Lew Rockwell Institute

The US and Iran are on the brink of war. Israel and the United States are planning a major attack on Iran, which according to Biden himself could entail strikes on Iranian oil sites. Iran is now saying that its days of “individual self-restraint” are over, and it is prepared to go all-in if the US and Israel keep ramping up escalations.

The IDF continues to slaughter civilians in Lebanon with US-backed airstrikes as news surfaces that Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah had agreed to a 21-day ceasefire with Israel shortly before Israel assassinated him. The US reportedly knew about the deal.

And of course Israel is still killing dozens of civilians a day in its daily massacres in Gaza. Ninety-nine American healthcare workers who volunteered in the enclave have published an open letter to their president detailing the horrors that they have witnessed, and estimating the current death toll from this onslaught is over 118,908.

“Gaza was the first time I held a baby’s brains in my hand. The first of many.” https://t.co/wsE4WmFqZV

— Dave DeCamp (@DecampDave) October 4, 2024

And at this juncture in history, I think it would be good for us to give the western press their due credit for helping to take us here by manufacturing consent for the political environment in which such western-supported atrocities are possible.

All the mass media personnel who’ve been lying and manipulating for Israel helped pave the way to this.

All the pundits and reporters who’ve been assigning far more weight to the Israeli deaths on October 7 than to the vastly greater number of Arab deaths before and since.

All the editors who’ve been running “Gaza child walks into bullet” passive-language headlines designed to mask Israel’s responsibility for the killings.

Everyone who uncritically reported fake atrocity propaganda about beheaded babies and mass rapes as real news stories.

Everyone who uncritically parrots every claim made by the IDF and the Israeli government but refuses to report what Palestinians have been saying unless Israel confirms it.

NYT does it again. A barely-english sentence about Israel bombing another country that doesn’t mention Israel. pic.twitter.com/afn7nOjCDI

— Assal Rad (@AssalRad) October 2, 2024

Everyone at the press galleries in Washington who fail to forcefully interrogate US officials for the lies and spin they’ve been spewing about Palestine, Lebanon and Iran.

Everyone who publishes White House press releases disguised as news stories about how angry and upset Biden is about the Israeli war crimes he knowingly refuses to prevent.

Everyone who reports on starvation and sickness in Gaza like it’s some kind of natural disaster and not the inevitable consequence of deliberate siege warfare by Israel.

Everyone who treated Iranian missiles targeting Israeli military facilities without killing anybody as more horrific and significant than Israel’s daily massacres of civilians.

Everyone who uncritically regurgitates the phrase “Hamas-run health ministry”.

Everyone who uncritically calls Hezbollah a “terrorist organization”.

All the high-profile opinion columnists who’ve been running nonstop apologia for Israel’s criminality and encouraging the west to support even further aggressiveness.

Delete your subscription to the New York Times.

I cannot stress this enough. pic.twitter.com/Ckrz3GZGCM

— Alan MacLeod (@AlanRMacLeod) October 2, 2024

Reporters who refer to Hezbollah, the Houthis, and Shia militias in Iraq and Syria as “Iran-backed” but never refers to the Israeli military as “US-backed”.

Everyone who helps frame the Biden administration as a passive and reluctant witness to Israel’s mass atrocities instead of a willing and active participant.

Everyone who called Israel’s invasion of Lebanon a “limited ground operation” after ridiculing Russia for calling its invasion of Ukraine a “special military operation”.

Everyone who framed the pager bombings and assassination strikes in Lebanon as heroic achievements of extraordinarily sophisticated intelligence when they’d be shrieking their lungs out if a nation like Iran or Russia did anything similar.

Everyone who helps lend credence to the false narrative that opposition to Israeli murderousness is indicative of an epidemic of “antisemitism” in our society.

Turned on CNN for a bit. Dana Bash’s voice is quivering. Jim Scuitto noted that Mossad’s HQ is in a densely packed civilian area.

Emotion and context the Lebanese and Palestinians are far less likely to get from the network’s U.S. team.

— Arif Rafiq (@ArifCRafiq) October 1, 2024

All the mass media staff who helped manufacture public consent for the horrors we’ve been watching in the middle east are just as responsible for what happens there as the people who are physically inflicting the violence.

They may as well have dropped the bombs and launched the missiles themselves.

They may as well have pulled the triggers on the sniper rifles that shot all those Palestinian children in the head.

They may as well have personally inserted those iron rods into the anuses of Palestinian prisoners.

The propagandists of the western press are just as essential to maintaining the western-backed atrocities that Israel is committing as the Israeli military itself.

No matter how much you despise these psychopathic manipulators, it’s less than they deserve.

________________

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The post The Western Media Helped Create These Horrors in the Middle East appeared first on LewRockwell.

Except for the neoconservatives whose agenda it is, I sometimes wonder if I am the only other person who understands what the Ukraine conflict is about. While we await Washington’s decision about firing missiles into Russia, I will explain how we reached the current crisis.

In 2007 Washington declared war on Russia without announcing it. Putin provoked Washington’s secret declaration of war when he rejected Washington’s uni-polar hegemony at the Munich Security Conference.

Washington’s first attack was a year later when, while Putin was distracted at the Beijing Olympics, Washington sent a US trained and equipped Georgian army into South Ossetia. The purpose was not to defeat Russia militarily. Instead, it was a calculated risk that Putin might stand down and to avoid a military conflict that the West could misrepresent as restoring the Soviet Empire, and allow the Russian protectorate to be absorbed into Georgia. The American neoconservatives were gambling with lives not their own that Putin and thereby Russia would be weakened by giving in, thus opening more paths of aggression against Russia.

The neoconservatives’ plot against Putin might have worked except the Georgian invaders killed Russian peace-keepers. In 2008 Putin was trying to resurrect Russian pride, which was lost with the Soviet collapse 1991, and could not turn his back on dead Russian soldiers in South Ossetia. He returned from China, sent in an army, and smashed the US trained and equipped Georgian army in 5 days.

All of Georgia, a province of the Soviet Union until 1991, was in Putin’s hands. The Western propaganda is that Putin is dangerous because he intends to recover the Soviet empire. Obviously, this is a lie, because Putin pulled the Russian army out and left Georgia an independent state.

Following the US neoconservative’s failure in South Ossetia, which they mischaracterized as a “Russian invasion of Georgia,” the neoconservatives began pouring billions of dollars into Ukraine in order to create cadres, NGOs, and purchased politicians that would support the “Maidan Revolution,” which was Washington’s overthrow of the democratically elected government of Ukraine that was living in profitable peace with Russia.

Again Putin was inattentive, this time distracted by the Sochi Olympics, and this time he did nothing. It is unclear why Putin allowed Ukraine to become Washington’s puppet state hostile to Russia and a candidate for NATO.

The neo-Nazi state that Washington created began a number of operations against the Russian population in Donbas. The use of the Russian language was banned. Russians were accosted and killed in the streets by bands of Stepan Bandera’s followers. (Bandara fought for Nazi Germany against Russia during World War II.)

The Russian parts of Ukraine, Donbas and Crimea, which were separated from Russia by Lenin and Khrushchev, asked Putin to protect them by re-admitting them to Russia. Putin accepted Crimea’s request as the Russian Black Sea naval base is in Crimea, but Putin refused the requests from Donbas, which had formed into two independent republics to protect themselves from slaughter by the Ukrainian army. Putin, always cautious, was advised that if he accepted Donbass he would give credence to Western propaganda that Russia was restoring the Soviet Empire.

Nevertheless, Putin knew he had to do something to protect the Donbas Russians. He concocted the Minsk Agreement. The Minsk Agreement kept Donbas as part of Ukraine, but gave the territory some autonomy, such as its own police and courts, to prevent persecution by Washington’s puppet in Kiev.

Kiev and the two Donbas republics signed the Minsk agreement, and Germany and France promised to enforce it. Believing that the West had integrity, Putin was taken for a ride. Both the German Chancellor and French President later publicly admitted that they deceived Putin for eight years while Washington built and equipped a strong Ukrainian Army capable of conquering the two break-away republics in Donbas.

When during December 2021 and February 2022 Putin and Lavrov’s efforts to secure a mutual defense agreement between Russia and the West were met with extremely cold shoulders from Washington, NATO, and the European Union, Putin was faced with a large Ukrainian army about to invade the Donbas republics. Putin’s false hopes and mistaken belief in the West’s integrity left him unprepared, but he was forced to intervene and Russia, due to unpreparedness was forced to rely on a small private military force, the Wagner Group. As Putin had not prepared for the obvious conflict staring him in the face, he limited his intervention to Donbas to clearing out the Ukrainian forces, not to quickly prevailing in the conflict. The long conflict has given the West two years and eight months to involve itself and widen the conflict.

As Putin never enforced any of the announced red lines, he has no credibility in the West. Recently, the NATO Secretary-General said NATO does not pay any attention to Putin, because he talks but never does anything.

Consequently, the world has reached the precise point I said would be reached. Putin has backed up so much that he has no more room. His back is to the wall. NATO, the British Prime Minister, and the neoconservatives are lobbying Washington to give a green light to US/NATO firing missiles into Russia from Ukraine territory.

Understand, Ukraine hasn’t the capability and satellite targeting systems to fire the missiles. A missile attack on Russia can no longer be characterized as a “proxy war.” Putin himself has made this clear. Putin said that missiles fired into Russia means the US and NATO are at war with Russia and that Russia reserves the right to respond with nuclear weapons.

A crisis is upon us. The only relevant decision in the world at this time is whether Washington decides that Putin means what he says or that Putin is so averse to war that he will stand down from his threat in order to avoid a wider conflict involving nuclear weapons.

What is the agenda behind this crisis? The neoconservatives believe that Putin is so averse to war that he will stand down and sacrifice some of his declared goals of his Special Military Operation for peace in order to avoid the wider war that would result from Russia’s response to missile attacks on Russia.

Such a response from Putin, the neoconservatives believe, would undermine Putin in Russia both with the people and the military. The people would ask the meaning of the sacrifices and lives lost for the sake of surrendering the goals. The military would say, as Admiral Avakyant already has, that if Putin stands down “the pressure on Russia from its historical opponents will only increase, and the escalation process will enter an irreversible phase. The enormous resources currently invested in the indirect hot war of the collective West against our country will be redirected to finance all destructive and anti-state forces (regional separatism, ‘the fight against the rotten corrupt regime’, ‘the promotion of universal freedoms and values’, etc.). Various states ‘historically offended’ by our country will begin to make territorial claims against Russia from all sides.”

In other words, Putin could lose support and the Russian government could become less stable.

The neoconservative’s aim is to destabilize Putin and Russia. The neoconservatives would take advantage of destabilization to encourage the various ethnicities that comprise the Russian Federation to break apart. Washington’s goal is a dismembered Russian Federation into its constituent parts with many countries in the place of Russia.

The breakup of Russia by Washington began in 1991 with the Soviet collapse. Vast areas of Russia were taken from her: Ukraine, Belarus, Georgia, Armenia, Azerbaijan, and Central Asia extending from the Caspian Sea in the West to the borders of China, an enormous area encompassing Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, and Turkmenistan. Only the Russian Federation remained, itself a collection of ethnicities. Like the Western world, Russia itself is a tower of babel, only unlike in the West, in Russia the emphasis is on unity instead of division.

The neoconservatives believe that if Putin, in order to avoid wider war, reduces his demands on Ukraine, he can be painted as a loser, discredited, undermined, and Russia with him.

There is one and only one issue and one and only one decision: Does Washington believe Putin or not. If Washington believes Putin, Washington will not send missiles into Russia. If Washington does not believe Putin, World War III is about to happen unless Putin stands down.

I suspect a delayed decision as the can is kicked down the road. The Middle East is another avenue of attack on Russia. The absence of a mutual defense treaty between Russia, China, and Iran leaves Iran subject to a US/Israeli attack. The possibility exists of Israel’s war with Hezbollah leading into a joint attack of Israel and the US on Iran. This could hurt Russia’s prestige, and Western propaganda would present it as a Russian defeat.

