Lew Rockwell Institute

As I have observed in previous columns, our era in the United States is frequently beset with incidents characterized by a catastrophic loss of competence. Decades of procedural knowledge seem to vanish from one day to the next, leaving sensible people wondering how it could possibly happen.

The attempted assassination of Donald Trump this evening at the the Butler Farm Show Grounds is a perfect example of this bizarre phenomenon. The shooter climbed onto the roof—purportedly with an AR-15 style semi-automatic rifle —120 meters from Trump on the stage. From this vantage point, he had a clear line of sight for a shot that would have been easy for even a middling marksman. The following aerial photograph shows the shooter’s position relative to Trumps.

As anyone who understands the rudiments of security knows, the FIRST thing you do is secure all rooftops within sniper range. Note in the following video that a counter sniper (with the word POLICE embroidered on the back of his vest) on the roof behind Trump is scoping the would-be assassin’s position.

He appears to see the would-be assassin and start to engage (while flinching) right before the would-be assassin’s shots can be heard. Clearly the counter snipers knew that the rooftop presented a high risk position or they wouldn’t have been scoping it.

Why wasn’t this building—AGR International Inc., a manufacturing plant just north of the Butler Farm show ground—secured before Trump began speaking? It seems to me that this building would be the first thing a security detail would secure. The green pin on the roof to the east of Trump’s position marks where the counter snipers are posted. Again, why didn’t they just secure the building onto which the shooter climbed? This makes no sense.

Here is the venue.. pic.twitter.com/A6kT7tMZQk

— John Cullen (@I_Am_JohnCullen) July 14, 2024

The gunman apparently fired right as Trump looked to the right, towards the gunman. The grazing shot to Trump’s right ear was just a centimeter to the left (from the gunman’s POV) of a fatal head shot. I emphasize that the gunman was positioned at very close range. In the following video, I hit a small condiment package at 75 yards on the second shot with the same kind of rifle with open sights.

Read the Whole Article

The post Secret Service Has Some ‘Splainin To Do appeared first on LewRockwell.

A quotation from Die Transvaler in 1958, cited by Walter E. Williams in his book “South Africa’s War Against Capitalism,” illustrates a widespread misunderstanding about the nature and purpose of the laws of economics. The political choice to be made by Afrikaner nationalists during the apartheid years was whether to pay a price in terms of economic progress by rejecting free markets, freedom of association and contractual freedom as a trade-off necessary to safeguard white civilization as they saw it: “It is fortunate that under a Nationalist government these worshippers of economic laws have never had their way but that a higher and nobler goal has been strived after — the maintenance of white civilization.”

This reference to “worshippers of economic laws” misunderstands the nature and scope of economics as a value-free science. Economic laws, properly understood, cannot be the subject of worship. Economics cannot tell anyone what value to place on nationhood, racial identity or civilization. All economic laws can do is explain the function of factors such as division of labor, specialization and trade, all of which are essential to civilization. But it is no more possible to “worship” these laws than it would be to “worship” the law of gravity or Isaac Newton’s laws of motion. One can, of course, imagine a trade-off between further material progress and the desire to safeguard a people from extinction, which is implicit in the Afrikaner nationalist position described above. But where that balance should be struck, if at all, cannot be decided by reference to the laws of economics. This principle does not just apply to Afrikaners or to white people, but applies equally to any who may value their culture, as the economist Peter Bauer often explained. Anthony Daniels, who knew Peter Bauer, explains:

“That Peter’s thought was not unidimensional, let me mention here that he did not think of economic development as necessarily an unequivocal good, that people the world over ought to aim at single-mindedly. This is because there is rarely gain without loss, and people may, with reason, care more about their losses than for their gains. It is conceivable that attachment to the holy cow in India has at times retarded economic development, but only a monomaniac would be prepared to violate the sentiments of the great mass of the Indian population in increasing the GDP by a point or two: that is, on the doubtful assumption that there would be no political consequences of mass slaughter of the holy cow that would not retard economic life. If one were to learn that the construction of skyscrapers in the Vatican would promote Italian economic growth, who, other than a barbarian, would advocate it?”

The threat posed to peace and stability by nationalist fervor is always a concern in debates about Western civilization. The implications of economics as a value-free science are particularly pertinent in the context of political debates on border defense and immigration control because those who defend open borders and mass immigration often claim to be supporting free markets and economic productivity. Yet the laws of economics do not dictate the price that people must be willing to pay in their pursuit of economic growth. That is a matter of subjective or political opinion and cannot be found in any economic laws. All economic laws can do is tell us “whether the means chosen are fit for the attainment of the ends aimed at,” as Ludwig von Mises puts it in “Human Action.”

In “Liberalism,” Ludwig von Mises mentions nationalist fears — nowadays often referred to as “the great replacement” — as one reason why people might be opposed to free markets. This is because free markets and open trade imply the need for a further raft of economic policies that leave racial minorities under threat of losing their national identity and of having their race replaced by invading races. In such situations, as Mises explains:

“The entire nation, however, is unanimous in fearing inundation by foreigners. The present inhabitants of these favored lands fear that some day they could be reduced to a minority in their own country and that they would then have to suffer all the horrors of national persecution. …

“… It is frightful to live in a state in which at every turn one is exposed to persecution — masquerading under the guise of justice — by a ruling majority. It is dreadful to be handicapped even as a child in school on account of one’s nationality and to be in the wrong before every judicial and administrative authority because one belongs to a national minority.”

The solution proposed by Mises is individual liberty and the limited state. Individual liberty ensures that people can uphold their moral or religious values within their own community, should they wish. Nobody would be entitled to force them to comply with “diversity, equity and inclusiveness.” They could school their children in whichever language and cultural values they wished. They could limit their community only to members of their own heritage, language, religion and culture, as did the Afrikaner founders of Orania — albeit that in the case of Orania, the emphasis is on cultural heritage and not race or skin color. The limited state would not interfere with such liberties. This is precisely the liberty for which many ancestors of the Afrikaners, such as the French Huguenot refugees who arrived at the Cape in 1671, fled Europe in the first place. Only such liberty would be compatible with upholding economic laws, namely as wide a scope as possible for the operation of free markets.

The reason why nationalists are suspicious of liberals, and often deeply hostile to them, is the determination of modern liberals to wield state force in coercing everyone to uphold what they see as liberal values, such as DEI. If the state is enforcing DEI as “our shared values,” then it seems to nationalists that the only solution is to seize control of the state through the democratic process and abolish DEI. This solution is of course not available to racial minorities, who have little to no chance of ever acquiring control of the state in a democracy. They are compelled to suffer the oppression to which Mises refers, and in these circumstances, it is easy to see why the nationalist government in apartheid South Africa would view it as essential for Afrikaners to retain control of the state even if this came at a cost to the economy. For example, the nationalist government regarded paying higher wages for white labor than it would have to pay for black labor as a price worth paying for “the maintenance of white civilization.”

In “Liberalism,” Mises explains that liberals who coerce the populace through democratic control are wrong. They have failed to understand the meaning of liberalism. Despite having commandeered the term “liberal” to their cause, they have failed to grasp the fact that liberalism does not seek to create an ideal society (ideal in the opinion of self-styled liberals) and force everyone to live what liberals have identified as the “good life.” As Mises explains, liberalism “does not promise men happiness and contentment, but only the most abundant possible satisfaction of all those desires that can be satisfied by the things of the outer world.” This is accomplished through a defense of private property, not by dictating people’s moral or cultural values.

The notion of leaving everyone free to associate or not associate with whom they will is considered by progressives to be a weakness of liberalism. Progressives consider it important to nudge everyone toward “doing better.” They look to socialist ideals for insight into eradicating inequality and making life more meaningful for everyone through state enforcement. The banner of “liberalism” is now borne aloft by those who claim to offer succor to the mind and soul by building a utopia in which everyone will feel “welcome and included” and in which everyone can aspire to “deeper and nobler” ideals such as cosmic justice and communing with Mother Earth. Liberals today, like all devout socialists, promise utopia and nirvana, as Mises explained:

“Socialist authors promise not only wealth for all, but also happiness in love for everybody, the full physical and spiritual development of each individual, the unfolding of great artistic and scientific talents in all men, etc. Only recently Trotsky stated in one of his writings that in the socialist society ‘the average human type will rise to the heights of an Aristotle, a Goethe, or a Marx. And above this ridge new peaks will rise.’ The socialist paradise will be the kingdom of perfection, populated by completely happy supermen. All socialist literature is full of such nonsense. But it is just this nonsense that wins it the most supporters.”

Mises cautions that on that basis, progressives offer nothing less than a secular form of mortal salvation:

“Just as the devout Christian could more easily endure the misfortune that befell him on earth because he hoped for a continuation of personal existence in another, better world, where those who on earth had been first would be last and the last would be first; so, for modern man, socialism has become an elixir against earthly adversity.”

Mises insists that these fake liberals are misguided on both the nature of liberalism as well as the function of economics. In his view, “One cannot understand liberalism without a knowledge of economics. For liberalism is applied economics; it is social and political policy based on a scientific foundation.” No surprise, therefore, that those who fail to understand liberalism also fail to understand what they can expect from economic laws. They seek from economic policy what economic science cannot yield. As Mises insists, social and economic policy “can never succeed in making them happy or in satisfying their inmost yearnings. … All that social policy can do is to remove the outer causes of pain and suffering.” Economic policy can only promote the material well-being of society through productivity by showing the path to greater productivity: “As against the isolated action of individuals, cooperative action on the basis of the principle of the division of labor has the advantage of greater productivity.”

