Lew Rockwell Institute

Murray Rothbard conceptualized liberty as an emanation of property rights and self-ownership. Freedom of association is, therefore, best understood as “a subset of private property rights.” Just as property rights are absolute and limited only by respect for other people’s property rights, freedom of association is absolute and constrained only by other people’s freedom to associate or not associate with whom they will.

Unless we are all to live as slaves, human interaction should always be voluntary. The correct ethical principle is that no one should be forced to associate or not associate with others against his or her will. It follows that the antidiscrimination principle is incompatible with freedom of association. The civil rights framework of rules based on “protected grounds” such as race, sex, or religion, violates freedom of association in two ways. First, by coercing people into associating with others against their will, for example, by imposing “disparate impact” penalties for failing to achieve racial or gender “equity” in employment. Second, by forbidding people from associating with those of their choice, for example, by constraining a landlord’s freedom to choose his own tenants. The Fair Housing Act “prohibits discrimination by direct providers of housing, such as landlords and real estate companies as well as other entities, such as municipalities, banks or other lending institutions and homeowners insurance companies.”

These restrictions on freedom of association were originally justified as necessary to enable everyone to have the benefit of private property and contractual freedom. However, economists such as Walter E. Williams have shown that there is no empirical evidence of barriers to participation, at least not after the Civil Rights Acts of 1866 and 1964, and later the repeal of Jim Crow laws in the 1960s. A new justification for constraining liberty, therefore, rose to prominence, and the prevailing argument now is that restrictions are necessary to promote values such as diversity, equality, and inclusiveness. The antidiscrimination principle is now justified, not as a way of eradicating barriers to market participation, but as a way of advancing liberal values that we are all said to share.

The apparent consensus on liberal values is promoted by academics who argue that “all reasonable people” agree on the importance of egalitarianism and just disagree on how best to implement it. This apparent consensus is echoed by uniparty politicians. As Rothbard observes,

On the entire question of legally and judicially imposed “civil rights,” we have been subjected to a trap, to a shell game in which “both sides” adopt the same pernicious axiom and simply quarrel about interpretation within the same framework. On the one side, left-liberalism, which in the name of equality and civil rights, wants to outlaw “discrimination” everywhere, has pushed the process to the point of virtually mandating representational quotas for allegedly oppressed groups everywhere in society… But the Official Conservative opposition, which includes not only neocons but also regular conservatives, conservative legal foundations, and left-libertarians, adopts the self-same axiom of civil rights and equality.

Cancel culture

The axiom of civil rights and equality, now often expressed in the language of DEI, is a powerful weapon in the hands of those who take it upon themselves to dictate “our shared values.” They use the tools of cancel culture to control who is or is not permitted freely to associate with others. The cancel mob is against freedom of association for rebels who reject DEI values. Although the cancel mob can be shown to be wrong in most cases, as their reasons for cancellation are based on ideological disputes in which reasonable people strongly disagree with each other, it must be emphasized that freedom of association is not dependent on showing that the cancel mob has incorrectly stated the facts or that the cancel mob is unjustified in its opinions. Liberty based on self-ownership does not depend on showing that everyone agrees on how that liberty is to be exercised. Freedom of association is an absolute freedom whose boundaries lie only at the point where they encroach upon other people’s right freely to associate.

While anyone is entitled to boycott those with whom they disagree, and to encourage others to join the boycott, it is wrong to harness the backing or power of the state to prevent people from freely associating on grounds that they happen to hold different opinions or values. An example is the ongoing furor over preserving Confederate history, which has recently targeted a museum in Georgetown, Delaware, for displaying the Confederate battle flag. The NAACP objected to the museum receiving public funds, arguing that “supporting a group that displays the confederate flag makes a statement of public policy that’s an affront to the sensibilities and dignity of a majority of Americans.” In September 2024, the activists were back in the news: “The debate over the Confederate flag flying at the Marvel Museum in Georgetown continues as Delaware action group Speak Out Against Hate (SOAH) works to bring the issue back to the spotlight and have the flag taken down.”

Ideally, given that taxation is theft, we should abolish taxes and thereby avoid the need for disputes over the allocation of public funds. But given that everyone is forced to pay taxes, the notion that some self-appointed activists should get to dictate which groups of taxpayers have opinions worthy of their respect should be rejected. The NAACP opposition to this museum is primarily based on their objection to groups associating for purposes of preserving Confederate history, an aim which the NAACP considers “an affront to their sensibilities” and against “the values of the people.” They are upset by the flag and monument raised by the Delaware Grays Sons of Confederate Veterans on museum grounds. Yet the NAACP fails to recognize that, as illustrated by a recent survey, Americans are split roughly in half on the question whether Confederate monuments should be destroyed with 52% supporting efforts to preserve them. Therefore, this is clearly a question on which people reasonably disagree, and neither side of the debate can claim a monopoly on “the values of the people.” Each side represents only the values of those who share their view, and freedom of association, therefore, becomes paramount.

Freedom of association does not depend on showing that everyone, or even a majority, agrees with the aims of any association. Freedom of association is an absolute liberty of free people, subject only to the freedom of others not to associate with them. The solution for anyone who disagrees with the heritage preserved by a museum is simply to not visit the museum, and leave others at liberty to support the museum should they wish.

The post Freedom of Association and Cancel Culture appeared first on LewRockwell.

Elon Musk is all in.

(0:00) Elon Musk Is All in on Donald Trump
(6:35) Providing Starlink to Victims of Hurricane Helene
(9:22) If Trump Loses, This Is the Last Election
(21:49) The Epstein and Diddy Client List
(33:38) Vaccines
(35:49) The Movement to Decriminalize Crime… pic.twitter.com/jNqB1ThqQz

— Tucker Carlson (@TuckerCarlson) October 7, 2024

The post Tucker Talks to Elon Musk appeared first on LewRockwell.

Hillary Clinton, John Kerry, and Democrat Law School Deans Say Free Speech Threatens Their Agendas. Democrats are no longer the party of John F. Kennedy. They and their media whores are the party of Joseph Goebbels, Reich Minister of Propaganda.

“We are not afraid to entrust the American people with unpleasant facts, foreign ideas, alien philosophies, and competitive values. For a nation that is afraid to let its people judge the truth and falsehood in an open market is a nation that is afraid of its people.” — President John F. Kennedy. See this.

Hillary Says the First Amendment means “We Lose Total Control”

Clinton Continues Her Censorship Campaign on CNN, and the presstitute media supports their own demise.

Jonathan Turley notes that Hillary and the Democrats want free speech only for their ideological agendas. Everyone else has to shut up.

Watch tens of millions of dumbs..t Americans vote for this tyranny on November 4.

If Empire Of Lies Crumbles, Hillary Clinton Warns: “We’ll Lose Total Control”

Hillary Clinton told CNN host Michael Smerconish that unless social media companies are censored “we lose total control.” Only censorship and the First Amendment’s destruction can save the Elites’ Empire of Lies.

Wall Street Journal Editor Emma Tucker said: “We owned the news. We were the gatekeepers, and we very much owned the facts as well.”

She added that people are learning that they cannot trust the whore media and that, consequently, the presstitutes are having a difficult time protecting the official narratives, which are lies that permit a handful of corrupt elites to impose their agendas.

The First Amendment is under full scale attack by Democrats. They openly admit that it is a major block to their ability to gain power by manipulating the information that people receive.

Read The Empire of Lies by Paul Craig Roberts.

“Paul Craig Roberts is one of the best and most-informed political commentators today. I urge everybody to read his indispensable book The Empire of Lies, ” Llewellyn H. Rockwell.

PCR is a national treasure

This is the best of several books by PCR I’ve read. I like the layout, with topics grouped in such a way that you can inform yourself about them by category.

PCR is careful with his prose. He doesn’t assert certainty unless he really is certain, and he uses conditional language wherever that’s appropriate.

If you want to get up to speed on current events and recent, relevant history with one book, this is the one to buy.

Unbiased Potential Truth in a World of Lies

In a nutshell, this collection of essays is an exposé of major deceptions in five critical areas. In addition to a detailed chapter on deception vis-à-vis economics, which was PCR’s formal profession as a professor at US universities and as the chief of economic policy under President Ronald Reagan, he also tackles US foreign policy, notably the War in Ukraine, September 11, COVID-19 vaccines, and the unreliability of the corporate media. While I don’t agree with everything in the book, it is intellectually honest and unhindered by political correctness, which is a rarity in the current age of self-censorship. The book represents a refreshing novel account of current and past events that shaped the 21th century from the perspective of a highly critical and analytical Washington insider.

What is particular refreshing about the book is that the author is clearly not representing nor defending the left or the right. This is not a political manifest; the author’s stated intention is to get to the truth wherever it leads.

The post Democrats Are the New Gestapo appeared first on LewRockwell.

Yesterday Peter joined Michael Gayed and Will Rhind on the Lead-Lag Report. They cover a variety of topics, including the future of the dollar, China’s role in the economy, the prospects of war in the Middle East, and gold’s path to a $3000 price point and beyond.

Early in the interview, Peter laments the possibility that the United States will decline economically. China is poised to surpass our economy as the dollar continues to weaken:

“I think the media is constantly writing China’s obituary. And I think they’ve got it wrong. Just like they downplay the significance of the problems in the US economy, they overplay the significance of the problems of the Chinese economy. I’m not saying it’s perfect over there in China. But I think they have a lot going for them that people are overlooking.”

Michael and Peter discuss the role of U.S. foreign policy– specifically having a military presence around the world– in driving up deficits and the debt:

“We’re all over the world. We’ve got our troops all over the world, but we can’t afford to deploy them. We can’t afford to provision them without borrowing money, and that is not sustainable. I mean, it’s going to crumble. I don’t think the world is going to pay an ever-increasing tribute to the United States to maintain this situation. I think it’s going to come to an end. Yes, it’s gone on for a long time, and our military has probably been part of what’s enabled it.” 

With tension in the Middle East ratcheting up this week, Peter delivers a masterful explanation of why wars are terrible for the economy. The temptation to inflate combined with the physical destruction of productive goods mean wars inevitably impoverish all involved:

“You’re more likely to debase your currency with a war, and it’s actually twofold, depending on how big the war is. Wars can result in the destruction of goods, and there’s a destruction of productive capacity. So, you have less supply of goods in a war. A lot of times, if it’s a big war, you have to produce ammunition and military hardware at the expense of civilian consumer goods. So, wars tend to reduce the supply of consumer goods but increase the quantity of money. Governments today don’t want to pay for wars. They don’t want to tell the taxpayer, ‘We’re fighting a war, so we’re raising your taxes.’ … And they go out and borrow, creating bigger deficits. So, the Fed has to print more money.”

The trio also discusses Peter’s opinions on investments other than precious metals, including stocks and crypto. He argues that Bitcoin highlights the difference between large institutional investors and retail investors trying to cash in on a trend:

“Bitcoin peaked out in November 2021, and priced in gold, it’s almost 40% below that peak. Despite all that money spent, all that hype, all those ETFs in the market, all that institutional buying. So that tells you something. It tells you there’s a lot of people that have been selling their Bitcoin into all the hype. And I think the people selling Bitcoin are a lot smarter and know a lot more than the people who have been buying it.”

Peter is optimistic for the future of gold. With no end in sight for the Fed’s money printing, there’s a distinct possibility that gold’s price could increase by many multiples over the next couple of decades:

“I think the potential is much higher because we’re going to print so much money. We’re going to have so much inflation that the dollar is going to lose a lot of value, and you’re really going to need a lot of dollars to buy gold. If gold can go from $20 an ounce to $2,600 an ounce, it can go from $2,600 to $26,000, or even to $100,000. There’s no limit because, again, gold isn’t changing—it’s the value of the dollar that’s decreasing.”

Halfway through the interview, Peter also drops some trivia about his wife, Lauren. Did you know she both sang and acted in a 2022 Bruce Willis film? Check out the full recording (starting at 38:30) for the details!

This originally appeared on SchiffGold.com.

The post Gold’s Potential Is Wildly Untapped appeared first on LewRockwell.

Executive summary

The CDC lied. People died.

The COVID vaccine had no benefits

1. It actually increased your risk of getting COVID. We know that from the Cleveland Clinic study.
2. It did nothing to reduce your risk of hospitalization. We know that from the data revealed in a study published in JAMA by a top epidemiologist at the VA.
3. The vaccine did absolutely nothing to reduce your risk of dying from COVID. I’m going to show you that below. It’s crystal clear. Rarely in science do you see anything that is this perfect.

In short, the COVID shots were all downside with no benefits. The vaccines and the vaccine mandates cost a lot of people their careers or their lives.

It was a massive con job by the FDA and CDC to make us believe that the vaccines worked when their own numbers show that it didn’t do a damn thing. In fact, I’d bet that they probably didn’t even look at their own numbers from CMS.

