Lew Rockwell Institute

If anything like civil war ignites in this country, the sides will not be the political Red and the Blue but the sane and the insane. Now it happens, unfortunately, that the insane are driving the engine of government. They have been at war with the people of this land for years, depriving them of livelihoods, stuffing them into prison, breaking the social contract, wrecking the country’s relations with the rest of the world, and belaboring the peoples’ minds with one insulting absurdity after another.

They comprise a bizarre coalition of the permanent bureaucracy, the Democratic Party, and the news media. The permanent bureaucracy includes its own machine for making war on citizens: the intel blob, whose tentacles reach into other agencies: Homeland Security, the State Department, the so-called Justice Department, the Pentagon, the myriad Public Health offices, and the shadowy clique that stands-in for a disabled president in the White House.

You can tell they are insane because they are driven by a single motivation: to remain in power for no other purpose than to escape responsibility for their many crimes against the people. This is insane behavior because it depends on the proposition that reality does not matter, that reality is optional, that there is no such thing as truth, and if it happened to exist, to be a thing, it would have no greater value to the human project than its opposite, untruth.

The greatest absurdity of the moment, is the idea that Americans might desire to continue under the rule of this evil coalition devoted to unreality and untruth, that is, to vote for candidates of the Democratic Party. Its greatest crimes, of course, are the lawless measures taken to pervert the very elections that might allow them to retain power in office.

Some of it is well-hidden and abstruse, such as the machinations of election lawfare manager-in-chief, Marc Elias, who for many years has used the courts and the state legislatures to fiddle election rules that make it impossible to account for who is actually casting the votes. This, you understand, is insane. What sovereign people would seek to institutionalize election fraud?

Some election crime is just in your face. The open border policy may have many nefarious angles, but an obvious one is stuffing the voter rolls with live bodies that have names attached, which can be bundled and harvested in ballot form like so many sheaves of oats. No one is fooled by this. Yet the Democratic Party has its heavy hand on the lever of power that controls entry to the country. Alejandro Mayorkas, the Secretary of Homeland Security allows this to happen and bullshits Congress in open committee hearings. Congress has impeached him for this affront and the Democratic majority Senate has declined to hold the attendant trial — because stuffing the voter rolls with illegal immigrants allows them to remain in power.

The remedies for this dastardly mess are pretty simple and straightforward: return to paper ballots cast on one election day, requiring voter ID that amounts to proof of citizenship. Everything else — computerized (hackable) ballot-counting machines, mail-in ballots, early voting, automatic voter registration by means of other government transactions that have nothing to do with elections (motor-voter acts) — only insures election fraud. Sane people do not seek to defraud themselves.

It is widely suspected by the not-insane that even the attempt at massive voter fraud may not avail to put over the paramount candidate of the insane: Veep Kamala Harris. Nobody believes that she is capable of being president. But the insane don’t seek a capable president — in fact, the opposite. They want a president who can only function with direction and management of the blob, by the blob, and for the blob. The blob’s motives, besides seeking to avoid responsibility for its prior crimes, are a license to commit new crimes, especially crimes that expand the many perquisites and privileges of being in power. These include the fortunes to be made in control of the nation’s wealth, and the sadistic pleasure derived from punishing and humiliating their not-insane opponents. For instance, running the insane Ukraine war, with its fabulous kickbacks for the military contractors and office-holders. . . and making you witness more drag queen story hours.

Due to the possibility that sane citizens, despite calculated election fraud, might elect Mr. Trump, who opposes all that psychotic, criminal nonsense, the coalition of the permanent bureaucracy, the Democratic Party, and the news media appears to have few options left besides murdering Mr. Trump. The first two would-be assassins show a train of association with the intel blob. Thomas Crooks (or, at least one of his many cell phones) traveled repeatedly to a downtown DC building adjacent to the FBI HQ; Ryan Wesley Routh has alleged links to the Arlington, Va., Maximus Company, a CIA cut-out — perhaps explaining how the otherwise indigent Routh funded his global travels. Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla) disclosed yesterday that the DHS knows of five assassination teams targeting President Trump, three connected with foreign governments, two domestic.

The most mystifying element in the coalition of the insane is the news media — that is, the cable news networks plus The New York Times / WashPost axis —who have tirelessly broadcast the mantras that Mr. Trump seeks to quash our democracy and that he is a new Hitler who must be stopped at all costs. The inflammatory barrage has had an obvious effect. But the mystery is: what’s in it for these news companies to go along with their insane and desperate partners: the blob and the Dems?

What’s in it for Joe Khan, Executive Editor of The Times? His paper lies and spins unreality incessantly. He surely makes a comfortable salary, but he can’t be getting rich. . . that is, really rich. . . millions. Apparently, he publishes unreal stories because he’s insane. He believes things that are not true. Nor are his reporters getting really rich. They just appear to be blinded by sheer hatred — rising to insanity — and perhaps also by the lurking fear that their many published lies, dating back to RussiaGate, will eventually disgrace them professionally if allowed to be pursued and revealed by the sane.

The temperature is rising in this political crucible. Something is going to melt down. It’s looking pretty clear now who can take the heat, and who can’t.

Reprinted with permission from JamesHowardKunstler.com.

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The Soviet Union collapsed when Soviet President Gorbachev was placed under house arrest by hardline elements in the Politburo who were alarmed by the rapidity with which Gorbachev was establishing friendly and open relations with the West.

For the hardline American neoconservatives, the Soviet Collapse removed the constraint on American unilateralism. The neoconservatives quickly seized the initiative and with the Wolfowitz Doctrine declared US hegemony and stated that the principal goal of US foreign policy was to prevent the rise of any power that could serve as a constraint on Washington’s hegemony. This policy resulted in the hopes of Reagan and Gorbachev and the trust Gorbachev had placed in Washington being frustrated. Washington’s pledge not to move NATO one inch to the East was disavowed, and more hostile steps followed.

By 2007 it was clear to Russia’s President Putin that the promise of a multi-polar world was being over-ridden by a policy of Washington’s hegemony. At the Munich Security Conference, Putin threw down the gauntlet and said that Russia did not accept Washington’s rules based uni-polar world. At that moment the US/NATO went to war against Russia.

The first attack on Russia was a year later in 2008 when Washington sent a US supplied and trained Georgian army into disputed South Ossetia, resulting in the deaths of Russian peace-keepers and many civilians. Putin, caught off guard, returned from the Beijing Olympics, and the Russian army quickly defeated the US trained Georgian forces. Putin is often accused of intending to rebuild the Soviet Empire, but he had in his hands Georgia, historically a part of the Soviet Union and previously of Russia. Instead of reincorporating Georgia back into Russia, he turned them loose to be again subjected to Washington’s plots against Russia.

Having failed in Georgia, Washington turned its attention to Ukraine, another former province of the Soviet Union and previously of Russia for centuries. As Victoria Nuland boasted at a televised conference, Washington spent $5 billion organizing NGOs, students, and purchasing Ukrainian politicians in support of a coup to overthrow the democratically elected Ukrainian government and install a neo-nazi regime hostile to Russia.

For unknown reasons except perhaps surprise–Putin was at the Sochi Olympics–Putin did nothing to prevent Washington’s coup. For eight years Putin relied on the Minsk Agreement, which the West used to deceive him, while Washington built up a Ukrainian army capable of overthrowing the Donbas republics that broke away and resisted Ukraine’s persecution and murder of the Russian population.

When Putin and Lavrov’s efforts during December 2021 and February 2022 to achieve a mutual defense agreement with the US and NATO were cold-shouldered by Washington, NATO, and the EU, Putin had no choice but to intervene in order to protect the Donbas, a former Russian province attached to Ukraine by Soviet leaders, from massacre, as the Israelis are doing in Gaza and the West Bank.

The West disingenuously called Putin’s “limited military operation” confined to Donbas an “invasion of Ukraine.” It was no such thing. The fact that it was not an invasion and conquest of Ukraine was Putin’s mistake.

It is the limited nature of Putin’s intervention that is the cause of the possible explosion of the conflict into a nuclear war.

Putin, being a mid-20th century American liberal, had trusted diplomatic relations and good will between nations and did not understand that the West was at war with Russia. He and his Foreign Minister kept stressing their “American partners” and belief in negotiations, while the West organized its attacks on Russia.

These attacks now include attacks deep into Russia far removed from the battle front. Russia has suffered many attacks from low-flying drones that evade air defense systems. As I write, Nato Secretary Stoltenberg and the UK prime minister are urging the Biden regime to give approval to US/NATO firing long range missiles into Russia. Putin has said that this is the final red line that will force him to acknowledge that Russia is at war with the West.

NATO General Secretary Stoltenberg says the West does not need to pay attention to Putin’s threat, because “There have been many red lines declared by Putin before, and he has not escalated.”

We have reached the point that I said we would each. Putin by his failure to act in response to aggression now has his back to the wall. He has three choices: He can surrender. He can end the Ukraine conflict with force, which puts the West on notice that the West is at risk if the conflict continues, or he can continue to ignore reality, thereby leaving the initiative in the West’s hands where it has been throughout the conflict.

We are faced with Putin’s mettle. Is he a warrior or an out-of-date American liberal?

I agree that this question is unfair. Putin is the only statesman the world has at this crucial time when the world’s continued existence is in question. Putin has accepted insult after insult, provocation on top of provocation in order to avoid a war that means death for humanity.

No one gives Putin credit for this.

Stoltenberg, a nonentity, mocks Putin. Biden, a nonentity, insults him. Zelensky, a nonentity, vows to defeat him.

We can see Satan’s hold on the West when the only leader determined to preserve human existence is demonized.

Despite his honorable characteristics, Putin is failing because he cannot recognize the extreme evil that confronts him and the country he represents.

As England’s ambassador Craig Murray has reported, the Western world is criminalizing free speech. Washington’s investigations of Scott Ritter, Dimitri Simes, and others indicate that those who talk with Russians are being criminalized for aiding and abetting Russian disinformation, which is being equated with espionage. How can the dangerous situation be resolved when talk is prevented?

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My closest friend Mike and I have known each other since 1st Grade. Until we graduated high school, we were pretty much inseparable. Mike was an only child, and I was the oldest of six, so he had a lot more leeway than I did. I was expected to be the responsible third parent, while Mike was free to do a lot more exploring — and his dad was much cooler than mine. As far as my dad was concerned, Mike led me to the person, place and occasion of sin.

Anyway, Mike was always getting me into “situations”. One of those situations was in 8th Grade, when he talked me into getting a fake ID that said we were 18 years old. Did we want to buy booze and cigarettes, or vote? Nope. We wanted to see R-rated movies without a parent or guardian.

We went up the street to an old house, where a woman who looked and sounded exactly like Selma Diamond ran a notary service and made ID cards to order, all laminated and everything. Mike, who’s now an attorney, walked in like John Wayne and ordered his card. Meanwhile, I was nearly defiling myself and shaking like Jell-O in an earthquake. I can’t imagine I looked anywhere near 18. Neither of us were even shaving then, but Mike had nerves of steel, while mine where made of over-cooked noodles. I wasn’t then the outlaw I have become.

I think we paid $5 each, which was a fortune for a couple of grade schoolers in 1974, even though I had a job pulling down $25/week at the time, selling motorcycle tires for my uncle, and pumping gas at my cousin’s Sinclair station.

The cards weren’t even cooled yet when we hit the Alabama cinema, one of those old fading movie palaces. It had a balcony and deco interior, and a pretty decent snack bar. Years later in high school, Mike and I hung out there on Saturday nights to see the midnight showing of The Rocky Horror Picture Show (he had permission, I had to sneak out). The place was a neighborhood institution.

The first R-rated movie we saw was The Longest Yard, with Burt Reynolds. That was the first time I had ever heard adults using cuss words in casual conversation. Oh sure, I learned most of them when my cousin Peter ran over Dad’s foot with a tractor, but that was just a long string of obscenities without syntax. Now I was hearing them used discreetly as nouns, verbs, adverbs, and adjectives.

The next movie we saw changed my life.

At the time, I knew almost nothing about the writer/director, but the star I knew as Willie Wonka, from a much tamer, more kid-friendly flick. The movie exploded my horizons. It steered me to the likes of George Carlin, Richard Pryor and Lenny Bruce. It launched me on a creative odyssey that I am still living out.