As Washington and Russia are not talking, little can be done to ease the tension. The neoconservatives’ agenda of hegemony has produced a more dangerous situation than the Cuban Missile Crisis, and Washington has not acted to defuse the crisis.

The post At This Time in the World There Is Only One Important Decision Waiting To Be Made appeared first on LewRockwell.

After being hit by some 200 Iranian missiles Israel has not yet dared to response to to the strike. It instead has launched new air attacks into the center of Beirut and its southern area known as Dahiyeh (which simply means suburb) with its predominantly Shia population.

Israel seems to have forgotten what attacks on Dahiyeh mean:

Hizbullah asserts that it has established a new deterrence equation: an Israeli attack on the al-Dahieh neighborhood in Beirut will be met with a retaliatory strike on Tel Aviv.
…
According to Hizbullah, the new equation established by Hassan Nasrallah is that any attack on Tel Aviv will be the response to Israeli actions taken in the al-Dahieh district in Beirut.

Hizbullah’s new leadership will certainly adhere to that doctrine.

That Hizbullah has not been degraded by Israel’s strikes at is leadership could be seen by yesterday’s incursion attempts by the Israeli army into south Lebanon. Its special forces was immediately ambushed by Hizbullah forces. Eight of its soldiers were killed and many more wounded. Additional casualties were reported today.

Israel is now tempted to risk an all out war with Iran. There is little chance that such a war would achieve anything but an all out war in the Middle East, a rapid increase in oil prices and a severe hit on the Democratic chances in the ongoing election campaign.

Iran, who’s ballistic missiles had no problems in passing Israels air defenses, has threatened an all out attack on Israel’s infrastructure – electricity and gas installations as well as harbors – should Israel attempt to take revenge against Iran.

U.S. media still spreading the myth that the Biden administration is trying to hold back Israel.

The Washington Post for example headlines:

Biden works to limit conflict as Mideast edges closer to all-out war

However the piece admits that some views disagree strongly with its headline:

American officials say they are encouraging Israel to respond in a measured way, but U.S. allies in Europe are concerned that Washington is not putting sufficient pressure on the government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. “Our understanding is the Americans are not holding them back,” said the official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss a sensitive military matter.

Further down it comes to the heart of the issue:

Biden has been unwilling to use the most significant source of U.S. leverage — conditioning or suspending military aid to Israel — to try to change the dynamics of the war, as Israel has repeatedly rebuffed U.S. advice and counsel.

Not for one moment has Biden tried to limit Israel’s ability to strike on its neighbors. A headline in the Times of Israel even proclaims that Biden is urging Israel to launch a new strike:

Biden: US opposes Israel hitting Iran nuclear sites, response should be ‘proportional’

Speaking to reporters in Washington, Biden urged Israel to respond “proportionally” to the attack. Asked whether he backs a strike on Iranian nuclear sites, Biden responded: “The answer is no.”

Yves at Naked Capitalism correctly notes that:

Biden’s Israel Policy Has Led Us to the Brink of War on Iran

Yves shows that its was U.S. treachery that preceded the Israeli attack on Hizbullah leader Hassan Nasrallah:

We now learn that Nasrallah had agreed to the ceasefire shortly before he was assassinated and Israel or the US was affirmatively duplicitous, as if that comes as a surprise. Antiwar summarizes a CNN interview with the Lebanese foreign minister:

Lebanese Foreign Minister Abdallah Bou Habib has said that Hezbollah Secretary-General Hassan Nasrallah agreed to a US and French-proposed 21-day ceasefire with Israel right before Israel killed him.

Habib said the US and France told Lebanon that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu also agreed to the ceasefire proposal.

“They told us that Mr. Netanyahu agreed on this, and so we also got the agreement of Hezbollah on that. And, you know what happened since then,” Habib told CNN host Christiane Amanpour.

I would put my bet on the misrepresentation being US doing, to secure agreement from Hezbollah and then hope they could use that to browbeat Israel into what it would contend was a short pause. Recall that the US has presented ceasefire proposals as originating with Israel and later ‘fessed up that they came from Biden.

It was this ceasefire lie by the Biden administration that enabled the Israeli strike which then prompted the moderate Iranian president Masoud Pezeshkian to change his course. As I noted yesterday:

Pezeshkian noted rather bitterly that the order by the Israeli Prime Minister Natanyahoo to kill Nasrallah had been given from New York:

Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian says the international community will not forget that the order for Israel’s terrorist act to assassinate Secretary General of the Lebanese Hezbollah resistance movement Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah was issued from New York.
…
In a message of condolences on Saturday, Pezeshkian said the United States cannot absolve itself of complicity with the Zionists in the terror attack against the Hezbollah chief.

The assassination of Nasrallah demonstrated that Pezeshkian’s politics of moderation had failed.

After arriving back in Tehran Pezeshkian’s tone had changed: …

In a second point Yves presents evidence that the Iranian attack on Israel has caused significant damage and likely disabled significant parts of Israel’s F-35 fighter forces.

She then quotes a Code Pink piece which concludes:

Biden has been out of his depth throughout this crisis, relying on political instincts from an era when acting tough and blindly supporting Israel were politically safe positions for American politicians. Secretary of State Antony Blinken rose to power through the National Security Council and as a Senate staffer, not as a diplomat, riding Biden’s coat-tails into a senior position where he is as out of his depth as his boss.

Meanwhile, pro-Iran militia groups in Iraq warn that, if the U.S. joins in strikes on Iran, they will target U.S. bases in Iraq and the region.

So we are careening toward a catastrophic war with Iran, with no U.S. diplomatic leadership and only Trump and Harris waiting in the wings. As Trita Parsi wrote in Responsible Statecraft, “If U.S. service members find themselves in the line of fire in an expanding Iran-Israel conflict, it will be a direct result of this administration’s failure to use U.S. leverage to pursue America’s most core security interest here — avoiding war.”

The U.S. has many indefensible assets in the Middle East. Its troops in Iraq and Syria are few and in precarious positions. Its bases in the Gulf states have no defense against attacks from Iran and its navel forces in the Middle East lack the ability to refuel the fleet.

Should Israel be allowed to strike Iran the security of all U.S. forces in the Middle East, the energy infrastructure of the whole region and the global oil supplies will be in danger of imminent destruction.

It is hight time for someone to wake the White House up to those facts.

Reprinted with permission from Moon of Alabama.

The post Biden Is Pushing Israel Towards Larger War appeared first on LewRockwell.

Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò has strongly criticized Francis for the penitential service he held on the eve of this year’s Synod on Synodality, saying the bizarre ceremony that included the public confession of a number of “politically correct” and loosely defined sins was another step toward a “globalist religion.”

“Unwilling to ask forgiveness for the real sins against God and neighbor – which the followers of the Bergoglian sect casually commit – the Synod on Synodality invents new ones against the Earth, immigrants, the poor, women, the marginalized,” Viganò wrote Wednesday on X. “A new pauperist and politically correct decalogue.”

Unwilling to ask forgiveness for the real sins against God and neighbor – which the followers of the Bergoglian sect casually commit – the Synod on Synodality invents new ones against the Earth, immigrants, the poor, women, the marginalised. A new pauperist and politically… pic.twitter.com/8ySUE07Doz

— Arcivescovo Carlo Maria Viganò (@CarloMVigano) October 2, 2024

“Here then, ‘on behalf of the faithful’ to whom Bergoglio appends faults that they did not even know existed, we discover the sin of those who have ‘turned their heads away from the sacrament of the poor (sic), preferring to adorn ourselves and the altar with culpable adornments that take bread away from the hungry,’” Viganò continued.

“These words are reminiscent of the objections of Judas – the ‘mercator pessimus’ so much appreciated by Bergoglio – when Mary of Magdala broke the precious jar of aromas to anoint Our Lord’s feet: ‘Why was not this perfumed oil sold for three hundred denarii and then given to the poor?’ (Jn 12:5). And we ourselves, with the Evangelist, could comment today: ‘This he said, not because he cared for the poor, but because he was a thief, and as he kept the chest, he took what they put in it’ (Jn 12:6),” he added.

Viganò’s strong criticism comes in response to a penitential service led by Francis on the eve of the Synod earlier this week in which he and other prelates confessed a wide variety of vague and seemingly political “sins,” including the “sin of using doctrine as stones to be hurled” and the “sin against synodality/lack of listening, communion, and participation of all.”

Others far less critical of Francis than Viganò also took issue with the Francis-led service, with Canon lawyer Father Gerald Murray telling EWTN that the ceremony was the “politicization of the examination of conscience” and reminded him “of Soviet show trials.”

This originally appeared on Lifesite News.

The post Abp. Viganò: Bergoglio’s Politically Correct ‘Sins’ Are Another Step Toward a Globalist Religion appeared first on LewRockwell.

The post Governments Make Everything Worse appeared first on LewRockwell.

Recently, the East Coast was hit by a devastating hurricane that swept through Florida, Georgia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Kentucky and Virginia, with 175 deaths in that region already been confirmed. Furthermore, unlike a typical hurricane, it also wiped towns off the map and was the worst hurricane in North Carolina’s history (with the possible exception of one in 1775).

Since I have a lot of ties to the area (e.g., many people I’m close to live there, and Asheville was one of our favorite spots to go road trips to—and one of my favorite songs is about the area), I’ve been hearing horrible stories over the last six days over what happened there (both from my friends and readers who have asked me to cover it) and I’ve put a lot of thought into what to say about the events. Eventually I decided it would be best to wait until the Vice Presidential debate was held, as given the magnitude of this unprecedented disaster, it was almost guaranteed the topic would be raised at the debate and by extension would likely make a much stronger case for the profound issues facing our country than anything I could say.

•The death and destruction from the hurricane, was an afterthought for everyone there (including the liberal moderators) except for JD Vance. This is particularly extraordinary given that the devastation was concentrated in the highly liberal areas of North Carolina.

•Their primary focus was not the suffering from the hurricane, but rather how those deaths could be used to support their agenda (the climate change boondoggle).

•Many of the claims the moderators made were false and justified by vague statements (e.g., “scientists say” or “the overwhelming consensus amongst scientists”).

This for context, is almost identical to what we saw those people do throughout COVID, as there was a callous disregard for the devastation of their policies (e.g., the unscientific and unjustifiable lockdowns) and the lives lost from their policies (e.g., from the systematic suppression of early COVID-19 protocols or mandating deadly and ineffective hospital protocols). Rather the deaths throughout the pandemic were only cited when something could be gained from them (e.g., more money or power for fighting COVID).

These events in turn touch upon a few key points I’ve emphasized throughout this publication which I believe are becoming increasingly important to recognize as we move into an era with a more and more predatory ruling class.

Doctor Thyself

Presently the affected areas are facing a huge number of problems. Two of the key ones are a lack of drinkable water and a lack of medical care. To illustrate:

Tropical Storm Helene caused severe damage to the water and distribution system for Asheville.

The city says that extensive repairs are required to treatment facilities, underground and above ground water pipes, and to roads that are washed away which are preventing personnel from accessing parts of the system.

“Although providing a precise timeline is impossible, it is important to note that restoring service to the full system could take weeks,” city officials say.

Or to quote a trustworthy friend in the area:

Mission Hospital in Asheville has been trying to hold itself together like it’s in a television starship battle taking damage.

Generators were the sole source of power in the days after the flood. With water from the city still not possible, pumping trucks have been brought in to satisfy the demand. Ceilings are leaking and crumbling outside of ORs in hallways.

Shifts are constantly running, and workers of all types are being incentivized to stay onsite as much as possible. Fuel trucks have been brought in to fuel staff vehicles at no cost, and the cafeteria is doing the same for weary bodies and brains.

The parent company of the hospital is donating a million dollars to help with relief efforts. Other hospitals were defeated entirely by the rising water. One such case is in Erwin, Tennessee where there was a dramatic rooftop evacuation by helicopter of all staff and patients at Unicoi County Hospital.

Helping hands are flocking from all over the country. Fire trucks have been seen from as far away as Los Angeles, with EMS and line workers coming all the way from Canada.

In this publication, I’ve repeatedly emphasized Ivan Illich’s belief that two key problems underlie the dysfunction in American society.

