Lew Rockwell Institute

The United States Navy (USN) and Marine Corps (USMC) keep increasing their military presence in the Southern Caribbean, more specifically in the vicinity of Venezuela’s coast. The last days of August saw a significant uptick in their activity, including American warships in eastbound transit through the Panama Canal. Only a week prior, White House spokeswoman Karoline Leavitt stated that US President Donald Trump was “prepared to use every element of American power to stop drugs from flooding into [the country] and to bring those responsible to justice”, also insisting that “many Caribbean nations and many nations in the region” supposedly “applauded the administration’s counterdrug operations and efforts”.

Interestingly, Mrs. Leavitt never mentioned which specific countries support such actions, nor did she explain how exactly warships armed with medium-range cruise missiles can be used in the supposed “heightened counternarcotics efforts”. Worse yet, the increasingly belligerent Trump administration is openly accusing Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro of supposedly “heading a narco cartel”, using it as a pretext to escalate its crawling aggression on the South American nation. The US State Department website unequivocally says that President Maduro allegedly “helped manage and ultimately lead the Cartel of the Suns, comprised of high-ranking Venezuelan officials”. Expectedly, without verifiable evidence.

“As he gained power in Venezuela, Maduro participated in a corrupt and violent narco-terrorism conspiracy with the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), a designated Foreign Terrorist Organization. Maduro negotiated multi-ton shipments of FARC-produced cocaine; directed the Cartel of the Suns to provide military-grade weapons to the FARC; coordinated with narcotics traffickers in Honduras and other countries to facilitate large-scale drug trafficking; and solicited assistance from FARC leadership in training an unsanctioned militia group that functioned, in essence, as an armed forces unit for the Cartel of the Suns”, the accusation reads.

“In March 2020, Maduro was charged in the Southern District of New York for narco-terrorism, conspiracy to import cocaine, possession of machine guns and destructive devices, and conspiracy to possess machine guns and destructive devices,” the website adds, also claiming: “After initially offering a reward offer of up to $15 million for information leading to the arrest and/or conviction of Maduro in 2020, the Department of State on January 10, 2025, increased the reward offer to up to $25 million. On August 7, 2025, the Department announced the further increase in the reward offer to up to $50 million after the Department of Treasury sanctioned Cartel of the Suns as a Specially Designated Global Terrorist on July 25, 2025.”

The US also brags that “Maduro, as leader of Cartel of the Suns, is the first target in the history of the Narcotics Rewards Program with a reward offer exceeding $25 million”. Once again, there’s zero evidence to support a single claim on President Maduro’s “corrupt and violent narco-terrorism conspiracy”. On the other hand, Washington DC has no qualms about backing actual narco-terrorist entities, such as the Albanian extremists currently based in NATO-occupied Serbian province of Kosovo and Metohia, to say nothing of well over half a century of CIA-run drug-related back ops in virtually every country south of the Rio Grande. However, despite decades of sanctions and other forms of pressure, Caracas refuses to budge.

During his first term, Trump was particularly aggressive toward both Venezuela and Iran. Back in 2017, he threatened that the US has “many options, including a possible military option, if necessary”. He made similar statements with regards to Tehran, although he never acted on either during his previous presidency. However, Trump is now far more belligerent and has attacked Iran. Although it largely failed (despite his insistence that it was a “total success”), this demonstrates his willingness to engage in direct armed aggression. American forces in the region are far too few to allow a full-blown invasion, but they’re enough to be used in limited long-range precision strikes, likely on critical infrastructure (particularly in coastal regions).

Washington DC certainly understands this would be nowhere near enough to defeat the Venezuelan military, but it’s possible that the Trump administration is hoping to destabilize Caracas politically. For instance, destroying or damaging the remaining oil refineries would disrupt normal economic activity and exacerbate the Latin American country’s troubles that stem from illegal US sanctions and constant pressure. In turn, Washington DC probably expects protests to erupt or even a full-blown rebellion. This approach is quite common whenever the US finds it more challenging to invade directly. And indeed, Venezuela’s complex geography effectively makes it a combination of Afghanistan and Vietnam, which is an absolute nightmare for any remotely sensible military planner.

Venezuela already deployed around 15,000 troops in the states of Zulia and Táchira (both bordering Colombia). These units are mostly comprised of special police and military personnel, indicating that Caracas is worried about cross-border raids and infiltration. Such measures are perfectly understandable given America’s propensity to use sabotage and terrorist attacks to undermine targeted countries. Back in 2020, the CIA launched the so-called “Operation Gideon” precisely from Colombia, with two boats carrying approximately 60 insurgents commanded by two former members of the US Army Special Forces (better known as “Green Berets”). Both were employed as mercenaries by Silvercorp USA, a Florida-based PMC.

Such private military enterprises are quite common in the US and are used by the Pentagon in order to maintain plausible deniability in case of failure. Precisely this happened to “Operation Gideon”, which was effectively some sort of Trump’s “mini-Bay of Pigs” moment. This failure was attributed to multiple factors, with several US intelligence services accusing one another of “major security breaches”. In fact, back in January, Jordan Goudreau, the head of Silvercorp (himself a former “Green Beret”), accused the CIA and FBI of “sabotaging the operation”. However, whether that’s true or not is irrelevant, as Venezuela needs to be prepared for any similar incursions, particularly now that such actions might serve as the vanguard of direct US aggression.

Source Infobrics.org

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A blast is heard from up the Bayou Teche, from the direction of Leonville, Cecilia, or Breaux Bridge. Then comes the ring of a far-off bell, barely heard through the cattails and wall of cicadas, crickets, and katydids. The tolling rolls down the waterway clear and rhythmic, like the echo of an evening train passing through a rural town.

It is August 15, and the Fête-Dieu du Teche has begun again. And just like the crushing weight of the Louisiana sun, countless Cajuns up and down the Teche will find themselves overcome. Hearts are about to break.

For many whose homes cling to banks of the bayou—rock-ribbed Louisiana Baptists, staunch anti-papists, nonbelievers, and the long-ago fallen away—the bell echoes in the backcountry like a rooster’s crow announcing the dawn of something forgotten or pushed away. Long-closed doors to the trace of a memory begin to open and set in motion first steps back to their centuries-old Nova Scotian roots.

And what a wonderful unfolding of grace this must be for Cajun-born Fr. Michael Champagne, the Religious Superior of the Community of Jesus Crucified, who, a decade ago, imagined how a Eucharistic procession down the heart of the bayou might move something deep in souls.

For readers unaware of the Fête-Dieu du Teche—Louisiana’s annual waterway procession on the Solemnity of the Assumption—the following is an image of its starting point: Canon fire pierces humid morning skies and sends a single boat, Vessel #1—the bell boat—down the serpentine waters that have flowed through these parts since before the birth of Christ. Thereafter, a phenomenon begins, where, over the past eleven years, Jesus Christ has floated back into the lives of fallen-away Catholics and Protestants, where an inner movement rises and begins to pull them back to the sacraments and faith of their martyred Acadian forebears.

The bell boat alerts families to something strange happening up the Teche. So they head to swinging porch doors that open into the ancient waterway; and before they are able to fuss about their privacy being trespassed upon, boat after boat begins to appear at a bend in the bayou.

Thereafter, a woody and warm scent overpowers the immovable loamy incense of the Teche; it is a pleasing smoke that moseys past the bank and floats like slow-motion sensory overload into backyards. Louisianans, some unmoored from the faith of their French-Canadian ancestors, feel the air becoming Catholic. Vessel #2 is the mist-covered thurible boat,purposed to burn and puff out incense that prepares the way for the Savior of the World in Vessel #3.

When Jesus, in the Eucharist, emerges in the haze, He is high-throned on an altar in a long-stemmed golden monstrance bordered by a few dozen sharp-edged rays. He is raised high but neatly protected beneath the shade of a canopy that all but grazes the tips of silvery-gray moss dripping from tree limbs like Louisiana tinsel. A young woman passenger glorifies Him by singing old Latin songs—“Panis Angelicus,” “Pange Lingua Gloriosi,” the “Ave Verum Corpus,” or any number of other hymns in a voice that carries up and down the Teche through a headset and a small microphone. The love songs to the King of Kings cut straight through the wall of swamp insects, and the tolling of the bell is forgotten.

Onlookers see that Vessel #3 seems to be a sacred place, sardine-packed with cassocked and habited men and women in veils who, for the next eight or so hours, will kneel to adore Jesus in the bow. They will interchangeably glorify and consider His Majesty through silent contemplation or pray from breviaries, rosaries, or from the hymnals by their sides.