That afternoon, I sat in the audience, transfixed by comedy I had never imagined. It lampooned everyone and everything. It fricasseed every racial and ethnic stereotype. It lambasted the Western genre. It grilled Hollywood. It stripped politicians naked and ate lunch off their bellies. It took every cultural sacred cow and poked it, prodded it, tweaked it, spanked it, and sent it away laughing.

It is hard to believe it’s been 50 years since Mel Brooks created the greatest comedy of all time: Blazing Saddles.

These days, I can’t even quote most of the best lines without someone getting their feathers ruffled. I think every racial and ethnic epithet in the English language, and a few in German, are in there. Every Hollywood trope and cultural meme are in there. Every form of comedy, from sight gags and slap stick, to malaprops and double entendre are piled neck deep. I can’t count how many times I’ve watched the film, and yet there’s always something new in it.

The beauty of Blazing Saddles is that at a time when America has forgotten how to laugh at itself, it sits there like a hang nail on Bumbledick ideology. The film is so well crafted that every frame depends on every other frame. One gag can’t be removed, without leaving a yawning hole in the whole. It can’t be dubbed, because the dialogue and the visuals are woven like a fine tapestry, and a dropped stitch would be conspicuous by its absence. It is perhaps more relevant now, than it was in 1974.

Blazing Saddles is such a classic work of comedy that it can’t be vanished, and to banish it would only draw more attention to it. It is subversive in the way Édouard Manet’s Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe poked a finger in the eye of Victorian rigidity. It transcends time and place to speak eternal truths in the most crass of terms.

The film is the quintessential American comedy — irreverent, satirical and just plain loony. From the Old West setting to back lot food fights, from Frankie Laine’s straight rendering of the Western-style theme song to Count Basie’s orchestra playing the outro in the desert, while the hero rides a limo into the sunset, the film encompasses the entire legacy of American comedy and culture. The Vaudeville bloodlines include Mae West, Will Rogers, Laurel and Hardy, and the Three Stooges. No stone is left unmocked, even down to the proliferation of toll roads and hanging horses.

Sitting there with Mike in the Alabama cinema, that 13-year-old kid was shocked, embarrassed, paranoid, and well…tickled to the point of side cramps. There was a entire carnival of possibilities flickering across his eyeballs, even as the corpses of sacred cows piled up at his feet. In an afternoon, that kid understood what Woody Allen so precisely said through the character of Lester, “Comedy is pain plus time.”

These memories came flooding back as I listened to the reviews of Matt Walsh’s new film, Am I Racist? Though it is not yet available in my neck of the woods, it sounds as if this film may be the heir to Blazing Saddles, with a healthy dose of This Is Spinal Tap and Penn & Teller: Bullshit! Judging by Walsh’s last film What Is A Woman?, he makes a fine picador in the cultural bullfight.

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There is a popular school of thought that believes most economic stability is purely psychological; that the health of the economy relies on the population NOT knowing the true state of things. In other words, “ignorance is bliss.” I partially agree with the premise but only under certain conditions. If an economy is built on lies then yes, the exposure of those lies would certainly put that system at risk. My argument is, if an economy is built on lies it’s not really worth saving.

The US public in particular is now struggling with the slow realization that our financial and monetary structures are not secure. Many of us in the alternative media have been warning about this for decades. I warned about the inevitability of a stagflation crisis for many years and was criticized as a “doom monger,” at least until 2021 when the crisis became undeniable. But that’s what happens when you live in an economy of lies and you start talking about reality – Some people will see you as a threat.

Even today with everything that’s happening there are still blind muppets and disinformation shills out there that assure us “all is well”. And, usually they’ll cite manipulated government stats as evidence to support their faulty position.

The Biden Administration has proven to be one of the worst culprits when it comes to data misrepresentation and manipulation. To be sure, Biden has had plenty of help with his “Bidenomics” agenda and he wouldn’t be able to rig the numbers without aid from the Federal Reserve, the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the corporate media, etc.  Most presidents get help from these institutions when promoting a sick economy as a healthy economy. Some presidents do not…

With that fact in mind, I’ve been wondering lately what will happen when Biden exits the White House in January 2025? What happens to the numbers after that? Will there be a statistical reset? Will the real data be exposed all at once; an avalanche of reality crashing down on the delusional system?

I’m still not convinced that any outcome is beyond dismissal for elections in November. If someone was to ask me what I predict, I would have to say Trump will be president again. From all the evidence I’ve seen the Harris campaign is an astroturf movement with a limited voter base. She’s obviously not very bright and I don’t think the theatrical “joy” strategy is convincing very many people of her competency. Her economic policies (including price controls) are full bore communist and would be devastating to any form of US recovery. Her fiscal plan will be even worse than Bidenomics has been.

But hey, I was certain Trump was getting a second term in 2020 and I was wrong. Who could have known Biden was going to get that unprecedented mail-in voter boost in the middle of the night after everyone went to bed? Truly, he is the most popular presidential candidate of all time. Why they dropped him for Kamala I’ll never fathom…

But seriously, the point is, we have come to a crossroads in our election process where anything is possible (whether real or engineered). I suspect that if Trump enters office once again there will be a multitude of changes to our economic data and they will happen quickly. Some of the rigging is already being exposed, just not on a level where the majority of the populace is aware of it.

Some examples of this rigging include:

Biden’s steady sale of US strategic oil reserves in order to drive down energy and gas prices, thereby artificially reducing CPI (official monthly inflation numbers). By June of this year Biden had sold off at least 50% of the nation’s emergency oil supply just to keep CPI down a few points. Keep in mind, bringing down the CPI does nothing to cut the real inflation that has already accumulated in necessities (30%-50% higher prices depending on the product or service).

Then there’s the manipulation of BLS unemployment data to show millions of new jobs that don’t actually exist. After it was announced that Biden was no longer the Democratic candidate, suddenly the US Payroll has been revised down by over 818,000, likely with more revisions to come. Meaning, Bidenomics was being fluffed with fake job creation.

An even greater concern is the fact that all new jobs created for the past several years have been going to illegal aliens, not legal citizens. In fact, since October of 2019 native-born US workers have lost over 1.4 million jobs. Over the same period, migrants illegally residing in the US have gained 3 million jobs. The new narrative among leftists is that this is a good thing; they claim that the US needs illegal immigration and open borders in order to support the jobs market and “bring down inflation.”

I’m doubtful that the jobs boost to illegals is real, either. More likely the migrant jobs data is rigged because it’s much harder to track and confirm. But these people don’t seem to understand how inflation works – Greater population means higher resource demand, and that helps drive up prices (as we’ve seen in housing). It doesn’t bring prices down, nor does it reduce the existing money supply.

It should also be noted that full time jobs numbers have plunged while part time low-wage jobs have increased. These are the kinds of issues no one in the Biden Admin is talking about.

Finally, rising GDP is often cited as a key indicator of a vibrant economy, but what the “experts” rarely mention is that GDP is rigged by the inclusion of government spending. The more federal and state governments tax, borrow and spend, the higher GDP goes. Currently, government spending accounts for at least 36% of GDP (officially) in the US.

It makes it look like America is more successful than ever but this is based on the government taking more cash from the public, printing more money and going into greater debt, then throwing that cash away with wild abandon in order to prop up the numbers.

Goldman Sachs recently made a statement that under a Harris regime GDP would go up and under Trump GDP would take a big hit. They are right, in a way, but they don’t explain the real reason why this is the case.

If Trump follows through on his fiscal responsibility policies (Elon Musk has been tapped to head up investigations into government efficiency), then OF COURSE we’ll see a drop in GDP. It would mean government spending will go down and the rigging of GDP will end. With Harris, government spending will skyrocket and so the GDP bubble will continue to grow. In fact, Harris will be incentivized to increase government spending in order to hide greater deflation in GDP.

Trump’s arrival in the Oval Office will result in a hailstorm of bad economic data, and most of this will be due to the sudden end of statistical manipulations that have been in place for the last four years. We are currently in the midst of a tone-shift in which recessionary forces are pressuring markets more than inflation. But don’t be fooled…

As soon as the Federal Reserve cuts rates inflation will spike again, and if Trump is in office a CPI jump will be even more pronounced. Biden’s oil reserve dumps will be over, no longer anchoring CPI. We will continue to see inflation in necessities with deflation in other areas including jobs and GDP. That’s what happens during a stagflation crisis.

With Harris the same problems will occur, they just won’t be reported and the stats will not reflect the truth. With Trump, the stats will be more transparent and the media will howl about how conservatives are destroying the economy. The game plan is obvious.

This article was written by Brandon Smith and originally published at Birch Gold Group

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Ben Wallace’s bizarre op-ed about Russia “coming for us” can be better understood as an admission of Britain’s guilt and not simply another absurd Russophobic rant.

When former British military chief Ben Wallace wrote his bizarre op-ed last month warning that “Putin will soon turn his war machine on Britain”, it may have come across as the usual Russophobic scaremongering.

The ex-minister of defense wrote in the Daily Telegraph that “Britain’s in Putin’s crosshairs… Make no mistake Putin is coming for us.”

He painted the Russian leader and its top generals as unhinged madmen who were driven by revenge for old scores like the Crimean War in the 1850s.

Wallace, who served as a British army captain and was the minister of defense under three Conservative prime ministers between 2019 and 2023, is known for his hawkish anti-Russia views. He previously told the Times newspaper that Britain must be prepared to fight wars alone without the help of the U.S. He has compared Putin to Hitler, and he once claimed that the Scots Guards – the regiment in which he served – “kicked Russian asses” in the Crimean War and could do so again.

But, in hindsight, his Telegraph op-ed was not so much the usual belligerent rant to whip up Russophobia. This was not a mere paranoid warning of Russia’s alleged malign intent, but rather it was more an admission of British guilt in recklessly escalating the proxy war in Ukraine.

Wallace claimed, somewhat curiously, that Britain would be the primary target for any Russian military attack, not the United States. What made him say that? After all, the U.S. is by far the biggest military backer of the Kiev regime.

Pointedly, Wallace emphatically denied in his article published on August 26 that Britain had played any role in Ukraine’s offensive on Russia’s Kursk region. That offensive was launched on August 6. The incursion appears now to have been a military disaster for the Kiev regime with nearly 15,000 of its troops killed and hundreds of NATO-supplied armored vehicles destroyed.

As the offensive in Kursk flounders and Russia pushes on with rapid gains in the Donbass region of formerly eastern Ukraine, it is becoming more clear that Britain took a leading role among the NATO sponsors of the Kiev regime in promoting the Kursk offensive.

Captured Ukrainian troops have told how British marines trained and directed them to take on audacious missions. The military purpose of the missions was not precise or pragmatic. Their main objective was to create propaganda victories by raising Ukrainian flags on Russian territory.

This week, another British military insider, Sean Bell, who was the former air vice marshall of the RAF, urged the NATO-backed Ukrainian regime to “inflict maximum pain” on Russia. The former RAF commander was referring to the Kursk offensive and an expansion of air strikes on Russian territory.

This comes as Britain’s new Labour prime minister Keir Starmer is consulting with U.S. president Joe Biden on granting Ukraine permission to use long-range missiles to hit deep inside Russia. Starmer and his new defense minister John Healey have been keen to demonstrate that their government is every bit as gung-ho as the Conservative predecessors in supporting Ukraine militarily.

It also comes as the Russian state security service, FSB, claims that leaked documents it has obtained show that Britain is taking a leading role among Western adversaries in ramping up military and political tensions with Moscow.

When the Kursk offensive kicked off last month, NATO leaders were adamant that they were not involved in the planning. By contrast, the Kiev regime hinted that NATO was.

Despite the official denials, sections of the British media couldn’t contain their excitement in what appeared in the initial stage to be a lightning punch in the nose for Putin.

It was reported that Ukrainian troops had been trained in Britain prior to the incursion. While the Daily Mail blared that British Challenger tanks were “leading Ukraine’s advance into Russia’s Kursk and Belgorod regions”.

The Times reported smugly that “British equipment, including drones, has played a central role in Ukraine’s new offensive and British personnel have been closely advising the Ukrainian military.”

Since the NATO proxy war against Russia erupted in Ukraine in February 2022, the British have been intensely involved in training commandos to carry out raids on Russian territory, according to Britain’s Royal Navy publicity.