No upside, all downside.

My new analysis of the US nursing home data is undeniable

The US Nursing home COVID mortality data is gold standard per-facility data on the most vulnerable population for COVID. There is nothing in the world better than this dataset.

I’ve written about the US Nursing home data many times before (most recently in this article), but now I have a new way to present the data that shows the full story instantly:

This is the only graph you need to see to prove that the COVID vaccine did nothing to reduce the risk of dying from COVID. The “gap” between cases and deaths did NOT change after the shots were rolled out. Some people say, “cases dropped” but as you can see, cases skyrocketed to new highs 12 month later. Also, we know from the Cleveland clinic study that the COVID vaccines increase your risk of getting COVID which explains why the height of the peak nearly doubled post-vaccine rollout.

What does it show? It shows the vaccines did NOTHING to reduce mortality. Zero. Zilch. Nada. It’s not even a close call. It’s OBVIOUS from just looking at one graph.

You can verify all this for yourself. I’ve created a dedicated github with the files and the code and the analysis spreadsheet with the graph below.

Here are the details…

The graph aggregates data from 15,058 nursing homes that is reported on a weekly basis. The blue lines (left axis) are cases. The orange lines (right) axes are SHIFTED deaths. The deaths were left shifted by applying a weighting factor of 0,.8,.2 to the death by week. This causes the death curve to align with the cases instead of being delayed. See the spreadsheet for details.

Secondly, I adjusted the scale of the right axis so that deaths would be scaled to match cases.

These two adjustments make it very easy to visualize the case fatality rate (CFR).

When the curves diverge is when you have a change in the CFR.

If the vaccines worked, we should have seen the curves start to diverge more and more from December 2020 through the end of March 2021 (see this article for the rollout curve), and then continue to diverge (at a slower pace) as more and more people were vaccinated.

But this didn’t happen.

You can see the curves are virtually right on top of each other (which is stunning) until the week ending 7/11/2021 is when we see the very start of a divergence but the divergence (gap between the curves) remains FLAT until Omicron hits. So this was not the vaccine “kicking in.” If that were the case, we’d see a rise over 3 months to maximum divergence and it would continue to diverge after that corresponding to the rollout of the COVID vaccine to nursing homes in the first few months of 2021.

The CFR drops precipitously a second time starting the week ending 12/26/21.

Read the Whole Article

The post Official US Nursing Home Data Shows That the Covid Vaccines Did Nothing To Reduce Covid Mortality appeared first on LewRockwell.

Everyone interested in where we are going in this dystopian civilization and ever-more tyrannical world, must see this extraordinary interview with David Icke by Kla.TV.

It can, and hopefully does, bring a larger awakening to the people around the globe.

David Icke talks about the corralling of the world population into ever smaller spaces under the pretext of “climate change” that requires a “net-zero” CO2 world, no travel, no industry, promoting the “15-minute cities”. It is absurd. 

“Zero-Net” – by 2050 – is propagated by the globalists as a must for humanity’s and Mother Earth’s survival. It will not happen. Humanity will survive. 

And all this while they – the self-declared masters of the universe – namely the financial establishment know very well that CO2 is a life essential gas; without which there would be no life, no plants, no food, no economic development — no-nothing.

But the believers in authority follow the masters’ orders and practically commit suicide by following and obeying a lie, attempting the reduction to zero of CO2. 

David explains how world events are connected. With a little research and a clear-thinking head, you will find that all major geopolitical, socioeconomic events are not just haphazardly occurring side by side or in certain sequences, they are all linked up throughout the world. So, connecting the dots, you will see that we are living in a well-orchestrated web, where all makes sense – for those who are in command of the web — and to the detriment of the vast bulk of populations.

There is a tiny-tiny elite behind the web, pretending to have all the power, only because we believe all the lies from our government and institutional so-called authorities, dictated to them by this elite.

We have been taught in school to trust in authority and to obey authorities. It is a difficult axiom to break. 

The constant drill of the mainstream media assures a steady drop-by-drop indoctrination of lies becoming the truth.

David Icke also describes how true non-mainstream media some 20 years ago, gradually was converted into “mainstream alternative” media, also called “controlled opposition” by the big media outlets, Murdoch, Disney, Warner Brothers and more.

As a new, controlled alternative media, he mentioned Tucker Carlson, among others. They are promoted and funded by Big Tech and Big Finance, but cannot trespass their given boundaries. 

The TRUE non-mainstream and independent remaining journalists and news sites are cornered, cyber-attacked and censored. That is how a small group of financial and big-tech oligarchs takes ever more control of society.

We MUST break out from this giant net or worldwide matrix controlled by a tiny elite that controls technology, finance, and decides over our heath or death, through WHO, supported by Big Pharma. Exiting the matrix is our condition to become free and sovereign citizens again.

And, yes, we can —by becoming self-asserted and independent thinkers, joining up with others and together breaking the elite-bullies “rules-based order” back to legality, international, national and local laws, respecting one another, and respecting the rights of people, indigenous, westerners, easterners, Africans and Middle Easterners and whatever ethnicity you may find.

We are all the same.

Our souls are not bound to a pyramid order of hierarchy.

They are equal.

David’s motto is: “Know the goal, then you will see the way leading there!” In the interview he shows that even free educators are in danger of supporting the development of a centrally dictated global dystopia.

David Icke, the Dot-Connector, starts the interview by saying,

“If you look at the world as a series of random events, random happenings, it makes no sense. Why do they do that? Why do they do it this way? Why don’t they do it that way? It would be much better if they did it that way. And so on and so forth. Why does this happen? But when you connect the dots, you connect these events, you find that they do all connect. It suddenly makes all sense. And, you know, people say sometimes about me: “You see a conspiracy everywhere.””

“No, I do not. I see one conspiracy to turn the world into a global dystopia. And that one conspiracy has endless facets and forms. But it is actually one conspiracy. It is one gigantic web. And that is literally true in terms of what I call the Global Cult, which is a global network of secret societies which are operating outside or in the shadows from those that appear to be running the world.”

David’s clear-sight points to a key element that may lead us into a dystopian world. Our societal behavior is based on our perception. The perceptions are based on the messages we receive. The Global Cult that pretends to control us, formulates the messages as lies, to make us believe there is a problem, the people react, then they can present, or impose us a solution.

He calls it simply, “Problems, Reaction, Solution”. 

David uses the recent example of covid. He says,

“People caved in to the COVID hoax because they perceived there was a dangerous virus. And they perceived, that the fake vaccine, not a vaccine under previous criteria, was a way to save them from the dangerous virus.

That perception led to people submitting to what were fascistic impositions all over the world. So, if you want to control behavior, you must control perception. And if you control behavior, well, collectively, that is what we call human society. And then you ask the question, where do perceptions come from? Well, they come from information received”.

And information is controlled and manipulated to serve the purpose of the controllers.

David Icke’s presentation is brilliant. It is a MUST-SEE for every truth seeker.

See the full video here or by clicking the image below.

The original source of this article is Global Research.

The post Uncovering World Tyranny and Its War Strategies appeared first on LewRockwell.

Yes, it’s happening. Following Hurricane Helene, we are witnessing a total failure in the government’s response to a major disaster. Reports on NBC, as well as hundreds of others give us some insight as to some of the problems people across western North Carolina are facing. With roads, bridges, water pipes, and electrical lines washed away, FEMA is telling us they don’t have the money to “Git er done.” It seems the money has gone to aiding immigrants at the border and providing weapons for Ukraine.

Desperate families are still waiting for word about missing loved ones, days after the flooding disaster in Tennessee, and North Carolina. Expect politicians to fill the slots in the mainstream media to spin the reality on the ground into a tale of “we are getting the job done” The fact is, they are not.  

Fast-talkers, such as Pete Buttigieg, will vigorously paint a picture that the Biden /Harris team in Washington has risen to the task. Sadly, the history of people like Buttigieg, the equivalent of a modern-day snake oil salesman is to twist the truth. As one of Kamala Harris’s prime damage control go-to guys, it is his superpower to capably paint a glorious picture, over-promise, and then underperform. 

 Buttigieg will concede that while this is terrible, efforts are continuing to be ramped up and things are under control. He is unlikely to adequately address the issue of why many of those with feet on the ground are being told by government authorities to stand down under penalty of arrest. This includes efforts to seize aid materials flowing into the area under the idea they need to be “inventoried” and redirected to the proper agencies.

In the middle of 2022, an article on AdvancingTime cautioned on how during a major disaster nobody should count on help from the government. It has been a long time since America has had a really good leader. Sadly, the damage these “less than stellar” Presidents cause a lot of problems for society that can linger for decades. With this in mind, it should be noted that bad leaders have a habit of opening Pandora’s box for the greater good whenever a disaster strikes. It seems, to some politicians, that the only way the government can help us during a crisis is to focus on taking more control over our lives.

At that time, some Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) documents released by the George W. Bush Presidential Library spotlighted the powers that modern pres­id­ents “claim they possess” in moments of crisis. Following 9-11, this type of expanding the President’s powers could be viewed as a pure power grab. In short, during a national crisis, governments seem more interested in control than coming to the aid of their citizens.

The “presidential emergency action documents” (PEADs), were created during the cold war. Back then, many people feared we might be attacked with nuclear weapons. These documents authorized the president to enact measures such as suspending habeas corpus, detaining “dangerous persons” within the country, censoring news media, and even preventing international travel.

The desire to extend power dovetails with today’s high-profile disasters where the media generates the feeling our government stands ready to rush to our aid in case of a national disaster. Following a tornado or hurricane in the news, we often see FEMA workers spread out and moving from door to door offering help to Americans in need. This reassuring media coverage is misleading. The truth is if you find yourself in a large area of devastation due to a crisis or disaster  the government will prove largely ineffective.

Read the Whole Article

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I don’t mean to sound like a sore loser, but while Netanyahu is prancing around the ring with arms raised high à la Rocky, it was an ultimatum from the IDF’s high command that led him to give the go-ahead to kill off Hezbollah’s leader. He even made sure to be out of the country in case something backfired, but be that as it may, Israel has won big, probably its most brilliant victory since the sneak attack on Egypt in June 1967.

No matter what the so-called experts say or write now, all those hundreds of thousands of Hezbollah missiles pointed at the heart of Tel Aviv were always to be taken with a very large spoonful of salt, believe you me, as they used to say in Hollywood. The Israeli disinformation and propaganda machine cannot be compared to any other. “Compare” is the wrong word. There are disinformation bureaus, and then there is the Israeli one. Israel can count on every Jewish-owned newspaper or TV network, or government services of any country—especially the United States—and its own services are so good at placing useful disinformation in the right places that even its own intelligence services have at times been totally misinformed.

“Israel is an apartheid state and will continue to be one.”

Ever since the fall of the incompetent Shah back in 1979, Israel has not only totally infiltrated Iran’s secret service, it has most of its personnel in its pay. Ditto for the Palestinian resistance and so on down the line. In America, the neo-cons do Israel’s bidding without pay, as it was shown back during George W. Bush’s tenure. Bush administration cogs Paul Wolfowitz, Elliott Abrams, Douglas Feith, and the Kagan brothers, all Jewish, all telling a tiny-brained George W. to be a hero and attack the nuclear-armed Saddam before it was too late. We all know the rest. That must have been one of Israel’s finest hours, as hundreds of thousands died, Iraq disintegrated, and any kind of Arab alliance to thwart Israel’s expansionist plans went up in smoke. What I find amusing is how easily duped the Fourth Estate is by Israeli disinformation, and how easy it is for Israeli agents to misinform so-called journalists about the impending doom faced by that brave little island of democracy in the middle of the Arab sea of sand.

The result of all this is that Americans are seen by the rest of the world as morally repugnant capitalists exploiting weaker people in the Middle East. The all-powerful Israeli lobby has ensured American support, no matter how extreme the actions of Israeli religious fanatics become, and the latest massacres in Beirut of Hezbollah confirm it. Mind you, Hezbollah, Hamas, and Iran have turned out to be paper tigers. They talked a very tough game, but when Israeli bombs began to drop, they folded quicker than you can say hands up. And Israel knew that since the beginning, but it had to clown around about being in mortal danger and all that because Joe Biden was playing statesman and was trying to control matters. If it weren’t for the thousands of young men who are now blind in Beirut, and the thousands upon thousands of women and children lying dead under the rubble in Gaza, the whole thing would be a big laugh, but no one’s laughing except the Israelis.

Read the Whole Article

The post To the Victor appeared first on LewRockwell.

The songwriter, actor, country/western singer, musician, U.S. Army veteran, helicopter pilot, accomplished rugby player and boxer, Rhodes scholar, Pomona College and University of Oxford degreed, and summa cum laude literature graduate, Kris Kristofferson, recently died at 88.