Over the years, this vision of the Eucharist boat and its quiet adorers has caused many thousands of men and women to fall to their knees. Because the sensus fidei rises quickly in them, their eyes often begin to burn and well, where tears fall and mix with moistened faces. Even Protestants have admitted to a spark in the soul and different kind of feeling in their gut. They know Vessel #3 is the reason for the Fête-Dieu du Teche—so some of these converts-to-be find themselves whispering words of adoration, and, for the first time, they drop the long-guarded belief that God could not become a wafer in a host; they begin to vulnerably embrace Him as the Slaughtered Lamb hidden in True Bread.

Thereafter, most stick around for another quarter of an hour to watch the long and lazy fleet of trailing vessels. Boat after boat floats by, filled with folks they recognize from the Piggly Wiggly or bank and post office lines. Old high school teammates and childhood friends or a neighbor or co-worker wave, where he or she has become a public witness to the Body, Soul, Blood, and Divinity of Jesus Christ. These trailing folks make periodic pit stops to dock their boat and make thirty-minute visits to old riverside churches or shaded grassy areas, where they merge with hundreds of other Catholics unable to find room on a boat but who wanted to join the pilgrimage nonetheless to pray a Rosary and Benediction.

It should be no surprise that Fr. Champagne chose to pierce hearts on the bayou. He grew up on the banks of the 125-mile-long Teche. As a school boy, he was told stories of the Acadian heroes who survived unimaginable hardship as they traveled south and down the Teche after refusing to kiss the British king’s ring. The priest had always seen the river as an escape route—the primary means of transportation for his ancestors’ 18th-century exodus from Nova Scotia.

So, all these years later, Fr. Champagne knew how the waterway procession might become the floating torchlight that would guide secular and fallen-away Cajuns to the upheaval, when old family members were murdered by British soldiers or endured torture, persecution, and imprisonment for refusing to leave the Catholic Faith.

Read the Whole Article

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Fruitless discussions about ‘security guarantees’ for Ukraine continue. It will still take time until it is acknowledged that there is no way to implement them. Meanwhile other ideas are cropping in.

Some dimwits in Europe still think that they will be able to prevent Russia from taking care of its security interests:

On Thursday, French President Emmanuel Macron and British Prime Minister Keir Starmer will co-host a meeting of the “coalition of the willing” comprised mostly of European allies. The discussions are expected to involve what potential security guarantees for Ukraine could look like and what type of peacekeeping force might be required.

The idea is to establish a setup that would prevent Russia from relaunching attacks on Ukrainian territory if a peace deal or cease-fire is established between the two countries.

President Donald Trump has signaled that the United States could play some kind of role in the effort, although he has ruled out putting American forces in Ukraine. [NATO Secretary-General Mark] Rutte on Wednesday also said the expectation was that the U.S would be involved in some form.

There will be no ceasefire in Ukraine. There will be a peace agreement in the form of a treaty. Ukraine and Russia sides will have to agree to its parameters. The Russian site will insist that Ukraine will be demilitarized and that no foreign forces will be stationed on its land.

European countries are unable to give any real ‘security guarantees’. What they could provide is a minuscule force of a few thousand men stationed somewhere in Ukraine. Such a force would be eradicated within minutes should, after a peace agreement, the conflict in Ukraine reignite.

The Ukrainian regime has come to understand that. It has moved away from requesting ‘security guarantees’ in form of foreign soldiers. It instead wants a huge amount of foreign money to buy and make new weapons.

As the New York Times wrote yesterday:

Ukraine Pursues a Weapons Buildup More Potent Than Any Security Guarantee (archived) – New York Times
Kyiv sees a well-equipped army as a stronger deterrent to Moscow than any Western pledges to defend it. It is working to attract billions to buy more arms.

Kyiv wants not only to sustain its army through the current war but also to make it the backbone of any postwar settlement, with the goal of deterring Russia from invading again. As Ursula von der Leyen, the European Commission president, recently put it: “Ukraine must become a steel porcupine, undigestible for potential invaders.”

At the center of these efforts is a new NATO-backed procurement system that will channel European funds into buying U.S. weapons for Ukraine. President Volodymyr Zelensky hopes the system will enable $1 billion in purchases each month, with a particular focus on acquiring U.S.-made Patriot air-defense systems to expand Kyiv’s limited arsenal.
…
Ukraine is focused on developing its own security guarantees that its much larger neighbor cannot undermine. Kyiv’s domestic weapon production and its acquisition of Western arms are areas where Moscow has little leverage.

“This is not something the Russians can really discuss,” said Alyona Getmanchuk, Ukraine’s new ambassador to NATO. “That’s our advantage.”
…

Ukraine does not only want to receive lots of weapons, paid for by Europe, but also wants to build a weapon industry with financing also coming from foreign sources:

[Maksym Skrypchenko, the president of the Transatlantic Dialogue Center, a research group in Kyiv,] said Ukraine was working to channel Western money not only into buying foreign weapons but also into its own defense industry, which has grown rapidly during the war but still lacks the funding needed to produce at scale.

That could allow Ukraine to produce the very missiles Western partners have been reluctant to supply — or have delivered under strict usage limits — for fear of escalation. The United States, Britain and France have provided small batches of ballistic and cruise missiles, but their use is restricted so that they cannot be used to strike major Russian cities like Moscow. Germany has long refused to transfer its long-range Taurus cruise missiles.

Fire Point, the Ukrainian defense firm behind the Flamingo missile, said it would welcome Western funding to speed up production. The company says it currently makes one missile per day, but plans to increase output sevenfold by this fall. Ukraine has also developed a short-range ballistic missile named Sapsan that recently entered production.

That this is a serious attempt by Ukraine to move the ‘security guarantee’ discussion towards a record financial transaction to Kiev is underlined by an op-ed by its former Foreign Minister  Dmytro Kulebain the Washington Post:

Ukraine doesn’t need a security guarantee (archived) – Dmytro Kuleba / Washington Post
Western boots on the ground won’t secure peace. Arming Ukraine and politically integrating it will.

[S]tationing foreign troops far behind the lines as “reassurance forces” (the option most often floated as an alternative to more robust peacekeeping) would also have limited effect. The Ukrainian people would almost certainly welcome such deployments. But reassurance forces would neither hasten the war’s end nor prevent hostilities from reigniting after any ceasefire. Moscow, meanwhile, has already rejected the idea, claiming it would be a pretense for putting a NATO presence on Ukrainian soil.

Instead of debating such dead ends, Ukraine’s partners should immediately move to provide a robust assistance package, coupled with firm commitments to Ukraine’s political integration in the West. Weapons need to be provided at an even larger scale — to be mass-produced in Western countries as well as in Western-financed factories inside Ukraine. Ensuring uninterrupted supply on a strict timeline is vital. The buildup of a European military-industrial complex needs to take place alongside Ukraine’s admission to the European Union as a full member on an accelerated (though still merit-based) schedule.

The attempt to get ‘security guarantees’ in the form of money for weapons and weapon fabrications is just as doomed as the idea of putting western troops on the ground.

From the NYT piece quoted above:

Europe has already outpaced the United States in military aid, providing roughly $95 billion to Washington’s $75 billion, according to the Kiel Institute for the World Economy.

Ukraine has already received weapons at a value of $170 billion. How much did they deter the Russian from fighting?

The Europeans have difficulties to grow their economies while facing higher interest rates and aging societies. It is ludicrous to expect that they will indefinitely continue to finance weapons for Ukraine.

The idea of building western-financed weapon factories in Ukraine can already be seen as a failure.

The NYT piece asserts:

Kyiv’s domestic weapon production and its acquisition of Western arms are areas where Moscow has little leverage. 

“This is not something the Russians can really discuss,” said Alyona Getmanchuk, Ukraine’s new ambassador to NATO. “That’s our advantage.”

The Russia Armed Forces disagree with that statement.

Germany allegedly provided the money and technology to develop the short-range ballistic missile named Sapsan which was to be produced in Ukraine.

By August 11 the Russia forces had ended that endeavor:

Russia’s Federal Security Service (FSB) claimed Thursday that it crippled Ukraine’s ability to launch strikes deep inside Russia after it carried out a special operation along with the Defense Ministry against Ukrainian missile production facilities.