Progressives dismiss value-free economic laws as too materialistic. They regard it as a failing of economics, as indeed of liberalism, that it does not concern itself with the goals to which we ought to aspire but simply with the appropriate means to adopt in pursuit of material well-being. They regard any social policy that does not make fine promises to create inner happiness as inadequate. As Mises explains:

“Liberalism has often been reproached for this purely external and materialistic attitude toward what is earthly and transitory. The life of man, it is said, does not consist in eating and drinking. There are higher and more important needs than food and drink, shelter and clothing. Even the greatest earthly riches cannot give man happiness; they leave his inner self, his soul, unsatisfied and empty. The most serious error of liberalism has been that it has had nothing to offer man’s deeper and nobler aspirations.”

Mises’ point is that inner happiness, by its very nature, cannot be created through social or economic policy as modern liberals promise. This is why liberalism confines itself to material well-being and desists from making false promises about spiritual redemption. Mises writes:

“It is not from a disdain of spiritual goods that liberalism concerns itself exclusively with man’s material well-being, but from a conviction that what is highest and deepest in man cannot be touched by any outward regulation. It seeks to produce only outer well-being because it knows that inner, spiritual riches cannot come to man from without, but only from within his own heart.”

Mises also addresses the strategic and terminological debate about using the term “liberalism,” as it is not much use clinging to a term that now means the precise opposite of its true meaning, but abandoning the term altogether risks losing a whole intellectual tradition and heritage. Moreover, endlessly screaming “that’s not true liberalism!” at socialists is rather pointless, as socialists cannot be banned from using whichever labels they want. Moreover, as Mises clearly reveals in his critique of John Stuart Mill, a large part of the corruption of liberalism is inherent in liberalism itself — a point that has also been made by scholars such as Paul Gottfried. The debate on whether liberalism is to blame for socialism is not easy to resolve, but what is clear is that liberalism, in the sense explained by Mises, does not purport to dictate one’s opinions on nationalism or racial identity. Moreover, as Murray Rothbard discusses in “Nations by Consent,” support for free markets does not require support for open borders. People can debate whether to open their borders or not, but should they choose to abandon border defense and suffer their national identity to be erased, they cannot blame free markets or free trade for that.

The post The Limitations of Economic Laws appeared first on LewRockwell.

We know that if the bullet had not hit his ear, the media would have left it as a big question mark yesterday.  It happened in the worst possible way for the killers.  There’s no denying it.  You predicted it.  Don’t be predicting nuclear war, please…

“The Party of Assassination: Democrats and CNN Presstitutes almost get what they have been calling for”

Not quite calling for that, but Biden pretty much justified this in 2022.   Yesterday, they were all blaming the people or the country and not the rhetoric that says he is a “dictator” (falsely), and that he would democracy (false too), but President Biden was the first one, wasn’t he, who claimed in 2022 that a Trump MAGA victory would mean the end of democracy in the 2022 midterms.  HIs 2022 “warning” alarmed me back then because, among other things, it was a whistle-call to stop him at all costs because the function of the State is to ensure the constitutional system’s survival from threats foreign or national, and this type of speech is never heard in democratic elections (basically saying “it’s the last election in this country if I don’t win”).  It was very wrong that no one criticized Biden at all in 2022 for this kind of political speech.  Only when it became a widespread message this year, Republicans finally criticized it.  It’s a message that should have been denounced two years ago and especially by Donald Trump (no pun intended).

“There will be further assassination attempts”

Trump should not campaign anymore.  He needs to be very realistic (smart and responsible) about what happened yesterday, and he has every incentive now to be that.  As a young person that is uncontaminated by a beltway-type mentality (for lack of a better term) told me, this is “terrible” and it’s “ridiculous” that anyone can just climb on a roof and shoot the president.  A long line of television commentators with no common sense were praising the secret service for surrounding the president afterwards, when we know that only because of good luck they did not have to remove the dead body of a president.  The witnesses are devastating to the secret service, especially the one who spoke to the BBC, Greg Smith, who, if he had been in the secret service or police, we know would have ordered for the president to be removed from the stage and the shooter who was climbing the roof would not have been able to find Trump, and he, with others, was pointing to the shooter so that the authorities looking at him would look to the assassin in the roof!  Its (secret service) reputation is not worth even mentioning to anyone anywhere after yesterday’s miraculous survival of the former president.

Like I guess dear ones say to Trump, he should suspend his campaign, not his presidential run.  He does not need to accuse anyone.  He can just say that he must do the safe thing and not risk himself anymore until the election (he could announce it in the Republican Convention).  It’s just miraculous that he is alive.  He was supposed to be dead.  I thought yesterday that the shooter must have gotten nervous, and his arm maybe shaking made him miss (he had reasons to be very nervous).  The public would understand his decision to campaign from his own home (or “bunker”) this time, and it’s also the way for the problem to be tackled better.

It was too nice of Trump to receive a phone call from Biden yesterday, if he did.

The post ‘Initial Coverage by Whore Media Pretends No Assassination Attempt’ appeared first on LewRockwell.

At the NATO summit in Washington on Thursday the US president referred to Ukraine’s President Zelensky as “President Putin”, referred to Kamala Harris as “Vice President Trump”, and said he is “following the advice of my commander-in-chief” on important military decisions.

This man’s brain clearly does not work. It is done. Finito. No mas. Dementia has sunk in the rear naked choke, and Joe Biden’s neurology is tapping.

Americans are watching live proof that their country does not require a president with functioning gray matter in order for decisions to get made and policies to be enacted in the Executive Branch of the US government. The wars and militarism have ticked on uninterrupted, the authoritarian agendas keep getting rolled out, and the same political status quo continues to be advanced. You could not ask for more conclusive proof that for all the fuss that gets made about US presidents and presidential elections, it is nothing more than a figurehead position for an empire that is not actually run by its official elected government.

And it’s only fitting that the US president’s brains should be leaking out his ears even as the brain rot of the ideology which gave rise to him is exposed in front of the entire world.

There is a kind of poetical beauty in the fact that the so-called “moderates” of western liberalism are cheerleading for the re-election of a half-dead dementia patient while his administration facilitates an active genocide in Gaza, perpetuates a world-threatening proxy war in Ukraine, prepares for war with Lebanon, and militarizes with increasing aggression against Russia and China, all while killing the earth’s ecosystem and contributing to the poverty, sickness and oppression of the American people at home. The brain rot of their worldview has a guy with an actual rotting brain as its official representative.

The Biden administration has completely discredited every value that western liberals claim to uphold. Peace. Justice. Human rights. A free press. Opposition to racism. Opposition to tyranny. These freaks just plum forgot that genocide is a bad thing on October 7, and probably won’t remember again until the imperial propaganda machine needs to use that accusation against the next government that the empire has targeted for regime change.

The “moderates” and “centrists” of the western world are in reality violent extremists, and not just violent extremists but the most murderous and destructive extremist group on the face of this planet. Not one group on Washington’s list of designated terrorist organizations has a body count that’s even a tiny fraction of what the US empire has racked up just in the 21st century alone.

This is the political ideology that Biden has aligned with throughout the entirety of his far-too-long career, from when he was just a baby swamp monster elected to the Senate at the age of 30 all the way until now as he watches all the cognitive flotsam and jetsam of his decades of Beltway soul-selling blur together like oil paints on the palette of his ruined cerebral matter.

This is who Joe Biden is. This is who western liberals are. They are the carnage, starvation and disease in Gaza. They are the biosphere strangling to death under the boot of ecocidal capitalism. They are the nuclear missiles being rolled into position around the world. They are a dying brain and a dying heart on a dying world of their own making.

Hopefully the death of this toxic, omnicidal ideology won’t be too far behind the death of Joe Biden.

_______________

My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece here are some options where you can toss some money into my tip jar if you want to. Go here to find video versions of my articles. Go here to buy paperback editions of my writings from month to month. All my work is free to bootleg and use in any way, shape or form; republish it, translate it, use it on merchandise; whatever you want. The best way to make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list on Substack, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. All works co-authored with my husband Tim Foley.

The post The Biden Administration Has Exposed the Brain Rot of Western Liberals appeared first on LewRockwell.

Yemen’s stellar strategic maneuvering in defense of Palestine from its dramatically ascendant role in West Asia’s Axis of Resistance is acquiring the contours of an epic odyssey – eagerly scrutinized by the Global Majority.

As if the unprecedented humiliation of the US Navy in the Bab al-Mandab and the Red Sea was not enough, Ansarallah targeted an Israeli ship with a Hatem-2 hypersonic missile, a remarkable advancement in indigenous technological development.

These prodigious strategic-military advances displayed by Ansarallah at the same time revived the always simmering, unfinished war and blockade launched against Yemen in 2015 by Saudi Arabia and the UAE with the usual US and UK backing.

Riyadh abhors the Yemeni resistance like the plague. Instead of Sanaa, Yemen’s recognized capital city, it supports an anti-Ansarallah’ government’ sitting in Aden, sort of recognized by the ‘rules-based international order.’ In truth, though, that government actually sits in a luxury Riyadh hotel.

Ansarallah has tried hard to negotiate a prisoner exchange involving captured Saudi pilots traded for jailed Hamas members in Saudi Arabia. Riyadh has not only refused but threatened that bank transfers to and from Yemen would be blocked, and Sanaa’s international airport and sea ports would be shut down.