Americans may have known him best for writing smash hits like “Me and Bobby McGee” and “For the Good Times,” his wide-ranging, star-acting roles in A Star is Born and Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid, his numerous solo albums, especially with then-spouse and singer Rita Coolidge, and the country group super-quartet he formed with Johnny Cash, Waylon Jennings, and Willie Nelson.

In other words, Kristofferson was a rare Renaissance man who could do it all in an age of increasingly narrow specialization and expertise.

At certain times throughout history at particular locales, we have seen such singular people from all walks of life.

Classical Athens produced polymaths like Aristotle—tutor to Alexander the Great, logician, student of music, art, and literature, educator, think-tank founder, biologist, philosopher, and scientist. Later Greeks like Archimedes and Ptolemy, as men of action, mastered six or seven disciplines and applied their abstract knowledge in ways that made life easier for those around them.

The late Roman Republic was another cauldron of multitalented geniuses. It produced the brilliant stylist, historian, politician, and consummate general Julius Caesar, as well as his republican archrival Cicero—politician, philosopher, orator, master stylist, lawyer, and provincial governor.

Turn-of-the-century Victorian Great Britain produced giants like Winston Churchill—prime minister, statesman, essayist, historian, orator, strategist, and wartime veteran. As Britain’s war leader, between May 10, 1940, and June 22, 1941, he, almost alone, resisted the Axis powers and prevented Adolf Hitler from winning the war.

But we associate the idea of a “Renaissance man” mostly with Florence, Italy, between the 15th and 16th centuries. In that brief 100 years, the Florentine Republic hosted multi-talented geniuses like Leonardo De Vinci—master painter, sculptor, architect, scientist, engineer, and inventor—best known for the Mona Lisa and Last Supper.

The multifaceted talents of his younger contemporary Michelangelo were as astounding, whether defined by his iconic sculptures David and Pietà, his stunning painting on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, or as the master architect of the Vatican’s St. Peter’s Basilica.

The American Revolution was a similar embryo of Renaissance men. Thomas Jefferson was perhaps the most famous example of unchecked abstract and pragmatic genius displayed in almost every facet of late 18th– and early 19th-century life—main author of the Declaration of Independence, third U.S. President, founder of the University of Virginia, inventor, agronomist, architect, and diplomat.

But Benjamin Franklin may best approximate the model of the Florentine Renaissance holistic brilliance—journalist, publisher, printer, author, politician, diplomat, inventor, scientist, and philosopher.

Franklin’s life was one of perpetual motion and achievement. In one lifetime, he helped to draft the Constitution, invented everything from the lightning rod to bifocals, founded the American postal service, and successfully won over European countries to the nascent American cause. Theodore Roosevelt—president, historian, essayist, conservationist, naturalist combat veteran, battle leader, explorer, and cowboy—exemplified the idea of an American president as the master at almost everything else.

The history of our own contemporary Renaissance people often suggests that they are not fully appreciated until after their deaths—especially in the post-World War II era.

Why?

We have created a sophisticated modern society that is so compartmentalized by “professionals” and the credentialed that those who excel simultaneously in several disciplines are often castigated for “amateurism,” “spreading themselves too thinly,” “not staying in their lanes,” or not being degreed with the proper prerequisite letters—BA, BS, MA, PhD, MD, JD, or MBA—in the various fields that they master.

But specialization is the enemy of genius, as is the tyranny of credentialism.

Because the Renaissance figure is not perfect in every discipline he masters, we damn him for too much breadth and not enough depth—a dabbler rather than an expert—failing to realize that his successes in most genres he masters and redefines is precisely because he brings a vast corpus of unique insights and experience to his work that narrower specialists lack. The Greek poet Archilochus first delineated the contrast between the fox who “knows many things” and the hedgehog who “knows one—one big thing.” We have become a nation of elite hedgehogs, whose narrow expertise is not enriched by awareness of or interest in the wider human experience.

Renaissance people often live controversial lives and receive 360-degree incoming criticism, not surprising given the many fields in which they upstage specialists and question experts—and the sometimes overweening nature of their personalities that feel no reason to place boundaries and lanes on their geniuses and behavior or to temper their exuberances.

Read the Whole Article

The post We Are in Need of Renaissance People appeared first on LewRockwell.

We are now a year into the Israel government’s military action devastating the people and infrastructure of Gaza and since expanded into escalating violence against countries including Lebanon and Iran. Yet, even today, United States Senate members are repeating flagrant lies produced in the war’s early days to trick Americans and others around the world into supporting Israel’s war.

On Monday, Republican US Senators introduced a resolution repeating some of these old lies that helped build support among Americans for Israel’s war — that “Hamas terrorists” killed “approximately 1,200 individuals” in their October 7, 2023 attack and that Hamas used “rape as a weapon of war.” Why repeat the lies? To support the resolution’s conclusions, including that the Senate wants to “ensure the forever survival of Israel.” Left unsaid in the resolution is that the way the US government continually acts to purportedly achieve this goal includes shoveling more and more money, weapons, and intelligence to Israel for Israel to use in whatever way it chooses. Indeed, the US government’s commitment seems unfazed no matter Israel’s level of barbarity and no matter how much Israel’s actions cause further geographic expansion of the war.

To the extent American politicians repeating these baseless claims regarding October 7 are doing so because they are ignorant about what happened, they would do well to watch a new documentary — Atrocity Inc. — featuring reporter Max Blumenthal. Blumenthal was there from the beginning calling no dice on the propaganda promoted by Israel and US politicians, along with American media, that has been used to gain public support for Israel’s aggressive actions. The widespread rape allegations are ridiculous fabrications and a significant portion of the death toll is from the willful killing of Israelis by agents of their own government, Blumenthal explains in the documentary. Blumenthal also debunks other outrageous lies, including claims related to the killing of, and even beheading of, babies on October 7.

Senators, and everyone else, can watch the documentary here.

This originally appeared on The Ron Paul Institute.

The post Old Lies Behind Israel’s War Live on in Senate Resolution appeared first on LewRockwell.

After what we have just witnessed, how will anyone be able to trust those that are running the country ever again?  Hurricane Helene’s extremely unusual journey left an immense trail of destruction that was more than 500 miles long, and there are many communities that were completely and utterly wiped out.  Authorities are telling the mainstream media that only a few hundred people died, and so that is what the mainstream media is telling us.  But those that are on the ground in the areas that got hit the hardest are telling us a completely different story.

For example, one woman in Asheville, North Carolina says that thousands of people are missing and that there are still “bodies hanging from trees they haven’t gotten to yet”…

Asheville, North Carolina woman says the media is lying about the de*th toll from Hurricane Helene, says the real number is much higher than 200.

The TT user says cold trailers are overflowing with bodies.

“If you go to certain backroads, you will still find bodies hanging from trees they haven’t gotten to yet,” she posted.

“I don’t think people understand that 500+ people are de*d. Thousands more missing.”

Another local woman is claiming that there are more than 900 bodies at a local hospital in Asheville which still have not been identified…

There are reports that Mission Hospital in Asheville North Carolina was told today, that they will be the morgue for body recovery. As of a few days ago, there were reports of 900+ bodies at the hospital that haven’t been identified.

There are also reports of babies and children washing up in the river, and more reports of bodies in trees.

An insurance agent Hana’s teammates went to drop off supplies in Asheville and set up relief tents yesterday. While setting up they saw four babies, three children as well as adult bodies that were recovered from the mud and trees.

National guard member Breona Bryant has also mentioned that they are seeing dead children. Those doing rescue operations are traumatized and many survivors of the storm are suffering from survivors guilt.

Please keep in mind that Asheville is just one of the cities that was absolutely devastated by this storm.

There are hundreds of others that are dealing with dead bodies as well.

In South Carolina, an elderly couple that was embracing one another during the storm was killed when a large tree suddenly crushed their house…

An elderly couple, killed in South Carolina when a large tree fell on their home during Hurricane Helene, were found embracing each other in their bed, their grandson said. He is among hundreds of residents across six Southeastern U.S. states mourning the loss of their loved ones. The death toll surpassed 230 late Saturday.

The couple, identified as Marcia, 74, and Jerry, 78, from Beech Island, South Carolina, died as the hurricane raged outside, with winds strong enough to snap branches and uproot trees, The Associated Press quoted their grandson, John Savage, as saying.

It is going to take a very long time for emergency workers to recover all of the dead bodies.

As I shared with my core supporters on Friday, a group of FEMA executives were overheard discussing the fact that “a couple zeros” should be added to the current death toll that is being given to the public.

In Tennessee, the town of Erwin is just gone.

I do not know if there were any survivors.

At this hour, there are millions of people living in parts of Florida, Georgia, South Carolina, North Carolina and Tennessee that are still waiting for help.

In a part of North Carolina that was hit particularly hard, one woman says that she still has not seen a single person from either the state government or the federal government yet…

As the communities within Yancey and Mitchell counties are rural, assistance has been slow to enter into those areas given the lack of road and bridge access. In fact, Emily tells me the communities there are mainly sheltered in place and she’s not seen anyone from state or federal gov’t.

Emily has been able to set up Starlink at the Newdale fire department in Burnsville to establish communication in coordinating emergency services — but more Starlink systems and supplies for that area will be needed for those communities and soon.

There are vast numbers of people that do not have access to clean water right now, and the governor of North Carolina is admitting that his state has never experienced anything like this…

As recovery missions and repairs continue in North Carolina more than a week after Hurricane Helene carved a path of devastation through the western part of the state, the state’s Republican Sen. Thom Tillis called for more resources to bolster the relief effort and likened the damage to Hurricane Katrina’s mark on Louisiana in 2005.

“This is unlike anything that we’ve seen in this state,” Tillis told CBS News’ Margaret Brennan on “Face the Nation with Margaret Brennan” on Sunday morning. “We need increased attention. We need to continue to increase the surge of federal resources.”

When it is all said and done, I believe that the total damage caused by Hurricane Helene will greatly exceed the total damage caused by Hurricane Katrina.

I am entirely convinced that we just witnessed the greatest natural disaster in modern U.S. history, and according to the Wall Street Journal many homeowners that had their houses destroyed will be extremely disappointed when they try to file insurance claims…

Homeowners are rushing to file insurance claims after Hurricane Helene left a trail of destruction across six states. Many of them will likely be left empty-handed.

Property insurers in recent years have hollowed out coverage and sharply increased rates to make up for steep underwriting losses driven by natural disasters. Owners of homes and businesses slammed by Helene could be in for a nasty shock when they check the small print of their policies.

“Insurers have become significantly tougher on hurricane claims,” said Rick Tutwiler, a claims adjuster for property owners based in Tampa, Fla. “We’ve moved to an era dominated by exclusions, diminishing coverages, and even harsher policy terms.”

A number of people have asked me if this disaster will have a dramatic impact on the upcoming election.

Without a doubt, voters in some conservative areas of North Carolina will be faced with difficulties…

Officials in North Carolina warned that voting in some parts of the battleground state might be impacted due to Hurricane Helene’s impacts.

During Helene, critical infrastructure in large swaths of western North Carolina and especially parts of the Appalachian Mountain areas were damaged or totally destroyed.

“There may be polling places impacted by mudslides, there may be polling places inaccessible because of damaged roads, and there may be polling places with trees that have fallen on them,” Karen Brinson Bell, the executive director of the North Carolina State Board of Elections, told NPR on Tuesday.

In November, voting in some of the most rural parts of North Carolina could be way down because of this storm.

But the overwhelming backlash to the extremely poor federal response to this emergency could give a boost to the Republican ticket all over the nation.

So we shall see what happens.

Meanwhile, another major hurricane is poised to hit central Florida.

According to Fox Weather, it is being projected that Hurricane Milton could be “the worst in over 100 years for parts of west-central Florida”…

Less than two weeks after Hurricane Helene struck Florida’s Big Bend, Milton is threatening to do the same, but given the state’s distinctive coastline, the angle of landfall could allow the new storm system to be the worst in over 100 years for parts of west-central Florida.

The area is certainly storm-weary, having recently experienced impacts from Helene, Debby, Ian and Idalia. However, the FOX Forecast Center warns that the unique angle of approach makes the situation similar to what emergency managers have dreaded but prepared for over decades.

All the way back at the beginning of this year, I warned my readers that this would be a banner year for natural disasters.

It is expected that Hurricane Milton will become a Category 3 storm before it comes ashore in the Tampa Bay region…

Florida’s west coast is preparing for a potentially massive evacuation ahead of a strike from Milton, which rapidly intensified into a hurricane on Sunday.

