem are attempting to claim that the Holy Temple built by King Solomon and rebuilt by Herod never existed. Apparently, they want us all to believe that Jews—from Abraham to Jesus—never sacrificed, built, or worshipped on that particular piece of real estate. “Temple denial” is yet another tool by which they seek to erase the Jews and the Jewish state. If that isn’t delusional enough, on a recent trip to Bethlehem—the birthplace of Jesus—I discovered that Palestinians now claim that Jesus was not in fact Jewish but instead a Palestinian. Try that one on for size—or watch my two FOX Nation documentaries on the subject: Battle in the Holy City and Battle in Bethlehem.” Michael Tracey@mtracey

A Secretary of Defense doesn’t have to be impartial to fulfil his responsibilities to the president and the American people, but it does make one wonder how Hegseth’s pro-Israel zealotry will impact the way he implements US policy. If, for example, Hegseth was ordered to stop the delivery of all bombs and lethal weaponry to Israel while ceasefire negotiations with Hamas took place, would a Christian Zionist like Hegseth obey such an order or act according to his own deeply-felt religious convictions?

I can’t answer that, but the obvious conflict of interest should have been a red flag for Trump if his goal was actually “America First”.

Oh, and did we mention that Hegseth is also an Iran hawk, which appears to be a basic requirement for any position on the Trump team. This is from Axios:

Alongside his strong support for Israel, Hegseth has also expressed strong positions regarding Iran… He had called the Iranian revolutionary government an “evil regime”, and in 2020 said that if Iran wanted “to come back to the table for talks on their nuclear capabilities” it should do so “limping and begging.”…

“Sometimes we have moments, and I happen to believe we can’t kick the can down the road any longer in trying to prevent Iran from getting a nuclear bomb,” Hegseth said in an appearance on Fox & Friends.

“What better time than now to say ‘we’re starting the clock, you’ve got a week, you’ve got X amount of time before we start taking out your energy production facilities. We take out key infrastructure, we take out your missile sites, we take out nuclear developments, we take out port capabilities.’” Trump appoints pro-Israel, Iran hawk Pete Hegseth for secretary of defense, Axios

Does that sound like a reasonable approach to you or the fast-track to a regional war?
And how does this fit with all the non-interventionist gobbledygook that Trump was spewing before the election? Was it all for show? And, please, don’t tell me that Hegseth wasn’t fully vetted or that Trump was unaware of his political views before he picked him. That’s nonsense. Hegseth is a hard-nosed, prowar jingoist who recently dismissed public demands for a ceasefire as “extortion on behalf of Hamas” (say what??) and who thinks the only problem with Biden’s Middle East policy was that it wasn’t tough enough.’ And so it is with all Trump’s picks. They’re all ferociously devoted to Israel and they’re all gung-ho for a war with Iran.

Pete Hegseth on dual loyalty—Wow.

Here’s how the typically temperate Daniel McAdams summed up Hegseth:

President-elect Donald Trump’s designated Secretary of Defense is a certifiable lunatic. A cultist in the manner of Manson. Literally someone who needs to be in a mental hospital. Who craves an apocalyptic war to end all of mankind so that his twisted understanding of God will come down and slaughter all (including Jews) who do not convert to his cult’s beliefs. This is a truly dangerous person. This is the person running our military machine. The madmen have taken the asylum. Daniel McAdams @DanielLMcAdams

Yikes. Looks like Don Rumsfeld won’t be our worst Sec-Def after all.