Ansarallah’s response was stark: if Yemeni banking is blocked, the Saudi Arabian banking system would be destroyed. If Sanaa airport is targeted, the same would happen to Saudi airports.

So, the war that never ended is suddenly and ominously back on track. Ansarallah would have no problem targeting Saudi Arabia’s oil production as retaliation to a full blockade – considering its proven capability with brand-new missiles and naval drones. The consequences for global oil markets would be catastrophic.

Two delegations come to Moscow…

Yemen represents the classic case of a fierce resistance actor in the context of the emerging multipolar, multi-nodal world. So that begs the question of where multipolar/multi-nodal champion Russia stands when it comes to Yemen’s fight.

Which brings us to the fascinating case of two Yemeni delegations that recently visited Moscow.

One of them, led by a senior Ansarallah official, met in Moscow with the Russian President’s Special Envoy to the Middle East (West Asia) and Africa, Mikhail Bogdanov.

They discussed not only the ongoing Gaza genocide but also what Ansarallah describes as “the American–British aggression on Yemen,” a reference to ongoing western naval operations in the Red Sea that have – unsuccessfully – sought for months to thwart Yemeni ops against Israel-bound and Israel-associated shipping vessels. A retaliatory siege, if you will.

The Yemenis reassured the Russians that their maritime operations “do not pose a threat to international navigation or target anyone, but rather support the Palestinian people and respond to the American and British airstrikes on Yemen.” Ansarallah praised Russia’s understanding and expressed gratitude for:

Russia’s position against the American–British aggression on Yemen and their support for the humanitarian and political process in our country. We also reviewed the outcomes of the de-escalation efforts between Yemen and the aggressor countries and highlighted the necessity of reaching a comprehensive solution that ensures Yemen’s unity and sovereignty.

All of the above concerns what could be described as the Yemeni political process delegation. In Oman, while waiting to collect their Russian visas, they crossed paths with another Yemeni group: let’s call it the geoeconomics delegation.

This delegation was led by Dr Fouad al-Ghaffari, special advisor to Yemeni Prime Minister Dr Abdulaziz Saleh bin Habtoor’s National Salvation Government in Sanaa.

Habtoor is a leading Yemeni intellectual and the author of the remarkable Undeterred: Yemen in the Face of Decisive Storm, which highlights key details of the war launched in 2015 “by a hostile coalition of 17 countries,” fully supported by the US and the EU, and complete with air, sea, and land blockades.

The prime minister explains the economic war, as the Yemeni Central Bank was transferred to Aden; the biological war, which led to a horrendous break out of cholera across the nation; and how the Arab League was bought and paid for all the way. He stresses how “this is the first war in History in which all the rich Arab countries stand together under the cloak of the most powerful imperialist country in an unsacred coalition against the poorest country in the Arabian Peninsula.”

That war is far from over. Yemen is suffering badly. The specter of a large famine has not disappeared. So, the focus of Dr Ghaffari’s delegation clearly had to be humanitarian and centered on food security.

He tells The Cradle what Yemen expects to receive from Russia’s Ministry of Agriculture:

We have food to export and import from Russia. We should have a shipping line between Russia and Yemen at Hodeidah port. Last month, another Yemeni delegation was in China. There were good contacts, and they are now developing an agreement. Here, I came as an adviser to the Prime Minister, and parallel to the Russian presidency of BRICS, I came to highlight the importance of developing an agriculture connection – and food security connection – between us and Russia. We need Russian expertise on all this. We have special products in Yemen that we want to export – and now we are fighting a boycott by the US and the west. We want Russian products instead of products coming from Europe.

Ghaffari adds, “Some Russian products do come to Yemen – but they don’t come directly. They come from Gulf countries or African countries. But not as Russian products. In Yemen, there are no Russian products. Now, after 96 years of Russia–Yemen relations, Yemen is defining itself as a good player in our region. It’s a time for BRICS to unite – and to fight back against the US model.”

Yemen’s BRICS drive

Dr Ghaffari further explains what, in effect, breaks down as the possible geoeconomic integration of Yemen:

We had good signs from official contacts, and the Prime Minister in Yemen welcomes that. The objective is to close a deal with Moscow. We have a vision. We want to explain this vision of how to bring the North and South of Yemen together into one railway. This brings us back to 15 years ago when Russian Railways had a project. We bring oil, gas, [and] agriculture investment to seaports. Maybe Yemen could do that by itself in 50 years, but with good help, we can do it in one or two years.

He says a long discussion was also held in Moscow on Yemen’s desire to apply for BRICS membership – and the pitfalls involved:

We have been working close to BRICS for 10 years in Yemen, because we believe in this vision, if we have a chance to become a member. I am the only adviser to the Prime Minister for BRICS advancement. We want to work with BRICS. We now have a golden opportunity.

The prime minister’s office in Sanaa has sent letters to the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs expressing its desire to join BRICS. If these contacts develop, Moscow could certainly invite Sanaa to participate as an observer in the BRICS summit in Kazan in October.

But does the recent BRICS membership of Saudia Arabia and the UAE create an instant obstacle in Yemen’s pathway to joining the multipolar powerhouse?

Ghaffari doesn’t seem to think so, linking Yemen’s BRICS drive to establishing “security in the Gulf. The Emirates and Saudis are now in BRICS. BRICS could take all of us together.”

So Dr Ghaffari’s delegation visited Russia with several objectives: to study the opportunity of establishing a joint agricultural company, to discuss import and export opportunities and shipping methods, to discuss cooperation within the BRICS strategy for economic partnership in agriculture, to learn about the Russian experience in boycotting western products; to introduce the specificity of Yemeni products, especially coffee, honey, and cotton into the Russian market, and to discuss the construction of one of the Yemeni dams.

Add to this a key diplomatic objective: to discuss the possibility of a Yemeni representative attending the upcoming BRICS summit. “We stand with Russia. Russia should have a complete picture of what happens in Yemen. If Yemen is not at the summit, something would be missing in the region.”

Moscow, Beijing, and Tehran would certainly agree. But then hardcore geopolitical reality calls. The Russian Federation, forced to protect an extremely delicate geopolitical balance between Iran and Saudi Arabia inside BRICS, may still be far from solving the Yemen riddle.

The views expressed in this article do not necessarily reflect those of The Cradle.

The post The Yemen–Russia Riddle appeared first on LewRockwell.

As everyone knows, Donald J. Trump, the 45th president of the United States and the presumptive nominee of the Republican Party for the 2024 presidential election, was nearly assassinated yesterday at a campaign rally near Butler, Pennsylvania. Many people – including many of my readers – have predicted that something like this would happen for a very long time.

A 20-year-old sniper named Thomas Matthew Crooks fired as many as eight shots in Trump’s direction, nine minutes after he began speaking. Crooks was perched on the roof of a building just north of Trump’s podium, and he succeeded only in wounding the president in his right ear; two other spectators were critically injured and another was killed. The Secret Service Counter Assault Team brought the attack to an end with a fatal shot to Crooks’s head (here is a graphic image of the aftermath). Trump, meanwhile, ducked to the ground while agents shielded him with their bodies. Half a minute later he stood up, demanded that his protectors allow him to get his shoes, and raised a defiant fist to the audience, shouting “Fight, fight, fight.”

Almost anything I say about these events will be superseded by media reporting within hours, so I’ll limit myself to three points:

1) The failed assassination represents a security failure by United States Secret Service that is so astounding, it will rightfully inspire conspiracy theories for years to come. Kevin Rojek, who heads the Pittsburg field office of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, acknowledged that it was “surprising” that Crooks was able to take so many shots unchallenged. And I can think of no reason why Trump’s detail should’ve drawn their security perimeter to exclude a prominent, elevated firing position a mere 130 metres away from Trump’s podium. Finally, there is the fact that Crooks and his rifle were visible to spectators for minutes before he opened fire; multiple rally attendees tried to alert police, fruitlessly. There is even a screen grab of drone footage circulating on social media, showing Crooks climbing onto the building.

2) Initial media reports included many ridiculous headlines – the worst of them this utter failure by CNN:

But there were others, which reported only on “loud noises,” despite the fact that all journalists had access to footage of unmistakable gunfire and Trump with blood on his face:

That these clumsy attempts to downplay an assassination attempt were no fluke, is confirmed by the terrible aftermath commentary of broadcast news analysts like Samantha Vinograd, who declared that “the biggest threat” following this attempt to shoot a major presidential candidate in the head is “retaliatory violence” from the right:

We know that tensions were already high before this incident, and the counter-terrorism officials and homeland security officials that I’ve spoken to … are deeply concerned that this event will be used as a rallying cray to launch attacks against individuals associated with the Biden campaign and lead to broader domestic distress, so right now the goals are to investigate the incident … as well as to try to tamp down any tensions that may arise coming out of it.

“President Trump nearly killed – Biden campaign and the establishment American left most affected.”

Read the Whole Article

The post ‘Fight, Fight, Fight’ appeared first on LewRockwell.

Having now done literally hundreds of interviews/livestreams/podcast over the past seven years, I’ve learned a few things about media. The first is that this is a lot harder than it looks.

I’ve done it the very hard way, limited success through repetitive failure.

It’s who I am. I’m neither a book nor ear learner. Learning is a kinetic process for me.