The Tampa Bay region, still reeling from massive coastal flooding from Helene —its worst hurricane in a century — remained in the crosshairs of Milton, a small but fast-strengthening storm expected to become a major Category 3 hurricane before it bulldozes the Gulf Coast.

What a nightmare.

Much of the state is still trying to recover from Hurricane Helene, and now another “life-threatening” storm is on the way…

Tampa Bay could see tropical storm-force winds as early as Tuesday. There could be a “risk of life-threatening impacts” including storm surge, wind and flash flooding along parts of Florida’s Gulf Coast, the National Hurricane Center said in its 11 a.m. advisory. Heavy rainfall is expected ahead of the storm on Sunday and Monday, which could be “at or near major hurricane strength” before landfall.

Nightmarish storms are just one element of “the perfect storm” that is now upon us.

Unfortunately, this is just the beginning.

We have been getting pummeled by historic natural disaster after historic natural disaster, but what we have already been through is not even worth comparing to what is ahead.

Reprinted with permission from The Economic Collapse.

The post They Are Lying To You About Hurricane Helene appeared first on LewRockwell.

WASHINGTON, D.C. — The Supreme Court rejected a bid by the Biden-Harris administration to force doctors in Texas to commit so-called “emergency” abortions in violation of state law.

The justices rebuffed the Biden Justice Department’s appeal of a lower court ruling that blocked enforcement of pro-abortion federal guidance mandating that emergency facilities perform abortions in states that ban them.

The guidance, released by the Biden administration in July 2022 in response to the Supreme Court’s reversal of Roe v. Wade, purported to reinterpret the federal Emergency Medical Treatment and Active Labor Act (EMTALA) of 1986 to require physicians to “provide” abortions to women with an “emergency medical condition” – even if doing so violates state abortion restrictions.

EMTALA, which applies to hospitals that participate in Medicare, does not mention abortion and actually requires protection for an “unborn child.”

Abortion – the destruction of an innocent preborn child – is always gravely immoral and is never necessary nor justifiable for alleged reasons of “health.”

U.S. District Judge James Wesley Hendrix halted enforcement of the Biden administration guidance in 2022, and, in January, the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals upheld his decision in an unanimous ruling. Texas and two pro-life medical associations – the American Association of Pro-Life Obstetricians & Gynecologists and Christian Medical & Dental Associations – had sued to block the guidance.

Biden administration Solicitor General Elizabeth Prelogar asked the Supreme Court to reverse the Fifth Circuit’s order.

The Supreme Court announced its decision on Monday morning without comment.

Texas has some of the country’s strongest pro-life protections, including a near-total ban that prohibits abortion except when a woman has a “life-threatening physical condition” and is allegedly “at risk of death” or “substantial impairment of a major bodily function.”

In a separate case earlier this year, the Supreme Court left in place a lower court ruling in Idaho allowing the Biden administration to force the state, which also has a near-total abortion ban, to permit some emergency room abortions while litigation plays out.

This originally appeared on Lifesite News.

The post Supreme Court rejects Biden Admin Attempt To Force Texas to Allow ‘Emergency’ Abortions appeared first on LewRockwell.

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IF it is portrayed as a war crime; genocide—the methodical, malicious murder of the many—can be dismissed as incidental to battle; a mere case of, “Oops, bad things happen in war.” You hear the last phrase all the time from Israel’s supporters, as they gush their enthusiasm for the Israeli State’s crimes.

The genocide-as-a-war-crime conceptualization provides cover and lends imprimatur for criminals and criminality. You mitigate and minimize genocide when you call it a war crime.

This is precisely the point of Israel and its co-belligerents: The purpose of framing Israel’s ongoing extermination of Palestinian society in Gaza as a byproduct of war—the same having commenced in the West Bank, East Jerusalem and Southern Lebanon—is to give the impression that industrial-scale mass murder is often incidental to war. Bad things happen in the butcher’s shop of war.

But genocide—legally and morally—is a stand-alone crime; it is not a crime attached to a set of mitigating or explanatory circumstances. The Israeli State, gleefully engaged in methodical, indiscriminate mass murder, is thus a criminal entity. Perhaps not a common criminal, but, nevertheless a criminal country, a threat to the comity of nations. It doesn’t take a Carl von Clausewitz, famed Prussian general and war theorist, to figure this out.

Disquieting though this is, a better source of metaphor for Israel than von Clausewitz is Truman Capote. He is the originator of the true-crime genre, in which a real event is treated with fictional techniques and turned into a literary work of art. That Capote’s In Cold Blood certainly is.

The Israelis State, to commandeer and paraphrase Capote, is that “rarity, a natural killer—absolutely sane, but conscienceless, and capable of dealing, with or without motive, the coldest-blooded deathblows.”

In the crime he anatomized, Capote encountered the “single-killer concept” and “the double-killer concept.” Israel comes under the nation-killer concept, given that the nation, with thumping majorities, backed the killing of Gaza. Currently, it is by a preponderance of 71 percent that Israelis support a war on Lebanon.

In any event, because it is an indefensible crime for which there are no extenuating circumstances or traditional defenses—genocide is not a war crime.

The manifestly willful attempt to destroy a society and its people is a crime for which the death penalty—execution of those involved—has, historically, been meted. The exculpatory agents of Israel’s crimes against humanity are, alas, incapable of reasoning from fact, ethics and logic. Like programmed automatons, they therefore recite a counterfactual storyline, an ideological meme.

HASBARA

Israel’s odious excuse-making has come to be known as Hasbara.

In Hebrew, hasbara is the name of the verb to explain (lehasbir). It means explanation. Exculpatory constructs, assorted Hasbara, serve to coat Israel’s corporeal crimes against humanity with ideological respectability, to give these some imagined purity of purpose.

Think of Hasbara as the steady supply of bogus constructs with which to rape reality.

The facts of mass murder have been undercounted so far in a 649-page list of every Palestinian recorded killed in Israeli attacks. Two hundred and twenty-six pages of these list the names of children 18 years and younger, including 14 pages of newborns and babies under a year old. Each name corresponds to a body, identified and interred. The last 11 pages list Palestinian elders, ages 77- to 101-years-old, all older than the country that killed them. (Via The Electronic Intifada.)

This carnage is being dismissed as a byproduct of war, executed within the matrix of Israeli “self-defense,” as Hasbara has it.

Hasbara to what end? To propagandize international audiences into sympathizing exclusively with Israel and demonizing Arabs. (+972 Magazine.)

Hasbara to dress up tiny dismembered babies, courtesy of Israel’s American baby-busting bombs, as something other than a little torso, and a miniature groin, from which a floret of baby flesh protrudes, where once a chubby little leg kicked. Watch! (https://x.com/DaniMayakovski/status/1833695316165398763. ) I am told by an expert code writer that the embed source code generation for these tweets of mangled baby flesh has been disabled. Censorship down to the code in the service of Hasbara. (https://x.com/Afcq1954/status/1837472434707902578).

Hasbara to frame the specter of baby flesh peeled away to expose gleaming white bone—little bodies and minds shattered for life should they live—as the doing of a third party. “I didn’t do it,” jokes Bart Simpson in that all-American parody, The Simpsons. Hamas made me do it. CNN’s Hasbara, which ascribes an almost-attractive raffishness to IDF criminals, has it that the Occupation made Israeli soldiers commit their crimes.

Hasbara to help leave refugees with no redoubt, and nothing to their name but a nylon dome above their heads. Gaza’s homeless must wait to parry whatever next thrust Israel will deliver in… “self-defense.”

In-the-heat-of-battle Hasbara greases the skids for a Jewish Taliban and his posse of soldiers, whooping it up, as they explode one more mosque among the hundreds they’ve already vaporized.

Hasbara to ostensibly explain away another possessed IDF demon grimacing maniacally while reciting The Shmah, our “Hear, O Israel, the Lord is our God, the Lord is one” prayer. He then levels a mosque. “Have an explosive Sabath,” roar these particular IDF, before bursting into popular song, “The Nation of Israel Lives,” and sharing that they had just wired up a house of prayer in Khirbet Khizaa, Khan Younis, in the central Gaza Strip. Next I want to see their faces, scores of them, appear on our screens from the Hague. But will Hasbara tools like Matthew Miller, ensconced in the State Department, allow it? Rhetorical.

Israel’s Hasbara facilitates “Israel’s conceit of invincibility,” in the words of commentator Mouin Rabbani. It has marred the West’s morality, but will never contaminate the natural law, and has yet to fundamentally change the common law.

Civilizing systems of ethics still stipulate that no one has the right to kill a single innocent human being, directly or indirectly, let alone hundreds of thousands of them—for by the time the Israeli serial killers are cajoled into stopping the carnage, there could be, in the informed opinion of American patriots like Ralph Nader, between 250 to 500,000, maybe more, Palestinian deaths brought about by Israel.

Easily—that is if the Lancet, the medical journal of record, and the human rights community don’t obfuscate the truth. The scholar Norman Finkelstein, author of Gaza, An Inquest Into Martyrdom (2018)—an exegesis of fact and law—has strongly suggested that they, too, have been compromised.

MINARCHIST, ANARCHIST OR STATIST: GENOCIDE IS FORBIDDEN!

International law is not at odds with the natural law or the libertarian law on the matter of industrial-scale mass murder. For reasons obvious, there should certainly be no difference between how classical liberals or anarchists understand the non-aggression axion in this context. Minarchist, anarchist or statist; genocide is verboten in libertarianism.

Craig Mokhiber, one of this country’s most principled specialists in “international human rights law, policy, and methodology,” explains:

‘International law does not allow a claim of self-defense to justify crimes against humanity and genocide. Nor does it magically overcome the international humanitarian law imperatives of precaution, distinction, and proportionality, or the protected status of hospitals and other vital civilian installations.

In addition, the presence of people associated with armed resistance groups (even if proven) does not automatically transform a civilian location or protected structure into a legitimate military target. If it did, the common presence of Israeli soldiers in Israeli hospitals would equally render those hospitals legitimate targets. Attacking hospitals is not an act of self-defense. It is an act of murder and, in systematic and large-scale cases, of the crime of extermination.

A claim of self-defense does not justify collective punishment, the siege of civilian populations, extrajudicial executions, torture, the blocking of humanitarian aid, the targeting of children, the murder of aid workers, medical personnel, journalists, and UN officials- all crimes perpetrated by Israel during the current phase of its genocide in Palestine. And all shamelessly followed by claims of self-defense by Israel’s defenders in the West.’  (Via Mondoweiss)

Having figured out, over this pixelated page, that genocide must be addressed as a crime, not a war crime, I humbly discover that I stand on the shoulders of “Raphael Lemkin.

Lemkin was … first …to put forward the theory that genocide is not a war crime and that the immorality of a crime such as genocide should not be confused with the amorality of war.” Genocide is “the gravest and greatest of crimes,” and thus dubbed “a crime against humanity,” wrote Lemkin, a Polish, Jewish human rights lawyer.

“‘The term does not necessarily signify mass killings although it may mean that,’ Lemkin explained in a 1945 article. ‘More often it refers to a coordinated plan aimed at destruction of the essential foundations’—cultural institutions, physical structures, the economy—’of the life of national groups.” (Via Mother Jones.)

Much like any good libertarian, Lemkin was a natural-rights thinker, whose reasoning about genocide was derived from reasoning about the crime of homicide. Mass murder, essentially, is when “the natural right of the individual to exist” has been sundered many times over.

As to the offender: If the individual may not gratuitously and serially kill people; neither may the collective, the state, exterminate a class of people. It should make no difference as to whether the felon is a lone criminal or the “common force,” to use Frédéric Bastiat’s natural-rights nomenclature. In The Law, Bastiat writes this:

“Since … force by an individual cannot legitimately be… used against the person, freedom, or property of another individual, by the same argument, the common force cannot legitimately be used to destroy the person, freedom, or property of either individuals or classes.”

WHEN MONEY MEDIATES MURDER

If words matter, then boy! does money count.

The Israel Lobby, AIPAC (The American Israel Public Affairs Committee), is an almighty fifth column which ought to have long since come under corruption investigations and dismantled (ditto the ADL). At the very least, AIPAC, a blatant Israel operative, ought to have been forced to register as a foreign agent and scrutinized.

The first such endeavor was attempted by William Fulbright decades back. In 1963, by Wikipedia’s telling, Fulbright—academic, statesman and politician—had implicated AIPAC in laundering five million tax-deductible dollars “from philanthropic Americans,” by ostensibly sending the money to Israel “and then recycle[ing] it back to the U.S. for distribution to organizations seeking to influence public opinion in favor of Israel.”

On April 15, 1973, Fulbright told Face the Nation, a current affairs television program, that “Israel controls the U.S. Senate. … [and that we] should be more concerned about the United States interest rather than doing the bidding of Israel … The Senate is subservient to Israel, in my opinion much too much.”