•People are conditioned to believe they need to be taught to learn (which as discussed here destroys their natural capacity to learn and think critically).

•People are conditioned to believe they need a doctor to be healthy.

In turn, while I’d cite a few others as well, I believe Illich was spot on.

In the case of the second point, by reframing health as a product to consume rather than something you have your own agency over, it creates a situation where there can never be enough medical care, and in turn helps to explain why every year, more and more is spent on medicine (e.g., 17.54% of all spending in America in 2024), yet despite being by far the top medical spender in the world, we have some of the worst medical outcomes in the world.

Because of this reality, my focus has always been on two things:

1. Finding a way to practice medicine where minimal external infrastructure is needed for what I do (e.g., I have a small bag which carries everything I need [e.g., DMSO] to address more than half of the medical issues I run into).

For example, something most people don’t appreciate about our extravagant (resource intensive) hospital system is that it doesn’t keep a costly reserve of staff on hand and has almost no ability to handle a sudden increase (surge) of patients (e.g., this is why every year we see news stories about hospitals being overwhelmed by a “disastrous” flu season).

In turn, during either a pandemic or an infrastructure destroying disaster, it’s guaranteed that the surge capacity of the medical system will be reached. Because of this, there’s a good chance you’ll be on your own. Many of us witnessed this during COVID (especially in the hard hit areas of NYC). Since I knew this was essentially inevitable at the end of 2019, I made a point to learn everything I could about treating COVID on an outpatient basis. Then I spent the next year treating people who would have otherwise required hospitalization (and almost certainly died). In contrast, despite almost every leader in the medical field recognizing outpatient treatment of COVID would be necessary to prevent the hospitals from hitting their surge capacity, every single outpatient option for the treatment of COVID-19 was methodically suppressed by the healthcare authorities (except giving Tylenol or Ibuprofen—which arguably made the infection worse).

2. Providing people with the information to take care of themselves for the myriad of medical issues that don’t actually require prolonged medical care (e.g., if I have the option, I’d much rather tell someone how to deal with their issue themselves so I don’t need to keep seeing them and feel like I’m taking advantage of them by creating a cycle of dependency or unsatisfactory results).

Note: a massive (and incredibly profitable) investment over decades was made to enshrine this belief in doctors and hospitals. In turn, one of my biggest questions with COVID has always been why the industry was willing to risk the credibility it relies upon for the COVID grift—as the long term cost of the public losing its trust in medicine would greatly outweigh whatever was made off the vaccines. To illustrate—a large survey published in JAMA found in April 2020, 71.5% of Americans trusted their doctors and hospitals, whereas in January 2024, only 40.1% did—which is earth shattering for medicine. I feel most of my colleagues still do not appreciate the implications of this damage to public trust.

Because of this, the primary goal of this publication is to promote the Forgotten Sides of Medicine, which I believe can directly help the readers here. For example, I recently started a project I kept on putting off (due to the time commitment required to do it properly)—unveiling the medical applications of DMSO and the abundance of evidence for them. Many of them (e.g., treating strokes, spinal cord paralysis, and Down Syndrome) are understandably mind blowing. However, what’s even more important is that DMSO frequently and safely treats many far more common disabling and debilitating conditions people live with for years (if not decades) to the point they often contemplate committing suicide over them.

In turn, after I published that article, I’ve begun receiving emails and comments like this:

Great article. Very useful. Actually reading this is making me interested in returning to doing more research and observation on a surgical topic- the first time since I retired from surgery a few years ago— but I am now interested to watch wound healing / skin graft taking/ ulcer healing with DMSO help. That being said, since you introduced your last article I have been using it with neurologically damaged patients , chronic pain, and patients with autoimmune diseases and at very first response the responses have been very positive- in line with the data you present. As I have explained the data you introduced me to patients and given them the option they are showing intense interest. I am excited to follow these outcomes!

Note: this comment came from James Miller, a surgeon of remarkable integrity I’ve previously shared the work of here (who after one article was then featured on the national news).

Your articles are a blessing to me. I’m post spine surgery #16…10+ fractures, 4 fusions, nerve transfers…6 discs going bad…AS, parathyroid tumor, now gone, (long undiagnosed)…and today, I was utterly miserable. Read your articles, and remembered I have a jar of the DMSO gel. Put it on an hour ago…it’s working. God bless you! Words cannot explain the hope I now have.

Thank you so much!! I have grade 4 chondromalacia and basically no cartiladge left behind the kneecaps , due to a patellofemoral tracking disorder . I strained my knee several days ago and the swelling was significant . I thought I would have to have the fluid drained and steroid instilled . I have had this done twice in the past . I used castor oil first on my knee, rubbed it in, then, 100% DMSO . I iced and rested the knee. I did this two or three times a day . Amazing response!! Better than draining and steroid !! I put some DMSO on my dog’s paraspinal muscles . She has lumbar spondylitis . She was moving better and brought me a pine cone to thank me !!

Note: 100% DMSO is too strong for many people.

DMSO is incredible. I suffered two weeks in bed with a back injury…and rose up and walked two hours after applying DMSO. I also have used DMSO many times to treat serious burns…every one of them healed quickly, and with significantly reduced pain. I crushed the cartilage in my right ear by accident, applied DMSO, and the wound was healed in three days, without scars. I have experienced no side effects other than the characteristic odor after use. It should be in widespread use.

I really admire your work AMD! I hope that one day we live in a culture where heroes like yourself can share information with out masks or fear of being criminalized, de-platformed or de-licensed. Since your first post on DMSO, I have spent a great deal of time researching the subject and have a few anecdotes to report.

I have had a large lipoma (fatty tumor) on my arm for many years. It was about 50mm in size (or about the diameter of an egg for your American audience). I used a topical application of 50% DMSO plus curcumin & ginger. I have been applying the DMSO to the lipoma 2-3x a day for less than a week and the tumor has already shrunk to 12mm (the size of a blueberry).

My wife has had pretty severe knee pain since injuring it 15 months ago. After explaining to her what DMSO was, I applied the same DMSO+curcumin mixture to both sides of her knee. She reported that it relieved her pain even before I finished massaging it in. The following day I asked if gave her a few hours of relief. To which she said, “no”. I was a little disappointed, until she smirked back “it wasn’t a couple of hours, it hasn’t hurt since”.

Note: the first part of this series which focuses on the neurological and circulatory diseases DMSO treats can be read here while the second part which focuses on its use for pain and musculoskeletal injuries can be read here (while the rest will take a bit longer to finish).

After I read all the comments here and the larger threads on Twitter (where many others shared how DMSO had helped them in the past), the thing I was most struck by was how little awareness exists about what can be done with DMSO (even from people who’d spent their life studying integrative medicine) despite the fact:

•It took the country by storm in the 1960s (e.g., hundreds of thousands of Americans were using it, gas stations advertised they were [illegally] selling it and thousands of studies on it were published).

•So much interest in DMSO still existed after decades of the FDA outlawing DMSO (e.g., due to it effectively treating chronic pain) that many legislators continually fought for it to be legalized (e.g., multiple congressional hearings were held in the 1980s to address end the FDA’s embargo).

This in turn, speaks to how incredibly effective the propaganda apparatus is at getting people to forget things which get in the way of its business model (e.g., GHB treating insomnia or ultraviolet blood irradiation revolutionizing hospital care and chronic circulatory, infectious and autoimmune conditions). Likewise, it still amazes me that Fauci enacted the exact same playbook on the gay community forty years ago with HIV crisis that he did for COVID, but despite the gay community openly calling him a mass murderer at the time, this time around, they ardently supported him.

Note: in addition to needing medical self-sufficiency, I also believe it’s becoming more and more important to have water self-sufficiency. This is because water is becoming an increasingly scarce resource, many of the municipal supplies being contaminated with things that harm your health, and because in disaster situations (e.g., this one) you can’t rely upon the grid to give you clean water. For this reason, I previously wrote an article discussing my preferred options for sourcing healthy water (including ones that can effectively filter runoff in a disaster) because I’ve found that is often critical for people’s wellbeing (e.g., a few readers found the bottled water brand I mentioned profoundly improved their health)..

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The post Hurricane Helene Has a Critical Lesson for All of Us appeared first on LewRockwell.

A symbol was shattered. A legend is born. The Resistance, more than ever, won’t back down.

A symbol was shattered. A legend is born. The Resistance, more than ever, won’t back down.

That was framed not by a Shi’ite, but by a Lebanese Christian leader, encapsulating how a true Political Islam icon is capable of transcending all – artificial – borders.

This decade, that I defined as The Raging Twenties, started with a murder: the – all-American – targeted assassination of Quds-Force leader Gen Soleimani and Hashd al-Shaabi commander Abu Mohandes just outside Baghdad airport.

Gen Soleimani, more than a symbol, was the conceptualizer of the Axis of Resistance. For all its setbacks, especially in the past few weeks, the Axis of Resistance is much stronger now than in January 2000. Soleimani – the martyr, the legend – left an unparalleled legacy that will never cease to inspire all the West Asian nodes of the Resistance.

The same will happen to Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah. More than a symbol, he was the Face of the Axis of Resistance, extraordinary popular and respected all across the Arab street and the lands of Islam. For all its setbacks, especially in the past few weeks, the Axis of Resistance will be much stronger in the next few years than in September 2024.

Nasrallah – the martyr, the legend – leaves a legacy comparable to Soleimani’s, to whom, incidentally, he was always in awe in military matters, and always learning. As a politician though, as well as a fatherly, spiritual source of wisdom, Nasrallah was peerless.

Now let’s descend from the stars to the gutter.

An unredeemable serial war criminal and psychopathic genocidal, violating scores of UN resolutions, popped up at the UN General Assembly in New York and then ordered, from inside the building, yet another war crime: wiping out an entire block in southern Beirut with dozens of American bunker buster bombs, including the BLU-109 with a JDAM precision guiding system – leaving countless civilians still unaccounted for under the rubble, including Sayyed Nasrallah.

As the war criminal addressed the UN General Assembly, over half of the delegates staged a mass walkout: the hall was de facto nearly empty of real Global South diplomats. The remaining audience was presented with yet another trademark display of IQ-impaired “maps” featuring the “blessed” – Saudi Arabia, Sudan, Egypt, Jordan, UAE – and the “cursed” – Iraq, Iran, Syria, Lebanon, Yemen.

A rabid, lowly interloper from Polish extraction – a complete fake – passing judgment on ancient civilizations does not even qualify as gutter-level trash.

History is replete with instances of entities which cannot be really qualified as proper nation-states. They are more like severe bacteriological infections. The only thing they specialize in is kill, kill, kill. Preferably unarmed civilians – as a terrorist tactic. Terribly dangerous, of course. History also tells us the only way they must be dealt with.

No more velvet gloves

Israel killed Sayyed Nasrallah for two main reasons. 1) Because he explicitly reaffirmed Hezbollah would never abandon Gaza for any “deal” allowing the genocide and total ethnic cleansing to go on. 2) Because the Talmudic psychopathological fanatics want to invade and re-occupy Lebanon.

Israel did manage to find serious breaches in Lebanon’s – and Iran’s security. In the case of Beirut, the whole city is infested with infiltrators. Fifth columnists of all stripes move back and forth doing anything they want. Iran is a much more serious proposition. Even as the IRGC’s Commander Brigadier General Abbas Nilforoushan was also killed alongside Nasrallah in Beirut, the IRGC itself in Tehran may have been compromised.

As a serious internal security rethink now becomes imperative from Tehran to Beirut, Hezbollah’s carefully constructed structure won’t collapse because of Nasrallah’s assassination – no matter the tsunami of tawdry psy ops by the usual suspects.

Hezbollah is independent of personalities. The structure is a maze, a rhizome – and other nodes, duly trained, as well as a new leadership, will spring up, as with the Vietcong during the “American war”.

Of course it’s always about an American war, because the foundation of the Empire of Chaos is Forever Wars.

Back in 1982, Israel’s war on Lebanon was so brutal that even Ronald Reagan – who once threatened to pave Vietnam and paint it over with parking stripes – was stunned. He told Prime Minister Menachem Begin, who came to prominence as an Irgun terrorist, “Menachem, this is a holocaust.”