For those who aren’t natural public speakers it’s even harder than that. They have to take lessons and shit. And practice. Practice. Practice. I got a small amount of training back when I ran as a Libertarian in 2002. How to dress, reactively listening (Still no clue how to do that), etc.

So, while I’m no expert public speaker, I have become pretty aware of a few things about it: Long form is better than short. Not all media is good media. You have to be willing to ‘get into character.’

Just Be Yourself, Kinda.

Crafting a version of yourself to fit the format is the key to being both a good host and a good guest, both of which I’m still working on. That version/character you craft has a lifespan.

This isn’t to say that the character is artifice necessarily. It isn’t. It is the essence of the lines by T.S. Eliot from The Lovesong of J. Alfred Prufrock:

There will be time, there will be time
To prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet;

It’s not artifice to be a gracious host or a respectful guest, in common parlance it’s called “manners.”

And mine, despite my best intentions, are just barely adequate on the best of days.

How well you prepare that face and greet the opportunities to meet new faces with humility, will ultimately determine how far you go. We all have that choice in front of us every day.

It’s why Prufrock is one of my favorite poems in the English language, it so thoroughly captures the embedded schizophrenia of post-modern society.

You can have your script, practice your character, and maintain the lie for a certain amount of time. But eventually, no matter what you say, there you are.

The bigger the deviation that character is from the real you, the more exhausting maintaining that character is, the shorter the lifespan.

And because anyone can fool another person if they only have to put on the corporatist/globalist feedbag for a 2-5 minute fawning media segment, short form media is itself nothing but a potential lie-generation engine.

It is the height of artifice.

Podcast Campaigning

Podcasting, on the other hand, is just conversation. And conversations have their own vibe.

You still, however, have to craft a version of yourself for any conversation, because manners. But ultimately the inverse time function of maintaining a facade rules.

I can hold it together for about an hour, after that fatigue sets in and the persona, however slight it may be, begins to slip.

So, pro tip, podcasters, if you want controlled, normie-friendly Luongo, keep it under an hour. If you want That Mr. Hyde guy, just keep the tape rolling an extra 20 to 30 minutes.

This is why podcasting has taken off the way it has. It’s why Joe Rogan found the magic by accident.

Eventually everyone lets their guard down. Everyone is laid bare for us to truly see. And since we are all desperately crying out for authenticity in a sea of smarm, we gravitate towards the format which gives us the highest probability of getting the truth and the people who bring that to the table consistently.

I keep going back to one of the first blogs I posted on this site, The Authenticity Gap, detailing why Hillary Clinton’s credibility gap was her Achilles’ heel against Donald Trump.

The Democrats have been lying to us about literally everything while the GOPe led by Yertle the Turtle ran cover for them to…

 … gin up World War III before Trump takes office to avoid being thrown in jail.  This is how sick these people are.

Because, all that matters in the end is their maintaining power, no matter who it hurts or what it costs.

I wrote those words in 2016, before Trump won. They are just as accurate today.

This is why we’ve only seen Joah Bii-DEN! in public here and there, in sound bites and short clips, creating the fiction that he was anything other than a mushroom sporifying in the White House, feeding him a steady diet of bullshit-flavored ice cream.

That piece is still relevant today, just replace The Hildabeast with Joe Biden. Trump and Putin are still ‘literally Hitler.” And the Democrats are self-immolating on the altar of their own tenuous relationship with common decency.

Having watched/listened to hundreds of hours of Tulsi Gabbard over the years, I’ve noticed a few things.

First, she’s not a natural public speaker, nor is she really comfortable in front of the camera. So, she has worked very hard on crafting a public persona which is not easy for her to slip into but which is also authentically her.

Because she is uncomfortable, that face begins to slip after a while…. about an hour. I always get the sense that there is a ‘macho military’ version of Gabbard lurking just below the surface, that swears like a mafia don and prays like a priest. And every once in a while it leaks out.

But it will never do so in a six-minute segment on Fox News.

You’ve got to get past that fatigue barrier. The reason I bring all of this up is because Gabbard was recently on the Keep Hammering Collective podcast with Cameron Hanes for nearly two hours.

She did that podcast after spending the day with him doing his triathalon he calls Lift, Run, Shoot which I suggest you watch the video of, especially if your name is Donald Trump.

Why? You know why. I’ve already made my case for why I thought Gabbard is the ‘box-ticking’ favorite to be Trump’s running mate this fall. I think, however, in retrospect, that was a little unfair to Tulsi Gabbard.

I, like the Davosians who tried to groom her into their perfect barista of globalism, made the mistake of not really getting past the character she plays, the boxes she ticks. There’s a fiery person underneath that calm face she wears in front of the camera. Her book, which I’ve read, makes this point ad infinitum.

And the rounds she’s making supporting the book are showing us a Tulsi Gabbard hinted at, but she hasn’t really shown us before.

What’s, uh, the VP deal?

Dexter White’s recent post reminded us about why Joe Biden was selected to be Barack Obama’s VP, “the life insurance policy for the first black president…”

Obama thought “…I sure don’t want to get shot, who could I pick for VP that would make even an assassin think twice?  Oh, I know, Joe Biden.  No one wants that dumbass in charge!”

Over the years, we’ve gotten so caught up in the political game that is choosing a Vice-President we forgot what the actual job description is… to be the person to step into the role should the President not be there, physically, mentally, or otherwise.

I say this to remind the ghost of Al Haig that we still don’t want him in charge.

It is precisely because Kamala Harris was picked to be Biden’s veep for every other reason than the job description that the Democrats and Davos are in the bind they are in as I write this.

It was never about Harris’ competence, capability, or commitment that landed her in the Naval Observatory. It was the boxes she ticked, the perception of her moral fluidity, and her solidification of the black female vote at a time when black men were drifting into Der Trumpenfuhrer’s orbit that made her the center of their Venn Diagram.

Notice how she was never a person to them… just a series of attributes.

For Trump, who has held back his choice for vice-president for months, the big question has been, if he wins the election will the blob/Deep State/Davos/etc. just kill him off before the inauguration?

It’s a real conundrum.

So, I say, turn about is fair play. Biden was Obama’s insurance policy, make Gabbard Trump’s. Because, if there is one person of all the people on the short list to be Trump’s VP that Davos et.al. do not want to see on the ticket it is Tulsi Gabbard.

Because she really is that person who walked away from power, has a strong moral center, and is authentically motivated by service. And that motivation, coupled with their previous shots against her, like they’ve done with Trump, should scare them maybe more than he does.

Remember, Trump’s ultimately a deal-maker. Is Gabbard? Open question.

This is why every trial balloon imaginable has gone up in the past three months for the usual suspects like Skeletor Scott, his separated at birth brotha Tim, Little Marco, Tom Cotton Pickin’ Neocon, etc… They are trying to move Trump to tick boxes rather than choose the whole person.

The only person other than Gabbard that gets their globalist goat more is Gen. Mike Flynn.

But, really, go watch the real Gabbard emerge in the 2nd half of the Cameron Hanes podcast. She knows who they are. She told them to “GFY,” but has too many manners to say it publicly. Beneath that calm demeanor is someone deeply angry.

Even if she tries to hide the real fire in her belly while she’s auditioning for the role.

And, lastly, she understands the threats and dangers to civilization itself these people represent.

Because Gabbard is the real deal, folks. I thought it before. I know it now.

You can’t fake what she has. And that’s an insurance policy whose payout is more than even the ghouls at Globalist Central can afford.

Reprinted with permission from Gold Goats ‘n Guns.

The post Tulsi Gabbard – The Ultimate Insurance Policy for Trump appeared first on LewRockwell.

On Saturday, July 13th, 2024, President Trump was shot at a rally in Butler Pennsylvania by a sniper on a roof top, approximately 150 feet away. The bullet pierced his ear, but apparently did not do any serious or life threatening damage.

Trump’s courageous response attempting to go back to the microphone telling people to fight with blood coming from his ear sealed his general election victory in the 2024 Presidential election race. Cheating on the computer vote and mail in vote will be too risky. This unwillingness to back down has been both a strength and a weakness. It is a weakness because he has yet to admit the mRNA nanoparticle injections are biological weapons of mass destruction. After a media created sex scandal in the 2016 presidential election, this quality served him as a strength when he paraded Bill and Hillary Clinton’s alleged rape victims in the audience during a presidential race. This quality clearly serves him as a strength after the shooting. This footage of Trump exiting Trump Force One indicates that he is physically fine.

Trump’s statement that he put out Sunday morning indicates that he will not be intimidated:

Thank you to everyone for your thoughts and prayers yesterday, as it was God alone who prevented the unthinkable from happening. We will FEAR NOT, but instead remain resilient in our Faith and Defiant in the face of Wickedness. Our love goes out to the other victims and their families. We pray for the recovery of those who were wounded, and hold in our hearts the memory of the citizen who was so horribly killed. In this moment, it is more important than ever that we stand United, and show our True Character as Americans, remaining Strong and Determined, and not allowing Evil to Win. I truly love our Country, and love you all, and look forward to speaking to our Great Nation this week from Wisconsin.

Information continues to come out on the shooting. Revolver News has raised some serious questions in this article. For starters, why weren’t all the nearby roof tops secured? There were only a few. In the video embedded in the article you can see the secret service agent pointing his rifle at the sniper on the roof. Yet he did not fire at the sniper until shots were fired. Even more disturbing is the video interview of an eyewitness in the parking lot where the sniper was shooting from. The witness said that he notified the police about the man on the roof, and nobody did anything. His questions were pertinent. Why didn’t they get Trump out of there before the shooting if they were told there was a sniper on the roof. In the time it took to get the secret service sniper on the roof it would have been wise to also get Trump off the stage.