Despite Ben Wallace’s assertion that Britain had no planning involvement in the Kursk offensive, it seems clear that his denial is a lie. Britain was and presumably still is heavily involved. It is known that mercenaries from other NATO states are on the ground in Kursk. But the British role is prominent in leading the charge (from behind, that is).

That charge has now run into a dead-end with heavy losses among Ukrainian troops. For the British planners, however, the military losses are of little importance. The Ukrainians were merely cannon fodder in a PR stunt to embarrass Putin and to whip up another round of military aid.

Britain has a sordid historical role in starting wars in Europe. Ben Wallace in his Telegraph op-ed mocked Putin for blaming Britain for being behind the Crimean War and the rise of Nazi Germany. On both counts, it is accurate to condemn Britain. What was it doing anyway sending troops to Crimea in the 1850s? And the covert role of Britain in financing, arming, and giving Hitler a free hand to attack the Soviet Union during the 1930s was a major contributor to fomenting World War Two, a war in which up to 30 million Soviet people were killed.

Today, Perfidious Albion is stoking the proxy war against Russia, which could lead to a nuclear Third World War. Its sinister fingerprints are all over the Kursk provocation. The has-been empire is trying to inflate its geopolitical importance among Western partners through machinations and manipulation. Even at the risk of inciting an all-out world war.

Ben Wallace’s bizarre op-ed about Russia “coming for us” can be better understood as an admission of Britain’s guilt and not simply another absurd Russophobic rant. The old Tory warmonger was projecting the reality of Britain’s nefarious role in escalating the proxy war. The British establishment knows that if Russia goes on to take reprisal, it has it coming. Its pretense of innocence is classic British dissembling.

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

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Every public broadcaster in the world has one client, the government. As such it is never independent. Perhaps in a more ethical time, when the plurality was Christian and you had to go to church if you wanted to keep your job and standing in the community. On Sundays you were warned of iniquity, that the wages of sin were an entirely unpleasant death and subsequent condemnation in the afterlife. Even the full-on atheist was cautious, and often that was enough to keep civic peace. Lying, mis-representing, destroying and the imperative to love one’s neighbor, that’s gone now. Now it is winning by any means necessary and truth be damned.

And with that, the media, especially state media became the enemy of the people. Canada’s “polis” if you like, is in full-on rebellion. Covid, the lockdowns, the preposterous carbon taxes, the horrors of vaccine damage which affects almost every family now, the flood of migrants, the disastrous miscalculations about legal street drugs, the skyrocketing price of energy, the shutdown of LNG, the homeless encampments in every city, and the debt ratio – the largest debt-to-GDP in the G7 – all these policies were viciously defended and aggressively promoted by the CBC, which eats up half the media dollars in the country.

The public broadcaster, once loved to excess by every Canadian is now widely hated, and last time I looked, its “news” is watched by fewer than 2% of the population. Admittedly, its morning drive-time radio news might take 10% of the market, but dollar for dollar more than 60% of us want it permanently shuttered.

The following is an analysis of just how that happened: This is an excerpt from Against the Corporate Media, 42 Ways the Media Hates You, published on September 10th.

And when I say the richest country in the world, I mean in this way. We are the second largest in geographic terms, with a small albeit highly educated population, but we sit on the greatest natural riches in the world without parallel. No other country comes close. Per capita, every single Canadian could like like a Saudi prince, creating the most extraordinary culture the world has ever seen. Instead, we get by on 60% of the average American’s income, and we are, generally, depressed and fearful of the future. This is 100% the fault of our media, and to a lesser extent, government “art”.

The CBC: From Crown Jewel to Jacobins

The Beast

Renegade governmental organizations are virtually impossible to rein in, especially if they have careened off the rails into destructive action. Take, for the sake of argument, the FBI or Environmental Protection Agency in the U.S., or the World Health Organization and the United Nations internationally, or the plethora of sovereign and sub-sovereign health ministries that went AWOL during COVID-19. If threatened, a throng of defenders rise, vocal to the point of shrill, defending the original idea, refusing to look at the slavering beast all that public money hath wrought.

“Reform or die,” says prime minister after president after premier. Nodding subservience is followed by…nothing. Commissions are formed, recommendations are made. Cosmetic changes ensue. Like rogue elephants they continue to roam the heights of the culture, braying and stomping and breaking things. Power, once acquired, needs to be wrenched from bleeding hands.

In Canada, that raging elephant is the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. Founded in 1936, at last count, the CBC sprawls across the country in twenty-seven over-the-air TV stations, eighty-eight radio stations, a flotilla of websites, podcasts, streaming TV, and multiple satellite radio stations. Its mandate is high-flown, to connect the multiple city-states of the country, its frozen north and isolated rural communities via dozens of offices big and small. It broadcasts in English, French, and eight indigenous languages.

The CBC’s Toronto headquarters, finished in 1993, was a statement of extreme optimism at a time when the corporation was widely loved. Designed by Philip Johnson, its cost $381 million. It is de-constructivist in form, a symbol of the CBC’s purpose, which is to re-conceive Canada’s founding as racist and the country in need of radical reform led by itself. Its orthogonal grid is “interrupted by skewed elements,” its interior dominated by a green elevator shaft set at an angle to the building grid. Outside, a forbidding Soviet box, windows are outlined in CBC red. Inside, it’s confusing, echoing, and replete with empty studios. Despite effulgent funding, the aura of failure wears on those still employed. They don’t understand why they are no longer astride the culture.

A behemoth, it demands $1 billion and $240 million of direct subsidy from the government every year, and rakes in several hundred million more through licensing, advertising, and production subsidy. It eats up, say some analysts, half the media dollars spent in the country, yet is watched on its twenty-seven TV stations by fewer than 5 percent[RK1]  of Canadians. Its news outlets perform worse. Only 1.75 percent watch CBC news on broadcast channels or cable. The National, its star suppertime news show in Toronto, is watched by fewer than half a million people, while private-sector competitors in the same city crest at 1 million or even 2 million.

In June 2023, the editorial board of Canada’s long-time national newspaper, The Globe and Mail, put its rather large bear paw down and suggested shuttering CBC TV entirely, and focusing on digital and radio, which are relatively successful. The editorial board (acting in its own institutional interest), pointed out that digital advertising for CBC should be halted because a subsidized CBC should not eat up ad dollars in a tight market. The editorial board also stated that more than 24 million CBC digital visitors a month is substantial. It is not. The media is undergoing explosive growth in every country; it is only legacy media that is not growing. Routinely in the U.S., popular digital sites host tens of millions of visitors a day, and more than a billion a year. Using that metric, the CBC reaches about 10 percent of the available digital audience.

Most Canadians agree with The Globe and Mail. In fact, in mid-2023, 62 percent of Canadians wanted it shut down, saying they would vote for conservatives if they promised to do so. Not reined in, not given less taxpayer money, not privatized, but shut down, its many buildings, its wealth of equipment sold, and its employees scattered to the winds. Among some 30  to 40 percent, the mother corporation (as it calls itself) is actively hated, loathed. When Pierre Poilievre, the popular conservative candidate leader, promised to shut down the CBC, his audience rose for a prolonged standing ovation.

How did this jewel of Canadian culture which, for sixty years was held in near reverence by every sentient Canadian, come to this?

Public broadcasters, in general, engage in state-building, in national and cultural integration. They “provide social cement,” they build bridges, “witness” and connect. Or are supposed to. They are meant to be free, in order to serve those without the funds for cable or streaming subscriptions. In Ireland, Raidió Teilifís Éireann (RTE) provides an alternative to the deluge of British programming, those in Nordic countries promote “equality, solidarity and belonging,” and in Australia, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) sets itself against the dominance of wicked corporatist freebooter Rupert Murdoch.

In Canada, the CBC is meant to provide a Canadian voice in a country where, as the old saw goes, Canadian culture is in a distinct minority. This purpose has been served well in French Canada, where Radio Canada (best said with a French accent) is widely loved and has managed to act as a beacon for Quebecois culture, an impressive amount of it created to flout, humiliate, and laugh at the maudit Anglais to the south, east, and west.

The digital and streaming explosion of the early aughts[RK2]  left the CBC flailing to catch up, and this is typically given as the reason its audience numbers are so poor. However, this is not the case for the CBC’s radio stations which are the only division of the corporation that truly service small-city and rural Canada and can compete in an admitted fever of ever-expanding competition. Their drive-time shows can reach as many as 20 percent of the audience, and are often in first place in the ratings.

There are other rather more convincing arguments for its decline. CBC hosts on radio and TV have historically been beloved figures. Today, few Canadians could name one of them; personalities seemingly are not wanted at the CBC anymore but Canadians still love them. Canadian YouTubers routinely attract hundreds of thousands of viewers and, in Jordan Peterson’s case, tens of millions, trouncing the “mother corporation” by orders of magnitude. Podcasts are popular, but half of those listened to in Canada are[RK3] [EN4]  by rightwing Americans. Which indicates that, even given its radio successes, the corporation has lost touch with Canadians. It simply does not have news or entertainment product strong enough to compete in the new marketplace. And, as the proliferation of new media in Canada proves, its editorial policy is so backward, almost every single digital opportunity has been missed.

In contrast to received opinion—which is that the culprit is the explosion in digital and streaming outlets—the answer to the corporation’s distress is far simpler, and far more reparable. A series of bad political decisions have been made by policy chiefs who craft the corporation’s editorial policy every year. Reputedly that secretive department costs taxpayer $180 million annually, but it is as closeted as the Kremlin and few even admit it exists. But it does, and it is those policy setters who have created the wholesale repudiation of the CBC via a rough-shod political brinksmanship that was meant entirely to remake Canada in a fresh, socialist image. And to destroy the one political party standing in the way.

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On Friday, September 13th Pope Francis delivered a speech to the youthful students at Singapore’s Catholic Junior College, a group which included many non-Christians. In it he fired a shot that has been heard round the world. Putting aside his prepared script, His Holiness began speaking spontaneously, with words that now, more than ever, we can presume to have come straight from his heart. With soft, grandfatherly tones and intently earnest body language, he led his young audience gently and persuasively down a very different path from the straight and narrow one marked out by his predecessors in the chair of Peter.

Those previous popes had repeatedly censured and warned against religious relativism or indifferentism– the tendency to gloss over and deny the importance of the differences between Christ’s Gospel and other religions. After all, Jesus says, “I am the way, the truth and the life; no one comes to the Father except through me”. To the apostles he sends out as missionaries he says, “He who hears you, hears me; whoever rejects you rejects me, and whoever rejects me rejects the one who sent me” (Lk 10: 16). Again, “This is eternal life, that they should know you, the only true God, and the one whom you sent, Jesus Christ” (Jn. 17: 3). Countless other New Testament texts could be cited to the same effect.

But a very different message was sent to those Singapore school students by none other than the earthly leader of Christ’s Church. Eliciting their smiles and applause, he led them down a wide and shining path whose smooth surface seemed to iron out all those troublesome, contentious differences between rival creeds. Comparing the world’s mutually contradictory religions to its different “languages” – none of which, of course, is ‘truer’ or morally better than any other – Francis affirmed bluntly, “Tutte le religioni sono un cammino per arrivare a Dio“. This was immediately rendered accurately by the translator at his side, who said loudly and clearly, “All religions are a pathway to arrive at God”. No hint of any nuance or qualification there.

Magisterial as well as biblical pronouncements against this kind of levelling of religious differences could also be cited in abundance; but two examples, one from two centuries ago and the other from Vatican Council II, will suffice here. Gregory XVI, in his 1831 encyclical Mirari Vos, denounced

indifferentism, . . . that base opinion which has become prevalent everywhere through the deceit of wicked men, that eternal salvation of the soul can be acquired by any profession of faith whatsoever, provided morals are conformed to the standard of justice and honesty.

And no. 846 of the Catechism of the Catholic Church, citing Lumen Gentium #14, recalls that Christ

explicitly asserted the necessity of faith and Baptism, and thereby affirmed at the same time the necessity of the Church. . . . Hence they could not be saved who, knowing that the Catholic Church was founded as necessary by God through Christ, would refuse either to enter it or to remain in it” (emphasis added).