Then there’s Marco Rubio or “Little Marco” as Trump used to affectionately call him during the 2016 campaign. Rubio—who Trump picked as Secretary of State—is another shoot-first-and-ask-questions-later warhawk whose views veer only slightly from those of John Bolton and Lindsay Graham. In a recent video by peace activist Medea Benjamin, Benjamin—who is shown standing outside Rubio’s senate office next to a giant flag of Israel—says the following:

We are here outside Marco Rubio’s office. You have probably heard that he has been picked by Trump to be the next Secretary of State. We have been to his office before, and we were always curious that there was an Israeli flag outside. And I thought maybe he would take the flag down to show his allegiance is 100% to the US government and not to the Israeli government. But, no, lo and behold, the flag is still here, which gives you a pretty good indication of where his allegiance is going to be as Secretary of State. Medea Benjamin@medeabenjamin

Imagine if Rubio placed a Russian flag outside his office, or a Palestinian flag? What do you think the reaction would be? Is it really appropriate for a US senator to display the banner of a foreign power in front of his taxpayer-provided office? Here’s more background on Rubio from Michael Tracey:

Marco Rubio would arguably be the most hardcore interventionist Secretary of State for an incoming administration in decades, perhaps rivaling Hillary Clinton. Definitely outpaces Colin Powell, who was in the relatively more “realist” faction of the G. W. Bush Administration

And here’s more on Rubio from the horse’s mouth, The Jewish Telegraphic Agency:

President-elect Donald Trump is filling out his national security team with pro-Israel hawks who favor maximum pressure on Iran… Reports Monday said Trump planned to name two Floridian allies to top jobs: Sen. Marco Rubio will be tapped to be secretary of state, and Rep. Michael Waltz will be his national security adviser.

Both men have said Israel should not be prevented from staging a direct attack on Iran’s nuclear weapons program. That stance echoes Trump who, before the election, urged Israel to “​​Do what you have to do.” Trump had criticized President Joe Biden for confining Israel to only hitting military sites, but not nuclear ones, in a retaliatory strike….

Trump has yet to formally name Rubio, but his pending appointments has been widely reported and the Republican Jewish Coalition, which has a longstanding relationship with Rubio, congratulated him.

“President Trump’s choice of Senator Rubio for this critical role sends a message loudly and clearly: The days of weakness and appeasement are over,” the RJC said in a statement on Monday night. “We know that with Senator Rubio leading the State Department, America will stand shoulder-to-shoulder with our allies and confront our enemies.”

Rubio came up in Florida politics in part because of the backing of billionaire auto dealership magnate Norman Braman, a past president of the Greater Miami Jewish Federation. He is known to be close to Miriam Adelson, the pro-Israel casino magnate who funneled $100 million into Trump’s campaign this year…

In October, after Iran barraged Israel with missiles, and as Israel’s conflict with the Lebanese terror group Hezbollah was escalating, he tweeted, “Israel should respond to Iran the way the U.S. would respond if some country launched 180 missiles at us. And they should do in Lebanon what we would be demanding our leaders do if terrorists were launching anti-tank rockets at us from a neighboring country, forcing 60000 Americans to evacuate their homes and farms for almost a year.”

In the 2016 election, she and her late husband, Sheldon Adelson, were close to deciding whether they would back Rubio or Texas Sen. Ted Cruz as the Republican nominee. Then Trump pulled ahead of the pack and Sheldon Adelson decided to endorse the reality TV star.

Funny how much influence people like Adelson have when it comes to selecting who is going to lead the country. And, it doesn’t stop there either because—as we can see—a hundred million bucks not only buys you a president but everyone in the president’s cabinet as well. Sounds like a bargain to me, although seriously corrupt too. It is convenient, however, when publications, like the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, explain exactly how the system works and then boast about how it serves their overall interests. What’s that saying about “the tail wagging the dog”?

Read the Whole Article

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In today’s world we need to be vigilant and prepared for sudden changes in our environment which may be brought on by Mother Nature or Political Activities. We all want to protect our family from harm, and preparedness for disaster emergencies should be one of our top priorities. I’m not advocating that you pack up your family and move to some isolated location to hide from the world, but I am offering simple preparations for ice storms, floods, hurricanes, or terrorist activities will make your existence much more palatable during the disaster.

1. Be prepared

Yes, the first thing on the list is to use the list to be prepared. It is one thing to take a glance at the list, but unless you actually put this list into a workable plan for your family, then reading this is just wasted time on your part. Just making the preparations will give you a sense of calm when faced with the disaster.