That was the end of Fulbright’s campaign.

Underscored in 1973, Fulbright’s reality has reached its nadir in 2024. On July 23, American law-makers-cum-Israel-lap-dogs leap to their feet some 50 times, with cheers and deafening applause, to express adulation for mass murderer Bibi Netanyahu, who is named as an offender by the International Criminal Court.

From Fulbright whose re-election bid AIPAC helped torpedo in 1973, to Cori Bush and Jamaal Bowman, two charismatic Americans with grassroots support, who’d refused to do Israel’s bidding, in 2024: AIPAC (track it) continues to buy influence, and to subvert Americans whenever they attempt to exert their popular will against that of the Israel donor-class.

Progressive representatives Jamaal Bowman (D-NY) and Cori Bush of Missouri dared to voice disgust for Israel’s genocide of the Palestinians of Gaza. That was the end of the Bush/Bowman bids for office.

While we’re deconstructing Israel’s lexicon of crime, do please quit calling its “Operation Swords of Iron” in Gaza a war. It’s not.

GENOCIDE IS NOT WAR

Israel’s onslaught on Gaza—from my diligent daily tracking, the Israelis have comfortably settled into massacring between 30 to 100 individuals, each day—is not a war by any definition.

In Gaza, there are no armies arrayed one against the other. This is no war between equal, opposing warrior forces. There is no parity on the battle field, only, for the most, the bullyboy’s aerial blitzkrieg carried out against a trapped civilian population. In terms of matériel, not the quality or morality of its men, the Middle East’s most powerful army is also among the world’s top 20 military forces. “Since the beginning of ground operations in Gaza, on October 27, 2023; 346 Israeli soldiers have fallen in combat,” reports the aforementioned Dr. Finkelstein.  In conversation with journalist Glenn Greenwald, Finkelstein bolsters my point here. Losing a soldier a day in battle is not a war.

Rather, the IDF’s extermination campaign against a population of cornered civilians has been disrupted by pockets of asymmetric guerilla warfare from non-state resistance fighters. Their exploits are available in full on the X platform  of military analyst Jon Elmer.

Gleaned from my close observations over 11 months; the Gaza-based Hamas fighting brigades are no fat cats; they are skinny young Ghazzawi men, some in sandals, slinking among their ruined homes, darting in-and-out to defend what is left of their communities. These fighters are indubitably of the Palestinian people and for the people, as Palestinians see them.

And the way Palestinians see things is all important. The art of getting along, differences and all, is imperative in conflict resolution. Realpolitik demands not dominance, but that dueling perspectives be taken into consideration. Israel and America should never foist their reality on their opponents.

At any rate, let us try to avoid a dialogue of the deaf, and remember that words matter. They mediate action. Use them accurately: Genocide is the kind of crime that stands alone; no mitigation or extenuation attach to genocide. By extension, Israel is waging genocide, not war, and … Americans want it stopped.

For all their initial stated eagerness; most of our countrymen (61 percent now) want Israel’s genocide halted. Americans, moreover, want to stop arming Israel, as a June poll from CBS showed (via The Intercept). This includes 77 percent of Democrats and nearly 40 percent of Republicans.

Beholden to donor-class dominated politics, the regnant villains of the Stupid and the Evil Parties are, nevertheless, refusing to end the genocide in Gaza. Yet it must be stopped. Actively and urgently so, given that the Israeli terroristic enterprise has expanded into Lebanon.

The post Deconstructing Israel’s Lexicon of Crime appeared first on LewRockwell.

JD Vance is no slouch as a debater. We’d think even Tim Walz would grant that much after getting shellacked last night by the Donald’s running mate.

We will also grant that both men were civil, even midwestern “nice”. But that just goes to prove that most of the blame for the nastiness that pervades the current political process in America, and which has thereby buried the real issues, lies with the Donald. He’s just an incorrigibly bombastic, ill-mannered lout who substitutes name-calling, slogan-checking and bragging for anything that even remotely sounds like a policy discussion.

Of course, when it comes to silencing the real issues you can add to the mix the fact that the mainstream media faithfully shunts aside anything outside the UniParty’s “Overton Window” of permissible discussion.

Thus, the two network harpies who moderated the debate devoted a preponderant share of the time to secondary or non-issues like abortion, gun control, immigration and J6. At the same time, they did not ask a single question about—

• the nation’s catastrophic public debt and massive structural deficits as far as the eye can see.
• the rogue central bank that has shackled the US economy with bubbles, inflation, debt and mal-distribution of windfall wealth.
• a bloated Warfare State that is bleeding the Treasury dry and pushing the world ever closer to WWIII.
• the newfound eagerness of the Washington ruling class to suppress dissent and literally suspend the bill of rights with respect to speech, assembly, worship, property rights and 4th Amendment’s safeguards against unreasonable search and seizure.

Moreover, when it comes to even the mundane matter of fact-checking they allowed Tim Walz’ blatant lie about illegal border crossings being lower now than under Trump to slide by with nary a raised eye-brow.

As it happens, however, border apprehensions under Harris-Biden have been quadruple those under Trump on a month-after-month basis, as is made blatantly evident by the blue versus red areas of the chart below. But if you have your magnifying glass handy you can also see that for the month of August 2024 the 58,038 border apprehensions were slightly lower than the 75,316 during Trump’s final month in office.

But talk about cherry-picking! Harris’ running mate compared nearly the highest month under Trump with an aberrantly low month under Harris-Biden and than proclaimed “we won”.

That’s not even school-yard bullshit, but don’t blame the hapless Coach Walz. Harris made the same unfact-checked claim in the presidential debate.

Our real point is far larger, however. The back and forth between the two candidates on the immigration issue is merely illustrative of how the UniParty engages in make-pretend political combat, while ignoring the substance of this and nearly every other serious issue facing the nation.

In the case of the ersatz battle over immigration, it needs be noted that the red area above didn’t happen because the Donald failed to complete his big beautiful Wall or hired too few border patrol agents. And the far greater surge in the blue area wasn’t really owing to Biden’s alleged repeal of 84 Trump Executive Orders, as Vance argued, or due to Trump’s sabotaging of the so-called Bipartisan Immigration Reform bill, as Walz and Harris keep saying.

No, those are just phony partisan debating points that are, as Kamala should say, “unburdened” by the economics which underlie the chart above. Stated differently, there is a big economic “sucking sound to the north” that is pulling desperately poor Latin American workers and families into the structurally labor-short American economy north of the Rio Grande.

But just to remind, the US absorbs more than 4.5 million legal immigrants every year. In 2023 this included 1.17 million permanent green card holders, along with 3.38 million temporary visas recipients for student enrollments, temporary work, cultural exchange etc.

Virtually all of these legal immigrants arrive on Delta, United etc or Greyhound buses and other forms of commercial transportation. They don’t use the services of criminal coyotes, wade through the Rio Grande with suitcases balanced on their heads or sneak along the Arizona desert in the dead of night. Nor do they otherwise cause chaos at the border or engage in anti-social behavior once they are settled inside the country at locations from coast-to-coast.

This massive, smoothly-conducted, trouble-free inflow of 4.6 million immigrants in 2023 was processed through upwards of 200 US embassies and consulates around the world, but especially via the 50 or so State Department locations in Mexico and down through central and South America. The green card holders, in particular, were comprised of family members of US citizens or residents and various categories of skilled workers in science, technology, medical and other professional fields, plus the so-called diversity lottery conducted in nearly every country on the planet.

Needless to say, there were not many criminals, mental patients, drug dealers or other social misfits among these 4.6 million legal immigrants in 2023 because as part of the application process at all the locations indicated by the stars, dots and squares on the map below they were vetted for compatibility with a law-abiding temporary or permanent stay in the United States. The misfits got screened-out in the preponderance of cases.

US Embassies, Consulates and Other State Department Locations Abroad

The problem, of course, is that America needs regular workers and even unskilled factory, warehouse, fast food, construction, housekeeping and lawn-care hands, too, not just Indian and Korean PhD’s. In fact, so few babies were born to native American families during the last 10 to 40 years that the supply of native born workers has just plain flat-lined.

As shown below, since May 2019 there has barely been a single native-born worker (black line) added to the US employment rolls, even as the foreign-born work force (purple line) has grown by nearly 4 million or 14%. So there is no mystery as to why there are throngs of young and middle-aged men, with or without their families, at both the border ports of entry and in the illegal stretches in-between. To wit, owing to sheer demographics, the US has become a giant magnet for unskilled and semi-skilled workers from abroad.

Index of Foreign-Born And Native-Born Employment Since May 2019

And this gets us to the utterly broken and dysfunctional Federal immigration laws and system. The US needs millions of unskilled and semi-skilled workers, but the giant legal immigration system described above provides less than 5,000 slots per year for such workers. That’s not even a piddling drop in the bucket relative to need.

But given both the ingenuity of people and markets, what amounts to an economic vacuum gets filled. That is to say, job-seekers come to the border claiming to be refugees and asylum seekers because that’s the only legal path to the millions of unfilled jobs from Seattle to Sarasota.

Needless to say, there is a nasty Catch-22 in this asylum ruse. To get in the cue for legal asylum you first have to break the law by crossing the border. And once you do that you join about 1.1 million other “illegals” waiting for their hearing and asylum claim adjudication in a line that might take years to complete. In the interim, you are put on “parole” in the US with virtually no vetting as to whether you are criminal or law-abiding worker, even as you join the count of 11 million so-called “illegals” about which politicians endlessly bloviate.

Then again, suppose the “unskilled worker” quota was expanded to, say, 400,000 per year, which would equate to just 0.25% of the employed labor force. And applicants were required to apply just like other green card and temporary visa holders at the 200 stars, dots and square locations on the State Department map above and be vetted for background checks just like the 4.6 million visa-holders admitted in 2023.

Alas, the throngs at the border would dry up virtually overnight. Work-seekers would no longer pretend to be refugees and would not need the services of coyotes and the criminal cartels to get to the border crossings. They would go to the nearest US consulate in their own country, instead, and upon the receipt of a unskilled worker quota would spend far less on a Delta ticket from, say, Honduras than they would on the current criminal transit system.

Moreover, with the crowds reduced by upwards of 95% at the ports of entry and illegal crossing points in-between, the Border Patrol would once again be positioned to do its law enforcement job. That is to say, the only migrants left at the border would be drug dealers, criminals and other social misfits who got screened out at the consulates. And these could be arrested, cuffed and sent packing back to their home countries.

In short, a large scale Guest Worker program operated in this manner would at once enable migrant workers to fill the nation’s pressing labor shortage while keeping criminals and drug-dealers out—even as it put the high paid bureaucrats in the State Department’s foreign locations to work doing something productive.

Needless to say, such a rational solution to the border problem is of interest to neither the Dems nor the GOP and therefore never comes up in the endless noisy debates about the so-called border crisis and invasion.

Self-evidently, the Democrats are looking for voters dependent upon government supplied cash and services, and actually don’t even want to accommodate the inflow of genuine workers. That’s because the unions have long said a loud “nyet”.

At the same time, the Trumpified GOP wants a political issue that can be positioned to scare the bejesus out of everyday Americans hard-pressed by the failing, inflationary economy that has been fostered by the spend, borrow and print policies of the UniParty.

We were hoping that the highly intelligent, reasonably informed and independent-minded JD Vance would rise above Trumpian demagoguery when the issue arose repeatedly last night. Alas, he ended up sounding just like the Donald, sans the nasty rhetoric.

Meanwhile, did young Mr. Vance go on the attack against the Washington spenders and soaring public debt? Or the unelected money-printers at the Fed who have become the handmaids of Wall Street speculators and Washington spenders? Or even the new Dem War Party that has now welcomed neocon cretins like Dick Cheney to their campaign?

No, he did not. As the insightful Anton Wahlman penned this AM, Walz’ boast that the Harris campaign now enthusiastically embraces both the Welfare State (Bernie Sanders) and the Warfare State (Dick Cheney), and therefore is heading us balls-to-the walls toward national bankruptcy, provided an opening for a crushing blow to his opponent.

JD Vance should have opened his closing statement by saying “Tim Walz just said that Kamala Harris has built a new coalition consisting of Dick Cheney to Bernie Sanders. That’s war and communism. Ladies and Gentlemen, I rest my case. If you want Dick Cheney and Bernie Sanders, war and communism, by all means vote for Harris-Walz. But if you don’t want war and communism, then we are the only alternative. With us, you get peace and capitalism, with them you get war and communism. He said it himself.”

Well, maybe next time. And while he is at it maybe next time he will also stop listening to those Washington-based Republican strategists and consultants who obviously told him to pull his punches on issue after issue that goes to the heart of liberty and prosperity.