If Catholicism is the “necessary” path to salvation – even supposing that to be a necessity of precept rather than of means – it clearly can’t be presented as just one path among others. The blood of countless martyred missionaries down through two millennia has testified to their conviction, based on the Lord’s clear teaching, that all human creatures need to know Christ the Savior. The purpose of preaching the Gospel to every creature is to save souls! (Cf. Mk 16: 16.) Accordingly, the sensus fidelium of Catholic believers down through the centuries has always reacted sharply and intuitively against the siren song of any preacher or teacher who lumps Christianity together with other religions as one among many paths that lead to a common transcendent destiny.

Now, the Italian original of Pope Francis’ assertion, cited above, went up immediately on the Vatican website, as did accurate translations into six other languages. But with the English translation came a little silver lining to this dark cloud hovering over Roman skies: a sanitized version of the Holy Father’s key statement. Some English-language Vatican official was evidently so dismayed by Francis’ heterodox affirmation that he felt a duty to do some damage control. Mindful, perhaps, of Noah’s sons, who in filial piety covered their father’s nakedness after his lapse into drunkenness (cf. Gn. 9: 20-24), this official tapped out a bowdlerized version of the Pope’s words that turned them from an explosive theological statement into a bland empirical observation. He wrote, “Religions are seen as paths trying to reach God.” Note these three changes:  1) the sweeping word “All” is deleted; 2) it is said that these religious paths are only “trying” to reach God (and so don’t necessarily succeed); and 3) we’re told that they are only “seen as” i.e., believed to be, paths of that sort – a sociological statement that prescinds from whether or not said belief is true. One or two other relatively minor ‘improvements’ to the original also polished up the posted English version.

Unfortunately, this silver lining soon vanished. Our anonymous harm-limiting official was apparently rapped over the knuckles for misrepresenting the Holy Father’s statement, and the Vatican website’s English version was promptly amended so as to translate more correctly the words I have placed in bold type in the following citation of the Pope’s key paragraph. It is still not quite accurate because “a path” has become “paths”, and the verb “reach” (equivalent to “arrive at”) is included only in Francis’ second iteration of his novel claim. Nevertheless, the message is now pretty clear:

One of the things that has impressed me most about the young people here is your capacity for interfaith dialogue. This is very important because if you start arguing, ‘My religion is more important than yours…,’ or ‘Mine is the true one, yours is not true….,’ where does this lead? Somebody answer. [A young person answers, ‘Destruction’.] That is correct. All religions are paths to God. I will use an analogy, they are like different languages that express the divine. But God is for everyone, and therefore, we are all God’s children. ‘But my God is more important than yours!’. Is this true? There is only one God, and religions are like languages, paths to reach God. Some Sikh, some Muslim, some Hindu, some Christian. Understood?

The significance of this swift correction should not be underestimated, because it is hard to imagine that Francis could have been unaware of it. English is the most widely spoken language on earth, and if millions of us round the world saw the initial sanitized version and learned of its discrepancy from what the Pope actually said, is it likely that he himself was left in the dark about this? Or that whoever ordered the correction did so without knowing that he (she?) would be supported by Higher Up? There has long been a reported consensus among Vatican insiders that Francis keeps close tabs on everything important that goes on in his curia.

But if the Holy Father approved this amendment to the first English-language version of his speech, this shows that, far from wanting to clarify, correct, or nuance his spontaneous and unscripted assertion to the Singapore highschoolers, he is doubling down on it. He’s telling the world, “That’s exactly what I meant to say, and I still mean it!” And unless some contrary announcement on this matter comes very soon from the Vatican, I think we must draw this troubling conclusion.

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1. How to Invest in Gold and Silver: A Complete Guide with a Focus on Mining Stocks
2. Hellstorm: The Death of Nazi Germany, 1944-1947
3. Chain of Command: The Road from 9/11 to Abu Ghraib 
4. The Law,” “The State,” and Other Political Writings, 1843–1850
5. The Origins of Totalitarianism
6. The Demon of Unrest: A Saga of Hubris, Heartbreak, and Heroism at the Dawn of the Civil War 
7. The New Jerusalem: Zionist Power in America
8. When in the Course of Human Events: Arguing the Case for Southern Secession 
9. Military Memoirs of A Confederate 
10. 10-Minute Strength Training Exercises for Seniors: Exercises and Routines to Build Muscle, Balance, and Stamina 
11. Marching Through Georgia: The Story of Soldiers and Civilians During Sherman’s Campaign 
12. Freedom Betrayed: Herbert Hoover’s Secret History of the Second World War and Its Aftermath
13. Preston Tucker and His Battle to Build the Car of Tomorrow
14. The Immigration Solution: A Better Plan Than Today’s 
15. Eat Meat And Stop Jogging: ‘Common’ Advice On How To Get Fit Is Keeping You Fat And Making You Sick
16. Phenomena: The Secret History of the U.S. Government’s Investigations into Extrasensory Perception and Psychokinesis 
17. Big Israel: How Israel’s Lobby Moves America
18. Prescription for Natural Cures
19. The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine
20. Against the Corporate Media: Forty-two Ways the Press Hates You

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When in the course of history’s twists and turns dire necessity becomes the mother of invention the hour is usually late. That’s the case with America’s septic fiscal derangement at the present time. There is simply not a snowball’s chance in the hot place that either the Trumpified GOP or the beltway blob-controlled Democrats will lift a finger to deflect America’s fiscal doomsday machine from its appointed rendezvous with disaster.

The latter stems from the UniParty’s bargain with the fiscal devil. It amounts to a coalition of convenience dedicated to the fierce perpetuation of the fiscal status quo at all corners of the budget.

For its part, the Trumpified GOP now says it will no longer be accused by the Dems of planning to throw granny out into the snow. Instead, its very own party platform now says no cuts from Medicare or Social Security. Not even a single thin dime is to be squeezed from what will be the staggering $36 trillion cost of these two programs over the next decade.

That’s right. Neither wing of the UniParty will now even utter the words entitlement reform or spending cuts in the same sentence with Social Security, which alone will cost $20 trillion over the next decade, or Medicare, which will clock in at $16 trillion.

The GOP also reiterates its long standing refrain of no tax increases in any way, shape or form. In fact, it calls for an extension of the expiring Trump tax cut (2025) at a deficit cost of $4.5 trillion over the next decade.

Such an extension, however, would bring down Federal revenues to an average of just 16.5% of GDP—the lowest level since the 1950s. And, no, it won’t even out in the wash of higher “growth” either because CBO’s Rosy Scenario already assumes loads of cumulative real growth owing to no recession or any other economic upset for the next 10-years. Effectively, CBO’s 2.0% real growth with no recession for a decade is the same thing as 3.0% growth interrupted by a normal cyclical downturn and recovery.

In any event, the resulting revenue number of $58 trillion over the 2025-2034 decade would actually give the idea of soaring red ink an altogether new definition. That’s because the baseline spending level during the same period according to CBO’s latest projections is just under $85 trillion or 24% of GDP. So as the Trumpified GOP would have it, Joe Biden’s parting public debt of $36 trillion would reach upwards of $65 trillion by the mid 2030s.

At the same time, the Beltway Blob on the Dem side of the aisle is dug in deeply on the Medicaid/ObamaCare complex and safety net programs like Food Stamps, SSI, unemployment insurance, family tax credits and child nutrition, which would cost about $13 trillion over the decade. And when push comes to shove in the cauldron of legislative battle, the GOP doesn’t have the cojones to dislodge the Dem defenses in this corner of the budget, either, despite rampant abuse and weak to non-existent work requirements for most of these programs.

Finally, we come to the Forever Wars, the Washington global hegemon, the military/industrial/intelligence/security assistance complex and the $15 trillion of baseline spending over the next decade for defense, international relations and veterans.  As it happens, the neocons, war-hawks, the internationalist busy-bodies and the beltway racketeers which infest both parties have locked up this bulging corner of the budget tighter than a drum.

In fact, there is so much loose change seeping through the budgetary cracks of this $15 trillion Warfare State bonanza that the defense think tanks, international NGO’s and multitudinous military contractor lobbying arms are in high clover. The massively swollen national security budget thus funds its own lobbying and self-justification force—a self-licking ice cream cone, as it were.

Therefore, and to summarize: From a slate of $85 trillion of total baseline spending over the next decade we have the following UniParty “No Go”” zones:

• Medicare and Social Security: $36 trillion.
• Medicaid, ObamaCare and the Safety Net: $13 trillion.
• The National Security Budget: $15 trillion;
• Net Interest on the Debt: $13 trillion.
• Total UniParty No-Go Zones: $77 trillion.
• Percent of Baseline Spending: 91%.

In short, the frozen in place UniParty fiscal equation amounts to—

• A revenue take at 17% of GDP at best.
• Politically frozen spending at 24% of GDP—or far worse in the likely event that the weighted average cost of Treasury debt happens to rise above the absurdly low 3.0% level assumed by CBO.
• Annual deficits of 7-8% of GDP or 2X the assumed nominal GDP growth rate as far as the eye can see.
• A runaway public debt that reaches $65 trillion by 2034 and 166% of GDP or $150 trillion by 2050.

Needless to say, long before the public debt reached $150 trillion the financial system would implode because even the Keynesian mad-men, mad-women and mad-theys domiciled in the Eccles Building couldn’t come up with an excuse to monetize even a small share of the tsunami of public debt now coming down the pike. And make no mistake, the only reason we are at $36 trillion today is that the Fed has enabled it politically. That is, by massively monetizing the public debt it has temporarily deferred what would have otherwise been a severe crowding out of private borrowers and escalation of yields in the bond pits.

Still, we don’t think that the public debt will get to the financial implosion point because we do not believe that American democracy is inherently suicidal. In fact, even in the context of today’s tightening fiscal vice we see the emergent shadows of a path to resolution or at least a stick-save not too far down the treacherous road ahead.

To wit, it is now exceedingly likely that Donald Trump will not only win the 2024 election, but it is also possible that his return to the Oval Office could trigger the Great Realignment that might finally shatter the UniParty’s death grip on the fiscal equation.

To be sure, we italicize the “possible” part for good reason: The Donald is one of the most unstable, inconsistent and unpredictable politicians to ever prance upon the stage of presidential politics in America—so anything can happen, even a worse mis-governance disaster than his first time around the barn.

But our impression is that he is bitterly resentful of the manner in which the UniParty and its RINO wing undermined and ruined his first presidency. So this time he may actually allow himself to be guided and re-directed by the fantastic posse of brilliant dissidents—Robert Kennedy, Nicole Shanahan, Tulsi Gabbard, Vivek Ramaswamy, Tucker Carlson, Elon Musk and JD Vance—who have recently joined or rallied to his campaign. Call it the Good Squad.

Indeed, it is this flying wedge of anti-Washington statesmen and intellects that could constructively harness and channel the Donald’s own inchoate instincts to drain the swamp. If their natural leader, RFK, can use his co-chairmanship of the transition organization to keep the neocons, RINOs and anti-abortion howlers out of the key posts in the next administration, it would make all the difference in the world. And if he could manage to parlay that role into Chief of Staff and de facto deputy president after the inauguration it would obviously be all to the better.

That’s because the GOP needs a big purge. It has been hijacked and led astray from is core fiscal mission during recent decades by ideological factions—neocons, tax cons, right to lifers, nativists and militant nationalists. But during a Trump Administration, which is led or strongly influenced by the Good Squad, the Donald’s promise to settle the Ukraine disaster quickly via partition of the artificial country that Lenin, Stalin and Khrushchev built could trigger the very realignment that is sorely needed.

To wit, much of the neocon Never Trumper brigade has already migrated to the Dems and will cement their departure through specious claims of being “Republicans for Kamala” during the balance of the campaign. But where the potential deal of the century with Putin will have its biggest impact on the Realignment will be among the neocon ranks of Republicans on Capitol Hill.

Upon the Kennedy-Trump led rapprochement with Putin, these befuddled souls will either—

• Retire from Congress disconsolately.
• Switch parties to join the rest of the bitter-end Never Trumpers.
• Or, in the main, see that their whole world view was wrong. That is, after a deal to split up Ukraine, Estonia did not fall, Poland remained free, the Brandenburg Gate was still visited by tourists not Russian troops, and that, alas, NATO could be disbanded with no harm done to Homeland Security.