This sense of calm will work in your favor because you will be less likely to be one of the hordes of people acting in a reactionary, fear driven, panic when the reality of the disaster is recognized (usually when the news anchors start saying things like “This is going to be bad.”… or… “We can’t stress enough the dangerous nature of this storm.”… or… “Here is video of people fighting over the last of the bread at this grocery store.”… or… “The police have lost control of this area of town.” While the crowds are rushing to the grocery store and emptying the aisles of bread and milk, you will be safely at home making last minute preparations to keep yourself and your family safe.

Because I realize that there is a definite cost factor in making these preparations, I will try to prioritize the items on the list as to which are absolutely necessary and which ones can be added as funds are available. Any item with an * next to it is a priority item and needs to be included from the beginning. To my Prepper Friends, I do realize that this list will not satisfy your need to prepare for any and all situations and it is only a short term duration solution, so don’t pounce on me with a long list of items that you think I have left off. It is intentionally a short, condensed list which is meant to help an average family through a short term disaster situation, not a nuclear holocaust. I also have not addressed any need for firearms or ammunition.

A big part of the preparation is being organized. There will be enough things to be concerned with when the situation presents itself, trying to remember where all of your supplies might be stored should not be one of them. Buy one of the following. We will be storing everything possible in them, so your preparedness items will be readily available to you when you need them.

a. Storage Locker* – Find a well built, heavy plastic storage locker that is large enough to hold a lot of gear, but still small enough to fit in the trunk of your car or the bed of your truck. This is not one of those plastic storage bins that people use to store winter clothes in during the summer, this thing needs to be a bit more durable than that. Find one with handles to make it easier to move into and out of your vehicle. Most stores like Academy will have them starting at about $20.

b. Backpack* – This is not a child’s school backpack. Go to the camping section and find one that is well made, durable, and large enough to hold lots of stuff. Don’t worry about it being too big, we are not going to have to backpack across the Grand Canyon with it, and my experience is that you ALWAYS need more space to store stuff. The starting price for a good one will be around $39, but if you can only afford a back-to-school type backpack, go ahead and get it, we can always upgrade later.

2. Shelter from the weather

Unexpected disasters will likely subject you to the elements. This could be due to a fast developing situation where you are caught away from home when the disaster strikes, or it could result from a storm that has caused widespread power outages, broken windows in your home, or taken off a portion of your roof. Exposure to the weather is not just annoying, it can be dangerous. The combination of being wet and cold is deadly.

a. Polyethylene tarp – These come in a variety of sizes and are quite inexpensive. (a 6×8 tarp is only about $5 if you check some camping supply stores). These are great for keeping out the weather if windows are broken during a storm. They can also be used for a makeshift tent if you happen to be caught out of your home when the disaster strikes. They will be great for keeping you dry and holding off the wind. Get 3-4 of them. Put them in your storage locker.

b. Plastic rain poncho* – One for every member of your family, plus a few extra (they are cheap (as little as $1) and will get torn when being worn for any length of time). Get the kind that fold up into a small pouch. Put into your backpack.

c. Quart – ½ Gallon sized plastic zip-lock bags* – These will be used to store some of the items on this list as well as storage of food and medicines. These are important, but cheap. Put in the storage locker.

d. Wool, Cotton, Fleece pullover or Hoodie – One for every member of the family. My preference would be wool, but anything is better than nothing. They are about $12 each for Haynes brand at most stores. If the power goes out, or if you are caught away from home, the cooler temps at night are deceptively dangerous. One main goal is to stay dry and warm. Roll up and place into a zip-lock bag and then put in your backpack.

e. Extra wool or cotton socks* – Two or three pair for every member of the family. Style is not important here, regular white tube socks are just fine (about $8 for a pack of 3). Cheap, but a fresh change of socks can do wonders, and will help keep your feet more healthy and comfortable during the disaster situation and can act as emergency mittens if needed. I can’t say enough about taking care of your feet. I know it sounds trivial, but it is not. Put unopened packs into zip-lock bags and then into your backpack (keeping them dry is key).