The FSB said it had discovered the locations of buildings and air defense systems involved in the production and protection of Ukraine’s Sapsan ballistic missile system, also known by its export designation Hrim-2, in the Sumy and Dnipropetrovsk regions.
…
Russia’s Defense Ministry said […] the strikes were conducted throughout July, targeting Ukrainian design bureaus, rocket fuel production facilities and missile assembly plants in the Dnipropetrovsk and Sumy regions.

The Russian military also said it destroyed four launchers of the Western-supplied Patriot surface-to-air missile system and a U.S.-made target detection and guidance radar in the Dnipropetrovsk region alone.

The FSB claimed that Ukraine had developed the Sapsan/Hrim-2 with financial support from “specialists” of an unidentified Western European country.
…
Ukrainian media previously reported that the Sapsan missile completed combat testing in May after successfully striking a Russian military target at a range of almost 300 kilometers (186 miles).

Another deep strike hit the factory of a U.S. manufacturer of electronic circuit boards, Flex-tronic, in western Ukraine. Circuit boards are needed for Ukraine’s mass drone production. Six hundred employees, working the night shift to allegedly ‘build coffee makers’, had fled into the companies bunkers when several cruise missiles arrived. It took several days to expunge the fire.

A Turkish company had built and equipped a factory to make Bayraktar drones in Ukraine. The factory was supposed to open at the end of August. Days before the official opening Russian missiles arrived:

The factory where Turkish Bayraktar drones are assembled continues to burn near Kiev. The day before, several Russian missiles hit the workshops. The building was seriously damaged. The production process was disrupted.

The video of the fire is published today, August 29, by Channel Five.

Together those were at least three large strikes in just one month against western-financed weapon production sites in Ukraine. Any future weapon factory build with western finance in Ukraine will receive a similar treatment.

Such facilities are just too big and obvious to operate in total secret. The Russian security service will find them and mark them for destruction as soon as the most expensive machinery for them has been installed and is ready to go.

‘Security guarantees’ in form of western troops on the ground are just not going to happen.

‘Security guarantees’ in form of weapon deliveries or weapon production within Ukraine are not sustainable.

The only real ‘security guarantee’ Ukraine can get is through a piece agreement with Russia. This will require Ukraine  to give up on land, to commit to neutrality and to behave well.

President Alexander Stubb of Finland argues in the Economist that Ukraine should follow his country’s (previous) model:

What Finland could teach Ukraine about war and peace (archived) – Economist
President Alexander Stubb argues Ukraine can repeat Finland’s success

Finland’s experience has been cited from the start of the war in Ukraine—both as a model to avoid and one perhaps to follow. Mannerheim’s speech was circulated in President Volodymyr Zelensky’s office in the first months of the war, but was put to one side.

The peace that was imposed on Finland in 1944 was hardly just. But it could have been worse. Finland handed over 10% of its territory, including Karelia and half of Lake Ladoga. Its army was restricted, as was its ability to join NATO. It was forced to let Russia lease a naval base on Porkkala, a peninsula in the Gulf of Finland just 30km from the capital. And, because it had joined forces with Hitler, it was forced to pay reparations to the Soviet Union which had attacked it five years earlier.

To much of the world, this was a defeat. To Mr Stubb, whose father was born in the territory annexed by the Soviet Union, and whose summer house stands in Porkkala, back in Finnish hands since the 1950s, it looks different.

The simple secret of living peacefully next to a mighty neighbor, Finland had found, was to behave well:

Lacking any security guarantees from the West or anyone else, Finland exercised this independence not by turning anti-Russian—which would almost certainly have resulted in another invasion—but by building one of the most successful countries in Europe. “People didn’t wait for perfect conditions. They worked with what they had,” Risto Penttilä, a foreign-policy expert, explains.

In politics and in the media Finland carefully avoided anything that could anger Moscow. To most outsiders, what became known as “Finlandisation” was a servile form of appeasement. To Mr Stubb and most of his countrymen, “it was the definition of realpolitik at a time when we did not have a choice.” It allowed Finland to stick to its core values: universal education, social welfare and the rule of law.

The ‘Finlandization’ of Ukraine, if done seriously, would satisfy major Russian demands – neutrality, demilitarization and denazification. It is a realistic base for successful peace talks.

I am encourage that the Economist, as a major mainstream outlet, has picked up on this.

For the idea to ripen it will have to wait until the powers-that-be have recognized that all other variants of ‘security guarantees’, be they troops on the ground or weapon-fabrications, are rather pipe-dreams than serious plans.

Reprinted with permission from Moon of Alabama.

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It appears more and more people are challenging the United Nations narrative that CO2 emissions are causing disastrous climate change. Indeed, there are signs that the narrative is collapsing. The book Climate CO2 Hoax – How Bankers Hijacked the Environment Movement provides evidences and testimonies from renowned international climate scientists that contradict the UN assertion that climate change is caused by CO2 emissions or methane. (The 1992 UN Rio Earth summit involved the establishment of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) as an international environmental treaty to combat “dangerous human interference with the climate system” – a treaty signed by 154 states.)

In the book I refer to the conclusion of the Climate Intelligence Foundation (CLINTEL) that the climate changes naturally and slowly in its own cycle; and that CO2 emissions or methane from livestock, such as cows, are not the dominant factors in climate change. The number of signatories of the CLINTEL World Climate Declaration has now risen to 2,000. Coincidentally

The conclusions of the Climate Intelligence foundation include the following:

“There is no climate emergency. Therefore, there is no cause for panic and alarm. Natural as well as anthropogenic factors cause warming… Warming is far slower than predicted… Climate policy relies on inadequate models… CO2 is plant food, the basis of all life on Earth: CO2 is not a pollutant. It is essential to all life on Earth. Photosynthesis is a blessing. More CO2 is beneficial for nature, greening the Earth: additional CO2 in the air has promoted growth in global plant biomass. It is also good for agriculture, increasing the yields of crops worldwide.”

Patrick Moore, co-founder of Greenpeace, and President of Greenpeace in Canada for seven years, states:

“the whole climate crisis is not only fake news its fake science… of course climate change is real it’s been happening since the beginning of time, but it’s not dangerous and it’s not caused by people… Most of the scientists who are saying it’s a crisis are on perpetual government grants… you don’t have a plan to feed 8 billion people without fossils fuels or get the food into the cities…” – Patrick Moore, co-founder of Greenpeace

I also have experience in the field, including at United Nations Environment; at the UK Government Dept of Energy and Climate Change; and as a PhD researcher on the subject of sustainability. See also the books Climate CO2 Hoax and Transcending the Climate Change Deception Toward Real Sustainability.

The United Nations and the globalist Davos World Economic Forum declared the necessity of reaching a worldwide goal of “net zero carbon” by 2050. Massive transformations have been underway worldwide setting the stage for creation of what in the 1970’s was called the New International Economic Order. In reality it is a blueprint for worldwide technocratic totalitarian corporate-communism. The EU, a political project of globalists from its very inception, has been leading this agenda and plans to become the world’s first “carbon neutral” continent by 2050 and reduce its CO2 emissions by at least 55% by 2030.

With a virtual monopoly on mainstream media as well as social media, the ‘climate change is caused by CO2’ lobby brainwashed much of the world into believing that we should eliminate hydrocarbons including petroleum, natural gas, and coal. This bogus claim is cover for an ulterior agenda. CO2 is not carbon or soot, it is an invisible, odorless gas essential to plant photosynthesis and all life forms on earth, including us.

The myth of manmade climate change due to CO2 emissions has become so normalised amongst all political parties worldwide and in the general population, that at times it seems as if one is living in an entire society ‘blind to the truth’. Images of the apocalyptic movie and book ‘Day of the Triffids’ springs to mind. In this book almost the entire population of the Earth has become physically blinded. In 2023, it appears we are living through a society that has largely become ‘mentally blinded’ to the truth.

What can be done? The unfortunate reality is that the blind are leading the blind; and the politicians and leaders whatever their political colour, green or otherwise, will never rock the boat of the ‘institutional orthodoxy’ or relinquish their bloated government salaries, regardless of whether they are aware of the truth or not.

The current green energy/renewable technologies being promoted by the UN and WEF, are not a viable solution for the world’s energy supply.

Most ‘green policies’ are based on mathematical madness and in the above books I also describe that the current green energy/renewable technologies being promoted by the UN and WEF, are not a viable solution for the world’s energy supply. Although these technologies have some limited viability in certain locations and scenarios, the fact remains that the Energy Returned on Energy Invested is much too low – in essence the entire process is mathematically flawed.