The FBI will investigate the attempted assassination. The odds that the FBI is going to report that this was an inside job or a set up is highly remote. The reality is that if you can take a person’s photo you can kill them. This is a difficult truth to accept. It means that a lone gunman can be the sole cause of an assassination. However, when the police are being told there is a sniper on the roof and nobody does anything, that lends itself to this being an inside job.

During the COVID lockdowns there weren’t mass shootings? Why is that? To varying degrees, people were caged up like animals. Forced to wear masks, follow lines on the floor, stand six feet apart, threatened to lose their jobs if they did not get a bioweapon injection, and so on. I remember walking in the grocery store for 4 months being the only normal person without a mask. Why weren’t there mass shootings all over the place?

That should have driven people over the edge to commit such acts everywhere. Yet they didn’t happen. This points to a few simple explanations. Overwhelmingly these public shootings are the product of government mind control, brain washing, or simply enabling someone that already has malintent. Is it that far of a reach to consider that these assassins are also the product of government mind control, brain washing, or simply enablement?

Historically, any major figure that attempts to buck the system or shadow government too hard, regardless of ideology gets shot. Teddy Roosevelt on the Bull Moose Ticket, Huey Long, JFK, RFK, MLK, George Wallace, Reagan, Trump. I am probably missing a few names in this list.

Reagan’s presidency was a shadow of its promise after he survived an assassination attempt. In the aftermath of this shooting, Trump’s choice of a VP will indicate whether he is caving to intimidation or not. If he picks a neocon, then it would appear that he was in fact wavering.

Read the Whole Article

The post Trump’s Courageous Response to Shadow Government’s Attempted Assassination appeared first on LewRockwell.

Be mentally, physically and spiritually prepared for all hell to break loose.

I am an unabashed and unapologetic conspiracy theorist. A conspiracy theorist is the Bumbledick term for “critical thinker”. A conspiracy theorist is simply someone who has studied a little history, applies some basic trend analysis, and actively tries to filter out as much malarkey as is humanly possible. In doing so, one is left with the most likely scenarios that explain current events and predict future developments. This is also happens to be the true definition of “science”.

With that said, anyone who has paid the least bit of attention to the world around us, has known of Joe Biden’s “cognitive issues” since at least 1988, when he was forced out of the presidential race for being a lyin’, cheatin’ plagiarist. He is also living proof of the Peter Principle, in that he has failed upward his entire life. He’s like the kid in grade school who always got picked just for the entertainment value of watching him fall flat on his face.

In order to be gaslit, the chump must actively deny the evidence of his own common sense, while accepting the clearly flawed narradigm he is being fed — a combination of gullibility and willful ignorance. It’s an active process in which one assumes that a liar with a large paycheck and a position of authority must be telling the truth simply because of the paycheck and the postion, and that the gaslighter earned that position with skill and knowledge that exceeds the chump’s feeling of insufficiency.

Thus, the remedy to being gaslit is the realization that people with bigger paychecks and higher positions are the bigger idiots, who were promoted to get them out of the way of competent folks, and provide entertainment by regularly falling flat on their faces. Other expressions with more or less the same connotations include class clown and useful idiot.

Let’s get to the conspiracy part of all this: it has been glaringly obvious to anyone paying attention that Joe Biden is and always has been an idiot. So why all the sudden hand-wringing and tongue wagging?

Biden was clearly installed in his current position, because he was maliable and wouldn’t get in the way of the apparatchiks who really run the show. He was the perfect front man, demanding attention and distrating the rubes while the magicians were busy in the background. There was never any doubt about Ole Joe’s mental faculties, and in fact that was the whole point. It was a key part of the illusion to cause all this “sudden” ruckus at the moment the Bumbledicks needed it, to complete the Big Switchar-oo.

The only people surprised by the “revelation” of the Big Guy’s cognitive short-comings are the ones who haven’t been paying attention, and it’s all going according to plan.

Here are the facts: first, a “debate” was set up between Biden and Trump where the rules clearly ham-strung the vacuous Biden. Trump obviously knew this, because he was oddly not his usual blustery bombastic self. Next, the wailing and gnashing of teeth started immediately after the “debate” ended, precisely on cue. Furthermore, Biden won 99% of the delegates in the primary races, meaning he can’t be arbitrarily removed without subverting the “democratic” process.

The debaucle lit up exactly at the moment the primaries had finished — Guam and the Virgin Islands were the last on June 8th — and before convention season — Bucketheads in Milwaukee July 15-18, and Bumbledicks in Chicago August 19-22.

At this point, the conspiracy theorist realizes something is afoot. Why is Biden’s lack of mental processes “suddenly” an issue, when it has been plainly obvious for decades? Why is the issue being allowed into public discourse at precisely the moment the primaries end and the conventions start? Who are the players in the pro/con dog-and-pony show and what do they bring to the table?

To analyze this situation, we apply the Hegelian Dialectic. We are being presented with the classic thesis-antithesis-synthesis scenario. Create a problem, offer two carefully controlled and seemingly opposing views, guide the solution to the desired outcome by not allowing any views outside the chosen two.

We note that historically, all successful conspiracies achieve multiple outcomes, with a core or primary goal, and a number of ancillary goals. The goals are prioritized by “must haves” and “would likes”. The aware reader will notice that conspiracies differ from any other plan of action only in the connotation of the term.

First off, the Merkin electorate still has some fight left in it. The voters must be thoroughly neutered and demoalized to make them compliant. Thus, for the last 60 years, Lucy has constantly pulled the ball just as Charlie Brown runs up to kick it. The Biden fiasco is the final act to deflate and despirit the Merkin voter. Between Trump and Biden, now both sides are forlorn and hopeless.

Second, the Merkin economy is the greatest financial engine ever built, though most of it is vaporware. Regardless, it can be mined and harvested to finance a plethora of institutions and operations around the world — in the form of holding companies, NGOs, and quasi-governmental organizations — that would not be supported by the economic units (i.e. people) directly, but who could be duped into shoveling trillions of “dollars” into fighting various “wars” and imaginary threats. Those trillions are looted and laundered into slush funds and compliant political pockets to advance the conspiracy.

Third, this “sudden” issue sets up a number of preplanned excuses to do a little homegrown election manipulation. No matter how this situation is “resolved,” it plants the seed of doubt in the process and undermines faith in the System. There will be calls for “reform” and greater bureaucratic control of the national governmentSecond, this “sudden” issue sets up a number of preplanned excuses to do a little homegrown election manipulation. No matter how this situation is “resolved,” it plants the seed of doubt in the process and undermines faith in the System.

Fourth, the “controversy” over Biden undermines US influence and leadership in global affairs. What the world sees is the US having a choice between a Dangerous Clown and a Blithering Idiot. Whichever choice “the people” make will decrease US status and influence. Remembering that the forces controlling global events use nation-states as pawns in a very large chess game, and sometimes you gotta sacrifice the Queen to get the opposing King in check (mate?). The US is powerful and useful, but it is not the only piece on the board.

Read the Whole Article

The post Ordo Ab Chao appeared first on LewRockwell.

In late winter, I wrote a series on election fraud. The day after the last, the man I had written about Saturday, Peter Bernegger, a freaking hero, was arrested. Later that week another subject, Christina Bobb, Trump’s lawyer, and the Republican National Committee’s voter fraud expert, had to fly to Arizona and turn herself in.

The left can no longer win on the merits of their ideas, much less their actions. They have created one catastrophe after another. The only way they can win elections is steal them. And they have developed three hundred separate, specific, methodologies to do it. In my opinion, and that of others closer to the coal face.

Dominion Voting Systems is Canuckistan’s contribution to the great eliding of truth that is Marc Elias and the Democrat party’s massive election ‘improving’ enterprise. They are acutely aware of any attack. Dominion has sued everyone not nailed down, to some success, mostly via Soros’s corruption of the judiciary. And Canada’s left is a vicious monster, its leader nationally in power for almost a decade, and they hunt for enemies, no matter how small, as assiduous as our cat in the summer field.

I spent last evening watching the voter rolls fill up with applications from people without ID in real time. HAVV is the U.S. Social Security website, specifically the Help America Vote Verification System. It keeps track of those trying to register to vote. HAVV shows the number of people who have with a verified social security number. And those applications which did not turn up a real person.

All the swing states are under assault from “new voters”. In Pennsylvania alone, in one week, one-third of applicants could not be verified. Pennsylvania was stolen so hard in 2020 I imagine it to be still reeling. The site showed that in just one week in Ohio, 1068 out of 1333 new applicants did not match to any records. A lot of deceased people in Texas, Alabama and Missouri were applying for voter id in the weeks I studied. Here’s the site: look at each week for your state. I’m not saying the government website is corrupt, but many of the people applying for voter id in the swing states, are, most certainly, being paid by the financial system that was set up under the auspices of Arabella Associates, the Clinton foundation, the Open Society Foundation, Tides and the Chinese Progressive Association.