f. Change of clothes* – A complete change of clothes for each member of the family. This is not time for a fashion statement, we are after durability and function here. Long pants (blue jeans) and a long sleeve shirt. Don’t forget a change of underwear. Also include a pair of shoes that you would be comfortable wearing for long periods of time. An old pair of tennis shoes might be the answer. Really no costs here, we are going to use clothes we already have in the closet, but probably don’t wear because it has a stain on it, or it is not a color we wear often. Put in the storage locker.

g. Sleeping Bag – One for each member of the family. In this case, I am recommending a specific product, SOL Emergency Bivvy Bag* (do a Google search for stores selling it). Sells for about $17 each but packs up very small and will save your life. Much smaller than a standard sleeping bag (starting price, around $20). If you have the room for a sleeping bag for each person, by all means get them. Store the SOL Emergency Bivvy Bag in your backpack, and the Sleeping bags in a single location near where you will store the backpack and storage locker.

Read the Whole Article

The post Most Important Things You Need To Do Right Now To Be Prepared For a Natural or Man-Made Disaster appeared first on LewRockwell.

(I was, I now recognize, unintentionally deplatformed here because Substack had switched to a no-human totally automated system for enabling writers to sign in, and it led in circles, so I haven’t been able to sign in ever since October 12th. By a stroke of luck, I was finally able to sign in today; and, so, here is today’s article:)

14 November 2024, by Eric Zuesse. (All of my recent articles can be seen here.)

On November 13th, I headlined “Why Trump Must Fire His National Security Advisor Mike Waltz”, and documented that Waltz advises Trump to allow Ukraine to use U.S. weapons in order to bomb The Kremlin — something that (as I explained) even the deeply neoconservative President Biden had finally (on October 10th) decided not to do. Later that day (November 13th), Trump announced his appointment of Tulsi Gabbard to be his Director of National Intelligence (DNI) — the U.S. President’s eyes and ears on the latest confirmed information from all 17 U.S. intelligence agencies (all member-agencies of the U.S.A. Intelligence Community), such as the CIA, FBI, and Defense Intelligence Agency. The fight to confirm her in the almost totally Deep-State-controlled U.S. Senate will be huge, but any Republicans who vote against her will be conspicuously on the side of Hillary Clinton and (since she’s hated by that Party) might become defeated at the next election, and any Democrats who vote against Gabbard will lose all support from the significant progressive segment of that Party’s electorate; so, the result could go either way. I think that her appointment will be approved.

Unless Mr. Waltz will be taking a crash course on the actual history entailed in protecting U.S. national security (which would have to include, at a bare minimum, all of the linked-to documents in my November 13th article, as well as in the documents that are linked-to therein), and correct himself on that matter prior to Inauguration Day, 20 January 2025, Trump will be informed by Gabbard that the National Security Advisor (NSA) Waltz’s recommendation to say yes to the Ukrainian President’s (Volodmyr Zelensky’s) request for permission to be granted to use U.S. weapons to bomb The Kremlin would almost certainly lead, in very short order, to a nuclear war between Russia and the United States, WW3.

At that point — if not even sooner — President Trump will almost certainly appoint a different person to be his National Security Advisor.

The DNI doesn’t only report to the President, but also advises the President. This is perhaps the most important post in the Administration of any U.S. President. Beyond serving merely as a reporter of facts to the President, the DNI also serves, upon the President’s invitation, as the principal advisor to the President of the United States, the National Security Council, and the Homeland Security Council on all intelligence matters. The DNI, supported by his/her Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI), produces the President’s Daily Brief (PDB), a top-secret document including intelligence from all 17 Intelligence Community (IC) agencies, which Brief is handed each morning to the President of the United States. If the President will fail to invite the DNI to advise and not only to report, to the President, then the President will likely replace that DNI, because the DNI is the only individual who receives all of this information; the NSA doesn’t. The NSA is one of many federal posts that are superfluous (if not even worse).