So when an in-the-tank moderator asks about Trump’s statement that Climate Change is a Hoax, he would do well to say, “hell, yes, and its going to push your driving expense and energy costs through the roof”.

Likewise, would he please not say Trump rescued ObamaCare and that the Federal government is happy to force you into giant health insurance pools so you can subsidize neighbors who thrive on fast food consumed night after night on their TV room Barcaloungers?

And then there is the maternity leave mandates to all employers. That, JD, is old-fashioned Minnesota Farmer-Labor socialism. You’re agin that, too!

Reprinted with permission from David Stockman’s Contra Corner.

The post Vance’s Big Win Which Wasn’t All That appeared first on LewRockwell.

Federal Reserve technocrats like to use a variety of slogans and buzzwords designed to make the Federal Reserve look like it’s an apolitical, “scientific” institution guided only by a quest for sound management of the economy. Specifically, nearly every time Fed chairman Jerome Powell makes an appearance—whether it’s the usual FOMC press conference, or when testifying before Congress—Powell is careful to make mention of how the Fed is “data driven,” and how the Fed “seeks to achieve maximum employment and inflation at the rate of 2 percent over the longer run.”

This sounds nice, of course, and gives the impression that the Fed is concerned about keeping price inflation “low.” In practice, however, limiting price inflation is lowest among the Federal Reserve’s priorities. Rather, the Federal Reserve is primarily concerned with using monetary stimulus to keep the government’s borrowing costs low and employment rates high—which is contrary to the alleged goal of “low” price inflation.

Indeed, in recent years we have repeatedly seen how the Federal Reserve’s much-touted two-percent price-inflation goal is little more than a political slogan.

Two-Percent Inflation “Over the Longer Run”

The Fed’s lack of interest in keeping inflation low is demonstrated in part by how the Fed has repeatedly upped its target inflation rate over the past thirty years.

After all, the two-percent target has only been official Fed policy since 2012. It was the result of an arbitrarily-chosen number adopted to mimic with the policy of the European Central Bank which had adopted a two-percent target for the new euro currency in 1999. Before then, the only official, legislative price-inflation target had been zero percent, as stated in the Full Employment and Balanced Growth Act of 1978.

In the 1990s, some members of the Fed’s Federal Open Market Committee—especially Janet Yellen—began calling for a higher target of two percent. After the launch of the euro, the Fed informally adopted a two-percent target, and formally adopted the policy in 2012. The policy, as stated, implied that the Fed would seek to keep the price-inflation rate as close as possible to two percent at all times. Note the target was most definitely not “two percent or lower,” but simply two percent. Thus, during many periods of the past twenty years, we often heard complaints from Fed economists that price inflation was “too low.” The Fed repeatedly stated that it sought to push inflation higher to meet the two-percent target.

Less than a decade after the formal adoption of the two-percent target, however, the Fed abandoned the straight-up two-percent target and turned toward pushing for two percent “over the longer run.” The Fed explicitly stated the purpose of this change was to provide for “a flexible average inflation target.” Fed said this change was necessary because price inflation had supposedly been too low for too long, and this newfound “flexibility” allowed for holding the target rate higher than two percent to bring up the longer-term average rate of inflation.

So, since 2020, targeting two-percent inflation actually means running inflation above two percent—sometimes well above two percent—if the Fed decides that price inflation had been “too low” during some previous period.

The Fed also has total flexibility in how it defines price inflation over the longer term. The “longer term” can be defined as any time period of the Fed’s choosing. At the moment, according to this document from the Richmond Fed, to “compute average annual inflation over longer periods, we calculate annualized percentage changes in the PCE price index between two dates.” The longer run, it seems is the period from January 2012 to the present.

Of course, the time period we choose has a big impact on what our average annualized price-inflation rate will be. If our starting point is January 2012, annualized price inflation is 2.2 percent. On the other hand, if our starting point is ten years ago (August 2014), then annualized inflation is 2.4 percent. If our starting point is five years ago, then we’re looking at 3.5 percent annualized inflation—80 percent higher than the two-percent target.1 How interesting that the Fed just happens to have picked a base period that ends up showing that the Fed has masterfully steered the US economy toward 2.2 percent, so very close to its target rate!

“Balancing” Employment and Price Inflation on Manipulated Data

This flexibility in determining longer-run price inflation also allows the Fed to put its thumb on the scales when balancing the so-called “dual mandate.”

Powell and other Fed technocrats routinely mention that this mandate requires that the Fed ensure “employment and inflation goals” are “roughly in balance.” These goals must be “balanced” because they are in conflict with each other: in the short term, hawkish monetary policy tends to slow employment growth. On the other hand, if the Fed embraces easy money in pursuit of “stimulating” job growth, this will, in the short term, tend to drive more price inflation, either in assets or in consumer prices.

However, when the Fed enjoys greater flexibility in determining for itself how to define longer-term price inflation, the Fed can also decide for itself when to declare victory in achieving its inflation goals. This allows the Fed to more easily claim it can embrace new easy-money stimulus without fear of reviving price inflation.

Indeed, this appears to be exactly what is going on right now. At the September FOMC press conference, Charman Powell declared that the economy is in “great shape” and also that now is the time for the fed to force down interest rates in pursuit of stimulating employment. Yet, how can the Fed justify a turn back to easy money right on the heels of 40-year highs in price inflation? To justify this decision, Powell declared that the ”Committee has gained greater confidence that inflation is moving sustainably toward 2 percent.” This alleged confidence, however, hinges on how the Fed choses to arbitrarily define longer-term price inflation.

This is how the “data-driven” Fed works. First, it adopts an arbitrary two-percent inflation target well above its previous legislatively-defined target. Then, the Fed decides that new target is too rigorous, and so adopts a more “flexible” average two-percent target over a non-specific longer run. Then, the Fed just happens to adopt a longer run time frame that shows that the Fed has very nearly achieved victory in hitting its two-percent longer-run target.

After that, it’s time to lower the target interest rate again so the Fed can get back to what really matters: forcing down the cost of government debt so the Treasury can run another two-trillion-dollar deficit.

1 These calculations are based on the PCE price index, the Fed’s preferred measure of price inflation. See: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/PCEPI

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

The post Why the Fed’s Two-Percent Inflation Target Is Meaningless appeared first on LewRockwell.

I wrote a piece here called “Energies”, in which I began to address the meta-material “energies” that I believe surround us and flow through us. The bias of our post-Enlightenment Western hermeneutic, of course, is that these “energies,” whether beneficent or malevolent, do not in fact exist, and that we are crazy or fanatically deluded to speak of them, let alone to try to invoke the protection of the good ones and fear the influence of the negative ones.

That materialist bias can be good because it keeps us from leaping off into an ether of ungrounded imagination, or from cowering in the face of baseless superstition; but it is also bad because this materialist bias, and the silencing from public discourse of people’s actual (and common) experiences of metaphysical forces, leaves us extremely vulnerable to dark forces. And this leaves us vulnerable to dark forces at a time when what is underway, more fundamentally than anything else on the planet, is a battle between good and evil.

This battle is probably a battle for our very souls.

So much of what we see the perversions of pop culture, the abandonment by churches and synagogues of their missions, the division of families, the fetishization of abortion, the murder of elders in hospitals and the abandonment to hunger of citizens in North Carolina at this very moment, the worship of war in Washington DC — all of this surely is merely manifestations of this spiritual battle.

So I might as well just tell you. I now believe that metaphysical energies, good and evil, are real and surrounding us always and trying to affect us. Here are some experiences that led me to believe this more deeply and literally than ever.

I was always sensitive, as I have written before, to force fields such as those left in a building where violence or grief have taken place. I know plenty of people who have seen things they cannot explain materially — a pale figure flickering out of the corner of their eyes in a house they later learned was haunted, for instance.

Many years ago, a former partner of mine, when we stayed in a Civil War-era inn located at the edge of an old battlefield, was awakened all night by orbs of light. He thought at first that these were headlights of passing cars. I could not see them, thank God. But I watched him see them.

I’ve certainly heard footsteps I could not explain — this has happened to me three times. Once it happened in an old renovated shack in Massachusetts, where Brian, two young relatives of ours, and I, all stayed. The footsteps sounded like those of a man in heavy boots. They paced back and forth inside the little cabin all night long. At several points the footsteps sounded as if they had shifted onto the roof!

These footsteps were so scary and insistent that I ended up sleeping in the bathtub, as if that could help me. I was absolutely terrified.

In the morning, we all confirmed with one another that this had really happened; we all had individually heard these footsteps and for some reason we each had thought that none of the others present, could. There had also been a force field in the cabin when this was taking place, that felt to me rather paralyzing — as if it was pointless to try to do anything about what we were hearing, or to wake anyone else. I could not wait to just pack up and leave.

At another location, in an old hotel in Western Canada, years before that, I had heard male footsteps pacing back and forth all night about ten feet above me, in a room with a 12-foot ceiling. Again, I did not get the physics of what I was hearing. When I asked the hotel staff about it, they explained that a former guest, from the mid-20th century, checks in every day online at ten am, and that many guests hear his footsteps. Were the staff joking with me? Who knows; again, I was very happy to check out.

The last such instance took place when Brian and I were staying at Rhodes House. This is the beautiful home in Oxford University of the Rhodes Scholarship. It is an impressive stone building from 1926, built in memory of the founder of the scholarship, Cecil Rhodes.

Rhodes’ is of course a complex and in some ways very dark legacy. In addition to his having founded a scholarship that has done a great deal of good, Rhodes could be considered a mass murderer for his imperialist policies in Southern Africa:

“As the greatest individual symbol of British imperialism, Rhodes’s memorials clearly need no longer occupy prominent places, as these constitute a permanent assault on the descendants of his black victims. However, it is also critical that Rhodes’s monuments not be totally erased. […]

Rhodes was a white supremacist who committed crimes against humanity. He dispossessed black people of their ancestral lands in contemporary Zimbabwe and Zambia – Southern and Northern Rhodesia – through aggressive and duplicitous means, killing an estimated 60,000 people, and stealing 3.5 million square miles of Southern African real estate. Rhodes’s mercenaries embarked on a savage scorched-earth policy: pillaging and raping; summarily executing black prisoners of war, stealing farm land and thousands of herds of cattle, and burning kraals.”

Late one night, Brian and I — and another young relative who was with us, staying in a separate bedroom — all heard, on the second floor of Rhodes House, the high-heeled footsteps of a woman, pacing back and forth down the lengthy wood-floored hallway.

So there I was cowering in bed — yet again — trying to tell myself that this was all my imagination. I fear and dread encountering the supernatural, and just want it to go away and leave me alone.

But Brian, Irishman that he is, welcomes it. At the same moment that I was under the covers hoping that I was not hearing what I was hearing, Brian was pouring himself a drink in a guest kitchen on the bedroom level. He told me later that the high-heeled steps paused outside this kitchen door. Brian spoke aloud then, and invited whoever it was to stop trying to spook him, and to come on in for a drink.

After he said that, he told me the later, the sound of the steps just stopped.

The jovial Rhodes House porters the next day confirmed that others had also told tales of inexplicable activities on the second floor. Were they kidding with us? Who knows?

Thankfully, I have never previously, til recently, seen anything I can’t explain. I don’t want to!

But that all began to change when I started in 2024 to read the 1560 Geneva Bible aloud on video, and to compare it to the Hebrew Torah.

When I first felt moved to do this — to read both texts from beginning to end on video, and to analyze them and compare them with a typical modern English translation — I knew that this was an unusual and even Quixotic-seeming impulse. But something just pushed and pushed me to start achieving this task; even if no-one watched or followed these videos, it was something I felt I had to do.

I had never read the Hebrew Torah in anything like its entirety. I was on fire with excitement about having stumbled upon the 1560 Geneva Bible, with its extremely faithful translation into English from the Hebrew (rather than from the Latin) and its beautiful Shakespearean, pre-King James Bible wording. The 1560 Geneva Bible, as you know if you follow this project of mine, is the Founders’ Bible and the Puritans’ Bible. This is a translation that Protestant critics of Catholicism had risked their lives to create.

They had fled England, where Protestant reformers were being martyred, and formed an enclave in Geneva, where they worked at this dangerous, revolutionary task. They wanted every plow boy, as they put it, to be able to read and understand the Word of God, with no intermediaries. In the 1560 Geneva Bible, and in the original Hebrew, I have been astonished to learn (forgive me if you have heard me say this already, it is the eternal headline of this revelatory task) that God is a far different literary character than He is later mis-translated as being; in these two original texts, He is far more “like us”; far more present, loving, understandable, compassionate, kind and accepting of us, than later versions, from the KJV on, represent Him as being.