Omega4America has managed to identify the corruption of the voter rolls in 26 states. But nothing has been done. All the Secretaries of State, all of them, all of them, have refused to do anything. As we know from Omega’s work, this video here, many hundreds of thousands of “voters” permanently live at Mailboxes Unlimited, or in seasonal campgrounds, in warehouses, hospitals, municipal buildings or short-term rental suites, all of which are illegal addresses by the way. That one method certainly stole the vote in Georgia, you can watch the video here. The steal in swing states ranged between low to high six figures. Each state was decided by low five figures pointing towards a tight race. it was not. Trump won at least four of the swing states by six figures.

Read the Whole Article

The post They Will Kill Him Rather Than Let Him Win appeared first on LewRockwell.

The United States is safer from a foreign invasion than any other country, not because it spends half of all of the world’s military expenditures, but because it is separated by over 3,000 miles of ocean away from Europe and from Asia, and because its only two bordering countries are entirely friendly nations, Mexico and Canada — so, there’s no way, short of an invasion from thousands of miles away, that America can be militarily attacked.

The thing that nations are especially concerned about in national-defense matters is avoiding a blitz attack, which is an attack from a location so near to the nation’s central command — near to its Government — so as to be able to behead the Government too fast for the Government to be able to identify that attack and release its retaliatory forces against its enemy.

This is what the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis was all about: JFK needed to prevent placement of Soviet missiles in Cuba only 1,131 miles away from DC, which would have enabled the Soviet Union to blitz-attack America within less than 30 minutes. That’s why JFK threatened to Khrushchev that if they tried that, then America would invade and take over Cuba.

Nowadays the situation is in the reverse direction: Russia’s central command (The Kremlin in Moscow) is only 317 miles away from Ukraine, and on 17 December 2021 Russia formally demanded both America and its NATO to promise that Ukraine won’t be added to NATO and will never host U.S. military; and — entirely unlike what Khrushchev did in 1962 — the U.S. and its NATO responded on 7 January 2022 with a resounding and contemptuous no. Russia invaded Ukraine on 24 February 2022.

What is this actually all about? Empirical studies have shown unequivocally that the U.S. Government is controlled by and represents not its public but only its thousand billionaires plus the politically most active of its centi-millionaires. Each of these individuals is catastrophically wealthy and so can buy enough politicians so that even just the billionaires alone actually do donate more than half of all of the money that funds U.S. political campaigns — the ads, the ‘news’-stories in their ‘news’-media, their think tanks and universities, etc. — in order to drown-out whatever few politicians who simply refuse to be controlled by them.

Look at this graph, which shows that by far the best-performing corporate stocks in the U.S. have been in the defense-aerospace sector ever since the Soviet Union ended in 1991. No longer do U.S. Presidents and members of the U.S. Congress have a need to show their voters any military success and buy with all that taxpayer money weapons and military training that win wars; and, so, ever since 1991 (and even before that), America has been losing wars and yet the voting public don’t even care about that but believe all the pro-military ‘news’-reporting and commentary, all of the propaganda, that they receive.

From an armaments manufacturer’s standpoint, this is nirvana: they control their market because they control their politicians and their ‘news’-media etc.; so, no matter how overpriced and underperforming their products and services are, increased ‘defense’ budgets are assured, and the voters won’t even know about this con, because the ‘news’-media hide it and bury it, and cover it over with flag-waving. And we can even have a top financial-political whore to America’s ‘defense’ contractors leading now in at least one poll.

Reprinted with permission from Eric’s Substack.

The post U.S. ‘Defense’ Firms Control the U.S. Government. appeared first on LewRockwell.

There is a political cartoon that shows a gray, genderless non-player character asking a real man, “Who radicalized you?”  The man leans forward and whispers to the lefty NPC, “You did.”  It is a brilliantly succinct depiction of our historical moment.

Right now the NPC news media is pretending that it just discovered Joe Biden’s raging dementia when his brain crashed during the president-ish debate.  Literally right up to the beginning of that June 27 public revealing of the emperor’s neurological nakedness, the most respected, well-paid, and credentialed reporters in the land were lampooning conservatives who questioned Slow-Joe’s mental faculties and labeling authenticated videos of his dimwittedness, “cheap fakes.”

The day after Biden’s debate debacle, the same lefty NPC pundits were so “shocked” by Dementia Joe’s rambling performance that they immediately called for the anti-democratic Democrat Party to find his replacement.  Savvy conservatives had been predicting this scenario for years.  Why should Democrat Party bosses risk an open primary that might see the elevation of someone not under their complete control when they can just as easily ignore the will of primary voters, anoint Decrepit Joe, and swap him out with their handpicked successor during August’s nominating convention?

Whether the Biden Crime Family will permit this “swap” is another question.  If a sternly-worded letter delivered to congressional Dim-Dems on Monday means anything, Jill, Hunter, Ashley, and the other freeloading members of the Biden Clan have no intention of losing their quid-pro-quo meal ticket asleep in the White House.  Perhaps this means that the Dem-controlled Deep State will start acknowledging Biden’s half-century of political graft and unseemly interactions with women and children in an effort to bring him down more forcefully.  Or perhaps the NPC lefties now calling for his resignation will magically revert to their prior programming and begin praising Dodo Joe-Joe as the smartest, most energetic, most capable leader they have ever known.  The next few days will tell.

However the NPC Brigade decide to spin Joe’s future, their lies look desperate.  MS-DNC’s Lawrence O’Donnell wants Biden’s staff on stage at the next debate to help him answer questions and even answer questions themselves.  I know Zoomers are bringing their parents to job interviews these days, but that doesn’t mean would-be presidents should follow suit.  Big boys who want big jobs shouldn’t have to borrow other people’s brains.

Likewise, the Huff and Puff Post is calling for “Weekend at Joe Biden’s” campaign team to release AI-manipulated videos that falsely portray the president-in-name-only as more nimble, youthful, artful, and intelligent than he actually is.  Amazing!  For years, the NPC media has dishonestly claimed that every real Dementia Joe video is fake; now the NPC media wants to make fake videos and call them real.  When unethical “journalists” justify outright fraud in pursuit of Democrat “victory,” it’s no wonder why a majority of Americans remain convinced that mail-in-ballot fraud handed Biden the White House in 2020.  As proto-trillionaire Elon Musk continues to warn Americans these days, our NPC rulers “want to cheat.”  Actually, they have to cheat; otherwise, it’s game over for the non-player characters.

For those keeping score at home, the NPC Squad’s batting average is buried in a deep grave underneath an already deep basement.  Let’s review a few of their biggest whiffs over the past few years.  First, imagine one of those grey, genderless NPC faces scowling at you.  Now listen to their lies:

“COVID came from a wet market.”  Uh, nope.  “We must protect grandparents by closing schools.”  Doh!  “Closing small businesses will save them.”  Derp.  “Stand six feet apart, or you’ll probably die.”  Wait a second.  “Put this mask on; better yet, take three.”  That doesn’t make any sense.  “Shoot up with this experimental gene therapy; it’s safe.”  Are you sure?  “Yeah, once injected, you won’t get COVID.”  We still got COVID.  “What we meant was, you won’t transmit COVID.”  We still gave it to everybody.  “But you would have been a lot sicker without it.”  How do you know…?  “Just trust us, okay; we’re experts.”

Why is Joe Biden threatening our jobs if we choose to use ivermectin?  “Because he’s a genius who wants to keep America safe.”  You mean that guy who just read, “Now YOU take YOUR seat,” from his notecards before introducing his wife as the president?  “He has a stutter.”  Does it make him forget who he is?  “He’s just jet-lagged.”  After vacationing at Camp David for a week?  “He has a cold.”  You mean, like COVID?  Isn’t that impossible?  “Fine, you’re right, Joe Biden’s brain is mush, and we must immediately replace him with Hillary.”  Whoa now, NPC, let’s not jump to conclusions here.  It’s probably just a stutter.  We believe you.  

Read the Whole Article

The post Lefty NPCs Will Be the Death of Us All appeared first on LewRockwell.

LewRockwell.com readers are supporting LRC and shopping at the same time. It’s easy and does not cost you a penny more than it would if you didn’t go through the LRC link. Just click on the Amazon link on LewRockwell.com’s homepage and add your items to your cart. It’s that easy!

If you can’t live without your daily dose of LewRockwell.com in 2024, please remember to DONATE TODAY!

1. Be Not Afraid of Life: In the Words of William James
2. Atomic Habits: An Easy & Proven Way to Build Good Habits & Break Bad Ones 
3. How To Survive In A World Without Antibiotics
4. I Don’t Have Enough Faith to Be an Atheist 
5. Whittling for Beginners: Step-by-Step Projects to Carve from Wood 
6. Covid 19: Decoding Official Data: Mortality, tests, vaccines, hospitals.
7. The Complete Guide to Pressure Canning: Everything You Need to Know to Can Meats, Vegetables, Meals in a Jar, and More 
8. The Big Book of Herbal Medicine: 300 Natural Remedies for Health and Wellness
9. The Telomere Effect: A Revolutionary Approach to Living Younger, Healthier, Longer
10. Vegetable Gardening for Beginners: A Simple Guide to Growing Vegetables at Home
11. The Farmhouse Diet: A commonsense, no-nonsense approach to eating healthy and healthy living
12. Alchemy of Herbs: Transform Everyday Ingredients into Foods and Remedies That Heal 
13. Hoppe Unplugged: Views, insights and Provocations from Interviews and Speeche
14. Man’s Search for Meaning
15. The Great Surreptitious Coup: Who Stole Western Civilization?
16. New Optimum Nutrition for the Mind
17. Abigail Adams: Letters (LOA #275) (Library of America Adams Family Collection)
18. The Inflation Crisis and How to Resolve It 
19. The Tyranny of Good Intentions: How Prosecutors and Law Enforcement Are Trampling the Constitution in the Name of Justice 
20. They Want To Kill Us: Here’s how and why 

The post Great Books You Need To Read appeared first on LewRockwell.