And yet a lowly grifter called Joe Biden, then a Senator bought and paid for by the Zionist lobby, called Begin on the phone to reassure him that “if all the civilians get killed”, that’s no big deal.

Predictably, the then Senator now lame-duck zombie in the White House fully approved Nasrallah’s assassination.

The ball is now moving to public opinion all across the lands of Islam. Nearly two billion Muslims to a great extent will also drive the new phase of the Axis of Resistance. The killing machine, for its part, will continue to kill, kill, kill – mostly civilians, unarmed women and children.

Now nothing prevents the Axis of Resistance from stepping up to the next level. There’s simply no diplomacy, compromise, ceasefire, “two-state solution” or any other procrastination tactics in the horizon. Just a do-or-die existential fight against a relentless killing machine exhibiting, to paraphrase (and invert) Yeats, “a gaze blank and pitiless as the sun”.

For all practical purposes, the real (italics mine) Raging Twenties start now.

And the rage of the lands of Islam will be focused not only on the killing machine, but on its suckling she-wolf: the Empire of Forever Wars.

Iran, Iraq, Syria, Yemen, Turkey, Pakistan, scores of Global Majority actors should be getting ready for a historical first: coordinate diplomacy, geoeconomics and military potential to the max to finally confront the bacteriological infection head on.

An auspicious scenario now becomes quite plausible: BRICS assuming the role of chief diplomatic channel for the lands of Islam. The next logical stage would be to get the UN out of Israeli/American territory and establish a HQ in a nation that really respects international humanitarian law.

The politically emerging Global Majority will then establish its own global, really united nations, organization – leaving the racists to wallow and rot inside their own walls. Meanwhile, in the battlefield, velvet gloves should be removed: the time has come for death by a thousand cuts.

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

The post Nasrallah as Martyr/Legend: The Lands of Islam Get Ready to Channel Their Rage appeared first on LewRockwell.

When I read of people asking about the rationale of nuclear war, or mass censorship as stipulated by John Kerry, of the call to Eliminate the US Constitution, the people seem shocked and universally declare this can never happen logically or rationally.  Which is true – but underestimates the mentality we are dealing with in this Earth Holocaust.

If we look at history – that manic psychotic mania is evident in every Fall of civilization. 

Nuclear annihilation is most definitely not out of the realm of their view of the future.  If that’s what it takes – that’s what they will do.  The decimation of entire civilizations has been done throughout the centuries of our existence.

Recently, archeologists found an expansive modern underground city built of stone.  Intact.  But without a shred of evidence of the civilization that lived there.    In another part of the world, a mythological city was unearthed.  Speculation suggests it may have been the city ruled by Artemis, daughter of Zeus, and protector of girls.

If in fact science is attempting to unveil the possibility that mythology was reality, what would have caused these gods of mythology to disappear?   

Subtle alterations to history are becoming mainstream:  the Minoans of Crete are no longer a definitive reality, historians waffle as to whether they were part of mythology?  Why?  To prepare us for some ‘truths’.  Bezos is trying to turn himself into a human god via bionic transplants and brain implants.  Why?

Netanyahu believes he is a god.  This isn’t about Israel.  He is secular – he has no beliefs.  It is about evil rising up thru this man whose goal is simply to eliminate mankind.  Gaza became the West Bank became southern Lebanon, norther Lebanon, Yemen, Syria, Iraq, with an end point of – Iran.  Maybe.  Turkey, Egypt, are precarious targets as well.  What is his end game?

It is clear Netanyahu is unconcerned with silly platitudes such as law, morals, ethics, values, or compassion.  It is equally clear that everyone is afraid of him.  Mythology wasn’t just about gods, it shared earth with evil characters as well;  Lilith, Apopis, Kakia, Prometheus, etc…who  inspired chaos, torment, and abominations.  Just like – Netanyahu.

The Bible also had evil characters;  King Herod, Jezebel & Ahab, Delilah, Haman, etc…  It is clear that there has always been the evil antithesis to good.   It isn’t simply a Christian construct.   It isn’t a DNA construct.   It isn’t race.  Is it genetic?    Science claims everyone is born evil.     The Bible says that evil is the corruption of creational and relational goodness.   The Dark Angels ‘fell from grace’ – they were once good and fell.

Why does the West, in particular UK and US, want to provoke a nuclear war?  The combined populations of the EU and America are nearly 800,000.   But the fallout would extend over every continent.  The land would be useless for hundreds of years.  Waterways, wildlife, destroyed.   Earth would require centuries to reform.  This attitude is certainly better described as megalomania.  Death is seen as power.  Putin still believes that the Gatekeepers of the West are rationale humans.

Despite all the anti-Israel and anti-Netanyahu genocide being called out – no one is actually stopping him.   As though he would draw a sword and smite their neck in an instant.  Instead of stopping him the Biden handlers give him more of America’s Money.   Which means they support a form of global genocide.  And they have no genetic claim to humanism.

We have located at least 11 underground cities.  The reason for going underground could be climate related or it could be security from evil.  The UK has a 35 acre bunker for the PM and his immediate staff.  A nuclear radiation fallout would remain active for 20 years.  The bunkers aren’t outfitted for that length of time – and then what?   There is no food, no life, no vegetation.   Logical?

Jens Stoltenberg on Russia’s announcement that any attack by Ukraine into Russian cities would be met with nuclear retaliation – is simply rhetoric and blubber.   In other words, it is worth the risk that Russia will not respond and allow the CIA to blow up the country…   That is the mindset.   Of course this same mindset declared that sacrificing every Ukrainian for their resources was a good wartime strategy.  And the UN has no power.

Stoltenberg:   “I think we can change his calculus by making the cost of continuing the fight too high.  There are no risk-free options”.  Thus the strategy is to financially bankrupt Russia before nuking it to oblivion.

Reprinted with permission from HelenaGlass.net.

The post The Nuclear Option: Stoltenberg Claims Putin Is Bluffing appeared first on LewRockwell.

Let’s not mince words or use hyperbole. I’ve just attended the best, most glamorous ball since the ’50s, and two weeks later the best party ever, and this from a man who has been partying for more than sixty years. I will not go into details because my hosts in the English countryside and their beautiful property Daylesford, Lord and Lady Bamford, are different from the publicity-seeking Hiltons, Kardashians, and their ilk. They’ve asked for radio silence. I will only go as far as to say that the last time someone even approached the glamour and magnificence of their ball was at Guy de Rothschild’s dance, and whose château outside Paris, Ferriere, was the venue. I was in my 20s.

“What I fear is that separating a young person from their smartphone will one day be considered a capital offense.”

Two weeks later, in Paris, Arki Busson, whose parents are no longer with us but were very close lifelong friends of mine, took over Maxim’s, the most fabled Parisian restaurant of all time, and outdid even Franz Lehar’s fabled Merry Widow operetta that takes place in the restaurant on rue Royale. Never have I heard better music or seen more charming cancan dancers kicking up a storm while we drank champagne nonstop. Never have I seen Maxim’s come more alive, and it was all due to Arki. His children were present, two wonderful boys whose mother is Elle Macpherson, and his daughter with Uma Thurman. Arki’s now with a beautiful lady who’d rather be Madame Busson than the Duchess of Wellington, something that finds me in total agreement. Life can be beautiful when one has friends like Arki, Anthony, and Carole, and now that I’ve spilled the beans, here’s my incredible discovery at both parties: I didn’t see a single person talking on a mobile, proof that the two parties were unique and no one outsourced their humanity to their devices.

And speaking of these horrors, it is now accepted in the West that viewing is superior to reading. I believe that risk-averse parents are to blame. Prying smartphones out of the small hands of children is the first step. Following the parties I flew to the Bagel and made certain to look for any signs of books or newspapers on board or in the airports. Not a single one. Take my word for it. Instead, well, you know the rest. Everyone glued to those devices like slaves used to be glued to their oars, the only sound missing being the big bully banging on a slab giving the beat to those in chains.

What I don’t understand is that in America, where I now find myself, everything is disposable, so why don’t concerned parents get rid of these devices and leave their children on their own? The little monsters are bound to open a book, or are they? Perhaps I’m judging from my generation’s outlook. What I fear is that separating a young person from their smartphone will one day be considered a capital offense.

Drinking champagne nonstop gives one a terrible hangover the next day but illuminates the conversation the night before. I had some good ones: Western affluence and luxury abundance have led to exaggerated, nonexistent health problems; at least that’s what my beautiful and young dinner neighbor insisted. I wholeheartedly agreed. PTSD is now claimed nonstop by anyone disappointed over any result: an election, a football match, even a traffic ticket. An epidemic of mental illness seems to be everywhere in the West, and terms such as “bipolar” are bandied about by shyster lawyers, whereas once upon a time “shell-shocked” was used sparingly about victims of gunshot wounds or natural disasters.

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Assistant Secretary of Defense, Celeste Wallender, is suddenly concerned about Washington’s credibility due to the Ukraine War loss.  The fact that America has lost every war since WWII (which it won vis a vis with Soviet alliances) – is a distant memory for this PhD professional student having zero war or military experience.   She is an experienced – politician.

“The global standing of the US has been called into question by the Ukraine conflict”.  Understatement of the decade.   The war is no longer ‘about anything’ – it is an egocentric conflict centered on winning.  The obsession with Russia is over the top.   Her former employer, Center For Strategic Studies (CSIS), is busily analyzing, “Seizing Middle East Opportunities”.    Those ‘opportunities’ are about killing more people and installing the western proxy Reza Pahlavi.  Like Ukraine, the Israeli war is no longer ‘about anything’ either – which is why it will ultimately fail as well.

The dysfunction of psychosis becomes paralyzed when the reasoning is not ‘defense’ but annihilation.  Which is why Israel continues to assert ‘defense’ – a false premise that has been unveiled over and over again.  Defense is a ‘legal justification’.   However, if the person you murder is unarmed it is homicide.

This ‘defense’ premise is the Pandora Box of evil that Netanyahu unleashed and cannot contain.   Which is why the GLOBE is looking to nuke Pandora.

The Team that Trump has assembled is a powerhouse that Liberals and Neoconservatives fear exponentially.   It overcomes boundaries and unites a diversity of intellectuals against a pogrom of strategic idiots.  Militarily – the US, EU and Israel are completely inept and thus have created a military force equivalent to a Diddy pajama party.

Israel led the globe in trafficking, molestation, adenochrome, and drugs.   They then trained western police, sheriffs, and military ops in this ‘adventure’ scheme.   They use blackmail to own their politicians.  And now wonder why they are so increasingly strategically bereft of wisdom – and allies.   For the most part, Israel’s successes have been against unarmed civilians, children and women.   Which is why it is called – genocide.  But it proves they have no strategy – no military worth.  So, YES, their credibility is twallette water.

When confronted with Military might – both Ukraine and Israel are suddenly ‘freaking out’.  NO FAIR!   Is the cry.   As one pundit noted – Israel’s targets include Jews, Muslims, and Christians.  The common theme – religion.   Genocide of religious peoples by Secular peoples under the auspices of Biblical theory … as their cloak of armour.

CSIS would have us believe that ‘Biden” attempted to ‘stabilize the region’ but the evil Iran disrupted the agenda.   The evil Iran has retaliated against aggressive Israel.  They have not attacked any other country.   Their goal is sovereignty within their own form of government.  In order to create the global fusion as per the WEF, every country must come under the dictatorial regime of America’s Liberals.  But that was fading so the only alternative left was for Israel to come out of the proverbial closet of its genocide and torture.   It needs the war because there is no way around America’s DEBT which is intricately tied to Israel.  The awakening is Global.   And thus Celeste of no experience is correct – the US has zero credibility.

Apparently, in the mindset of illustrious CSIS analyzers  – they note that Iran did not strike despite all the previous punctuations of their society by Israel.   They are dumbfounded because the entire point was to prod Iran.  Thus, these analysts have determined that Iran’s reticence to engage in a WWIII – is reflective of their incompetence.  Once prodded to annihilation – inaction to provoke a global war is now considered a weakness.  In the eyes and minds of the insane.