The mistranslations later consistently also privilege or elevate the role of Priest or intermediary in a way that is not present in the originals. In the 1560 Geneva Bible and the Hebrew Torah, as I started to learn the minute I began my reading, God makes it very clear that you don’t need anyone between Him and you if you wish to speak with Him. In addition, later translations are far more “theological”, and they tend to imply, inaccurately, that manmade “religion” itself is needed for one’s access to God, when in the original texts, this is just not true.

It was, I think, late January or early February of 2024; Brian had to travel to see family, and I elected to stay behind and get to work with these first readings. I chose to stay in a Bed and Breakfast run by a neighbor of ours, near our house in the woods, rather than risk being alone in our house in the event that there was a power outage, which often happens in our remote area during stormy winters. I had never stayed in that Bed and Breakfast before.

My neighbor showed me upstairs to my room for the weekend. Her Bed and Breakfast was a lovely and well-run two-story farmhouse from about 1820. It was mostly unchanged from its 19th century appearance. It still had its original wide wood plank floors; maroon-curtain-festooned high windows framed snowy drifts. A parlor and a dining room were downstairs. Classic polished dark wood banisters, curved beautifully at the bottom, led you to the second floor. Charming framed photographs of our rural area area in the late 19th century lined the walls, alongside traditional paintings of landscapes and florals.

Upstairs were four bedrooms, two small and two larger. Each one was furnished with modest, historically-appropriate furnishings in warm colors — russets and goldens and leafy greens. It all made for a comfortable set of choices.

I selected a small back bedroom with a tiny en-suite bathroom. Its high window looked onto the pretty snowdrifts of the garden. A soft, deep, old-fashioned double bed awaited, as did bookshelves filled with second-hand biographies and histories that are a treat to browse on lazy snowy weekends in the country.

It was the perfect writer’s retreat: quiet and private, with layers of history to add to the general air of inspiration. And there would be a hot breakfast in the morning, made not by me! I could not wait to get started on my reading project.

I had brought two gigantic tomes with me: The 1560 Geneva Bible itself, in hardcover, was one. My 1560 Geneva Bible is a wonderfully-produced, faithfully printed facsimile copy of the original Geneva Bible, complete with golden linen covers under the dust jacket, and with the original woodcut engravings and the original fantastically relatable, down-to-Earth and illuminating editorial comments in the margins.

Read the Whole Article

The post Things I Feared Most To Write, Part Three appeared first on LewRockwell.

The Talmudic psychos not only obsessed on breathing fire against the Axis of Resistance but now also going after Russian national interests.

A case could be made that Iran’s Ballistic Retaliation Night, a measured response to Israel’s serial provocations, is less consequential when it comes to the efficacy of the Axis of Resistance than the decapitation of Hezbollah’s leadership.

Still, the message was enough to send the Talmudic psychopathologicals into a frenzy; for all their hysterical denials and massive spin, Iron Toilet Paper and the Arrow system were de facto rendered useless.

The IRGC made it known that the volley of missiles was inaugurated by a single hypersonic Fatteh 2 which took out the Arrow 3 air defense system’s radar – capable of intercepting missiles in the atmosphere.

And well-informed Iranian military sources stated that hackers went on heavy cyberattack mode to disrupt the Iron Dome system just before the start of the operation.

The IRGC finally confirmed that just about 90% of the intended targets were hit; the implication was that each target was supposed to be visited by several missiles, with some getting intercepted.

It’s open to wide speculation how many F-35s and F-15s were ultimately destroyed or damaged on two air bases, one of which, Nevatim, in the Negev, becoming literally inoperable.

The Iran-Russia military entente – part of their soon to be signed comprehensive strategic partnership – was in effect. The IRGC used the recently supplied Russian electromagnetic jammer to blind Israel-NATO GPS systems – including those of U.S. aircrafts. That explains the Iron Dome far off hitting the empty night skies.

Framing Iran’s retaliation as a casus belli

None of that substantially changed the deterrence equation. Israel continues to bomb southern Beirut. The pattern remains the same: whenever they’re hit, the genocidals cry out in pain or whine like annoying babies even as their killing machine keeps going – with unarmed civilians as privileged targets.

The bombing never stops – and it won’t, from Palestine to Lebanon and Syria, across West Asia, and leading to the “response” to Iran’s Ballistic Night.

Iran is in an extremely tough geopolitical and military position – not to mention geoeconomic, still under a tsunami of sanctions. Obviously the leadership in Tehran is fully aware of the trap being set by the Talmudic-American Zionist combo – which want to lure Iran into a major war.

Jake Sullivan, one of the stalwarts of the Biden combo which is really dictating U.S. policy (on behalf of their sponsors), considering the pathetic condition of the zombie in the White House, all but spelled it out:

“We have made clear that there will be consequences – severe consequences – for this attack, and we will work with Israel to make sure that’s the case.”

Translation: Retaliation Night is being spun as a casus belli. U.S.-Israel are already blaming Iran for the possibly incoming Mega-War in West Asia.

This war is the Holy of the Holies since at least the Cheney regime days – two decades ago. And yet Tehran, if it so decided, already has what it takes to raze Israel to the ground. They won’t do it because the price to pay would be unbearable.

Even if the Talmudic psychos and the Zio-cons finally got their wish, a remote possibility, this war, after a devastating bombing campaign, could only be won with massive U.S. boots on the ground. Whatever the spin rolling on Zio-con controlled Think Tankland/ media swamp, that won’t happen.

And still the March of Folly proceeds uninterrupted: the Zionist Project, a U.S./Israel deadly embrace, against Iran. But with a potent diferential: the back up of Russia and, further behind, China. These three are the key BRICS triad. They are at the vanguard of trying to build a new, fair multinodal world. And not by accident they happen to be the top three existential “threats” to the Empire of Chaos, Lies and Plunder.

With Project Ukraine going down the drain of History, as well as burying for good the “rules-based international order” in the black soil of Novorossiya, the real major front of the One War, the new incarnation of Forever Wars, is Iran.

In parallel, Moscow and Beijing fully realize that the more Exceptionalistan gets bogged down in West Asia, the more room of maneuver they have to accelerate the draining of the wobbly Leviathan.

Gaza-on-the-Litani

Hezbollah has a seriously though spell ahead. Resources – especially supply of weapons and military equipment, through Syria and by air from Iran to Lebanon – will become increasingly scarce. Compare it to Israel’s unlimited supply chain from Exceptionalistan – not to mention tons of money.

Israel intel is far from shabby – as commandos went deep, in secret, into Hezbollah territory collecting info on the fortification network. When – in fact if – they reach populated areas in Southern Lebanon, then it will be bombing dementia plus heavy artillery against residential areas.

That operation might well be called Gaza-on-the Litani. It will happen only if Hezbollah’s complex network in southern Lebanon is cracked – a major “if”.

Jeffrey Sachs, for all his good intentions, went as far as he could  to characterize Israelis as judeo supremacist extremist terrorists. Virtually the whole Global Majority is now aware of it.

What comes next in Talmudic-Zio-con planning may include a ghastly false flag, possibly after the U.S. presidential election, for instance on a NATO vessel or on U.S. troops in the Persian Gulf, to lock up the new administration into the long-planned U.S. war on Iran. Dick Cheney will have an orgasm – and croak.

The BRICS summit in Kazan under the Russian presidency is less than three weeks away. In sharp contrast to genocide and serial wars in West Asia, Putin and Xi will be standing by the – open – door on behalf of BRICS+, welcoming scores of nations that are fleeing the collective West like the plague.

Russia is now fully behind Iran – and as much as in floundering Ukraine, that means Russia at war with the U.S./Israel; after all the Pentagon is directly shooting down Iranian missiles, while Israel is the U.S.’s de facto pre-eminent state, fully, fiscally supported by U.S. taxpayers.

It gets trickier by the minute. Immediately after a very important meeting between Alexander Lavrentiev, Putin’s special envoy to Syria, and Ali Akbar Ahmadian, the secretary of Iran’s Supreme National Security Council, Tel Aviv went Full Dementia – what else – and targeted warehouses of Russian forces in Syria.

There was a joint Russia-Syria air defense response. What that shows is the Talmudic psychos not only obsessed on breathing fire against the Axis of Resistance but now also going after Russian national interests. This can get very ugly for them in a flash – and is yet one more illustration that the name of the (new, deadly) game is U.S./Israel vs. Russia/Iran.

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

The post They Lie. They Cheat. They Steal. They Bomb. And They Spin appeared first on LewRockwell.

“Normally, Western politics gives us actors who are trying to play the role of politicians. Walz is like an actor who is trying to play the role of an actor trying to play the role of a politician. Almost everything about him is just a few degrees off-centre. He’s like what would happen if you endowed Chat GPT with a human body and sent it off to campaign for political office.” —Eugyppius on Substack

Tuesday night’s veep palaver could be the last time you see the frightened animal known as Tim Walz for the duration of the campaign. He’s famous for his wild body language — jumping around on stage, flapping his arms — but this time the action was all concentrated in his face. You saw his eyes bug out, dart left and right, as if something fierce was coming at him (it was), and more than a few times, his head jerked around sideways so hard you wondered if it might do a whole three-sixty. His mouth, a pain-inflected frown in repose, turned down so deeply it looked like he had sashweights hanging from the corners. Altogether, his face said more than the embarrassing mishmash of mangled English that came out of it. I expect to see a few Tim Walz masks on the little goblins begging for Kit-kat bars the night of October 31.

That same obvious void of conviction you see on Tim Walz’s labile face is on display with the feds’ response to mass tragedy in the Appalachian hurricane zone. It was a point in my book, The Long Emergency, that our national government would become increasingly impotent, ineffectual, and incompetent as conditions worsened — and now here it is. The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), could not bestir itself to aid stricken citizens around the flood-ravaged region in North Carolina and Tennessee. Sec’y Mayorkas of Homeland Security said that FEMA was out of money which, in this season of political weirdness, is especially weird, seeing as how the nation’s fiscal year began Oct 1, and Congress’s continuing resolution for funding US agencies should assure that FEMA’s checkbook is full. What was up with that?

Well, everybody and his uncle has heard by now that FEMA (and many other agencies under Mayorkas’s DHS) commits tons of money to pamper the millions of mutts from foreign lands sneaking over the US border, with lots of assistance from NGO cut-outs funded by your tax dollars, who marshal groups of aliens south-of-the-border for the crossing, and then fly or bus them around our country for the special purpose of distributing them in swing voting districts to then coordinate with other NGOs devoted to registering non-citizens to vote in order to “harvest” their ballots. Quite an operation. Completely lawless and corrupt. And official!

So, no aid for you, baskets of deplorables, shivering in the dark in your hills and hollows of Appalachia, your houses splintered, scant chattels lost, and your beloved hound-dogs carried away in the roaring torrents. The money that might have helped you begin to recover from the complete devastation of your lives is paying for Guatemalans to bunk in the Roosevelt Hotel and order-in quesadillas and churros, and refill their government-issued debit cards so they can afford a few nice things as they wait for mysterious others to cast ballots in their names.

This is the work of your Democratic Party, the party of chaos, party of the Woke mentally ill, party of wrecking the country, of America’s end times. And you’re going to vote for more of it? Of course not. And despite the attempts to knock him out of the arena with scores of utter bullshit lawfare cases, and efforts to shoot him dead, Mr. Trump keeps coming at them, an implacable, relentless force, the true Golden Golem conjured up by their catamite news media. Their inability to destroy him has wrecked their minds.

One surprising October surprise is advanced by whistleblower Mike McCormick on Substack (Midnight in the Laptop of Good and Evil).  Mr. McCormick was White House stenographer under Presidents Bush II, Obama, and Trump. His job was to transcribe meetings, speeches, and interactions between major political figures. He was the proverbial fly-on-the-wall for years and years. He has seen and heard a lot and still hears a lot from people who know a lot. He says the Obama-Biden-Harris faction of the Deep State blob is anti-Israel and that Israel understands what this means. He says that Benjamin Netanyahu has told “Joe Biden” (or, let’s say, told errand-boys Tony Blinken and Jake Sullivan) that if the blob engineers a phony victory for Kamala Harris, he will blow up the oil fields in Iran and the anti-Israel Democrats will have to pick up the pieces.

There it is, raw power politics, like so much meat on the table. “Joe Biden” cannot control Bibi. “Joe Biden” is too far gone and two weak, and Israel does not aim to let itself get wiped off the map, as Iran’s leadership never tires of saying. The blob, McCormick says, has to ask itself: does it help rig the election for Harris or stand down on all its ballot harvesting and other trickery and actually allow a real election to roll out? Surprise! Now, take your Kit-kat bar and go home.

Reprinted with permission from JamesHowardKunstler.com.

The post October Surprise appeared first on LewRockwell.

In a lot of my commentary I give the UK a lot of grief. I give many people a lot of grief. It’s kinda my thing.