Well, here’s an interesting historical repeat. Apparently, it took the Roman Empire about 200 years to reduce the value of its currency, the silver Denarius, by 95%. As shown in the chart below, the silver content of the Roman currency had been nearly 100% at the peak of the Empire in 65 AD, but by 268 AD the coin had been clipped and debased so thoroughly that it was comprised of less than 5% silver.

Needless to say, inflation became rampant, causing the financial foundation of the Roman Empire to eventually collapse. In the process, future generations and nations got an unmistakable lesson: Debauching the money is absolutely not the road to sustainable prosperity.

Unfortunately, that has not prevented governments from attempting the currency depreciation route again and again. In our own era, the 111 year history of the Federal Reserve provides a striking case in point. In roughly half the time it took the Romans, the Fed has managed to accomplish the same 95% depreciation of the US dollar.

That’s right. The purchasing power of the consumer dollar as measured by the CPI has dropped from 100 cents when the Fed opened for business in 1914 to barely 3 cents today.

Index of Dollar’s Purchasing Power Since 1914 As Measured By The CPI

And yet and yet. After the most recent surge of inflation, the Fed is at it again. In today’s Congressional testimony, Chairman Powell as much as claimed victory and implied that the next round of rate cuts would soon commence, perhaps as early as September.

Reducing policy restraint too late or too little could unduly weaken economic activity and employment,” Powell said as part of his semiannual update on monetary policy. “More good data would strengthen our confidence that inflation is moving sustainably toward 2 percent.”

Let’s not mince words. What in the hell is he talking about?

The implication is that the Fed never has to make amends. If the inflation genie gets out of the bottle and pushes the general price level sharply higher, why the thing to do is to just brake the surge and advise the people to lick their wounds with respect to the depleted value of their savings and the waning purchasing power of their paycheck.

In fact, current Fed policy is simply a one-way ratchet. If inflation exceeds its utterly arbitrary 2.00% target, there is no off-setting correction and restoration of purchasing power. Effectively cumulative inflation is written off as a bad debt.

Unfortunately for main street households and businesses, this embedded inflation-ratchet policy assumes inflation is an equal opportunity cipher. That is to say, even at the Fed’s sacrosanct 2.00% target, the cost of goods and services goes up 2.00% and so, purportedly, wages, rents, profits, interest and all other forms of income rise in lockstep. No one is worse for the inflationary wear—households and businesses just need to keep adjusting both sides of their income statements and balance sheets by the Fed’s preferred PCE deflator and all will be copacetic.

That’s absurd on its face, of course. Right from the get go its obvious that borrowers would get a windfall of depreciated debts and savers would suffer severe confiscation of wealth over even a quarter century—to say nothing of the one and two century debauch of the silver Denarius and dollar shown above. In fact, after 25-years at the Fed’s precise 2.00% target, borrowers would be 40% richer and savers 40% poorer than under a regime of true price stability.

Why in the world today’s central bankers insist upon punishing savers and rewarding borrowers is no mystery. They embrace lock, stock and barrel—whether they acknowledge it or not—the horrid Keynesian fallacy that capitalism is inherently defective because humankind is wont to excessively save and hoard when they should be spending freely and living high on the hog.

It’s really that simple. Even a decent regard for the truism that economic growth and wealth gains are a function of savings and investment would negate the Fed’s pro-inflation policy on its face. Yet as it has happened, the drastic bias of central bank policy in favor of borrowers in all sectors—government, business, households and finance—has essentially extinguished America’s generation of net national savings.

As shown below, the latter measures the entirety of savings in the household and business sectors minus government borrowings. Yet since the Fed began de facto inflation-targeting in the late 1980s, the net national savings rate has headed steadily toward the zero bound. In fact, during Q1 2024 it was actually -0.5% of GDP— a figure on the opposite side of the universe compared to the +7-10% of GDP levels that prevailed during the heyday of middle class prosperity prior to the era of Bubbles Alan Greenspan and his heirs and assigns.

Needless to say, when there is nothing left in the savings till after governments gorge themselves at the borrowing window, where is the investment for productivity and growth supposed to come from?

In truth, the Fed never troubles itself with the question of savings. If the word is even mentioned at all in its post-meeting communiques it’s in the context of a short-run downward blip in household spending levels owing mathematically to what usually amounts to a tiny and transient increase in the savings rate.

Still, seven decades of data do not lie. Systematically and relentlessly, the Fed’s baleful bias against savers and for borrowers has literally dried-up the US economy’s supply of growth oxygen.

Net National Savings Rate. 1955 to 2024

For want of doubt, here is the inflation-adjusted interest rate on a two-years savings instrument, proxied here by the risk-free yield on the two-year UST minus the Y/Y change in the 16% trimmed mean CPI. The chart obviously speaks for itself, but it needs be noted that during the entire 15-year period between July 2008 on the eve of the Great Financial Crisis and July 2023, the geniuses in the Eccles Building had pegged the real yield at negative levels!

Even now after what the acolytes at the Wall Street Journal call the most rapid rise in interest rates in two decades, the real yield in May was just +1.4%. So why in the world is that considered onerous—a threat to the Fed’s alleged twin goal of maximum employment?

Stated differently, if the US economy can’t stand real rates peeking above the zero bound at just 1.4% on two-year instruments and is therefore in dire need of a new round of rate cuts, how in the world can the net national savings rate be lifted out of the economic gutter where it now resides?

Of course, the Fed never mentions real interest rates, either, except for the squirrely extractions it derives by comparing yields on inflation-protected treasuries (TIPS) versus their fixed coupon counterparts. But that has absolutely nothing to do with real yields, and merely reflects trading games played by technicians down in the bond pits.

Inflation-Adjusted Yield On 2-Year USTs, 1984 to 2024

Then again, the Fed subscribes to what amounts to bathtub economics. It thinks growth happens when demand is stimulated up to the brim of potential GDP, and that left to its own devices free market capitalism always whiffs by saving too much and spending too little. So cheap interest rates become the instrument of macro-economic stimulus, purportedly goosing demand until the bathtub of spending is full to the brim and economic growth and employment are maximized.

Alas, in a fully integrated and seamless $110 trillion global economy, the bathtub model of domestic economics is just plain hideous nonsense. Yet here were are again with the Keynesian fools in the Eccles Building itching to restart the printing presses and drive real interest rates and the net national savings rate back into the economic dungeon below the zero bound.

They never learn. Ever.

Reprinted with permission from David Stockman’s Contra Corner.

The post What Rome’s Currency Debasement Tells us About the Future of the US Dollar… appeared first on LewRockwell.

My wife often poses the joke “Do you know the difference between doctors and God?” with the punchline being “God doesn’t think he’s a doctor.” The atrocious behavior of my neurosurgeon made me wonder: How does anyone get away with acting like this?

In part one of my deep brain stimulation to fix the tremors in my hands, two holes are drilled into my skull while my head was secured in place by a metal cage with a plexiglass box fitted over it. I was sedated to a level where I was awake but didn’t feel any pain when the drill bit went through my skull, although I could hear it—a sound indescribable yet at the same time unforgettable.

What I also heard was the surgeon continually yelling at the staff, “What I want you to do is just stand there and not move. There is not a thing you can do for me. I guess I must do everything myself. Just stand there and don’t move.” Soon after, I heard him say, “This equipment is so dated. I mean like it’s twenty years old. Why can’t we get any new equipment? My god, this is the end of days. Why do I have to work with this stuff?”

All of this after checking into the hospital one day, being told the surgeon was called away to an emergency and rescheduled for the next day at noon, and then being called in a panic by his office that he was running ahead of schedule and if I could get there at 10 a.m. We rushed to get there at the appointed time only to wait and wait after arriving at the operating room. Getting on the elevator to the operating room, the surgeon said, “I’m going to go have a cup of coffee.” I think he had more than a cup.

In the definitive history of American medicine The Social Transformation of American Medicine: The Rise of a Sovereign Profession and the Making of a Vast Industry, Paul Starr wrote, “The key source of physicians’ economic distress in 1900 remained the continuing oversupply of doctors, now made much worse by the increased productivity of physicians as a result . . . [of the] squeezing of lost time from the professional working day.”

Starr points out that the number of medical schools expanded at the end of the nineteenth century. From the founding of the American Medical Association (AMA) in 1847 to 1900, the number of medical schools more than tripled. And while America’s population more than doubled between 1870 and 1910, the number of physicians increased more than 150 percent.

“The weakness of the profession was feeding on itself; ultimately help had to come from outside,” Starr wrote. Help came in the form of the Flexner Report, penned by Abraham Flexner, brother to the powerful Dr. Simon Flexner, a key player in the chase for a vaccine to battle the 1918 Spanish flu.

Abraham was not a doctor himself. While the report was commissioned by the Carnegie Foundation, “​Flexner’s report was virtually written in advance by high officials of the American Medical Association, and its advice was quickly taken by every state in the Union,” Murray Rothbard explained in Making Economic Sense. Using the Flexner Report as a guide, the AMA was able to use the state to cartelize the medical industry. Rothbard wrote:

The result: every medical school and hospital was subjected to licensing by the state, which would turn the power to appoint licensing boards over to the state AMA. The state was supposed to, and did, put out of business all medical schools that were proprietary and profit-making, that admitted blacks and women, and that did not specialize in orthodox, “allopathic” medicine: particularly homeopaths, who were then a substantial part of the medical profession, and a respectable alternative to orthodox allopathy.