True to form, Twitter is ablaze with every politician’s handler posting pre-scripted Israel support until the ‘end of America’…  Sound familiar?  Until every last Ukrainian…

45,000 US soldiers are now moving into battle in the Middle East.  Fighting a war that is not ours to fight.   A war that Israel would certainly lose without the US.   Even The economist anticipates Israel’s prodding could unleash a nuclear bomb.    Yet the implication is met with ‘excitement’…  Another fun time for the gatekeepers to watch from their tower in Nineveh.

The only question left is who will Israel bomb next – Egypt?  Turkey?  Jordan?  Meanwhile the US still pretends that China is an ally as well as Morocco which just arrested an IDF soldier on R&R for “War Crimes”.

Reprinted with permission from HelenaGlass.net.

The post Washington Is Concerned About It’s Credibility appeared first on LewRockwell.

The system has reached the limits of its adaptability. Everything else is entertainment.

A great many people have immense faith in political solutions to looming crises: if only we elect new leaders, if only we replace current policies with new policies, everything would be fixed and the crises will all dissipate.

There are powerful reasons for this faith and equally powerful reasons why political solutions fail in crisis. Our faith in politics is nurtured by recency bias in eras of relatively low-level volatility: when the system is humming along, decade after decade, the incremental adaptations of politics are enough to resolve whatever spots of bother arise.

There are three key points here. One is that politics is by its nature incremental, and there are profound reasons for this aversion to radical reforms. All organisms are well-served by the innate conservatism of natural selection: if it isn’t broken, don’t fix it. If the current set of instructions–genetic, epigenetic, social, cultural, economic, political–is working, then it makes sense to conserve what works and be cautious about adapting new instructions.

Natural selection tinkers with experiments when selective pressure is applied to a species, and this is an incremental process: if random mutations in an individual offer some meaningful advantage in changing conditions, over time that improvement spreads through the species.

Experiments that fail to offer advantages are eliminated by, well, death. Not exactly warm and fuzzy, but when push comes to shove, Nature doesn’t fool around.

This is why humans experience financial losses so sharply and forget the euphoria of winning. In the big picture, gains are nice and we enjoy the dopamine hit, but losses can be catastrophic, and so we’re wired to be risk averse as a key survival trait.

In the political realm, this plays out as favoring incremental policy adjustments over radical–and therefore difficult to risk-assess–course changes. Enthusiasm to really tackle the crisis head-on is tempered by fears that some unforeseen consequence could emerge from the untested policy that triggers losses or instability that cannot be reversed.

The second key point is everyone in a position of power or influence is committed to preserving the status quo that has rewarded them so well. Outsiders with no power or influence may be chomping at the bit to overthrow the stale, sclerotic, do-nothing status quo, but insiders are self-selected defenders of the status quo, as it has served their interests so well: they rose to wealth and power within this system, and no matter how great the crisis, all their energies are devoted to preserving the system that has served them so splendidly.

Self-service is neatly cloaked by a belief that since the system has served me so well, it serves everyone equally well, and so defenders of modest, incremental adjustments in policy naturally believe the system is the best possible and worthy of protecting, despite its flaws.

A third source of incrementalism is the lack of consensus and the self-serving divisions in the Power Elite. There are ideological differences which lead to disagreements over policy–welfare queens in Cadillacs, etc.–and there is the auction of favors where to get the vote / approval of a powerful politician, some utterly nonsensical, needlessly costly bauble must be tossed to them–for example, an outdated rocket engine must be manufactured in their district even though the cost is higher and the harm to the project is irreversible.

This is the infamous “making sausage” of political wheeling and dealing. Incremental change is all that’s possible when few of the participants are feeling any real pain that demands radical adaptations and the majority aren’t feeling they’re getting anything for supporting radical change. Rather, they’re risking their career on a longshot which might end up harming their constituency and position in the party / power structure.

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The post Why Political ‘Solutions’ Don’t Fix Crises, They Make Them Worse appeared first on LewRockwell.

If you’re old enough to vote in the United States, then you’re old enough to remember a time when Americans of all political stripes liked Donald Trump.  A public figure for most of his adult life, a businessman with a taste for luxury, and a showman who embodied the “American dream,” Trump appeared in television shows and movies because people enjoyed seeing him.  For decades, he was an American icon with universal name recognition, a global brand, and even a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.

Then he moved into the political arena, and everything changed.  Actors, musicians, and politicians who had once jumped at the chance to be photographed with him pretended they had never met.  Writers and entertainers who had always praised him for his generosity began calling him filthy names.  Television networks that had made boatloads of money from his goodwill with the public started slandering him as a “wannabe dictator,” a “Nazi,” and a “threat to democracy.”

What happened?  Donald Trump dared to challenge the political status quo.  By publicly questioning the economic and foreign policy decisions of the Establishment Class in Washington, D.C., he became an existential threat to a system that has long worked against the interests of the American people.  As David Plouffe, one of Barack Obama’s closest advisers, inveighed before the 2016 presidential election: “It is not enough to beat Trump.  He must be destroyed thoroughly.  His kind must not be allowed to rise again.”  Plouffe had harsher words for the guy with a wholesome cameo in Home Alone 2 than he ever had for the leaders of China, Hamas, or Iran.

Why is this one American’s voice so threatening to the old guard?  It’s simple: President Trump is (1) a political outsider who (2) rejects the supremacy of the administrative state and (3) prioritizes Americans over foreign nationals.

It might seem strange to call Donald Trump an “outsider.”  He’s a billionaire.  He’s famous.  He’s served as president of the United States.  But for all his success, wealth, and celebrity, he is not a member of the ruling political class.  If that were not obvious when the Intelligence Community conspired with Hillary Clinton’s campaign to frame him as a Russian spy, it should have become glaringly so over the last eight years as the FBI, DOJ, and Democrat prosecutors have dragged him through an endless spectacle of malicious investigations and corruptly predicated criminal trials.  Trump lived a long life without any criminal record.  Because he beat the Clinton, Obama, and Establishment Republican political machines, unethical prosecutors want him behind bars until he dies.

Americans can be forgiven for naïvely believing that any child can grow up to be president — or at least enjoy a Mr. Smith Goes to Washington moment in the halls of the nation’s capitol.  We have been told from an early age that America’s system of government is of, by, and for the people.  We are ostensibly a constitutional republic that protects individual rights, free speech, and representative democracy.  Everyone is supposed to have a voice and an opportunity to influence the way our government runs.

The reality is much less inspiring.  An unelected and unconstitutional administrative state does most of the actual “governing.”  Corporate lobbyists and other special interests write the legislative bills that eventually become law.  Agencies issue rules and regulations with far-reaching consequences yet few checks and balances.  Most members of Congress do not grasp the significance of their votes or understand how American tax dollars are really spent.  The permanent bureaucracy is so large that even veteran lawmakers would struggle to draw an organizational chart that accurately reflects the various committees and sub-groups of the Department of Transportation — let alone something as complex and saturated with “black budget” appropriations as the Department of Defense.

The American people could never hope to control a Leviathan with so many tentacles, and such an autonomous, unruly beast would never deign to consult the public before it acts.  There can be no Mr. Smith because there is no representative democracy.  The federal government works for itself, enriches itself, and empowers itself.  To the vast administrative state, the people are a nuisance to be deceived, mocked, and ignored.  The Washington Post’s self-flattering slogan, “Democracy Dies in Darkness,” is a cruel taunt reminding Americans that D.C. has been dark for more than one hundred years.

One of the chief ways that the U.S. government clings to the darkness is by controlling who is allowed inside its ranks.  Big Government socialists are good for regulatory expansion.  War hawks are handy for feeding the Pentagon and sustaining the military machine.  Empire-builders keep the State Department and Intelligence Community busy with world conquest.  Marxists are useful because government is their god, and it’s always helpful to have people worshiping a thing that wishes to act with impunity.  What’s not helpful is an independently wealthy and independently minded businessman with his own ideas for how the U.S. government can best assist the American people.

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The post Why They Hate Trump appeared first on LewRockwell.

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

One of the most common assumptions I come across in the survival-sphere is the idea that the next world war would automatically necessitate global nuclear conflict and a Mad Max-like outcome. In other words, a lot of people assume we aren’t in a world war until the nukes start flying and the survivors are left fighting in soda can armor over an irradiated desert. This is a dangerous misunderstanding for a lot of reasons.

What people are overlooking is the fact that we are ALREADY in the middle of WWIII. They don’t realize it because they’ve based their entire concept of world war on Hollywood fantasy.

There are many ways in which wars are fought. In our current situation WWIII is being waged through proxies like Ukraine and Israel (and maybe Taiwan in the near future). The war is also being fought on the global economic stage using sanctions, inflation and the dumping of the US dollar as the world reserve. To be sure, these situations can easily escalate into something bigger and that is exactly what I suspect they will do. However, planetary nuclear war is the least likely scenario.

Survival and preparedness communities have a tendency to hyper-focus on the obviously Apocalyptic. We talk a lot about EMP strikes and split-second grid down calamities. We talk about solar flares, overnight economic crashes and nuclear holocaust. I think survivalists do this because it acts as a mental exercise – A way to better clarify what the best preparedness solutions are in the majority of cases, including the worst cases.

But as I’ve said for many years, collapse is a process, not an event.

These things happen slowly, and then all at once. If you went back in time ten years ago and warned people that in 2024 the US would be in the middle of a stagflationary crisis with a 30%-50% average price increase on all necessities, they would probably dismiss you as a doom-monger. Well, guess what, that’s exactly what a handful of alternative economists (myself included) were doing well over a decade ago, and we were dismissed over and over again – Welcome to our world.

The reason people refused to believe us is because the danger was not immediately obvious. The economic threat was not hitting them in their wallet yet. Stock markets seemed to be doing fine. The jobs market was still functioning somewhat normally. They could only view economic crisis through the lens of a total collapse. The idea that it would happen incrementally never crossed their minds.

Even today there are still people who argue that everything is fine. The stock market is “fine.” The labor market is “healthy.” If you suggest all is not well, you’re a “chicken little.” This is the incredible danger of having a Hollywood fantasy idea of collapse. We may never get to 100% systemic implosion; but even a 50% collapse is still a survival situation.

The same dynamic goes for WWIII. We must not overlook the dangers right in front of us simply because intercontinental ballistic nuclear missiles aren’t crisscrossing the sky.

Consider the proxy battleground case for a moment.

In October of 2023 I published an article titled ‘It’s A Trap! The Wave Of Repercussions As The Middle East Fights “The Last War.”’ In it I stated:

“Israel is going to pound Gaza into gravel, there’s no doubt about that. A ground invasion will meet far more resistance than the Israelis seem to expect, but Israel controls the air and Gaza is a fixed target with limited territory. The problem for them is not the Palestinians, but the multiple war fronts that will open up if they do what I think they are about to do (attempted sanitization).

Lebanon, Iran and Syria will all immediately engage and Israel will not be able to fight them all – Hell, the Israelis got their asses handed to them by Lebanon alone in 2006. This will result in inevitable demands for US/EU intervention.”

I also warned on the potential motives behind escalation in the Middle East:

“The timing of the conflict in Israel is incredibly beneficial to globalists, and this might explain Israel’s bizarre intel failure [October 7th]. Just as US and British leaders had prior knowledge of a potential Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941 but warned no one because they WANTED to compel Americans to fight in WWII, the Palestinian incursion serves a similar purpose.”

I my article ‘Iran vs Israel: What Happens Next Now That Shots Have Been Fired?’ published in April, I predicted:

“A ground war between Iran and Israel is inevitable if the tit-for-tat continues, and much of it will be fought (at least in the beginning) in Lebanon and perhaps Syria. Iran has a mutual defense pact with both countries and Lebanon is generally a proxy for Iranian defense policy.

Iran will have active troops or proxy forces in all of these regions, not to mention the Houthis in Yemen striking ships in the Red Sea. There are questions in terms of how Iraq will respond to this situation, but there’s not a lot of love between the current government and Israel or the US.”

Not surprisingly there was a contingent of people that argued these things would “never happen” and talk of war between Iran and Israel was “doom mongering.” Those people were wrong (yet again), and I was right. Iran and Israel have now essentially declared war on each other and are exchanging missile barrages as I write this. The ground war will begin in Lebanon and expand from there.