This is evidenced by the work of scientists, including Professor David MacKay, former Regius Professor of Engineering at Cambridge University and former Chief Scientific Advisor at the UK Department of Energy and Climate Change in his book Sustainable Energy without Hot Air, see Endnote [i]. His analysis shows the mathematical absurdity of wind energy and that an area twice the size of the entire country of Wales would need to be completely covered with wind turbines to meet the energy demand in the U.K., based on average energy consumption per person. The creation of wind energy infrastructure is in most parts of the world a massive waste of existing fossil fuel resources.

Climate policy and green energy involve economic suicide – the example of Germany

Let us consider the example of Germany as detailed in an article by strategic risk consultant F. William Engdahl, see Endnote [ii]. In Germany, Angela Merkel and the German government as part of a 2001 government strategy to rely on solar and wind and other “renewables” aimed to make Germany the first industrial nation to be “carbon neutral.” F. William Engdahl described that:

• this strategy has been an economic catastrophe. Germany had one of the industrial world’s most stable low-cost and reliable electric generation grids, but today Germany has become the world’s most expensive electric generator.
• the energy inefficient wind and solar, today costs some 7 to 9 times more than gas. To reach targets by 2030 Deutsche Bank even admitted the state will need to create an “eco-dictatorship”, see Endnote [iii].
• by 2025 an estimated 25% of existing German windmills will need replacement and waste disposal is a colossal problem

Furthermore, a massive input of concrete and aluminum is needed to produce solar or wind farms, all of which requires cheap energy to produce; but solar and wind is not cheap it is very expensive. Consider also that the amount of added electricity needed for a ‘zero carbon’ EU by 2050 would be far more than today, as countless millions of battery chargers will need grid electricity with reliable power.

While the people of the world pay suffer large energy price increases many renewable energy corporations made massive windfalls via subsidies and profits via government led climate policy.  In its forced transition to renewables, while banning nuclear energy, Germany has paid a very high price in this ridiculous climate crusade of mathematical madness. Author Thomas Kolbe has described in a recent article that a group of German industrial labor representatives has broken ranks, and in an open letter to Chancellor Friedrich Merz, they fiercely criticize Berlin’s climate policy:

“A group of industrial works councils is calling on Chancellor Merz to halt the climate policy suicide run. Since COVID lockdowns, over 300,000 jobs in Germany’s industrial core have vanished. Energy-intensive production has become a fantasy—especially when competitors like the U.S. pay up to 75% less for electricity… These are not outliers—they’re survivors of Germany’s failed “green transformation.” ArcelorMittal recently scrapped its green steel plans—despite billions in offered subsidies. BASF is cutting 700 jobs in Ludwigshafen. The “green restructuring” of Germany’s economy now reads like an industrial obituary. Every day, another subsidized project collapses into the dustbin of central planning…

By issuing a public letter, they’re committing open defiance. They’re aiming straight at the Green Deal—the administrative metastasis that has paralyzed Europe’s economic lifeblood… After 35 years of subsidizing wind and solar, grid stability hasn’t improved—yet grid costs are in the hundreds of billions. The high energy prices aren’t just socially unjust; they’re an existential threat to prosperity and civil peace… This protest has grassroots power—it comes from people living the reality of failed climate economics, not from think tanks or talking heads…” – Thomas Kolbe, author and journalist

The so-called green economy is not green at all

The western world has become shackled by nonsensical policies that claim to be environmentally friendly; however, the green mask is slipping. In reality, we see that vast industrial processes to create a so-called green infrastructure have been offshored; and green industrialisation has been ramped up to produce vast numbers of electric vehicles, wind turbines, solar panels, etc; thus causing yet more ‘real pollution’ to land, air and water systems via industrial mining for rare earth metals etc, see this article.  Furthermore, after decades of subsidies, wind and solar still only produce around 5% of the world’s primary energy supply. The maths do not add up, the Energy Returned on Energy Invested in too low. The green economy is littered with an army of expensive toys that do not create value, for example electric vehicles. Meanwhile, the tax payer is forced to pay the bill via taxes and increased energy costs, while renewable energy corporations reap vast subsidies and ‘policy-led’ profits.

The bill to create a nonsensical and vast worldwide green energy infrastructure is so large it will never be paid. More government debt piled upon existing debt leaves the people impoverished via taxes that ultimately end up in the coffers of the world banking cartel. See also the book Demonic Economics and the Tricks of the Bankers.

Driving an electric car is fake environmentalism – Elon Musk debunked

Electric vehicle (EV) drivers are suckers for mega-corporate advertising, ignorantly proud of so-called low-carbon eco-cars. Apparently, unaware that the manufacture of millions of EV batteries, requires huge mining operations to acquire and refine large quantities of rare earth metals, such as lithium, rhodium and cobalt; that these metals have to be mined out of the ground using machinery which is powered by carbon-emitting vehicles powered by diesel or petrol; and importantly, that the mining and refining processes can cause significant and extensive pollution to land, air and water systems, for example in rural China and Mongolia, see Endnote [iv]. Unlike the fake climate agenda, these are real environmental problems.

Have the deluded green politicians considered what would be the environmental consequence of transitioning the entire world population to EVs, for example, for a population of 8 billion to be using about 2 billion EVs, at around 1 per family? The real pollution to land and water systems from the mining of rare earth metals, such as lithium, for EV batteries would be massive. For example see a picture of toxic lithium leach fields in Chile in this article.

Furthermore, the push to end gasoline or diesel transport by 2035 in favour of EVs is based on a lie as the lithium-ion battery-powered vehicles have a total “carbon footprint” when the effects of mining lithium and producing all parts are included, that is worse than diesel autos. The deluded greens are trying to get us all driving EVs, but EVS are still driven by electricity produced from fossil fuels and will most likely continue to be. Furthermore, EVs are not at all an efficient use of energy as the well to tank efficiency of this electrification process has been estimated at around only 37%.

There appears to be a growing realisation that electric transport is something of a ‘road to nowhere’.

Green politics is concerned with fitting in with a deceptive UN climate and sustainable development narrative

The majority of green policies, seemingly worldwide, are based on the misleading narrative that CO2 causes climate change. A generation of young people and deluded CO2 activists have been misled like sheep. This ‘group think’ and a need to be accepted by ones social or political peer group has turned many people into dumb animals – like sheep. Such concerns take away from the attainment of knowledge, truth, and deeper meaning.

The policies of international mega-banks and international institutions, such as the UN and the WEF, are driving environmentally destructive ‘globalisation painted green’. Green politics is fake environmentalism. The green political parties appear to be brainwashed by decades of UN-promoted propaganda; and appear to be unaware that the real environmental movement was essentially ‘hijacked’ by the Rothschild banking dynasty in 1992 at the UN Earth summit. This is detailed in the testimony of whistleblower George Hunt, see this video.

The green political parties founded in many countries in the early 1980s were often focused on policies for ecology, food security, local resilience, and local governance. The original founders of the green movement in the early 1980s, and the sustainability visionaries of the 1970s are better described as localists not globalists, for example the well-known E.F. Schumacher, author of the books Small is Beautiful  and This I Believe. However, nowadays this focus on local or regional sustainability appears to have been largely displaced by climate alarmism.

It should be noted that it is the world’s central bankers that are behind the decision to reduce CO2 emissions worldwide and are entirely funding and controlling the advancement of the worldwide project of combatting man-made climate-change. This project involves an attempt to de-carbonise the activities of the entire world population. In December 2015, the Bank for International Settlements (BIS) created the Task Force on Climate-related Financial Disclosure (TCFD), which represents $118 trillion of assets globally, see Endnote  [v]. In essence this means that the financialization of the entire world economy is based on meeting nonsensical aims such as “net-zero greenhouse gas emissions”.

In addition, seemingly most political parties are championing the deceptive UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). I decode the deceptive SDGs in the above book.