In turn, what amounts to bringing the Empire Home could finally pave the way for breaking the fiscal deadlock. A Trump foreign policy formulated by the Good Squad would enable at least a 50% cut in defense spending and $5 trillion of savings from the baseline National Security budget over the next decade.

Beyond that, we seriously doubt that even the Good Squad could talk the Donald out of his 10% across the board tariff. But if it is applied to all of America’s $3 trillion of annual imports and not used as a club to start an economic war with China, so be it. A VAT (value added tax) would be a better instrument—but a Trumpified stealthy version might function as a second best alternative under the circumstances.

In any event, a stealthy VAT could generate $3-4 trillion of incremental revenue over a decade, without getting into the mischievous and counter-productive business of raising income, payroll or corporate taxes. And with the fiscal ball rolling in this manner, it is conceivable that another $4 trillion in interest savings, corporate boondoggles, green energy waste and the like might also be cobbled together by a realigned government led by the Good Squad.

Needless to say, $13 trillion of savings over the next decade would decisively stifle the current race to fiscal doom.

Finally, what happens if by some off chance Kamala wins? Or if the Good Squad gets squeezed out and shunted aside in a second Trump White House by the same protectionist, nativist and right-wing loonies who screwed the pooch the first time around?

Well, that’s why Bobby Kennedy will remain on the ballot in 40 states and thereby have the electoral base for a Realigned Anti-Washington Party in 2028. Coalesced around the leadership of the Good Squad and after 4 years of dismal partisan warfare between Kamala and the old guard GOP on Capitol Hill the electorate could be fairly begging for a Realignment next time around.

Reprinted with permission from David Stockman’s Contra Corner.

The post Coming US Election and What It Means for America’s Fiscal Future appeared first on LewRockwell.

Schooling is constrained by government requirements to pay, attend, qualify before teaching, not employ children, segregate children by age, teach specific curricula, and administer specific tests.

Free ourselves from these constraints, and the schooling that individuals will ultimately develop and choose will deliver far-better performance, price, and value-added for everybody.

Building general-purpose expertise

People in childhood through early adulthood can learn a great deal, and have abundant time.

This extended time that’s available for learning would best be used to develop general-purpose expertise of three kinds. Reading delivers the best-available understanding from standout tutors in nearly all subject areas, as focused narrative streams, at personally-customized paces. Writing consolidates information and deepens understanding. Problem solving provides analyses that better-support actions.

An individual deepens his expertise the most in any given period of time through deliberate practice learning the hardest knowledge he’s ready to learn.

An individual’s learning time is abundant, but his learning resources are scarce. The challenge in schooling is to put scarce learning resources to their most-valued uses.

Freeing individuals to produce and shop

People who are learning are individuals, and choose their actions deliberately.

Early on, an individual doesn’t know much, so his choices are limited. Even so, he can already communicate what he finds interesting and when he needs breaks.

Soon, an individual learns some basics in reading, writing, and problem solving. From then on, he can tutor others.

Such peer teaching drove the initial great advances in literacy worldwide. Peer teaching lives on now, providing schooling that’s superior and efficient. Some of the world’s poorest parents pass up tuition-free government schools and instead opt for tuition-charging private schools that thrive on peer teaching.

Peer teaching will do even more good once the peer-teaching individuals who produce the learning are freed to sell this product.

Peer teaching is the first product that individuals can produce in volume.

Producing a product adds value. Selling the product yields earnings. The individual who added the value then shops for products (adding more value) and finally buys products. Producing is the action that increases material well-being.

Each individual should peer teach. He should earn at whatever rate that others will pay for his teaching. Empowered with his parents’ support and his earnings, his parents and he should then shop for and buy the schooling products that their deliberations indicate will help him the best.

Supporting individuals and parents

In an individual’s production of tutoring, his parents’ and his shopping for learning products, and his learning, he will be supported by the balance of the inputs of touch labor:

Tutoring is presenting information to groups or individuals, and facilitating investigations into subjects by groups or individuals. Individuals producing tutoring will range from other learners who have learned a little more to experts who practice in specific subject areas and love them.

Consulting will be guidance in selecting among subjects, learning modes, and learning products (particularly books). Consulting will help an individual make wise purchases of learning products.

Caretaking will be helping people get better-prepared to learn. Caretaking will range from ensuring all individuals’ safety to helping an individual prepare for learning by improving his rest, exercise, nutrition, physical health, and mental health.

Operations management will be producing testing infrastructure, analyses of how various options might work for each individual, and other infrastructure. Testing is well-proven to enhance memory and learning. Compiling and analyzing test data and other information will suggest what learning is likely to work best for a given individual. Other infrastructure, including information technology, will support various learning modes that make use of print content, video content, or interactive-learning content, whether online or offline.

In addition to support from touch labor, individuals and parents will also have support from intermediate products and facilities.

Intermediate products can include books, interactive learning aids, recorded lectures, dedicated media, and internet resources. Artificial intelligence is being developed rapidly.

Across all intermediate products, even AI, there will be a great increase in innovation that provides meaningful improvements in learning. Innovation will earn increased rewards, since peer teaching will add resources and will also free up resources. Innovation will also be needed to mitigate producers’ increased risks, as shopping will become maximally decentralized—customized by each individual—and relentless.

Facilities will help an individual learn in various settings. Office-like designs will facilitate learning by working alone, in small groups, in larger meeting groups, and in production teams. Sufficiently-open layouts, or suitable technologies, will provide for safety monitoring.

Embracing inequalities to increase opportunities

The scale and pricing of learning operations will vary. Some individuals will receive homeschooling, which provides intensive tutoring and will incorporate the best learning products developed by others.

In all schooling, wealthier parents and children will buy innovations first. Innovations that prove to add more value in an economical-enough way will soon get mass-produced and sold. Such improvements will ultimately reach the poorest individuals, as others voluntarily provide charitable support.

Because of this, such inequality within a given cohort should be embraced. This inequality brings improvements to succeeding cohorts.

Additional inequality between individuals will result from the massive decentralization, as each individual is freed from age discrimination.

On any given subject, an individual will start out learning much the same information that others his age are learning. Soon, though, his unique interests, potential, and effort will lead him to learn different information than others his age are learning. He will lead in some subject areas and trail in others. Freed to learn at his own pace, he will learn more of the hardest knowledge that’s valuable to him and that he’s ready to learn.

This inequality of development should also be embraced. This inequality brings improvements to each individual.

Early in life, each individual will develop expertise and independence. Each will then add more value, generation upon generation.

When people are free, people innovate. Government-free schooling will be world-changing freedom.

The post Government-Free Schooling appeared first on LewRockwell.

More Money for Israel

Fuel beneath a cauldron of hate
At the heart of the Middle East mess;
Protecting an ethnic-supremacist state,
Defending its right to oppress.

With the current wanton slaughter of Palestinians in which the state of Israel is currently engaged, it’s almost enough to give outlaws a bad name.  Even NBC News puts the current death toll in the war in the small area of Gaza at 30,000, and anyone can see from the nature of the destruction of housing complexes, hospitals, schools, churches, and refugee camps, that most of the victims are Palestinian civilians, mostly women and children.

The fact of the matter, though, is that Israel is, indeed, an outlaw state and it has been so for quite a long time.  Dr. A. C. Forrest was the longtime editor of the United Church Observer of Canada (called Broadview since 2019).  His book, The unHoly Land, based upon his experience in Palestine was published in 1971.  Since that time, things have gotten immeasurably worse for the centuries-long non-Jewish residents of the region.  Our two previous articles, “Genocidal Israelis Napalmed Civilian Refugees” and  “Deep Roots of the Current Gaza Slaughter” are drawn from that book.  His short chapter 23 is entitled “Israel and International Law,” and here we reproduce it in its entirety.  We need to be reminded as we read it that since it was written the Sinai Peninsula, which had been captured by Israel in the June 1967 Six Day War was returned to Egypt by the Camp David Accords of 1978.   It looks now like things are about to get a lot worse for the Palestinians in that area, as well.

It is often said with some pride that Israel was the creation of the United Nations.  It was the UN decision to partition Palestine of November 29th, 1947, that made the State of Israel possible.  Thirty-three UN states voted for the partition; thirteen were opposed, and ten, including the United Kingdom, abstained.  The majority was secured after remarkable lobbying and last minute pressure on doubtful states.  This UN decision is referred to by many supporters of Israeli policies as the ultimate authority for Israel to proceed to declare itself a State.

It seems ironic that later unanimous decisions by the UN have been ignored.  The General Assembly vote of 99-0 condemning the annexation of East Jerusalem and calling on Israel to “rescind all measures taken, and to desist forthwith from taking any action that would alter the state of Jerusalem,” on July 4th, 1967, was flouted.  In late 1970 Israel is continuing to erect high rise apartments on Mount Scopus in East Jerusalem.

Ambassador Michael Cromay and other Israeli officials told me that there was no way by which Israel would give up any portion of Jerusalem.  Israel has repeatedly declared she would not withdraw from Jerusalem.  But the November 22nd, 1967, Security Council resolution includes as a condition of settlement the withdrawal of Israel from occupied territories.  This was adopted 15-0.

In some ways Israel’s violations of the Fourth Geneva Convention for the protection of civilian persons are even more serious.  It seems a strange paradox that Israel would refuse to abide by the conventions of international laws which were written as a direct result of the Nazi treatment of the Jews and other innocent people during World War II.

Following the war the Geneva Convention “relative to the protection of civilian persons in time of war” was drawn up, and signed by most civilized nations, including Israel.  The world vividly remembered the awful abuses carried out by both the Nazis in Germany and the Japanese in Asia.  They were determined that such abuses would never occur again.

Four Conventions were approved: the first three concerned the protection of sick and wounded armed forces in the field, armed and shipwrecked naval forces, and the treatment of prisoners of war.  Each of the Conventions was consistent with the Universal Declaration of Human Rights of 1948.  Israel signed the Conventions and has observed the first three.  Whenever it has been to Israel’s interest to invoke the charter of the United Nations, or seek the security of international law, she has done so.  When it has been in her interest to ignore the UN or flout the Charter, she has also done so—without hesitation and, so far, with impunity.

The blowing up of houses, the destruction of property, the individual or mass transfer of populations from occupied territory, are all expressly forbidden.  Collective punishments and reprisals are forbidden.  Yet books could be filled—in fact books are being filled—with accounts of incidents and records of Israeli breaches of the Convention.

For example, Article thirty-three states: “No protected person may be punished for an offense he or she has not personally committed.  Collective penalties and likewise all measures of intimidation or of terrorism are prohibited.  Reprisals against protected persons and their property are prohibited.”

I do not like to refer in any way to Israeli treatment of the Arabs as “Nazi,” but the parallels are so numerous and so similar that Arabs speak of Nazi tactics and practices frequently.  The Israelis have relied upon a systematic destruction of homes and villages to suppress resistance.

Article fifty-three of the Fourth Convention says: “Any destruction by the occupying power of real or personal property belonging individually or collectively to private persons or to the State or to other public authorities or to social or co-operative organizations is prohibited except where such destruction is rendered absolutely necessary for military purposes.”

On a main street in Gaza eight houses were blown up after a Jewish merchant was killed. There was no apparent attempt to apprehend the murderer.  Reprisals were simply taken against the owners of the nearest homes.  One of the owners was in Kuwait, another was an elderly woman.  One can go down the list of the eight and the indications are that the victims were all innocent.  This is typical.  By mid-1970 something in excess of eight hundred homes had been individually destroyed and another seven thousand Arab homes had been brought down by the Israelis in one way or another.  Red Cross observers told me that the Israelis have followed six different methods of destroying Arab homes, four of which blatantly contravene Article fifty-three.  Two of the methods might be interpreted as militarily excusable.

The first contravention is the classical destruction of an Arab home as a punishment or reprisal.  Israeli authorities acting on information or suspicion known only to themselves, move in, order the householders out, dynamite the home, and leave, forbidding the owner to rebuild.

Then there are collective reprisals, such as the destruction of the eight homes in Gaza.  In the village of Hebron eighty such homes were destroyed.  Ten Arab villages were razed and all homes destroyed—some, apparently as reprisals, some, according to the Israelis, for security reasons.  One village, from which apparently Fateh could not be driven, was sprayed with liquid fuel and destroyed.  This, according to the Red Cross and international observers, might be exempted from the general condemnation for military reasons under Article fifty-three.