Just as in Ukraine, the looming danger is that war between Israel and Iran will draw in larger military powers like the US and Russia.

People dismiss this outcome because their modern conception of global war needs to change; this world war will not be fought exactly like those in the past.

This time the weapons of mass destruction will be financial and resource driven instead of nuclear. If Iran moves to blockade the Strait of Hormuz (which I believe is imminent), Americans can be harmed financially through energy shortages and gas price spikes even without our soldiers deployed to fight.

There’s also the question of our wide open borders and how many potential terrorists slipped into the US during the Biden Administration’s illegal immigration bonanza. How many attacks (or false flag attacks) are being organized right now?

The regional conflicts could spread and go on for a decade or longer. It all adds up to a world war, but it may never be officially declared a world war. Perhaps there will be a limited nuclear event somewhere; maybe a false flag or a limited strike. But a nuclear war is not necessary to create the kind of chaos the globalists are looking for.

People also need to understand that the powers-that-be also have a lot to risk should a war devolve into nuclear exchange. If it was really that easy for them to launch warheads, wipe out the majority of the human population and then establish a global dynasty, they would have done it a long time ago.

Global war on such a scale is inherently unpredictable. The elites have spent trillions of dollars and the better part of the last century constructing the most complex surveillance and control grid in history. It would be foolish to turn it all to ash in the blink of an eye and I highly doubt that’s the plan. They would be putting themselves and their legacy at risk of being erased forever.

Does this mean I will be ignoring the potential for a nuclear event? No. I will always keep it in mind and have preps ready just in case. A single nuke set off anywhere west of your home could result in radioactive fallout that would take around three to four weeks to dissipate. That said, the danger of these sceanrios might be overstated.

Here’s an interesting fact to ponder: The US government has tested at least 1050 explosive nuclear devices over the decades. Around 216 of those were atmospheric tests that resulted in massive fallout across the country. Some people in close proximity got sick over many years from these tests, but they didn’t result in an overnight mass death event. Perhaps, at a moderate distance, these weapons are not as dangerous as we’re led to believe?

The greater effect of nuclear weapons comes not just from the resulting damage to national infrastructure, but also mass psychological disruption. The economic system would take an immediate dive from even one strike, and it could be anywhere in the world. A single nuke in Ukraine would send shockwaves through already unstable markets.  The supply chain and food supply could be quickly disrupted.

If the globalists wanted to accelerate a worldwide collapse, they wouldn’t need a nuclear war, just one well placed device.

The biggest danger from WWIII is not nuclear exchange, but the disturbing changes societies go through when conflict inspires mass fear. Totalitarianism is much easier to institute during such a war. Freedom of speech is often suppressed and criticism of the government is often criminalized. People who rebel against this are accused of “working with the enemy.” Military conscription is usually enforced and young people are sent off to die overseas over a conflagration that makes little sense.

The economy nose dives and the supply chain tightens. Price controls and rationing are initiated. Black markets flourish but those who participate are aggressively targeted by the government. In the case of the US, armed revolution in many states is a certainty.

Public planning should focus far more on these eventualities and less on Hollywood images of Apocalypse.

Reprinted with permission from Alt-Market.us.

The post What Would World War III Really Look Like? It’s Already Starting… appeared first on LewRockwell.

Peter recently joined Francis Hunt on his Youtube channel, The Market Sniper, for an interview. Throughout the course of their conversation, they cover the future of gold, destructive campaign promises made by Kamala Harris, soaring deficit figures, and why the public is mistaken about gold ETFs.

Francis begins by asking Peter about the similarities between today’s economy and the economy in 2006 and 2007. Many of the Great Recession era problems linger, but we have even more debt:

“The problem is that after we got the financial crisis, the government didn’t learn from its mistakes at all. The Federal Reserve didn’t acknowledge any role in creating the crisis and it simply did more of what caused it. And so now, a dozen years later or more, the economy is in much worse shape. We have far more debt now than we had in 2008. We have a much bigger bubble that encompasses a lot more than just residential housing. And we’re on the precipice of a much greater economic crisis from which there could be no bailouts because the way they were able to bail everybody out before was to create inflation.”

Meanwhile, gold is having a killer year– its best in over 40 years. With the Fed already cutting rates, the stage is set for the metal to have its best year ever:

“Gold is on pace to have its best year percentage-wise since 1979. And it’s already its best year dollar-wise. Gold is up over $600 an ounce so far this year. But percentage-wise, it’s the biggest since 1979. But 1979 was significant in that that was the end of the gold bull market, because 1980 was the top and gold turn, because Volcker raised interest rates up to 20%. But Powell and his cronies are about to cut rates, or they already have cut rates, and they’re going to cut them more in 2025.”

The presidential candidates have only one answer to complaints about the economy, and it’s to create even larger deficits:

“She [Kamala Harris] wants to give everybody $25,000 to go out and buy a house, $50,000 to start a business, $7,000 to have a child. Where’s this money going to come from? It’s going to be bigger deficits that the Fed is going to have to monetize. Everybody’s talking about tax cuts. Even though we have massive deficits, people want to make the deficits bigger.”

At this rate, debt maintenance is primed to surpass tax revenue:

“We could easily add $25 trillion to the national debt. I mean, it’s already $36 trillion. I mean, it’s growing exponentially. Interest on the national debt is larger than defense. It’s over a trillion a year. In a couple of years, interest on the national debt will be bigger than either Social Security or Medicare. And both of those expenses are growing. But probably by the end of whoever wins this presidential election, I think that interest on the debt will consume 100% of tax revenue.”

The economy must detox from decades of artificial and cheap credit, wasteful government spending, and insufficient saving. This will be a painful process, but it beats the alternative:

“And so the only way to get back to a real economy is to allow the phony economy to die. But that means a lot of people lose a lot of money. But the alternative is they lose even more because then nobody loses their money, but the money loses its value. So we don’t default on the bonds. We don’t default on Social Security. Everybody gets their Social Security checks. They just can’t buy anything when they take the money to the store.”

Peter and Francis wrap up by discussing Bitcoin’s recent performance. They agree that retail investment is a contrary indicator. Money has been flowing from gold ETFs into Bitcoin ETFs, when the reverse would be more profitable:

“While the public has been wasting their money buying Bitcoin ETFs, they’ve been pulling their money out of gold ETFs. Gold ETFs have had net outflows this year. Gold stock ETFs have also had net outflows, despite the fact that this is the best year for gold in 45 years. So, the public has been selling gold the whole time it’s been going up, and they’ve been buying an asset that’s gone nowhere.”

This originally appeared on SchiffGold.com.

The post The Phony Economy Must Die appeared first on LewRockwell.

Those who scoff at the notion that nuclear war between the United States and Russia is an increasing possibility have an advantage in the argument. If they prove to be correct, they will be able to crow, “See, I told you worrywarts that there was nothing to be concerned about. Putin wasn’t about the start a nuclear war no matter how much we pushed, provoked, and dared him.”

On the other hand, if there is a nuclear war, those of us who warned about that increasing possibility won’t be around to exclaim, “We told you so. You should have listened to us.” Well, at the very least, we won’t be able to do it on X given the shortage of wi-fi during such a war.

What is fascinating is that the U.S. national-security establishment and its supporters are actually willing to risk such a war. They were so certain that, with the help of the United States, Ukraine would easily defeat Russia in a war that U.S. officials provoked with their NATO antics. Today, realizing that they were wrong, the Pentagon, CIA, and NSA, which are the ones who are really calling the shots in the Ukraine operation, are willing to do anything to prevent a Russian victory, even if it entails pushing, provoking, and daring Vladimir Putin to do something drastic. A U.S.-Ukraine defeat at the hands of their decades-old official enemy Russia, coming on the heels of the catastrophic results of their military escapades in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Vietnam, is just too hard a pill to swallow.

Proponents of increasing provocations against Russia are quick to point out that the naysayers were wrong about nuclear war in 1962 during the Cuban Missile Crisis. Everything worked out, they say, and so the fears of all-out nuclear war between the Soviet Union and the United States were ill-founded.

However, they forget two important things:

First, the U.S. national-security establishment, not realizing that the Soviet nuclear missiles in Cuba were armed and ready to be fired, was demanding that President Kennedy bomb and invade Cuba at the height of the crisis. If Kennedy had complied with that demand, it is virtually certain that there would have been an all-out nuclear war between the two nations. It was Kennedy’s wisdom and courage — and his willingness to take a stand against the national-security establishment — that prevented that from happening. After Kennedy resolved the crisis with a deal he made with Russia, the Joint Chiefs of Staff considered him to be a weak sister whose actions were comparable to those of Neville Chamberlain at Munich.

Second, the U.S. national-security establishment wanted a nuclear war with Russia. They knew that they had vast nuclear superiority over Russia and were convinced that a first-strike surprise nuclear attack against Russia, similar to Japan’s surprise attack at Pearl Harbor, would knock out much of Russia’s nuclear response capability. To his everlasting credit, JFK walked out of the meeting where such a plan was proposed, stating indignantly, “And we call ourselves the human race.” One can only wonder whether that pro-nuclear-war mindset within the early 1960s national-security establishment was passed down through the decades to the current 2024 national-security establishment.

There is a valuable lesson to be gained with respect to immigration by hypothesizing about nuclear war. Let’s assume that a nuclear war between Russia and the United States does occur. Mushroom clouds are popping up in cities all across the United States. To get a sense of what that would look like, take a look at this trailer for the television series “Fallout.” Alternatively, look at the current catastrophic situation in western North Carolina from Hurricane Helene, multiply it by a thousand, and apply it to cities and towns all across America.

Let’s assume that 20 million Americans survive the war but know that they will die if they stay here or move to Canada, where much of the nuclear radiation has spread. Let’s also assume that Mexico, Central America, and South America are not hit with any bombs and that life is pretty much normal in that part of the world.

One can imagine that many of those 20 million Americans would start moving south in a desperate attempt to save their lives — and the lives of their families — from nuclear radiation. However, when they get to the U.S.-Mexico border, they encounter the Mexican Border Patrol, the Mexican military, and the immigration concertina wall that the Mexican government has quickly constructed. Mexican officials refuse to permit the American refugees to cross the border and enter Mexico. The American refugees exclaim, “But we will die if we stay here. Our children will die. Our spouses will die. We need to come in.”

But the Mexican officials respond, “No, our immigration system is very similar to yours. We can’t handle such a big increase in population all at once. It would be too much of a burden on our welfare system, our infrastructure, our hospitals, and our public schools. You need to put in an application. We promise you that we will get back to you within a few short years. In the meantime, you need to just get in line.” The other Latin American countries take the same position.

My hunch is that many of those 20 million Americans, especially the ones with children, would say, “To hell with your immigration law” and do everything they could to circumvent Mexico’s immigration-control system, even hiring black-market transporters to help them get across the border. On the other hand, I’m sure that some Americans, especially those who are ardent supporters of America’s immigration-control system, would say to their spouses and children, “The Mexicans are right. The law is the law. We have to obey it. We will just stay here in the United States and wait a few years for Mexican officials to rule on our application to enter the country legally.”

Reprinted with permission from The Future of Freedom Foundation.

The post Reflections on Nuclear War and Immigration appeared first on LewRockwell.

Politico has an obnoxiously propagandistic and deceitful article out titled “Biden approaches limits of influence on Israel,” yet another in the mountain of imperial media spin pieces that have come out over the last year trying to wash this administration’s hands of its criminality by portraying it as an innocent, passive witness to the US-backed atrocities and military brinkmanship we’ve been seeing in the middle east.

Politico’s Jonathan Lemire and Robbie Gramer report, completely falsely, that Biden may be unable to stop “what his administration has spent a year trying to prevent: regional war.” They falsely assert that the Biden administration now has “far less say in shaping events,” because “Netanyahu and his government have consistently ignored American counsel as to how to prosecute the war in Gaza.”

These are just lies. They’re lying.