[i] The book “Sustainable Energy without Hot Air” by Professor David MacKay, Regius Professor of Engineering at Cambridge University and former Chief Scientific Advisor to the UK’s Department of Energy and Climate Change, is available for free at: https://withouthotair.com/

[ii] Source: https://www.globalresearch.ca/great-zero-carbon-criminal-conspiracy/5736707

[iii] Source: https://www.dw.com/en/german-wind-energy-stalls-amid-public-resistance-and-regulatory-hurdles/a-50280676

[iv] Source: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2012/aug/07/china-rare-earth-village-pollution

[v] Source: https://data.parliament.uk/DepositedPapers/Files/DEP2019-0718/Green_Finance_Strategy.pdf

Same in the U.S. In my travels, I saw wasteland. thousands upon thousands of miles of nothing and every town desolate. All the money had been withdrawn. Thousands of small towns once lit by familied love and charity, gone. Not an accident of fate. It had been decided by the Malthusian technocrats who wanted to bunch the talking pigs in cities where they could be further degraded into arty punks, petty criminals and indentured labourers for the mega-corps and government. And best case, confused by their “sexuality”. Fighting over scraps, while the country was cleared to be taken.

The post The Climate CO2 Hoax and the Flaws of Green Energy appeared first on LewRockwell.

Thanks, Rick Rozoff.

The post Epstein Victims Speak Live Right Now from US Capitol appeared first on LewRockwell.

The post More War: Trump Orders US Strike On Alleged ‘Drug Boat’ In International Waters appeared first on LewRockwell.

Writes John Leo Keenan:

A Palestinian journalist in Gaza, Ruwaida Amer, explained why Palestinian journalists are targeted directly:

 “Why is Israel targeting Palestinian journalists in Gaza? Simple. We are the only ones able to document and transmit what is actually happening on the ground. Every image, every testimony, every broadcast we produce pierces through the wall of Israel’s official narrative. That makes us dangerous: by recording the displacement, the starvation, and the relentless bombardment, we expose Israel’s actions to the world.

And so, we are deliberately attacked. Cameras are treated as weapons, and those who hold them as combatants. Our very presence threatens Israel’s ability to sustain its genocidal path — which is why it is doing everything it can to snuff us out.” 

This from the NYT is very good (clear):

“Videos Contradict Israel’s Rationale for Deadly Hospital Attack” 

https://www.nytimes.com/video/world/middleeast/100000010370105/nasser-hospital-gaza-israel-attack-videos.html?searchResultPosition=8

Amer’s article:

https://www.972mag.com/maryam-abu-daqqa-gaza-journalists/

The post Netanyahu said the attack against the Nasser Hospital in Gaza was a “terrible mishap” appeared first on LewRockwell.

Writes Bill Madden:

There are a lot of problems in the world.  When you begin to think that we live in a sane world, please read the titles of the VT articles in order to restore your cynicism.

The post VT Foreign Policy Daily Report appeared first on LewRockwell.

Thanks, David Martin.

Bitchute Video

The post Crybullies appeared first on LewRockwell.

Click Here:

Nicolas Hulscher, MPH

The post The mRNA Reckoning Has Begun appeared first on LewRockwell.

Writes David Martin

See article here.

Huntsville, the largest city in Alabama, is now poised to become a central location in operations to expand U.S. military might to the cosmos to compete with rivals like Russia and China.

Alabama city population from my 2012 AAA Road Atlas:

Birmingham    242,820
Montgomery   201, 568
Mobile,             198,915
Huntsville       158,216

But, amazingly, the article is right.  Huntsville is, indeed, now the largest city in Alabama.

And why is that?  The article tells us in so many words:

The city is a major hub for defense contractors and aerospace companies, including Boeing, Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman. The Army’s Space and Missile Defense Command is also located in Huntsville, which is nicknamed “Rocket City” because of its role in building the first rockets that helped the U.S. reach the moon.

And what’s wrong with Colorado?

“The problem I had with Colorado, one of the big problems, they do mail-in voting,” Trump said. “So they have automatically crooked elections.”

Trump is really on the money with that one.  Check out Paul Craig Roberts’ latest article.

The purple state of Virginia better vote Republican in its off-year election this fall for the benefit of Wallops Island.

The post Why is Trump moving Space Command headquarters to Alabama? Inside the decision appeared first on LewRockwell.

Click here:

Global Research

The post How the Global Elite Prepares to Replace Governments with Global Agentic AI appeared first on LewRockwell.

Thanks, David Martin.

See this.

The post Former UN Chief Exposes October 7 appeared first on LewRockwell.

Writes Bill Maden

Re: Since World War II the United States has not declared war even though it has been in a continuous state of war. It is no coincidence that none of these “wars” have been won. From 1950 Korea to 2025 Yemen and everything in between.

The major owners of Corporate America are not interested in winning wars.  They are interested in their quarterly profit distributions so we get no-win wars.  The “rules of engagement” are always structured to protect the enemy from annihilation which our forces are easily capable of doing. 

After reading: “The Brothers”, and “The Secret Team”:

I’m more convinced than ever that our alphabet agencies work directly for the major owners of Corporate America.  I believe that these wealthy families control our entire government but that the conduits of influence and control are shorter for the alphabet agencies than the other parts of government with the conduit for the CIA being the shortest.  The U2 that crashed in Russia to prevent the Paris Peace Summit back in 1960 was sabotaged during pre-flight.  According to Prouty’s book, it was not shot down, it flamed out due to a half-filled hydrogen tank.  The hydrogen was needed at high altitudes to maintain combustion.

The Cold War was very profitable and, like no-win hot wars, the profiteers wanted it to continue.

The post Re: Department of War? – Ron Paul’s 2 Sept. Column appeared first on LewRockwell.

The winner of New York City’s Democratic mayoral primary was Zohran Mamdani, a Muslim democratic socialist who has been a member of the New York State Assembly since 2021. Conservatives are ecstatic that they have a professing socialist to attack so as to deflect attention away from their support of socialistic programs and policies like Social Security, Medicaid, Medicare, and public education.

Mamdani advocates higher taxes on rich property owners, corporations, and millionaires; free childcare for children up to five years old; rent control; fare-free city buses; raising the city’s minimum wage; single-payer healthcare; and city-owned grocery stores.

Although many conservative opponents of Mamdani are hypocrites, their criticisms of his plans are nevertheless spot on—except for one thing.

Mamdani has advocated the decriminalization of prostitution. He told reporters he wants his policies to reflect those of ex-mayor Bill de Blasio, who advocated “community-centered services” for sex workers instead of arrest.

Incumbent Mayor Eric Adams, a Democrat and a socialist in all but the name, and an opponent of Mamdani in the November election, is now the darling of conservatives for making this remark:

I’m a man of God, just as Mamdani says he’s a Muslim. I don’t know where in his Quran it states that it’s OK for a woman to be on the streets selling their body. I don’t know what Quran he is reading. It’s not in my Bible. As a man who said he is of faith, I don’t quite understand what religion supports prostitution. You’re not doing any service to a woman who is on the street who is forced to sell her body for whatever reason.

So, is prostitution okay?

From a health and morals perspective, prostitution is certainly not okay, even if it is 100 percent voluntary and does not involve trespassing on someone’s private property.

I have no argument with anyone who says that prostitution is immoral, sinful, bad, unnatural, debauched, lewd, unholy, lascivious, indecent, shameful, unhealthy, risky, and potentially dangerous.

No one with any sense—except a deranged left-libertarian opposed to value judgments at all—would support or be ambivalent about his wife, daughter, aunt, mother, grandmother, granddaughter, mother-in-law, niece, or sister being involved in prostitution. No one but a libertine (which should never be confused with a libertarian) wants prostitutes hanging out on their street corner or near the local high school.

From a libertarian perspective; that is, a property and freedom perspective, prostitution is okay—not because it is wholesome, good, or harmless (it is just the opposite)—but because it is not the job of government to concern itself with how people choose to make a living, spend their money, or have sex as long as they don’t violate the personal or property rights of others when they are doing these things.

What consenting adults do on their private property, or on the property of others with permission, is none of the government’s business (and it is none of your business) as long as their actions don’t infringe upon the rights of others. This is still true even if what they are doing is immoral, and even if the majority of Americans don’t approve of what they are doing.

There is a big difference between not approving of someone’s actions and thinking the government should arrest, fine, and imprison someone for doing something that some people don’t approve of.

Two things that Mayor Adams said deserve a challenge: “I don’t quite understand what religion supports prostitution. You’re not doing any service to a woman who is on the street who is forced to sell her body for whatever reason.”

First of all, no religion “supports” prostitution. Not arresting, fining, and locking in a cage prostitutes and their clients is not supporting prostitution. And second, just because a woman is on the street selling her body does not mean that she is being forced to do so. Not every prostitute has a pimp, and not every pimp is forcing women to sell their bodies. And neither is poverty to blame. There are plenty of poor women in every city in the United States who would not even think of engaging in prostitution.