But to remind everyone, I was one of the chief champions of Brexit, cutting my teeth hard during the endless Brexit negotiations of 2017-19, trying to explain why things were happening the way they were.

I always knew that Brexit was a fight between UK elites beholden to Davos, the same folks that overthrew Margaret Thatcher in the 1990s, and the people themselves, backed by what I’m now calling The British Remnant. This group is easy to understand, they are the group still clinging to the glory of an Empire lost and will graft themselves to whoever they have more influence with.

Neither of these groups love their native population, just to be clear. But the Remnant loves to invoke past glory to keep “Little Britain” still thinking someone cares about them. There are no good guys in this however, only villains and victims.

The heroes are few and far between. The people of the UK are victims. Their governments have been the villains. But the question always arises, is there a bigger villain?

To me that answer is yes, the EU. And I say that knowing that their desire to do away with the British Remnant is an unqualified good thing. It dovetails with what I would like to see. But I also say that knowing that those who are trying to replace the Remnant on the world stage are even worse, especially because a good portion of that British Remnant will happily cut a deal with the EU to advance its long-held agenda of global control if the US is successfully color revolution’d into splitting up.

Divide and rule. It is the prime strategic ploy of abusers, narcissists and villains. Triangulate two factions into fighting each other while you sidle up to both of them. It’s worked brilliantly for the British and their allies for hundreds of years.

So, there are a lot of mixed feelings in laying out these scenarios. Because someone is going to wriggle off the hook if things work out for the best, defined as the US surviving in its current 50-state form, the BRICS alliance forming up to unify Asia, and the post-WWII institutional order, including the old monetary system, is destroyed.

To be blunt, I give that outcome something like a 5-10% probability.

Some form of the British Remnant or the EU will survive this. Globalism will not die, but it can be weakened severely and set on a different path, one not quite so sinister. So, for today’s post I’m going to reframe my comments from that perspective, seeing the UK as a victim, trapped by their proximity and relationships with the EU.

This, of course, is not the real story, only a part of it.

So, let’s get to the meat of today’s comments:

Linked above is a pretty good video discussing the background to today’s overlapping crises in the UK. It’s worth watching for the statistics and the general arc of the story but it misses some essential elements of the larger picture.

Starting with the basics. London dominates the UK economy. Without London the UK is already an irrelevant economy. Taxes are insane, only surpassed by the regulatory burden on the middle class. I’ve talked about this in my post about the television show Clarkson’s Farm. The things Jeremy presents in that show, which I highly recommend as both entertainment and education, are just one angle on what’s been going on in the UK.

What the video misses is that all of this is purposeful policy and that policy has been very successful. They identify three shocks to the British economy that rocked it to the core: Brexit, COVID, Ukraine.

I’ll give them credit they integrated Ukraine into their analysis, few do.

Brexit

Let’s start with Brexit. While the video blames Britain’s lost decade on why the people were angry enough to vote to leave the EU, it implies this was the wrong choice. It wasn’t. Remember back to the Brexit vote and the main criticism of Brexiteers was that they were backed by big oligarchic “old money,” that it wasn’t a grassroots movement.

Nonsense, of course it was, but it was also an opportunity for The Remnant to change the course of the country, and begin triangulating between the US and Europe. The election of Donald Trump a few months later solidified that opportunity.

That was to the Remnant’s credit, but they made the now near-fatal mistake of using that opportunity to push the US, under Trump, further towards their long-stated goals of subjugating Russia, forking them from China, and getting back to their rightful business of running everything from the shadows.

The “uncertainty” over Brexit was a wholly manufactured uncertainty created by both the British government working in concert with the EU to punish the British people for ‘voting wrong.’ The Brexit ‘negotiations’ were a sham until the British people got involved, overthrowing Theresa May and bringing in Boris Johnson.

Three years it took to finally get the UK out of the EU, the drama ending in December 2019 with the election of Boris Johnson in an historic victory.

From the moment the Brexit vote was organized however that ‘uncertainty’ manifested itself in a major drop in the British pound vs. the Euro, as I presented in the Patron Market Report from 9/18.

In currency charts the numerator directly correlates. In this case up means stronger euro and weaker pound.

The key here is that the big weakening of the pound versus the euro was a major source of inflation in the UK in the years before COVID. But, at the same time, there should have been a big investment push into the UK that created new jobs etc. because of that same weaker pound.

Trump promised this and was ready to give the UK a good trade deal which would have been excellent for the middle class.

And, guess what? The globalists within the UK political class sabotaged that at every turn. The EU dragged out negotiations for three years, ultimately lost the fight thanks to the alliance between Trump and Boris Johnson (as well as Queen Elizabeth) and the UK got all of the inflation, none of the investment, and ever increasing debt and more regulation to help ensure EU interests were protected.

Billions of euros of welfare for Brussels not a pound for “Little Britain,” who, it can’t be stressed enough, both factions despise, Davos and The Remnant.

The UK pursued a typical IMF-style austerity program, higher taxes and lowered social services to keep spending down to hold the budget deficit under a proscribed level. This is pure nonsense and, as always, prioritized sovereign bond holders at the expense of the local economy. It’s a recipe for economic destruction of the middle class.

It’s policy. And policy is a choice.

It is prima facie evidence that governments in the West are corrupt to the core. It is the exact opposite of how a country exits the debt trap from the previous round of government spending.

The better plan is to reduce taxes and spending at the same time and allowing bond yields to rise but issue far fewer of them. The budgetary cost is the same. Lower taxes invites investment which ultimately raise tax collections overall while the debt grows at a much slower rate thanks to lower spending in the long run.

They know this. And they don’t ever do it. Why? Because they hate us.

The result was a strengthening of the pound vs. the euro and threatened a breakdown of the EUR/GBP cross which would drop the EUR/GBP out of the range, forcing Europe to be competitive.

At that point a stronger pound would have been beneficial, increasing British purchasing power coupled with Trump giving the UK favorable trade terms. So, from Daovs’ perspective that had to be crushed.

When Jerome Powell took over the Fed and began raising interest rates while in 2019 US banks began refusing to take Euro-zone sovereign debt at repo collateral, pressure on Eurobond markets rose and Boris Johnson came to power taking the UK out of the EU at the end of that year.

COVID-19 

Now, think about COVID-19. December 2019, Brexit gets done. Britain leaves the EU. Johnson and Trump become the main target of the globalist operation to destroy the global economy. Johnson is forced to backtrack hard on lockdowns, etc. after a couple of attempts on his life. The pound weakens again.

I’ve always viewed COVID-19 as some form of operation. I refused to even call it a pandemic because the political fallout from it was clear that this was a multi-theatre, multi-modal attack on the foundations of society itself. In the past I’ve discussed COVID from the perspective of it forcing the Federal Reserve back to the zero-bound after the US Treasury markets go ‘bidless.’ How does that happen?

Not without help, that’s how.

As the video points out, serious damage is done to the UK labor market as the promises of Brexit never materialize. It never recovers. Why? Because the EU refuses to allow investment into the UK because it is no longer a member state. With Trump dealing with COVID and a de facto lame duck, nothing was going to happen on Capitol Hill to help the UK break free of this economic stranglehold the EU placed them in.

They just ran the operation, ran out the clock on Trump, with the intention to getting everything back on track. Brexit and Trump, as I’ve said for years, forced Davos to bring forward their timetable from 2030 to 2020. And, in the end, it will be their undoing, but man, have they fucked up the world in the process.

After Trump is deposed and there is no trade deal, a strengthening pound will now retard foreign investment. Johnson gets crushed. Powell starts raising rates. The Bank of England raises ahead of him, crushing the pound and further eroding the British budget.

Once Powell starts raising hard, Lagarde announces the TPI to protect bond spreads and the currency band, meaning she is going to further tilt the board in her favor, as I’ve discussed in countless posts and interviews.

The whole euro-zone goes on a UST buying spree to keep the US dollar from rising too fast and keep both City of London and EU banks from imploding. If Gilt and Bund prices fall too far then we’ll have a banking crisis in both places.

It should be clear at this point that both the BoE and the ECB are on the offensive against their respective middle classes to foment the very currency crisis that we’re on the verge of.

2021 is the year in which the US, through the Fed, begins tightening the noose on both of them, first by draining excess dollar liquidity globally through the Reverse Repo facility and then, after Powell’s reconfirmation as FOMC Chair through raising interest rates and quantitative tightening.

{Please refer to literally everything I wrote here on the blog in the second half of 2021 and 2022 to get up to speed. I can’t link it all folks. But you can start here the podcasts from the time laying out the argument then are linked from there}

Ukraine War

Lastly we get the war in Ukraine, which, as Alex Krainer has pointed out, the UK guaranteed billions in IMF loans to Ukraine to fight the war. After reading Alex’s post linked above, I really recommend Podcast Episode #190 for more detail.

In the context of all of this it should come as no surprise, in hindsight, that NATO was pushing for this war in late 2021/early 2022. At that point they figured Powell was dead in the water, with Biden at the helm, and the insider trading scandal at the Fed robbing him of his lieutenants, Kaplan, Carida, and Rosengren. Build Back Better and the Infrastructure bills would force Powell to stay at the zero-bound while war broke out.

In hindsight, February 2022 is a major turning point in this story. In the same week we get Powell’s confirmation hearing and Putin surprises everyone by starting the war early. So, now, the plan which was to throw unlimited money at Ukraine at the zero-bound would now have to be funded at much higher rates, making it that much more difficult for the UK and the EU to finance their latest war for Asian physical collateral using US weaponry.

Liz Truss tried to implement a budget that would make the country energy self-sufficient and we get the Gilt crisis of Sept. 2022 because that budget looks unsustainable in the current rate environment. Davos activates Blackrock who begins pulling investments from British pension funds. This is effectively blackmailing the Bank of England who has to bail them out to the tune of 160 billion pounds, according to Mr. Krainer’s analysis.

That brought down Truss’ government and it was timed with the death of Queen Elizabeth II. The last gasp of the Remnant was swept away. Charles ascends to the throne and begins the last phase of the destruction of the old British economy on behalf of his Davos handlers/benefactors/jailors… whatever.

The video makes too big a point about the resultant labor deficit in the UK which was, like all of this, a manufactured outcome from the entire scheme to punish the country for Brexit. The EU warned Britons about this. They warned the US against voting for Trump. They will not stop until they have destroyed everything.

Rishi Sunak is brought in to maintain the current path to undermine Brexit by further saddling the country with unsustainable taxes, low purchasing power, more climate change/DEI/ESG bullshit to retard investment and prep the country for Keir Starmer. Sunak was brought in to destroy the Tories and prep the country for one party rule.

What set a lot of this in motion was Putin going for the decapitation strike on Kiev ahead of schedule. Putin did what he wasn’t supposed to do… go first and invite the cheap moralizing of Davos and the West.

Everyone plays word games to justify the hardcore geopolitics of the war but the framework is the same. The war was scheduled. It was inevitable. By going first with the wrong army for the task, Putin, achieves the most important strategic goal, forcing NATO and the West into fighting in the Donbass on his terms, not theirs.

They will now have to settle into a protracted and expensive meat grinder. And here is where the Remnant made their fatal mistake, by telling Ukrainian President Zelenskyy to stay the course and not surrender in March 2022 in Istanbul. By guaranteeing support to Ukraine via the debt issued for Ukraine to fight the war both Davos and the Remnant are at that moment pot-committed to playing this game out to the bitter end.

Putin knows that the longer this goes on, the worse it gets for both the UK ,with Brexit fully compromised and hundreds of billions in loan guarantees it can’t credibly back, and the EU, who are dealing with political revolts in their core economies — Germany, France and Italy.

The only way out for them is for the US to fully commit to the Ukraine war militarily through NATO.

And that brings us to the events of July of 2024. This was the schedule on the Gantt chart in Brussels.

• Sunak is deposed on US Independence day, just to rub our noses in it. Davos buttplug Keir Starmer comes to power and immediately begins the final betrayal of Little Britain.
• Emmanuel Macron in France loses but just well enough to remain in power with his opposition canceling each other out.
• Trump was scheduled to be assassinated in the 2nd week of July.
• Biden removed from the scene after the debate, and the keys to the castle handed to Queen-heir-apparent Kamala Harris.
• But a miracle occurred. Trump survived.

The buying spree in the US bond market had to intensify after that to finally force Powell to cut rates. But he held his water in July, waiting for the Bank of Japan to make their move on the last day of the month.

The Fed held rates high until last week. The bond market still sold off.

Now, with the end of LIBOR the BoE is trying to figure out how to survive and was forced to not cut at the September meeting.

So, now, with all of that in your head, let’s look at these past 2 years from the perspective of UK 10 year spreads versus their adversaries at Davos — the EU and the Biden Administration.

Read the Whole Article

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