This is blatant state propaganda, and is a complete brazen lie. Shame on Politico for printing this headline. The Biden administration has all the influence in the world to stop this. It’s had the power to end Israel’s atrocities this entire time and has knowingly chosen not to. https://t.co/0xeaNdaT1i

— Caitlin Johnstone (@caitoz) October 2, 2024

As many have correctly pointed out over the last year, US presidents absolutely do have the power to stop Israeli warmongering dead in its tracks by threatening to terminate the military support Israel depends on, and past presidents have exercised this power. An Israeli air force official admitted last month that the atrocities we’ve been seeing in Gaza for an entire year could only be sustained for a few months without US support.

An arms embargo or the threat thereof would have stopped this long ago. Israeli warmongering isn’t getting worse and worse because the Biden administration can’t control Israel, it’s getting worse and worse because the Biden administration knowingly refuses to make use of the control that it has.

We saw this illustrated in a recent exchange at a State Department press conference. State Department Spokesman Matthew Miller was asked by reporter Tom Bateman about accusations that “you have simply not used leverage to get what you want,” citing Ronald Reagan’s well-documented phone call to the Israeli prime minister during the invasion of Lebanon in 1982 — which stopped the assault instantly.

“So there have been a number of times over the course of this conflict where direct US intervention with the government of Israel has led them to take steps that they were not previously doing — to take steps when it comes to humanitarian access, to take steps with regards to the shape of their military operations,” Miller replied, adding, “I’m not going to speak to all those publicly. Some of them have been reported over time.”

.@tombateman: In 1982 Reagan phoned the PM of Israel and told him to stop bombing Beirut or US-Israel relations would be endangered…you have not used leverage

Miller: Every country makes their own decisions…

Tom: Reagan did stop the bombing, Begin stopped it 20 minutes later pic.twitter.com/81xed6BK68

— Assal Rad (@AssalRad) October 2, 2024

This is actually a rather damning admission by Miller, because it shows that Biden has been exerting some influence over Israel, which means what we’ve been seeing from Israel is more or less what the Biden administration wants to happen. If it wasn’t, it wouldn’t be happening.

The other day Miller let the words “We’ve never wanted to see a diplomatic resolution with Hamas” escape from his lips while dodging pointed questions from reporter Prem Thakker, a position which of course makes all this administration’s talk about ceasefire negotiations completely meaningless.

Despite the nonstop churn of White House press releases disguised as news stories in the mainstream media about how “angry” and “frustrated” Biden is with Netanyahu and how powerless he is to divert Israel off the war path, this administration is just as responsible for these wars as Netanyahu himself. These are US wars. These are Biden’s wars.

Another article from Politico titled “US officials quietly backed Israel’s military push against Hezbollah” reports that White House officials Amos Hochstein and Brett McGurk “told top Israeli officials in recent weeks that the U.S. agreed with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s broad strategy to shift Israel’s military focus to the north against Hezbollah,” supposedly “to convince the group to engage in diplomatic talks to end the conflict.”

Got that? This same outlet which told us the Biden administration supports Israel’s warmongering in Lebanon is simultaneously publishing articles about how powerless Biden is to rein in Israel’s warmongering.

Absolutely pathetic. No matter how much you might despise the mainstream press, it’s not enough.

_______________

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International Man: There’s little doubt the self-anointed elite are hostile to the middle class, which is on its way to extinction thanks to soaring inflation and taxation.

It seems they would like to implement a kinder and gentler version of feudalism.

What is really going on here, and what is the end game?

Doug Casey: The middle class, the bourgeoisie, emerged with the death of feudalism, the inception of the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, and finally, the Industrial Revolution.

“Middle class” has been given a bad connotation in recent times. Leftists want everybody to believe that the bourgeoisie is full of consumerist faults. They’re mocked for being concerned with material well-being and improving their status. The elites feel threatened by them. Unlike the lower class plebs, grunt workers who don’t expect more from life.

Bourgeoisie simply means city dweller. Starting in the late Middle Ages, city dwellers were independent, with their own trades and businesses. Living in towns got them out from under the control of the feudal warrior elites.

Cities became intellectual centers, where the growing wealth of the bourgeoisie—the middle class—gave them the leisure needed to develop science, technology, engineering, literature, and medicine. Universities expanded the idea of education beyond the realm of theology. Commerce and personal freedom attracted the best of the peasants, who rose to the middle class. Cities ended feudalism, a system whereby everyone was born into a class and occupation, and was expected to stay there for life, obligated to pay taxes—protection money—to his “betters”. The rise of the bourgeoisie didn’t suit the ruling classes, who liked dominating society.

Capitalism developed as the bourgeoisie became wealthy. The rest is well-known history, but the point must be made that the creation of the middle class, capitalism, and bourgeois values elevated peasants from poverty and created today’s world.

But, then and now, a certain percentage of the population wants to control everyone else. The types who go to Bilderberg, the World Economic Forum, CFR, and the like see themselves as elite new aristocrats who should dominate the others. Even though most of them came from the middle class, now that they’ve “made it,” they like to pull the ladder up. And if not eliminate, at least neuter or defang the remaining bourgeoisie.

So what’s the end game?

I think it might look something like the movie Rollerball. Keep the plebs entertained while the elite, in the form of a corporate aristocracy, controls society.

International Man: Yuval Harari is a prominent World Economic Forum (WEF) member.

He suggested that the elite should use a universal basic income, drugs, and video games to keep the “useless class” docile and occupied.

What is your take on these comments in the context of Feudalism 2.0?

Doug Casey: A nasty little fellow, Harari is what might be termed a court intellectual for the World Economic Forum. He’s there to provide an intellectual patina for the power members, who are basically the businessmen, politicos, and media personalities. They’re not thinkers or interested in ideas but philistines concerned with money and power. Harari gives them an intellectual framework to justify their actions and plans.

As far as his books are concerned, they amount to a lot of generic truisms, obvious observations, justifications of current trends, and a projection of how the world will evolve. As an author and thinker, he’s knowledgeable and intelligent but grossly overrated. He owes his success to promotion from the new wannabe aristocracy and their hangers on. He illustrates the advantages of being hooked up with power people.

Harari has gone from being just another college professor, living with his husband in Israel, to being an internationally famous multi-millionaire pundit.

He expects the “useless eaters” will be maintained on a subsistence basis until they die out. I’m not sure how much the Covid hysteria, followed by the vaccine, has to do with that. It’s becoming quite clear that Covid itself was an artificially constructed flu variant, mainly affecting the very old, very sick, and very overweight. The vaccine is useless in preventing Covid but has caused significant increases in morbidity and mortality among healthy recipients. Was it a trial run to cleanse the world of useless eaters?

I don’t know. But, based on what people like Stalin, Hitler, Mao, and Pol Pot—among many others—have done in recent years, I don’t think it’s out of the question. No doubt, the new aristocracy wants to cement themselves in place. They certainly don’t like rubbing shoulders with the hoi polloi when they visit Venice, Machu Pichu, and the like.

International Man: How does the WEF’s vision of “you will own nothing and be happy” compare to the previous feudal system of medieval Europe?

Doug Casey: Serfs, unlike slaves, had some rights; they owned tools and huts. But their position in society was fixed, they couldn’t easily move—rather like a medieval version of today’s 15-minute city. They had to recognize their betters, and not say anything challenging—like today’s increasingly draconian limits on free speech.

I expect that the gigantic amount of debt in society today will be the means of turning middle-class Americans into serfs. The lower classes are already welfare recipients who produce very little; they’ll soon be replaced by robots.

The better educated ones are buried under their college debts. But everybody is buried under growing credit card debt, auto debt, mortgage debt, and sometimes even tax debt.

If someone makes a lucky capital gain in the stock market or by selling his house, he might spend that money only to find that the government wants 20%, 30%, or 40% of the gain. So the gain, instead of a blessing, becomes a disaster in disguise.

Many people today are burdened by debt, living paycheck to paycheck. They’re barely getting by, under immense pressure to cover food and rent. They’d probably be quite willing to take a deal offering essentially “three hots and a cot,” a tiny apartment, internet, and some extra money to hang around Starbucks.

International Man: How do you see Feudalism 2.0 developing over the coming months and years?

What can be done to resist this agenda?

Doug Casey: Trends in motion tend to stay in motion until they reach some type of a crisis—when anything can happen. Let’s look at some economic systems, as spelled out by Karl Marx.

In Communism, the Marxist ideal, the State owns both the means of production (factories, farms, and such) as well as consumer goods (houses, cars, and theoretically, even your clothes). Mao’s China is as close as anyone’s come.

Socialism is a way station to Communism. The State owns the means of production, but individuals can still own consumer goods. There are lots of countries with socialist ideals, but no real socialist countries. Cuba probably comes closest.

Fascism is an economic system where both the means of production and consumer goods are privately owned, but they’re both 100% State-controlled. Most of the world’s countries are fascist. The word was coined by Mussolini; he meant it to describe the melding of the State, corporations, and unions.

Few people know that Marx coined the word “capitalism”. It’s a system where everything is both privately owned and privately controlled. There are no purely capitalist countries.

In feudalism, a lord owns everything but grants fiefs to subordinates. An aristocracy is supported by the plebs through taxation. Feudalism is based on the plebs providing service and taxes to the lord in exchange for “protection” from other lords.

Now for some pure speculation on my part.

Most of the world’s governments, including that of the US, are terminally bankrupt. They’ll prove unable to meet their obligations. Meanwhile, the prospect of wars, secessions, and crime is growing. I suspect wealthy corporations and individuals will wind up supplanting most traditional governments.

The result could be called neo-feudalism.

The average person is looking for someone or something to save him, to kiss everything and make it better, when times get tough. With governments bankrupt and dysfunctional, solvent and powerful individuals and corporations could take their place.

Harari and his pals want to see the plebs given a guaranteed annual income, a place to live, and entertainment until the useless eaters fade away. But it won’t be as neat as Harari’s wet dreams imagine. The world will be chaotic. We may be on our way to an idiocracy as well, where the populace is dumbed down so they don’t get dangerous ideas.

No matter how things sort out, I think we’re looking at a chaotic and dangerous situation in the near term.

I don’t see voting as a solution. Notwithstanding the differences between Harris and Trump, it just amounts to choosing the lesser of two evils, which in this case would certainly be Trump. But even if you elected Mises, Hayek, Ron Paul, or Harry Browne, I’m afraid the tide of history would wash them away.

In any event, your vote doesn’t really count. Or perhaps I should say it counts about as much as a grain of sand on a beach with hundreds of millions of grains of sand. And even then, as Stalin said, it’s not who votes that counts. It’s who counts the votes.

What can you do to resist the shape of things to come?

It’s an uphill fight because if you’re liberty-oriented, you’re part of a tiny minority at odds with the views of most of your fellow citizens, who’ve been indoctrinated by years of schooling, media, and entertainment. Collectivist memes are cemented in their minds. And when they talk to their contemporaries, they tend to mutually reinforce their beliefs.

When you’re in a group, it can be dangerous to have different beliefs, in much the same way that it’s dangerous for a chicken in a flock to have a feather out of place. The other chickens will peck it to death. Reigning ideas tend to be brutally enforced.

What can you do about this?

Other than trying to maintain your personal integrity, there’s not much you can do to roll back the tsunami. There wasn’t much that a freedom-loving Russian could do in 1917, a freedom-loving German could do in 1933, or a freedom-loving Cuban could do in 1959. Or a freedom-loving Venezuelan today.

The best you can do is to try to save yourself, your family, and your like-minded friends. Changing society for the better is a long shot. Although I hope Milei in Argentina proves me wrong.

International Man: What do you suggest individuals do to ensure they don’t become modern serfs if Feudalism 2.0 emerges?

Doug Casey: There are two types of freedom: physical and financial.

From a physical point of view, it’s important not to be tied down the way a serf might be. You don’t want all your possessions to be in one place where they’re easily controlled by the powers that be. Don’t act like a plant. Staying rooted in one place is not an optimum survival strategy for a human in tough times.

The powers that be are interested in controlling other people. It’s best to be a moving target, which makes you much harder to hit.

This is a problem for those of us who think that the US is still the land of the free. It’s not. It’s been devolving for decades. My guess is that over the next few years, perhaps starting with this election, the US will evermore closely resemble the other 200 nation-states that cover the face of the globe like a skin disease.