Now, none of it means that libertarians countenance trespassing, loitering, or other violations of property rights that might occur when prostitutes seek or service customers. And none of this means that prostitution that involves coercion, trafficking, children, assault, exploitation, or kidnapping is okay. These are real crimes that no free society would approve or tolerate.

So, from a moral standpoint, prostitution is not okay; however, from a property and freedom perspective, it is okay. Therefore, from a legal perspective, prostitution should be okay as well.

The post Is Prostitution Okay? appeared first on LewRockwell.

It’s always about hard work – for the common good. That’s what BRICS and SCO are fighting for.

Oh, what a show that was. A pan-Asia, pan-Eurasia, crossover Global South ball, with glittering dynamo Tianjin as backdrop, enjoyed as such by the overwhelming majority of the planet, while predictably generating cascades of sour grapes among the fragmented West – from the omnipotent Empire of Chaos to The Coalition of the Toothless Chihuahuas.

History will register that as much as BRICS finally stepped into the limelight at the summit in Kazan in 2024, the SCO replicated the move at the summit in Tianjin in 2025.

Among a feast of hightlights – hard to top Putin and Modi walking hand in hand – this was of course M.C. Xi’s ball. The original RIC (Russia, India, China), as conceptualized by the Great Primakov in the late 1990s, were finally back in the game, together.

But it was Xi who personally set the main guidelines – proposing no less than a broad, new Global Governance model, complete with important ramifications such as a SCO development back, which should complement the BRICS’s NDB, as well as close AI cooperation in contrast with Silicon Valley’s techno-feudalism.

Global Governance, the Chinese way, encompasses five core principles. The most crucial, no doubt, is sovereign equality. That connects with respect for the international rule of law – and not a shape-shifted, at will, “rules-based international order”. Global Governance advances multilateralism. And also inevitably encourages a much-lauded “people-centered” approach, away from vested interests.

Putin for his part detailed the role of the SCO as “a vehicle for genuine multilateralism”, in tune with this new Global Governance. And he crucially called for a pan-Eurasian security model. That’s exactly the “indivisibility of security” that the Kremlin proposed to Washington in December 2021 – and was met by a non-response response.

So taken together, BRICS and SCO are totally engaged in burying the Cold War-era mentality, a world divided by blocs; and at the same time they are visionary enough to call for the UN system to be respected as it was originally conceived.

Now that will be the Mother of Uphill Battles – including everything from taking the UN out of New York to completely revamping the Security Council.

The dance of Bear, Dragon and Elephant

If Xi set up the guidelines in Tianjin, the strategic guest of honor had to be Putin. And that extrapolated to their one-on-one meeting on Tuesday at the Zhongnanhai in Beijing: very private, as only special conversations are held at the former imperial palace. Xi greeted his “old friend” in Russian.

As Putin emphasized the central role of the SCO Development Program for the next 10 years, he was playing it very much the Chinese way, when it comes to all those successive, successful 5-year plans.

These roadmaps are essential to set long-term strategies. And in the case of the SCO, that means organizing its progressive shift from initially an anti-terrorism mechanism to a complex multilateral platform coodinating infrastructure development and geoeconomics.

And that’s where China’s new idea – the establishment of the SCO Development Bank – comes in. It’s a mirror institution to the NDB – the BRICS bank based in Shanghai, and parallel to the Asia Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB), the multilateral bank based in Beijing.

Once again, BRICS and SCO run intertwined, as their key focus is to progressively ditch dependence on Western paradigms and at the same time fight the effect of sanctions, which not by accident hit hard on the four top members of both BRICS and SCO: Russia, China, India and Iran.

And of course, among all the camaraderie in Tianjin, there was Modi in China for the first time in 7 years. Xi went straight to the point: “China and India are great civilizations whose responsibilities extend beyond bilateral issues.” And M.C. Xi once again hit the dancefloor: the future lies “in the dance of the dragon and the elephant.” Cue to the Three Eurasia amigos chatting amicably in the corridors.

The Tianjin Declaration – not as extensive as Kazan last year – still managed to emphasize the key points that apply to Eurasia: sovereignty, above anything else; non-interference in internal affairs of member-states; and total rejection of unilateral sanctions as tools of coercion.

Crucially, that should apply not only to SCO member-states but to partners as well – from the Arab petromonarchies to the Southeast Asian powerhouses. Development strategies of different nations already cooperate, in practice, with BRI projects, from the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC) to the China-Belarus Industrial Park, extrapolating to cross-border e-commerce, AI and Big Data.

The SCO’s astonishing geographic scale, combined with half of the world’s population, carries tremendous potential across the spectrum – for instance on trade, transport infrastructure, cross-border investment and financial transactions. The potential is far from being realized.

But the high-speed trains are already rolling: geopolitical imperatives are guiding increased pan-Eurasia geoeconomic interaction.

Shanghai Spirit eviscerates “War on Terror”

So this is the top takeaway of the Tianjin Show: the SCO affirming itself as a solid strategic pole uniting a great deal of the Global Majority. And all that without the need to metastasize into an offensive military behemoth like NATO.

It’s a long way from a pavillion in a Shanghai park in 2001, only three months before 9/11 – which was marketed by the Empire of Chaos as the foundation stone of the “war on terror”. That other initially modest foundation stone – with Russia, China and three Central Asian “stans” – was the “Shanghai spirit”: a set of principles based on mutual trust and benefit, equality, consultation, respect for the diversity of civilizations, and an emphasis on common economic development.

How the Shanghai spirit actually outlasted the “war on terror” leaves us with much to ponder.

In his toast at the elegant banquet offered in Tianjin for SCO guests, Xi had to quote a proverb: “In a race of a hundred boats, those who row the hardest will lead”.

Hard work. Results of which can be seen by anyone facing Tianjin’s spectacular development. That has absolutely nothing to do with “democracy” – as debased by its allleged practitioners as it is across the collective West – opposed to “the autocrats”, or “villains”, or Axis of Upheaval, or any other stupidity. It’s always about hard work – for the common good. That’s what BRICS and SCO are fighting for.

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

The post The Tianjin Show: Let’s Dance to the Multipolar Groove appeared first on LewRockwell.

There are two types of war correspondents. The first type does not attend press conferences. They do not beg generals and politicians for interviews. They take risks to report from combat zones. They send back to their viewers or readers what they see, which is almost always diametrically opposed to official narratives. This first type, in every war, is a tiny minority.

Then there is the second type, the inchoate blob of self-identified war correspondents who play at war. Despite what they tell editors and the public, they have no intention of putting themselves in danger. They are pleased with the Israeli ban on foreign reporters into Gaza. They plead with officials for background briefings and press conferences. They collaborate with their government minders who impose restrictions and rules that keep them out of combat. They slavishly disseminate whatever they are fed by officials, much of which is a lie, and pretend it is news. They join little jaunts arranged by the military — dog and pony shows — where they get to dress up and play soldier and visit outposts where everything is controlled and choreographed.

The mortal enemy of these poseurs are the real war reporters, in this case, Palestinian journalists in Gaza. These reporters expose them as toadies and sycophants, discrediting nearly everything they disseminate. For this reason, the poseurs never pass up a chance to question the veracity and motives of those in the field. I watched these snakes do this repeatedly to my colleague Robert Fisk.

When war reporter Ben Anderson arrived at the hotel where journalists covering the war in Liberia were encamped — in his words getting “drunk” at bars “on expenses,” having affairs and exchanging “information rather than actually going out and getting information” — his image of war reporters took a huge hit.

“I thought, finally, I’m amongst my heroes,” Anderson recalls. “This is where I’ve wanted to be for years. And then me and the cameraman I was with — who knew the rebels very well — he took us out for about three weeks with the rebels. We came back to Monrovia. The guys in the hotel bar said, ‘Where have you been? We thought you’d gone home.’ We said, ‘We went out to cover the war. Isn’t that our job? Isn’t that what you’re supposed to do?’”

“The romantic view I had of foreign correspondents was suddenly destroyed in Liberia,” he went on. “I thought, actually, a lot of these guys are full of shit. They’re not even willing to leave the hotel, let alone leave the safety of the capital and actually do some reporting.”

You can see an interview I did with Anderson here.

This dividing line, which occurred in every war I covered, defines the reporting on the genocide in Gaza. It is not a divide of professionalism or culture. Palestinian reporters expose Israeli atrocities and implode Israeli lies. The rest of the press does not.