When East Jerusalem was taken, the Israeli authorities destroyed about one hundred Arab homes near the Wailing Wall to provide easy access for Jewish worshippers and a parking lot for tourists.  In the Golan Heights and in some other areas unoccupied Arab homes have been crumbling down and indications are the crumbling has had considerable assistance from Israeli troops.  This, too, may not contravene the Geneva Convention.

There are numerous types of punishment, which have been imposed by the Israelis on the civilian population, which are considered to be both collective punishments and reprisals.  The Commissioner-General of UNRWA, in reference to Gaza, wrote: “The succession of incidents and security measures such as curfews, interrogations, detentions and, on some occasions, the demolition of houses which followed” were used to suppress, intimidate, and punish.

On November 2nd, 1968, many of the Arab shopkeepers in Occupied Jerusalem did not open their shops.  The Israeli authorities regarded this as a strike and promptly confiscated fifteen shops owned by prominent Arabs.  The New York Times described the matter: “Israeli officials confiscated fifteen Arab-owned shops in East Jerusalem today for what they described as security reasons.

“The seizures were said by the Israelis to have been necessary for billeting Israeli policemen who needed the strategic locations to maintain public order.  The action was announced a few hours after the start of a strike by East Jerusalem shopkeepers and is regarded by many as an Israeli response.”

Mr. W.T. Mallison, Jr., Professor of Law at George Washington University and an expert in international law commented on this: “The action taken was clearly a reprisal directed at civilians and their property and therefore a violation of Article thirty-three.”

One of the most blatant abuses has been the transfer and deportation of civilian population.  Article forty-nine forbids this: “Individual or mass forcible transfers as well as deportations of protected persons from occupied territory to the territory of the occupying power or to that of any other country occupied or not are prohibited, regardless of their motive.  The occupying power shall not deport or transfer a part of its own civilian population into the territory it occupies.”

These prohibitions were most definitely designed to make illegal the well-known Nazi practices of removing the “inferior” civilian population of an occupied territory to make room for the “superior” German population.

Mallison points out, “it should be noticed that the quoted provisions of Article forty-nine are flat prohibitions which are subject to no exception of any kind.”  He goes on to say, “the individuals who are deported by the government of Israel in violation of the Convention are frequently leaders and notables.  For example, a large number of the leading citizens of Jerusalem, Jordan, including its mayor, have been deported.  The apparent purpose is to eliminate Arab leadership in the occupied territories and to make it more difficult for the remaining civilian population to protest against the oppressive and illegal measures to which they are subjected.  Among the individual deportees are substantial numbers of school teachers.  In Gaza, for example, the Commissioner-General of UNRWA has reported that forty-eight teachers have been deported.”

After getting rid of the civilian population, Israel has brought in its own settlers to the areas from which the Arabs have been expelled.  In order to provide a technicality for justifying such movements, Israel has called the new settlements military settlements.  They have established about fifteen settlements in the Golan Heights, and even one on the bank of the Dead Sea at Qumran.

Israel has established kibbutzim in Egypt’s Sinai, where their technicians are drilling for and pumping oil, and where an important tourist business is being developed.  But the most flagrant breach of all is in East Jerusalem itself.  By annexing instead of occupying East Jerusalem, Israel sought to provide a technicality for justifying its movement there and its treatment of Arab citizens.  To the International Red Cross and, for that matter, to the whole world, this was completely unacceptable.

Article four states that: “Those who at a given moment and in any manner whatsoever find themselves in case of a conflict or occupying power of which they are not nationals are among the protected persons.”

In April 1970, the Israelis cordoned off a seven hundred and forty acre area at Hebron “for security reasons.”  The Arabs protested—so did some Israelis—predicting that this would be another movement of Zionists into occupied territory.  The Israeli military claimed it was for military purposes.

On May 21st 1970, the Jerusalem Post carried the following news item:

“JEWISH HOMES IN HEBRON TO GO UP IN 3 MONTHS”

“Israeli Deputy Premier Yigal Allon has said the first homes for Jewish families in Hebron on the occupied Jordan West Bank will go up in three months.

“Allon told members of the ruling labor alignment Tuesday that 250 housing units would be ready in Hebron—where the question of Jewish settlement has created considerable tension—before the end of 1911.

“He said the Israeli cabinet also had plans for the building of new homes for the present group of 140 Jewish settlers already established in the town.

“Plans to build an additional large Jewish urban quarter in the town, which has a population of some 40,000 Arabs, were still open, he added.

“Last month, Israeli military authorities cordoned off a 740-acre area near the town’s military government for security reasons amid Arab charges that the area would be used to settle Jewish families.”

Within Israel itself there is considerable embarrassment and protest against such flagrant violation of the Geneva Convention.  Mr. Arie Eliav, secretary-general of Israel’s ruling labour party, Simha Flapan, and Meir Yaari, Mapam’s general secretary, all protest the reprisals, the proposed annexations, and destruction of Arab homes.  And in an article in Le Monde, February 11th, 1970, Yaari outlined an eight point peace plan that began with this:

“Israel should put an immediate and unconditional end to the establishment of kibbutzim and civilian Jewish villages in the occupied territory.”

Arabs add up these things and cannot help but be impressed more with what Deputy Premier Allon says he is going to do and then does, than by what more flexible labour leaders say should be done.

Articles seventy-nine to one hundred and thirty-five provide a detailed code of conduct for the occupying power in its treatment of civilians who are interned.  These articles were drawn up against the background of the infamous Nazi concentration camps, but often in Israel the treatment accorded internees seems more like what happened in some of the concentration camps than like what the Geneva diplomats hoped.

The Israeli government denies many of the charges made by both impartial observers and by the Arabs.  However, the Tel Aviv government has refused to permit an impartial enquiry.

On March 3rd, 1969, the UN Human Rights Commission in Geneva adopted a resolution denouncing the Israeli rule in the Occupied Territories and established a special working group to investigate the alleged Israeli violations of the Civilians Convention.  The government of Israel immediately announced that it would not co-operate with the UN group and their action was sufficient to frustrate any attempt at such an investigation.  The numerous reports have been studied, of course, and the documentation is piling up.

It seems to me that if any other nation in the civilized world treated its occupants in this way, the whole world would be informed.  Mr. Mallison says: “To the extent that the government of Israel fails to co-operate with authorized UN fact-finding agencies, its refusal justifies the invocation of further sanctions.”  He say it is essential that the world public opinion be completely informed of the facts of the situation and the need for particular sanctions.

There is one big reason why Israel can get by with its lawlessness, and it goes back to the very founding of the country.  It holds the levers of power in the United States, controlling its politicians and the national opinion-molding apparatus (NOMA), primarily its press.  The situation has been brought into vivid relief in recent weeks with the United States, virtually alone, continuing to enable the ongoing slaughter in Gaza.

Recently, at the International Court of Justice (ICJ) at The Hague, Netherlands, on behalf of the Arab League, Dr. Ralph Wilde of the University of London, addressed the question of the legality of Israel’s continued occupation of the territories that it grabbed through military force in 1967.  “The Palestinian people have been denied their legal right to self-determination,” he began, “through the more than century-long violent, colonial, racist effort to establish a nation state exclusively for the Jewish people in the land of mandated Palestine.”

In his presentation, Dr. Wilde explains how the Zionists from the time the British were given the mandate over Palestine in the wake of World War I have used one illegality after another to gain oppressive domination over the region’s ancestral residents.

In 2022, addressing specifically the question of the legality of Israel’s continued occupation of Gaza and the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, Dr. Wilde in a formal legal opinion wrote, “Any purported annexations are…without legal effect, because in international law Israel is not and cannot be sovereign over any part of the West Bank or Gaza, including East Jerusalem, through the assertion of a claim to this effect based on the exercise of effective control enabled through the use of force, and in the absence of consent to such annexation freely given by the Palestinian people.”

This originally appeared on Heresy Central.

The post Illegal Israel appeared first on LewRockwell.

“Wir schaffen das”—we’ll manage—will go down in history as true a prediction as the one by the Führer of a 1,000-year Reich. For any of you unaware of “Mutti’s” prediction, Angela Merkel said it back in 2015 when she took in one million Middle Eastern refugees. Adding insult to injury, Germany then went ahead and took in another cool million Africans in 2022. As a result of all this, I now read that Germany is about to rethink its borders, or at least try to stem the flood of refugees rushing to cash in, but that’s a bit like that old cliché of locking the barn after the horse has bolted.

Never mind. Immigration is the European topic most likely to inspire a circular firing squad of E.U. big shots. They’re the ones who insisted on open borders some thirty years ago, and instead of hanging their heads in shame, they’re now putting out cautious bulletins about ever-closer union being put on a waiting list for a while. These Brussels clowns should be forced to clean latrines of immigrant hostels for at least ten years. Hammered by illegal immigration and facing social meltdown, the Brussels dream is revealed as the nightmare it always was and is. In an age of global migration, doing away with national borders is the equivalent of leaving a bottle of whiskey in the bedroom of a recovering alcoholic.

“Doing away with national borders is the equivalent of leaving a bottle of whiskey in the bedroom of a recovering alcoholic.”

Take it from Taki, open borders will be the end of Europe as we know it. There is no way that the old continent of 745 million souls can survive if 400 million Africans land on our shores. Surely you must think I’m joking, but actually, I’m not. Mind you, it is happening as I write this and will probably take a century, but if things remain as they are, I cannot see white Europeans being in the majority fifty years down the line. Corrupt African leaders, draught, and climate change will drive African hordes north, no ifs or buts about it. I just read an item about the Nigerian president purchasing a multimillion-dollar jet that swells his fleet of private jets to twelve. President Bola Tinubu’s latest toy is a customized Airbus A330, on which he flew to France recently. The new plane has been described as spacious and furnished with state-of-the-art avionics, a customized interior, and a communications system. Now you tell me, dear readers, how out of touch can a man be to ask citizens to endure hardship and austerity while spending $100 million for an airplane to supplant eleven other flying machines?

This is Africa, and the very few have a hell of a lot while the very many have nothing. That the many want to come over to Europe and America is natural, where they think the streets are paved with gold. Well, ending up in settlements on the outskirts of Paris and in the Bronx might be disappointing, but at least they’re safer than back home. The problem is there’s no room—we’re already packed like sardines, at least here in Europe. Human trafficking gangs continue to thrive, bringing over desperate people. Italy has for years been paying Libya and Tunis to clamp down on migrants with some success. But Libya is a failed state and Tunisia is slipping back to autocracy and is therefore unreliable as to how long they will keep migrants on their side of the Mediterranean. In the meantime, people smugglers are busy cramming more people into dinghies and bringing them over.

Read the Whole Article

The post Minority Report appeared first on LewRockwell.

A prominent libertarian is calling Trump’s tax proposals to eliminate taxes on tips and Social Security benefits “goofy.” What’s so goofy about eliminating these taxes and letting Americans keep more of their money?

Said Trump about tip taxation: “For those hotel workers and people that get tips, you’re going to be very happy, because when I get to office, we are going to not charge taxes on tips. You do a great job of service. You take care of people, and I think it’s going to be something that really is deserved.”

According to the Internal Revenue Service (IRS): “All cash and non-cash tips an received by an employee are income and are subject to Federal income taxes. All cash tips received by an employee in any calendar month are subject to social security and Medicare taxes and must be reported to the employer.” Tips include:

• Cash tips received directly from customers.
• Tips from customers who leave a tip through electronic settlement or payment. This includes a credit card, debit card, gift card or any other electronic payment method.
• The value of any noncash tips, such as tickets or other items of value.
• Tip amounts received from other employees paid out through tip pools, tip splitting, or other formal/informal tip sharing arrangement.

Said Trump about Social Security taxation: “Seniors should not pay taxes on Social Security and they won’t.”

According to the Social Security Administration (SSA):

Fifty percent of a taxpayer’s benefits may be taxable if they are:

• Filing single, head of household or qualifying widow or widower with $25,000 to $34,000 income.
• Married filing separately and lived apart from their spouse for all of 2020 with $25,000 to $34,000 income.
• Married filing jointly with $32,000 to $44,000 income.

Up to 85% of a taxpayer’s benefits may be taxable if they are:

• Filing single, head of household or qualifying widow or widower with more than $34,000 income.
• Married filing jointly with more than $44,000 income.
• Married filing separately and lived apart from their spouse for all of 2021 with more than $34,000 income.
• Married filing separately and lived with their spouse at any time during 2021.