The DNI position received its power from the President on 18 February 2005, when GW Bush reorganized the U.S. Intelligence Community and transferred to the Director of National Intelligence the authority that, till the creator of the CIA, Truman’s, time, had rested with the Director of the CIA: the power to produce the President’s Daily Brief on intelligence.

The CIA is one of many federal agencies that are superfluous (if not even worse — anti-Constitutional) because the actual central intelligence agency of the U.S.A. is, and since 2005 has been, the ODNI. The only other powers that the CIA had had (which were not transferred) were the Directorate of Operations within the CIA, which in 2005 became re-named the National Clandestine Service (NCS), but under President Biden they were “rebranding” it back again to the Directorate of Operations, because the straightforwardly named NCS was too-obviously an aristocratic dictatorial organization, a foreign coup-producing machine, at odds with, and inconsistent with, the intent of the U.S. Constitution, which was intended by its authors to produce a democratic republic, not any type of dictatorship nor empire. Already, back in 1983, after the 1976 (Frank) Church Committee hearings on the CIA (its Directorate of Operations) as being the aristocracy’s coup-producing machine, the Directorate of Operations was largely transferred to the so-called (but likewise funded largely by the U.S. Government) charity, the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), which continues the Truman-created coup-producing machine, such as in the Philippines, Bangladesh (and this), and, of course, Ukraine, but does all of this as a ‘charity’ (501(c)3) (or ‘nonprofit’), so that the U.S. regime’s acquisitions of new colonies (such as Ukraine in 2014) will be ‘acts of kindness’ instead of acts of greed.

The report by the Church Committee acknowledged (page 438) that “The CIA engages in both overt and clandestine activity within the United States,” but was not critical of it, except that they advised that it “could lead to an exploitation of cooperating Americans beyond that which they themselves envisioned,” etc. And the report was otherwise entirely uncritical, and avoided saying anything about coups. It explicitly accepted that there must be “The conduct of foreign covert action operations” (including coups). It acknowledged (p. 536) that “The U.S. intelligence community soon became a global city desk to support the role of global policeman,” but had no criticism against that “global policeman” role. Though it was a total cover-up, the Committee’s mere existence scared America’s Deep State to make some PR changes. Thus far, that is all of the change which has actually occurred.

Trump, during his campaign for re-election, made many promises to conservatives, which everybody knows about, but he also made many promises to progressives (of which I am one), which are far less well-known (and I have documented those promises here. They included: “With you at my side, we will demolish the Deep State, we will expell the war-mongers from our government, we will drive out the globalists, we will cast out the communists Marxists and fascists, we will throw off the sick political class that hates our country, we will rout the fake news media, and we will liberate America from these villains, once and for all.” With the appointment of Tulsi Gabbard as his DNI (and, though not yet as official, of RFK Jr. to head a “Make America Healthy Again” operation in the federal Government), maybe he’s not ignoring us, after all.

(I should note here that when I refer to “progressivism” I refer to the opposite of “conservatism,” not to the mixture of progressivism and conservatism that is called “liberalism,” which is actually the extremely hypocritical form of conservatism, which pretends to be compassionate toward the poor but is just as ruthless as conservatism is, so that, for liberals, tax-exempt ‘charities’ that are more for the benefit of the billionaires who create and fund them than they are for the benefit of the poor in order to help them to rise into the middle class, are doing what is actually the most important obligation that the government and taxes — NO ‘nonprofits’ — OUGHT to be funding. In other words: all ‘nonprofits’ are, to progressives, basically mere scams for billionaires, though viewed by liberals as authentic kindnesses. A progressive opposes all tax-advantages for the super-rich, but liberals join with conservatives in approving of those tax-advantages, which actually constitute government funding of increased wealth-inequality.)

This originally appeared on Eric’s Substack.

The post Why I Predict that Trump Will Fire His National Security Advisor, Mike Waltz appeared first on LewRockwell.