Palestinian journalists, targeted and assassinated by Israel, pay — as many great war correspondents do — with their lives, although in far greater numbers. Israel has murdered 245 journalists in Gaza by one count and more than 273 by another. The goal is to shroud the genocide in darkness. No war I covered comes close to these numbers of dead. Since Oct. 7, Israel has killed more journalists “than the U.S. Civil War, World Wars I and II, the Korean War, the Vietnam War (including the conflicts in Cambodia and Laos), the wars in Yugoslavia in the 1990s and 2000s, and the post-9/11 war in Afghanistan, combined.” Journalists in Palestine leave wills and recorded videos to be read or played at their death.

The colleagues of these Palestinian journalists in the Western press broadcast from the border fence with Gaza decked out in flak jackets and helmets, where they have as much chance of being hit by shrapnel or a bullet as being struck by an asteroid. They scurry like lemmings to briefings by Israeli officials. They are not only the enemies of truth, but also the enemies of journalists doing the real work of war reporting.

When Iraqi troops attacked the Saudi border town of Khafji during the first Gulf War, Saudi soldiers fled in panic. Two French photographers and I watched frantic soldiers commandeering fire trucks and racing south. U.S. Marines pushed the Iraqis back. But in Riyadh, the press was told of our gallant Saudi allies defending their homeland. Once fighting ended, the press bus stopped a few miles down the road from Khafji. The pool reporters clambered out, escorted by military minders. They did stand-ups with the distant sound of artillery and smoke as a backdrop and repeated the lies the Pentagon wanted to tell.

Meanwhile, the two photographers and I were detained and beaten by enraged Saudi military police, furious that we had documented the panicked flight of Saudi forces, as we tried to leave Khafji.

My refusal to abide by press restrictions in the first Gulf War saw the other New York Times reporters in Saudi Arabia write a letter to the foreign editor saying I was ruining the paper’s relationship with the military. If not for the intervention of R.W. “Johnny” Apple, who had covered Vietnam, I would have been sent back to New York.

I do not fault anyone for not wanting to go into a war zone. This is a sign of normality. It is rational. It is understandable. Those of us who volunteer to go into combat — my colleague Clyde Haberman at The New York Times once quipped “Hedges will parachute into a war with or without a parachute” — have obvious personality defects.

But I fault those who pretend to be war correspondents. They do tremendous damage. They peddle false narratives. They mask reality. They serve as witting — or unwitting — propagandists. They discredit the voices of the victims and exonerate the killers.

When I covered the war in El Salvador, before I worked for The New York Times, the paper’s correspondent dutifully regurgitated whatever the embassy fed her. This had the effect of making my editors — as well as editors of the other correspondents who did report the war — question our veracity and “impartiality.” It made it harder for readers to understand what was happening. The false narrative neutered and often overpowered the real one.

The slander used to discredit my Palestinian colleagues — claiming they are members of Hamas — is sadly familiar. Many Palestinian reporters I know in Gaza are, in fact, quite critical of Hamas. But even if they have ties with Hamas, so what? Israel’s attempt to justify targeting journalists from the Hamas-run al-Aqsa media network is also a violation of Article 79 of the Geneva Convention.

I worked with reporters and photographers who had a wide variety of beliefs, including Marxist-Leninists in Central America. This did not prevent them from being honest. I was in Bosnia and Kosovo with a Spanish cameraman, Miguel Gil Moreno, who was later killed with my friend Kurt Schork. Miguel was a member of the right-wing Catholic group Opus Dei. He was also a journalist of tremendous courage, great compassion and moral probity, despite his opinions about Spain’s fascist ruler Francisco Franco. He did not lie.

In every war I covered, I was attacked as supporting or belonging to whatever group the government, including the U.S. government, was seeking to crush. I was accused of being a tool of the Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front in El Salvador, the Sandinistas in Nicaragua, the Guatemalan National Revolutionary Unity, the Sudanese People’s Liberation Army, Hamas, the Muslim-led government in Bosnia and the Kosovo Liberation Army.

John Simpson of the BBC, like many Western reporters, argues that the “world needs honest, unbiased eyewitness reporting to help people make up their minds about the major issues of our time. This has so far been impossible in Gaza.”

The assumption that if Western reporters were in Gaza the coverage would improve is risible. Trust me. It would not.

Israel bans the foreign press because there is a bias in Europe and the United States in favor of reporting by Western reporters. Israel is aware that the scale of the genocide is too vast for Western outlets to hide or obscure, despite all the ink and airtime they give to Israeli and U.S. apologists. Israel also cannot continue its systematic campaign of annihilation of journalists in Gaza if it has to contend with foreign media in its midst.

Israeli lies amplified by Western media outlets, including my former employer The New York Times, are worthy of Pravda. Beheaded babies. Babies cooked in ovens. Mass rape by Hamas. Errant Palestinian rockets that cause explosions at hospitals and massacre civilians. Secret command tunnels and command centers in schools and hospitals. Journalists who direct Hamas rocket units. Protestors of the genocide on college campuses who are antisemites and supporters of Hamas.

I covered the conflict between the Palestinians and Israelis, much of that time in Gaza, for seven years. If there is one indisputable fact, it is that Israel lies like it breathes. The decision by Western reporters to give credibility to these lies, to give them the same weight as documented Israeli atrocities, is a cynical game. The reporters know these lies are lies. But they, and the news outlets that employ them, prize access — in this case access to Israeli and U.S. officials — above truth. The reporters, as well as their editors and publishers, fear becoming targets of Israel and the powerful Israel lobby. There is no cost for betraying the Palestinians. They are powerless.

Call those lies out and you will swiftly find your requests for briefings and interviews with officials rebuffed. You won’t be invited by press officers to participate in staged visits to Israeli military units. You and your news organization will be viciously attacked. You will be left out in the cold. Your editors will terminate your assignment or your employment. This is not good for careers. And so, the lies are dutifully repeated, no matter how absurd.

It is pathetic watching these reporters and their news outlets, as Fisk writes, fight “like tigers to join these ‘pools’ in which they would be censored, restrained and deprived of all freedom of movement on the battlefield.”

When Middle East Eye journalists Mohamed Salama and Ahmed Abu Aziz, along with Reuters photojournalist Hussam al-Masri, and freelancers Moaz Abu Taha, and Mariam Dagga — who had worked with several media outlets, including the Associated Press — were killed in a “double tap” strike — designed to kill first responders arriving to treat casualties from initial strikes — at Nasser Medical Complex, how did Western news agencies respond?

“Israeli military says strikes on Gaza hospital targeted what it says was a Hamas camera,” the Associated Press reported.

“IDF claims hospital strike was aimed at Hamas camera,” announced CNN.

“Israel army says six ‘terrorists’ killed in Monday strikes on Gaza hospital,” the AFP headline read.

“Initial inquiry says Hamas camera was target of Israeli strike that killed journalists,” Reuters said.

“Israel claims troops saw Hamas camera before deadly hospital attack,” Sky News explained.

Just for the record, the camera belonged to Reuters, which said Israel was “fully aware” the news agency was filming from the hospital.

When Al Jazeera correspondent Anas Al Sharif and three other journalists were killed on Aug. 10 in their media tent near Al Shifa Hospital, how was it reported in the Western press?

“Israel Kills Al Jazeera Journalist It Says Was Hamas Leader,” Reuters titled its story, despite the fact al-Sharif was part of a Reuters team that won a 2024 Pulitzer Prize.

The German newspaper Bild, published a front page story headlined: “Terrorist disguised as a journalist killed in Gaza.”

The barrage of Israeli lies amplified and given credibility by the Western press violates a fundamental tenet of journalism, the duty to transmit the truth to the viewer or reader. It legitimizes mass slaughter. It refuses to hold Israel to account. It betrays Palestinian journalists, those reporting and being killed in Gaza. And it exposes the bankruptcy of Western journalists, whose primary attributes are careerism and cowardice.

This article was originally published on ScheerPost.

The post The Betrayal of Palestinian Journalists appeared first on LewRockwell.

Last week President Trump took steps to re-name the Department of Defense the “Department of War.” The President explained his rationale for the name change: “It used to be called the Department of War and it had a stronger sound. We want defense, but we want offense too … As Department of War we won everything…and I think we…have to go back to that.”

At first it sounds like a terrible idea. A “Department of War” may well make war more likely – the “stronger sound” may embolden the US government to take us into even more wars. There would no longer be any need for the pretext that we take the nation to war to defend this country and its interests – and only as a last resort.