(Income here is “provisional income” — adjusted gross income + nontaxable interest income + half of Social Security benefits.) Congress has never adjusted the income thresholds that subject Social Security benefits to taxation. They have never even been indexed for inflation.

Would eliminating taxes on tips and Social Security give the federal government less money to spend and increase the deficit? It certainly would. But consider this: according to the IRS Data Book:

• During Fiscal Year (FY) 2023, the IRS collected nearly $4.7 trillion in gross taxes, processed almost 271.5 million tax returns and other forms, and issued about $659.1 billion in tax refunds.
• In FY 2023, the IRS closed 582,944 tax return audits, resulting in $31.9 billion in recommended additional tax.

The federal government takes an obscene amount of money from American taxpayers. And it spends even more money than it takes in. In fiscal year 2023, the federal government spent $6.13 trillion, resulting in a deficit of over $1 trillion. And of course, more taxes will be collected and more money will be spent this year.

Any elimination of taxes or reduction in taxes collected should be welcomed, no matter how “goofy” it is.

As usual, Ron Paul gets it right:

It is common to describe tax cuts as “costing” the government. Saying tax cuts cost the government assumes that the government has a moral claim over an individual’s earnings, so anytime those running the government allow individuals to keep more of their money the rulers are being generous. The truth is that income belongs to the people who earn it and that saying tax cuts cost the government is like saying burglar alarms cost thieves. Therefore, any legislation that cuts taxes is a victory for liberty.

What’s so goofy about eliminating certain taxes and letting Americans keep more of their money in their wallets, purses, and bank accounts instead of handing it over to the profligate Congress to spend on unconstitutional government programs, government boondoggles, and U.S. military adventures around the world? I don’t see anything goofy about it at all.

The post What’s So Goofy About Eliminating Taxes? appeared first on LewRockwell.

United Sates President Joe Biden has spent most of his presidency refusing to talk with Russia President Vladimir Putin. This is despite — or maybe because of — the fact that such discourse could have led to an agreement ending the US government’s proxy war against Russia.

Instead of talking out a resolution to the fighting, Biden has kept pumping dollars, weapons, and intelligence to the Ukraine government, resulting in a rising death toll and expanding war. Also advanced has been the risk of drawing the US and Russia directly into a war against each other that could go nuclear.

Still, Biden will not pick up the phone or fly on a plane to talk things over with the president of Russia. “I have no good reason to talk to Putin right now,” said Biden on July 11, 2024 in response to a reporter’s question at one of Biden’s rare press conferences. We know Biden loves his vacation time, but, really, isn’t ending the Ukraine War and preventing its further escalation a good enough reason to start chatting with Putin? How about putting in a little effort to give peace a chance?

Long, long ago, during the presidency of George W. Bush, a US president not only regularly talked with Putin, including in in-person meetings, he even had an affectionate nickname for the Russia president. For Bush, Putin was Pootie-Poot. How things have changed.

Not every American president before Biden had a cute nickname for counterparts among the long line of Russia leaders, and Soviet leaders during the decades when Russia was subsumed in the Soviet Union. Yet, they all were willing to talk. This includes Ronald Reagan who called the Soviet Union an “evil empire” and pushed for increased US military spending to counter what he presented as a Soviet threat. Reagan met with and kept in regular contact with Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev, succeeding in putting in place arms control deals between the nations. Other US presidents, while directly and by proxy militarily countering the “red spread” and “Soviet expansion,” kept in communication with Soviet leaders. They wanted to be dedicated cold warriors while minimizing the risk of outright war between the US and Soviet Union.

Biden should give Putin a call. And when Biden makes that call, why not give Putin a nice nickname too? Doing this may run counter to Biden’s nature, but it could be the first step down the path to peace.

Unfortunately, there is little indication that seeking peace is even a small component of the Biden administration’s agenda.

Reprinted with permission from The Ron Paul Institute.

The post When Vladimir Putin Was Pootie-Poot appeared first on LewRockwell.

Last week Peter appeared on Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu to discuss inflation, Federal Reserve policy, wealth taxes, and a whole host of other economic subjects. This is the latest in a string of recent interviews Peter has appeared in. If you missed them, check out his appearance on Bankless and a David Lin debate with Jack Mallers.

Peter argues that it is absolutely critical that Americans see inflation as a deliberate, albeit subtle, tax:

“The best way to look at inflation is a tax. Inflation is what we pay for the government that we don’t pay for with the income tax or the Social Security tax or a sales tax. Basically, the deficits, the Federal budget deficits– we end up funding them by inflation. And those deficits are about to skyrocket. They’ve been skyrocketing. And so the inflation tax is going to be much bigger in 2025 than it was this year regardless of what the Fed is trying to tell us.”

Technical economic jargon like “quantitative easing (QE)” is used to obscure intentional inflationary policy:

“QE is just another word for inflation, just that it’s a euphemism. But that’s really what it is. But the Fed has to pretend that it’s finished the job on inflation. It can’t, you know, be honest and say, ‘Look, we still have high inflation and it’s going to go up. But, we don’t care.’ So they have to pretend that the 3% inflation that we have now is going to go down to 2%.”

From the jargon to the statistics, the entire monetary system is biased to facilitate and hide (both intentionally and unintentionally) inflation:

“If you are trying to track inflation yourself, if you’re trying to understand how prices are going up, there is a lot of manipulation that’s happening behind the scenes to control the public’s perception of the CPI number. … The government is doing sleight of hand. They’re manipulating the numbers, they’re doing sleight of hand so that they can basically– I’ll be aggressive here and use the word–  steal money from the people, not have to get people to vote so that they can keep doing just absolutely outrageous amounts of spending because they can get your dollars from you without having to ask for them.”

Even if there was honest political will to stop inflation, it would be political suicide:

“We are stuck with inflation because the alternative is a political non-starter, because if the Fed actually got rid of inflation, you would have a financial crisis that would make 2008 look like a Sunday school picnic.”

This policy can’t last forever, since it’s propped up by other countries’ willingness to participate and hold dollars:

“The problem is now, yes, they’re earning interest, but the Fed is also losing a fortune on its bond portfolio right now. So, the Fed is not making money anymore to pay the U.S. Treasury like they used to, but they do get the interest back. … But the real problem though, is going to be the dollar’s status as the reserve currency, because as the rest of the world wakes up to the reality of endless inflation and endless money printing … there is no justification for the dollar to be the reserve currency, and it won’t be.”

Understanding the inflation machine is key to understanding current sentiment around the economy. Most people sense the system is rigged, but they can’t necessarily articulate why:

“The public already knows that things are wrong. That’s why they just know something feels wrong, but they don’t know what it is. The politicians and a lot of the people in the financial media who still don’t get it, you know, they look at these phony statistics and accept them on face value. And then they look at the public and the public is so pessimistic. You know, Biden’s approval rating is so low. People are pessimistic. And they don’t understand why.”

This is a big week for monetary policy, as the Fed prepares to announce a likely rate cut. Stay tuned for Peter’s analysis later in the week.

This originally appeared on SchiffGold.com.

The post Inflation Is an Intentional Tax appeared first on LewRockwell.

I’ve been an observer of national politics since I was eleven years old. I cried when they killed Robert F. Kennedy. I was a die hard Democrat. I thought they were the good guys. Then I became an independent, and have grown more radical as I age. I know the process is rigged, and yet I continue to follow it, like a heroin addict.

Donald Trump was recently the victim of yet another assassination attempt. Apparently. The same people who believe the first attempt, in Butler Pennsylvania two months ago, was staged, naturally believe this one was fake, too. And they both might very well have been. After all, everything they do is seemingly scripted. No improvisation allowed. But the response is what really grabs my attention. As I’ve noted, those on the Left who are skeptical of the Trump assassination attempts aren’t skeptical about anything else. They believe in Russian collusion. They think “Climate Change” is a tremendous threat to us all. They accept the transgender lunacy. And despite the vast majority being White themselves, they are fully on board with the anti-White agenda. So they’re certainly predisposed to accept things at face value.

The alleged would-be assassin is supposedly one Ryan Wesley Routh. Another three namer- who could have predicted that? As you can see from the photo above, when Routh was apprehended, his shirt was oddly pulled up, revealing his A-cup man boobs, and his pants were pulled down lewdly, in big hair, rock star fashion. Did he do this himself? I don’t know, maybe that’s the latest fashion trend for potential patsies? It certainly is an attention grabber. Or did law enforcement pull his shirt up, and his pants down? That takes us into more bizarre territory. Perhaps their resistance got weak, and they absolutely had to see if this fifty eight year old had six pack abs. It’s a suppressed homosexuality thing, you wouldn’t understand. However you look at it, I don’t believe we’ve seen another arrest photo like it.

But Ryan Wesley Routh is far more than man boobs and almost exposed crotch. We are told that the FBI and Interpol were “warned” about him. We are told this, after the fact, about most of the accused perpetrators of high profile crimes. We understand how corrupt and incompetent the FBI has always been, so it makes sense that they would ignore “warnings” about any potentially dangerous individual. I suppose Interpol is no better. Maybe they can hire more people, with better lone nut detectors. The brave Secret Service detail was evidently denied the opportunity to stand down at Trump’s own golf course in Palm Beach, Florida. I feel confident they would have been exemplary once again, in not doing their job, if the patsy wearing the makeshift tank top had been able to get close enough to fire at Trump.

Routh is also an author. Just like me, and many others who have never fired shots at any politician. Or pulled our shirts up and pants down so provocatively in public. Routh’s self-published book Ukraine’s Unwinnable War: The Fatal Flaw of Democracy, World Abandonment and the Global Citizen-Taiwan, Afghanistan, North Korea and the end of Humanity, is an impassioned plea for World War III. Wow- nobody ever tell me that the subtitles for my books are too wordy. He is documented as a fervent leftist, having formerly supported Bernie Sanders, and having contributed financially many times to ActBlue. He tried to recruit foreign soldiers to help Ukraine defeat Russia. You’d think that, with all this information, it would be obvious that Routh was motivated by the same kind of irrational hatred for Donald Trump that has infected millions of formerly rational Americans with TDS.

But instead of acknowledging this, and perhaps issuing one of their standard lectures to the insane “Woke” Left, the mainstream media, and high profile Democrats themselves, are telling Trump to “tone down” his rhetoric. If you just stop saying “hateful” things, no one will try to assassinate you! What is most remarkable about Routh is the fact that he was inexplicably interviewed by Newsweek in 2022. His only claim to fame was his self-published book, touting the official state controlled media line on Ukraine. People who write self-published books don’t usually get to be interviewed by huge media outlets like that. I have legitimate publishers, and I couldn’t get Newsweek to notice me, even if I walked into their headquarters with a “9/11 Wasn’t an Inside Job” tee shirt pulled up past my nipples. So the FBI not only knew about Routh, but Newsweek thought he was worth an interview, two years ago?

Now I am fully aware that many are dubious about this attempt, just as they are about the incident in Pennsylvania. I am, too. Why would we believe anything that is reported, by a media that is simply regurgitating talking points from “authorities” that lie to us about everything? How did Routh know Trump was going to be at the golf course, the skeptics are asking. Good question. Initially, the New York Post went with a story that claimed two men had fired shots at each other, and it was all totally unrelated to Trump. Well, that sounds plausible. I used to golf regularly, very badly, back in the misty days of America 1.0. I guess I was lucky not to have encountered two men shooting at each other on any of the courses I played. Where else would you hold a gun battle, other than a golf course? Regardless, as in the Steve Scalise shooting, the victim’s motives are never political if he’s a leftist, only if he’s a right-wing extremist.

However real either or both Trump assassination attempts were, the response to them is even more telling. Trump has to be the only politician that survived at attempt on his life, and actually went down in the fake public opinion polls afterwards. You’d imagine that the second attempt would ensure his victory. But I think we can predict that he’ll plunge even further after the failed efforts of Ryan Wesley Routh. I’m sure the Republicuck leaders will leave no stone unturned in finding out the truth here. Sure, they haven’t managed to call a single one of the Secret Service agents who stood down completely in Butler, but these things take time. They’re still searching for photos of Thomas Matthew Crooks taken after he graduated from the eighth grade. That makes sense; few of us have our pictures taken after middle school. It’s all downhill from there.