The single most important thing you can do is internationalize and make sure that all your assets aren’t in one bailiwick, under the control of one government.

From a financial point of view, it gives you the freedom to travel and move, especially with the coming FX controls and CBDCs. Use gold and Bitcoin. You should already have a good stash of both. If you don’t, it’s not too late to start accumulating and transferring assets into them.

Reprinted with permission from International Man.

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In tyrannical societies, the state uses its monopoly of violence to dictate what citizens are permitted to say, activities they are permitted to engage in, and cultural symbols they are permitted to celebrate or display. Anyone who violates such edicts can be arrested and imprisoned. Given the tendency of states to become increasingly dictatorial and to trample on their citizens’ liberties with impunity, Murray Rothbard argued that the state itself, by its very nature, is a threat to liberty. In The Anatomy of the State, he argues that the state is a predator: “The State provides a legal, orderly, systematic channel for the predation of private property” including predation of all the liberties that emanate from self-ownership.

Even for those who support the minimal state, they would support state power only on the basis that the state’s monopoly of force will be limited to protecting and defending the rights of citizens, by designating violations of rights as crimes and taking the steps necessary to punish criminals. For example, in his book Restoring The Lost Constitution: The Presumption Of Liberty, Randy Barnett argues that the state has power to enact laws that are “both necessary to protect the rights of others and proper insofar as they do not violate the rights of the persons whose freedom they restrict.”

Western democracies have strayed far from these ideals of liberty. In many countries the state has conferred upon itself the power to tell citizens which heritage symbols they are permitted to display, and to punish them for celebrating any heritage that the state deems to be “hate.”

Anti-Hate Laws

Fueled by critical race theories and the concept of “antiracism,” many once-free jurisdictions are now trending rapidly towards tyranny, expanding their prohibitions of what they refer to in the relevant legislation as “hate.” This takes the form of laws prohibiting hate speech, hate crimes and hate symbols.

In the case of New York, the city has established an office for the prevention of hate crimes. Under “local laws on hate crimes” that office has power to designate hate crimes including the duty to:

Create and implement a coordinated system for the city’s response to hate crimes. Such system shall, in conjunction with the New York city commission on human rights’ bias response teams, the police department, and any relevant agency or office, coordinate responses to hate crime allegations.

The office for prevention of hate crimes designates certain symbols as “hate symbols.” Under Senate Bill S8298B this includes the Confederate battle flag.

Another example of a legally-designated “hate symbol” is the old South African flag. In support of an application to ban the flag, the South African Human Rights Commission argued that displays of that flag are analogous to displays of the Confederate battle flag:

Arguing in support of the ban, the South African Human Rights Commission referred to the case of Dylann Roof, the white man convicted and sentenced to death for the 2015 racist killings of nine Black church members in Charleston, South Carolina, as an example of how the apartheid-era flag retained clear connections to violent white supremacists. Roof once appeared in a photograph wearing a jacket with the flag on it.

On that basis, the South African Equality Court banned public displays of the flag. It was only by a narrow margin (following an appeal by the civil rights organization AfriForum) that South Africans avoided having private displays of the flag also being banned.

The ADL, an enthusiastic proponent of designating other people’s cultural icons as “hate,” also added the old South African flag to its hate list. The fact that this flag predates the apartheid era—having been adopted in 1928, two decades before the Afrikaner Nationalist government came to power—is deemed by these self-appointed hate-finders to be irrelevant. Also irrelevant is the fact that South African troops in WWII marched under the old flag to defend the allied cause.

How State Power Destroys Individual Liberty

While many have argued that the prohibition of hate symbols is within reasonable bounds as it only applies to selling or displaying such symbols on public property, the threat to individual liberty readily becomes apparent when it is recalled that the scope of “public property” has vastly expanded in recent decades. State power to regulate cultural displays on public property covers not just city offices, police stations, and fire stations, but also any location where publicly-funded activities may take place such as public schools or even street parades, parks, and fairgrounds. With the involvement of the state in so many aspects of daily life, it is increasingly difficult for citizens to avoid having any interactions that would be classified as falling within the public remit over which the state claims jurisdiction.

The important point in the context of defending individual liberty is that the edicts against hate symbols are not just people’s opinions on what amounts to “hate”—if they were mere opinions they could be challenged, dismissed, or simply ignored. But they are mandates backed by state force, accompanied by legal penalties. Thus, the issue in this context is not whether those symbols are indeed hate symbols, but whether the state should have power to ban such symbols and enforce their bans with legal penalties.

Organizations like ADL and SPLC also keep similar lists of “hate symbols,” and they may feel that they have good reasons for viewing those symbols as hateful, but these organizations are not backed by state force so they are at liberty to make lists of whatever they may love or hate. But it is one thing for left wing organizations to keep lists of “hate symbols” which, in their opinion as self-appointed hate-finders, have failed to uphold “our shared values”—by which they mean their own socialist and egalitarian values. It is a different matter altogether for the state to designate flags and cultural icons as “hate symbols.” Prohibiting “hate symbols” becomes a threat to liberty when it is enshrined in legislation and backed by state force.

The extensions of state power to the criminalization of historic flags and symbols misunderstands the meaning of liberty. Liberty includes people’s right to say things we might not want to hear, to wave flags we might not want to see, and to commemorate a history we might wish had unfolded in a different way. The state in a free society should not have power to crush individual liberty based on what they might consider to be “hate.” That many tolerate such encroachments on liberty is a sign that we no longer live in free states. As argued by the British journalist and politician David Frost:

At the root of all this, I fear, is a fundamental downgrading of freedom as a value… Yet you can’t long remain a free society if you don’t believe in freedom. And it’s no good just saying you believe in it: you have to live it. Sometimes that means politicians deciding “we would rather live with this injustice or this social problem than expand the state to deal with it.”

This means that while we might think people should not behave in certain ways or hold certain opinions that others might consider to be offensive, we should not expand the state to create offices with a bureaucratic mandate to eradicate “hate.” The dangers of bureaucratic excess are well known: if an office of the state is given power and money to wage war against “hate,” it has a perverse incentive to find hate wherever it looks.

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Recently, Israel killed some more “terrorists.” I guess it was more than usual, but I don’t pay much attention to what’s happening in other countries. I prefer to concentrate on domestic issues, considering how every major politician continues to neglect them. That’s how we became the World’s Wealthiest Banana Republic.

We are told that our government’s favorite little nation recently used pagers and walkie talkies to blow up what Israel claims were “senior leaders” of Hezbolah. Well, what else are you going to do with a “senior leader” of Hezbolah? I’m reminded of the excellent South Park episode on the Homeless, where after an autopsy on one of them, a maniacal doctor exclaims, “My God! They’re almost human!” I must admit I’m disappointed; all that money to the world’s smallest “democracy,” and they are forced to use pagers to “defend themselves?” That is so 1990s. But Israel wasn’t just blowing up “terrorists” with antiquated devices. They also were busy killing hundreds of women, children, and paramedics in Lebanon. To be fair, they had pretty much ignored the Lebanese since 2006. We must never forget; the Israelis are perpetually permitted to “defend themselves.” From Lebanon. Syria. Iran. Homeless Palestinians.

Who knew that “terrorist” leaders were hiding in Lebanon since 2006? And all this time, I thought it was Iran that was the “state sponsor of terrorism.” Maybe they can find some old exploding 8-track players to use on “senior leaders” in Iran. But what outfit would they belong to? It’s so hard to keep track of these “terrorist” organizations. Long ago, there was the PLO. And Ringo Starr’s lost brother Yasser Arafat. Then I guess it was Al-Qaeda. As I noted in Hidden History, Al-Qaeda roughly translates to “the toilet” in Arabic. That’s a really demeaning name to select for your group. Especially for violent, raving, Arab “terrorists.” Unless you want to offend them. Inside jokes, inside jobs. Maybe Alex Jones was right when he used to call them “Al-CIAeda.” At any rate, what happened to good old Al-Qadea? Did they find out what their name really meant? That would infuriate most non-terrorists.

There are so many other outfits we’ve heard bandied about by all the various Middle East “experts.” Isis. Isil. The Taliban. Isn’t the Taliban running Afghanistan now, after we senselessly spent all those years there? We’re we on the side of the Taliban in Syria, or am I confused? There is, of course, precedent for this. The beloved Franklin D. Roosevelt utilized Mafia kingpins like Frank Costello against the Axis powers in World War II. I wonder why Hitler and the Nazis are never called “terrorists?” I guess they are in their own special category, still inspiring Hollywood almost a century later. We are told that former CIA asset Osama Bin Laden was the founder and first “general emir” of Al-Qaeda. That’s an impressive sounding title. Kind of a combination of George Washington and Benedict Arnold. From his secretive Batcave, deep in the heart of Afghanistan, we are told that he orchestrated the 9/11 attacks.

Isis was allegedly a Jordanian group that eventually merged with Bin Laden’s Al-Qaeda. Bin Laden was a former CIA operative, and the group has been spoofed as “Al-CIAda.” Kind of a logical connection. At any rate, Bin Laden was also supposedly the world’s tallest Arab. Or at least one of the tallest. Certainly he was the tallest “terrorist.” So how could all those crazed Arabs not listen to him? Height makes a difference in how people are viewed; look at all the leadership studies. Isil was a variant to Isis, although I can’t comprehend the distinction. There is also the blanket term “Jihadist,” which is used to describe all of these groups. I think the conservative think tank people just like saying the word. Almost as much as they like saying Hezbolah, with an accent on the last syllable. I suppose that’s the proper way to pronounce it. If only they could pronounce “Iran” correctly. It’s E-ron.

Frankly, I start nodding off when I hear too much talk about the “threat of terrorism.” The terminology seems out of a fractured bedtime story. Rockabye baby, in the Hamas. Speaking of Hamas, how come none of their “senior leaders” were blown up with pagers and walkie-talkies? I thought the reason why the IDF has been killing so many innocent civilians in Gaza was because of that dirty, sneaky, rotten, Pearl Harbor like attack at a concert last October. By Hamas. Not Hezbolah. Seems kind of unfair for “senior leaders” of Hezbolah to be blown up by pagers, over something “senior leaders” of Hamas did. Kind of like going after Saddam Hussein when he wasn’t a part of the official 9/11 lie. Hamas, we are told, is a Sunni outfit that is loyal to the Muslim Brotherhood. “Sunni” and “Shiite” are two more words that make me very, very sleepy. And “Muslim Brotherhood” is just used interchangeably with all the others. I’m convinced they just pick these keywords at random. No one cares.

Although it is a violation of the new Antisemitism Awareness Act to mention it, we need to look again at the birth of Israel. You know, how we deposited a bunch of foreigners in the middle of someone else’s land. Think Haitians in Springfield, Ohio. Although I haven’t heard any credible reports of Israelis eating cats or dogs, it was a disastrous idea to just plant them there, and expect all the residents to welcome them with open arms. Especially when the U.S. taxpayers provided them with weapons the residents couldn’t hope to match. Thanks to all of our involuntarily withheld taxes, Israel- about the size of Rhode Island- has the third most powerful military in the world. We don’t have much to be proud of these days, so maybe there’s some twisted pride in that. We built that, to paraphrase the beloved Barack Obama, the “Muslim” president who killed more Muslims than anyone ever had.

Who remembers the Irgun Gang? And a young, future Israeli leader named Menachem Begin? As leader of this group, which some referred to as “terrorist,” and others as “freedom fighters,” he coordinated the bombing of the King David Hotel, which killed nearly a hundred people. Who were all “almost human,” to quote South Park again. One underreported but important historical figure is Ze’ev Vladimir Jabotinsky. He helped found the Irgun’s precursors the Haganah, and Betar. It seems that the Zionists had a thing for these names as much as the “terrorists” later would. Now, some have suggested that these were all “terrorist” groups, and that Jabotinsky was the father of Jewish terrorism. Then there was the competing group the Stern Gang. It was run by some Stern who was not related to the self-proclaimed “King of all Media,” who has become a deranged proponent of the deadly COVID vaccine.

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