As Clinton Administration official Madeleine Albright famously asked of Joint Chiefs Chairman Colin Powell when she was pushing for US war in the Balkans, “What’s the point of having this superb military that you’re always talking about if we can’t use it?”

So yes, that is a real danger. But at the same time, the US has been at war nearly constantly since the end of World War II, so it’s not like the “Defense Department” has been in any way a defensive department.

With that in mind, returning the Department of Defense to the Department of War, which is how it started, may not be such a bad idea after all – as long as we can be honest about the rest of the terms around our warmaking.

If we return to a “War Department,” then we should also return to the Constitutional requirement that any military activity engaged in by that department short of defending against an imminent attack on the US requires a Congressional declaration of war. That was the practice followed when it was called the War Department and we should return to it.

Dropping the notion that we have a “Defense Department” would free us from the charade that our massive military spending budget was anything but a war budget. No more “defense appropriations” bills in Congress. Let’s call them “war appropriations” bills. Let the American people understand what so much of their hard-earned money is being taken to support. It’s not “defense.” It’s “war.” And none of it has benefitted the American people.

Trump misunderstands one very important thing in his stated desire to return to a “War Department,” however. A tougher sounding name did not win the wars. Before the name change, which happened after the infamous National Security Act of 1947 that created the CIA and the permanent national security state, we won wars because for the most part we followed the Constitution and had a Congressional declaration of war. That way the war had a beginning and end and a clear set of goals. Since World War II the United States has not declared war even though it has been in a continuous state of war. It is no coincidence that none of these “wars” have been won. From 1950 Korea to 2025 Yemen and everything in between.

So go ahead and change it back to the “Department of War.” But let’s also stop pretending that maintaining the global US military empire is “defense.” It’s not.

The post Department of War? appeared first on LewRockwell.

In the labored daze of AI hype and GDP “growth,” few seem to notice the workforce is tired of being exploited as an uncomplaining resource.

“Great Powers” claim their greatness on prestige technologies and military force, but how do they measure up if we change the metrics to how they treat their workforces. How great are they then? China and the U.S. claim the mantles of “Great Powers” but if we look at how well they treat their workforces, both rate poorly.

What matters in assessing the workforce isn’t just wages; what matters is the entire quality of life. In this regard, childcare matters, because 1) without children, the “Great Power” has no future, and 2) the lives and budgets of workers with children revolve around the ease or difficulty of caring for their children. The “Great Power” state can either do a lot, do a little, or do nothing to help working parents.

Now that China’s birthrate is plummeting, the state has launched a few modest initiatives to help parents with the high costs of raising children. If we consider the cost of childcare to per capita GDP, the cost of childcare and education in China is high. It’s also absurdly burdensome in the U.S., which has also left childcare expenses up the parents and market forces, which unsurprisingly have pushed the costs of having a child and childcare to the stratosphere.

China’s total fertility rate was 1.1 children per woman in 2024, far below the replacement level of 2.1 children needed to sustain a stable population. America’s rate is around 1.6, also below replacement.

Compared to nations that pay for three years of childcare leave so at least one parent can care for the child at home to age 3, the “Great Powers” aren’t even close to “great.” Abysmal is a better description.

Let’s consider another metric: how well do the “Great Powers” treat their small-scale farmers and the people who raise their food? Once again, both “Great Powers” rate poorly. While the financial media focuses breathless attention on AI and measures of consumption, few pundits bother looking at how well the “Great Powers” treat their small-scale farmers and ag workforce. Pensions for low-earning family farmers? Not “great” by any measure.

After all, who needs children or food when you have AI data centers and robots delivering ultra-processed snacks? In both self-proclaimed “Great Powers,” the workforce is viewed as 1) a resource to be exploited (China’s infamous “996,” the grind of 9 a.m. to 9 p.m., six days a week, and America’s equally infamous “on call all weekend if the Boss texts you”), or 2) as consumers driving economic “growth” by purchasing more ultra-processed snacks and commoditized experiences.

If life is so great for the “Great Power” workforces, then where did laying flat, let it rot, the garbage time of history and the Five No’s come from? The Five No’s: no house, no car, no extraneous consumption, no marriage and no children.

Laying flat (tang ping): rejection of the hyper-competitive rat race and diminishing returns for punishing workloads, the desire for a simpler, more satisfying and enjoyable life; disillusionment with the fast-receding “China Dream / American Dream,” and the realization that the promise that material abundance would make everyone blissfully happy is false, as manic consumerism doesn’t generate fulfillment, meaning, purpose or happiness.

Let it rot (bai lan) summarizes the realization that the present era is the garbage time of history, and the appropriate response is to “actively embrace a deteriorating situation, rather than trying to turn it around.”

Read the Whole Article

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In the aftermath of any headline event, like the trans-killer-who-shall-remain-nameless church killing last week, it is always instructive for me to read the liberal commentary solving it all by taking guns away from far-right literally-fascist racist-sexist-homophobes gun nuts — or transphobes, as the case may be.

My “living truth” is that everything is the fault of the educated class, because it is our educated liberals that sit on the commanding heights of both politics and religion, the locus of power in our society. They created today’s world with their secular religious faith that with the right politics they would create heaven on Earth. So if anything is anyone’s fault, it is the fault of our ruling-class liberals. Period, full stop.

For instance, it is coming into focus right now that SSRIs — “a class of antidepressants that work by increasing the levels of serotonin in the brain” — are being prescribed all over the place and some people react in crazy ways when drugged up on SSRIs. I know: why didn’t the experts tell us? Could it be that lots of experts have NGO grants to research the benefits of SSRIs? More research is needed.

But I noticed a couple of articles blaming “nihilism.” Nihilism? That means Nietzsche, and I have been a Nietzsche-aholic ever since I caught a North London luvvie calling Nietzsche “the Nazis’ favorite intellectual.”

As I wrote a while back,

Nietzsche argued that for moderns, God had Died, and this meant a brutal process of decadence — the dying off of the old order — followed by nihilism, the terror of the eternal recurrence, as in the movie Groundhog Day, and finally the birth of a new god with the revaluation of all values.

Do you not see, dear liberal friends, that we are in a period of “nihilism” because your old gods are dead, and you killed them, one Blank Slate at a time, and the new gods are still awaiting an Übermensch to summon them out of the vasty deep.

I may sound like I am being trite here, but really, I am deadly serious. I believe in Nicholas Wade’s idea that

That quote comes from The Faith Instinct in which Wade tells how, in hunter-gatherer societies, religion played a vital role in reducing the need for force.

What? You mean that religion reduces the need for politics? So what happens when you combine politics and secular religion? I wonder.

Today, all across the world, the liberal gods — of equality, of the welfare state, of anti-racism, of climate change, of helpless victims, of administrative government and experts — are dead. They are dead because they were false gods all along, merely puppets dressed up as gods that liberals invented to give themselves political and moral power. And now liberals are reduced to yelling “pay no attention to that man behind the curtain.”

So now, per Fritzi, we are in a period of decadence, the dying off of the old order, and the nihilism and eternal recurrence of living the same day over and over again, just like Phil in Groundhog Day. Next up is the revaluation of all values and the appearance of the Übermensch, or, for you Joseph Campbell followers, the Sacrificial Hero. You tell me. Was Phil the weatherman an Übermensch, a Sacrificial Hero, or just a Mensch that helped little old ladies change a tire?

Oh no! Could it be that Don the TV Star is our Übermensch, appearing out of nowhere to run for President in 2016? And then descend into the underworld of lawfare, just like the heroes in the great myths, in order to travel the Hero’s Journey through death and rebirth and, through God’s Grace, to return to the land of the living to Make America Great Again?

I don’t think our liberal friends thought about what would happen if Trump actually survived his journey through the underworld of lawfare, because, in my experience, Margaret, our liberal friends are not that smart.

For instance, is it possible that by contesting everything Trump does in federal court our liberal friends will prod the Supreme Court into destroying the legal basis of the administrative state and its underground river of jobs and grants and status for educated liberals? And if all those educated liberal twentysomething Mamdani voters in New York City can’t look forward, one fine day, to jobs and grants and status, what would the robin do then, poor thing?

What will the new world look like, when we wake up one morning at 6:00 with Andie MacDowell in the bed with us? Is it possible to have a world with less government and more voluntary social cooperation, where people work together because we are good people and not because a politician is prodding us to fight the enemy or a priest is guilt-tripping us into being good?

Time will tell.

This article was originally published on American Thinker.

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