And their task won’t be made easier by the fact that the Secret Service is unwilling to cooperate in any investigation. Well, to be fair, any real investigation would make the Secret Service look really bad. The Biden administration, Homeland Security, all of them, are urging the Secret Service not to comply with Congress. What is Congress going to do if they don’t? Remember Hunter Biden’s taunting press conference? Maybe if Peter Navarro was one of the Secret Service agents in question. And, in keeping with their appearance of upright honesty, the Secret Service is also rejecting Freedom of Information Act requests about the Butler incident. Nothing evokes innocence better than that. So we’ll never find anything out. If it was real, who was actually behind it? Or if it was staged, as millions believe, why it was staged, and by who? Was Trump in on it? Why stage a shooting, and then stop reporting on it?

Melania Trump, one of the least visible of modern political wives, recently put out a heartfelt video where she talked about the first assassination attempt, and supported the “conspiracy theorists” who feel there is more to it than a loner walking around for thirty minutes carrying a rifle, and then scaling the wall of a building, while witnesses tried in vain to get the attention of law enforcement. If only Crooks would have committed an illegal U-Turn; those cops would have apprehended him before he could U-Turn again. At any rate, Don Lemon, the gay White hater who is married to a White man, played Melania’s emotional video and ridiculed it. Made fun of it like a sixth grade bully. A gay, racist bully. Lemon can freely mock Mrs. Trumpenstein, and millions of Americans believe the Giant Orange Man is orchestrating the whole thing. I think it is all orchestrated, but Trump isn’t doing the orchestrating.

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As an illegal immigrant, if you enter the US under one of the countries deemed to be hostile, you may apply for Temporary Protected Status (TPS).  This status allows an illegal immigrant from specific countries to file for TPS as a safety precaution given their own country is in turmoil.  It is a temporary status. It does not confer on them a green card, or a legal status, in essence they are in limbo.   The status must be updated regularly as circumstances in their country change.   

This is what the Haitians coming across the border illegally are directed to do by immigration.  They are NOT legal.  They are ‘temporary’ illegals living under a protected status.

During this temporary stay, the US Government provides:  Supplemental Security Income, Supplemental Nutritional Assistance, the women, infants and children program, free school lunches, subsidized housing, and Medicaid.

The government estimates of the number of persons in the US not legal but protected ranges between 850,000 to 1.2 million.   The fact that the Agency has no idea how many – SHOULD be a bit worrisome.  There is currently an additional 450,000+ applicants awaiting the approval of their TPS applications.

When the ‘government’ doles these freebies and charity out – they don’t ask permission from The People – they make a unilateral decision and voila your money is Gone Baby Gone.

This is the argument being levied by democrats regarding Springfield Ohio.  The Haitians are there legally via the TPS, but they are NOT legal residents – they can’t buy homes, cars, or anything else that would benefit the economy.  When immigration finds them employment they are paid minimum wage, not union wages, and the government subsidizes the EMPLOYER to hire them.  More associated taxpayer costs.   More US unemployment.

This status was added to the Immigration Act in 1990 within the Department of Homeland Security under Big Daddy Bush.   In 2021, the courts reiterated that if the person came into the country illegally but was given TPS status, they could not apply for permanent residency.

Currently there are numerous lawsuits in US Courts regarding HHS determination that some country’s should be removed from the designation particularly in California.   Given the requirement for continued renewal, California is arguing the renewal should be automatic.

When arguing the illegal immigration status, the typical democrat response is to assert the tax revenue that is generated.    According to Reuters, the cost of illegal immigration is $151 billion annually.  According to a study from IDEP, illegals contribute $11.7 billion in tax revenue.  Roughly 50% of them pay no taxes.  Of course, these numbers are statistical estimates/guesses because the government doesn’t actually account for people or money in real time.

Stats: 

• Of the foreign born legal Haitians in the US 69% have become naturalized citizens. 36% of Haitian immigrants and their children live in poverty.
• 7% are on some source of welfare.
• 48% lived in owner occupied homes.
• The Trump administration attempted to end many existing designations while the Biden regime expanded protections to include – Venezuelans among others.
• The crime rate in Springfield, Ohio is 34.51 per 1000; the crime rate in Ohio is 2.78 per 1000.

Immigration confused with illegal immigration has splintered America.   Crime, gangs, safety, particularly in urban environments is spectacularly high.  No amount of falsified FBI crime reports can hold up to the eyes, ears, and attacks levied on American citizens daily.   No manner of falsified statistics can allay the vast number of businesses physically destroyed.  Lying has become a national crisis with pathological overtones.  

A disease perpetrated by OUR GOVERNMENT. 

Reprinted with permission from HelenaGlass.net.

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Dear Brothers and Sisters in Christ,

“We adore Thee, O Christ, and we praise Thee, because by Thy Holy Cross, Thou hast redeemed the world.” This familiar prayer offered as part of the Stations of the Cross is familiar to Catholics, and well it should be. It succinctly expresses our faith, and the unique reality of Jesus Christ – God’s Divine Son – as the one Savior of all humanity.

We are obliged to adore and praise Jesus Christ because He is God’s Son, and because He has brought salvation to our fallen state. We must cling tenaciously to the truth that only Jesus Christ is Savior, and that He lived, suffered, died, and rose for all humanity for all time. His loving sacrifice of His Own life in order to redeem us is the greatest gift that humanity has ever received.

This simple prayer expresses the core of our faith that we are obliged to proclaim to the world if we wish to live as His disciples. The Church exists to proclaim this Truth in order to point the human family, from every nation and race, to the means of our salvation. There is no other name by which we can be saved, and no other movement, religion, or human endeavor will save us. Christ alone is our Savior. We truly can gain the whole world and still find ourselves lost if we do not embrace Jesus Christ and His Cross.

As you read this, I can imagine that your reaction might be that I am merely stating the obvious by expressing the basic kerygma of our glorious faith in Jesus Christ, our loving Lord and Redeemer, and you are correct. But we must open our eyes to the reality that too many within the Church, the Mystical Body of Christ, are rejecting this most basic expression of our faith and, in fact, rejecting Jesus Christ Himself. We must also acknowledge that leaders in the Church of the highest rank are leading the world, not towards but away from Jesus Christ.

Pope Francis, recently speaking to a group of young people in Singapore, made this statement:

“One of the things that struck me about all of you here is your ability to engage in interreligious dialogue, and this is very important. If you, in the beginnings of your conversations and debates, start to say things like, ‘My religion is more important than yours,’ ‘No, mine is more important than yours,’ that sort of thing, where will this lead us? Because if we start to fight amongst ourselves and say, ‘My religion is more important than yours,’ ‘My religion is true, yours is not,’ where will that lead us? Someone respond. Where would it lead us? It’s okay to discuss. Every religion is a way to arrive at God. To make an example or a comparison, they are like different languages in order to arrive at God. But God is God for all – and if God is God for all, then we are all sons and daughters of God. ‘But my God is more important than your God.’ Is that true? There is only one God, and each of us is a language, so to speak, in order to arrive at God. Sikh, Muslim, Hindu, Christian – they are different paths.”

This statement is theological heresy – it is called indifferentism. Indifferentism makes the claim that all religions are of equal value and all lead to the same divine truth. This directly contradicts the Church’s doctrine that there is one true faith and that the Catholic Church is the only path to salvation.

Although tolerance and religious freedom are important, we in the Church must defend our faith with conviction and share the truth with certainty. As Jesus said, “I am the Way, and the Truth, and the Life. No man cometh to the Father, but by Me.” (John 14:6)

In 1928, Pope Pius XI discussed indifferentism in his papal encyclical Mortalium Animos. He stated:

“For since they hold it for certain that men destitute of all religious sense are very rarely to be found, they seem to have founded on that belief a hope that the nations, although they differ among themselves in certain religious matters, will without much difficulty come to agree as brethren in professing certain doctrines, which form as it were a common basis of the spiritual life. For which reason conventions, meetings and addresses are frequently arranged by these persons, at which a large number of listeners are present, and at which all without distinction are invited to join in the discussion, both infidels of every kind, and Christians, even those who have unhappily fallen away from Christ or who with obstinacy and pertinacity deny His divine nature and mission. Certainly, such attempts can nowise be approved by Catholics, founded as they are on that false opinion which considers all religions to be more or less good and praiseworthy, since they all in different ways manifest and signify that sense, which is inborn in us all, and by which we are led to God and to the obedient acknowledgement of His rule. Not only are those who hold this opinion in error and deceived, but also in distorting the idea of true religion they reject it, and little by little, turn aside to naturalism and atheism, as it is called; from which it clearly follows that one who support those who hold these theories and attempt to realize them, is altogether abandoning the divinely revealed religion.”

Pope Gregory XVI in his papal encyclical Mirari Vos (1832) condemned the idea that one could attain salvation in any religion. Pope Pius IX in the Syllabus of Errors (1864) condemned the proposition that “every man is free to embrace and profess that religion which, guided by the light of reason, he shall consider true.”

I have often, at various times, expressed my deep concern regarding the occurrence of heresy and the atmosphere of apostasy as it emanates from the Vatican in Rome, but I must now ask this question: “Where is the outcry of the shepherds? Where is the courage and conviction to defend our faith?”

When Pope Pius X was worried that Modernism would wed the Church to the world with its emphasis on humanism, he mandated that every bishop must hunt down this heresy and crush it, and he required an oath as a prerequisite of receiving Holy Orders, which was in effect until 1978. Once, when Pope Pius X was asked whether he should perhaps adopt a more conciliatory tone and perhaps seek more dialogue, he stated: “You want them to be treated with oil, soap, and caresses. But they should be beaten with fists. In a duel, you don’t count or measure the blows, you strike as you can.” Pope Pius X saw the extreme danger in allowing heresy to stand unchallenged and uncorrected, as unchecked heresy will surely lead a great many souls away from Christ, and away from the fullness of the true and authentic faith, which is found and safeguarded in its entirety in the Catholic Church alone. And so, I ask again: “Where is the outcry of the shepherds?”

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The death toll has risen to 12 from Israel’s terror attack in Lebanon on Tuesday which detonated explosive materials hidden in thousands of pagers. Another 20 people were then killed in another attack on Wednesday with a second wave of explosions, this time using walkie talkies and home solar energy systems.

The total death toll now sits at 32. Two children and four healthcare workers are among the dead. Thousands have been injured.

As you would expect, western empire managers are getting really squirmy about this. White House spokesman John Kirby adamantly refused to answer any questions involving Israel’s responsibility for the attacks during a press conference on Wednesday, despite Israel being widely reported as the responsible party, with outlets like The New York Times citing US officials as their source.

“I’m not gonna speak to the details of these incidents,” Kirby said repeatedly when questioned about Israel’s role and what the US response will be.

Hypocrisy and contradiction are not great moral evils in and of themselves, but they often run cover for great moral evils. The fact that we are trained to think about the world by people who facilitate great evils perpetrated by their own side when they’d condemn identical evils committed by their enemies shows that they do not stand against evil, and are deeply evil themselves.

Recognizing the problems in our world is the first step to solving them. That’s what the propagandists and empire managers work to prevent us from doing, and that’s what we try to do by pointing out the glaring plot holes and inconsistencies in their narratives over and over again.

The correct thing to do when western leaders talk about human rights or denounce abuses by enemy governments is to mock them and dismiss them. They’re not saying anything true about their actual values and beliefs; if they were there wouldn’t be so much hypocrisy in the way they denounce governments they don’t like for offenses they ignore and make excuses for in governments they do like. They’re never saying what they’re saying to stop human rights abuses or make the world a better place, they’re only saying what they’re saying to undermine their enemies so that the western empire can rule the world and be the only one administering abuse.

Western media are primarily responsible for the ability of Western politicians to commit war crimes and acts of terrorism unchecked pic.twitter.com/wA7E8dwJxy

— Tiberius (@ecomarxi) September 18, 2024

And the same is true of the mainstream western press. You’ll see them completely ignore the abuses of US-aligned governments while showing immense interest in alleged abuses by empire-targeted groups, often on very flimsy evidence. Mock them and dismiss them when they act like they care about human rights abuses. They don’t care. They just want to make sure the abusive power structure they conduct propaganda for is the one in charge.

__________________

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