The report recommended closing schools, discarding competing therapies, and firing minority doctors that were considered substandard. “Medicine would never be a respected profession . . . until it sloughed off its coarse and common elements,” wrote Starr. Medical schools had been closing before 1910, with 20 percent shuttered in the four years before the report was published. Capital requirements for modern laboratories, libraries, and clinical facilities “were what killed so many medical schools in the years after 1906,” he wrote.

Rothbard explained further:

In all cases of cartels, the producers are able to replace consumers in their seats of power, and accordingly the medical establishment was now able to put competing therapies (e.g., homeopathy) out of business; to remove disliked competing groups from the supply of physicians (blacks, women, Jews); and to replace proprietary medical schools financed by student fees with university-based schools run by the faculty, and subsidized by foundations and wealthy donors.

The burgeoning cartel meant “a skewing of the entire medical profession away from patient care toward high-tech, high-capital investment in rare and glamorous diseases,” wrote Rothbard, “which redound far more to the prestige of the hospital and its medical staff than is actually useful for the patient-consumers.”

Abraham Flexner, according to Starr, “had an aristocratic disdain for things commercial.” The high-minded Flexner Report “more successfully legitimated the profession’s interest in limiting the number of medical schools and the supply of physicians than anything the AMA might have put out on its own.”

The result: after peaking at 162 medical schools in 1906, by 1922, the number had been cut in half. The Flexner Report (a.k.a. ​Bulletin Number Four) recommended that the number of schools be reduced to thirty-one. Fortunately, more than seventy survived. Left up to Flexner, twenty states would not have had a single medical school. Legislators intervened. The report “was the manifesto of a program that by 1936 guided $91 million from Rockefeller’s General Education Board (plus millions more from other foundations) to a select group of medical schools,” according to Starr. Two-thirds of these funds went to only seven schools.

Medicine made a great leap in the Progressive Era. “The transition from household to the market as the dominant institution in the care for the sick,” in addition to increased specialization of labor, “has created emotional distance between the sick and those responsible for their care,” Starr wrote, “and a shift from women to men as the dominant figures in the management of health and illness.”

Mike Holly wrote in a 2013 Mises Daily piece:

Since the early 1900s, medical special interests have been lobbying politicians to reduce competition. By the 1980s, the U.S. was restricting the supply of physicians, hospitals, insurance and pharmaceuticals, while [at the same time] subsidizing demand. Since then, the U.S. has been trying to control high costs by moving toward something perhaps best described by the House Budget Committee: “In too many areas of the economy—especially energy, housing, finance, and health care—free enterprise has given way to government control in ‘partnership’ with a few large or politically well-connected companies.”

Part two of my procedure involved making two incisions to connect the wires from my brain to a battery that would be implanted to my chest. I arrived at the scheduled time of 12:30 p.m. The rep for the medical hardware to be placed in me told us the surgeon was running late. When my wife complained, the rep said, “He’s a busy man.” She replied, “We’re all busy. I’m going to complain.” He calmly said, “He won’t care.”

When I rolled into the bright lights of the surgical center’s operating room, the clock on the wall said 17:45 (military time). The next thing I knew, I woke up in recovery. The surgeon’s physician’s assistant commented on how good I looked. A nurse who had spent the last four hours apologizing for how far behind they were helped my wife put me in the car. There was no sign of the surgeon. Another American medical success story.

The post Thanks to State Control, Doctors Have Become Gods appeared first on LewRockwell.

Catholic Episcopal Campaigns focusing primarily on Eucharistic Renewal have neither an orthodox theological basis nor a divine mandate, but do impede the true reform of Catholicism and revival of the Holy Catholic Faith. Furthermore, Catholics only do a disservice to the Blessed Sacrament when they compartmentalize it as the end all, “the source and summit”, of Christian life rather than as the intended leaven of that life (see Crucial Christianity, 2022).

Since their 2020’s promotional campaign Christ is with His Church until the End of Time to the ongoing National Eucharistic Revival Campaign up to this weekend’s National Eucharistic Extravaganza in Indianapolis, the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops have singularly emphasized Jesus Christ’s unique Eucharistic presence as His specific, and apparently (but wrongly) superlative presence in the Church and on earth. Thereby, the bishops find as well that all the ills that plague both the Church and the world will be singularly cured in increasing awareness and devotion to the Eucharist.  As if the Lord Jesus Christ said,

“Seek ye first the Tabernacle and his Eucharistic Presence; and all these things shall be added unto you.”

So says the USCCB,

“The Holy Spirit [or USCCB?] is inviting the United States to find unity and renewal through a grassroots National Eucharistic Revival. This movement is critical to rekindling a living faith in the hearts of Catholics across America, unleashing a new missionary chapter at this pivotal moment in Church history.”

The bishops apparently expect their claim of a divine mandate for their campaign to be blindly accepted by good Catholics (and they are right), for it is audaciously made without a shred of evidence.  But quite frankly, at this time in salvation history, that is all Catholics know how to do as Christians: go to church. And all they know how to rampant it up as Christians is to go to church more often.

In popular practice and perception, the specific difference of “being Catholic” has been reduced down to their dutiful attendance at Mass, reception of communion, and frequenting of other sacraments and devotions (in addition to certain moral adherences). But the Sacraments were made for Catholics, not Catholics for the Sacraments, even be it the Blessed Sacrament. Rather, Our Lord Jesus Christ gifted the Seven Sacraments to Catholics for their fortification in fulfilling the Christian Vocation to bring about His Kingdom on earth as in heaven, now; in their souls, families, and communities.

The Realer Presence Heresy

The orthodox understanding of the term Real Presence refers to the unique bodily presence of Our Lord Jesus Christ—body, blood, soul, and divinity—in the Blessed Sacrament. But beyond this is the prevalent false belief among Catholics that Christ also has a realer presence because of this physicality. For this Realer Presence belief is premised on the quite heretical notion that God is given greater or superlative presence by physicality. Christ gifted Catholics with the physical Holy Eucharist not so they could have something tangible to prostratingly worship but something tangible to intimately consume. In sum, a person is not a good Catholic because he goes to Mass, but rather a person goes to Mass to help him be a good Catholic.

The Source & Summit of the Problem

Reasoning in a circle, the USCCB, and especially its more conservative bishops, have made their priority increased devotion “to the source and summit of our faith in the celebration of the Eucharist. . . , [thereby} restoring understanding and devotion to this great mystery by helping us renew our worship of Jesus Christ in the Eucharist.” That is (as far as can be made out syntactically), the bishops’ goal is to increase devotion to the Eucharist in order to revive devotion to the Eucharist so that there can be more renewed worship of Jesus in the Eucharist.

With such hyper-devotional circular reasoning the Holy Faith will never make its way out of the chapel. Worse still the bishops quote “The Eucharist is the source and summit of Christian life.” (CCC) as if it is dogmatic fact rather than as a parenthetical clause taken from a complex sentence from Vatican II’s Lumen Gentium (2.5), a clause that when read in context, refers to Christ Crucified; from which the Holy Eucharist derives; a clarification the Catholic Catechism makes (but apparently not strongly enough):  For in the blessed Eucharist [is] namely Christ himself; our Pasch.” (CC. 12)

Thus, the Eucharist finds its source in Christ Crucified (Pasch) and, as noted, its own summit or end is in the flowering of Christian life. With this rectified understanding, Catholics will no longer underappreciate and impede the efficacy of the Holy Eucharist by compartmentalizing it as an end in itself (qua transubstantiated host) rather than as what it specifically is: the uniquely tangible, intimate, subtle—indeed palatable—manifestation of the Lord Jesus Christ, (body, blood, soul, and divinity) who so gives himself to Christians so they can (no, not just go to heaven) but better receive and promulgate his Father’s Kingdom on now earth as in heaven, just as his prayer singularly mandates.

For further essays on this and other Catholic reformational subjects please visit KingdomCatholic.org

The post Eucharistic Hyper-Devotionalism appeared first on LewRockwell.

For over 2 weeks, the “fake-news” cycle has been consumed by conjecture over Biden’s mental decline. The overwhelming emphasis in American politics is on the actors in the White House,… no longer on issues and definitely not on the military industrial and Neocon script writers behind the curtain. None of our recent presidents showed one whit of consideration for the public beyond suckering them to vote Republican or Democrat; party affiliations serving nicely as chew-toys for the people to fight over and keep them occupied.  Were we the people ever on the same page, our greedy elite would be tarred, feathered and run out of power.  The job of the media is to conceal the fact that politicians are paid pretenders, pretending they determine the trajectory of the nation while our “shadow government” calls all the shots.

Demented Biden colluded with the CCP, did Ukraine, gifted Israel with enough bombs to flatten Gaza, enacted a phony Green New Deal and opened borders to dilute our traditional culture,… while Trump gave the treasury to pharmaceutical raiders, failed to fire Fauci, crippled the nation with lockdowns and followed the lead of Netanyahu, his son-in-law and the rest of the Zionist Mafia. This only makes sense to gullible brain-trained ideologs existing within the frame of the system’s matrix.

All this campaigneering is so much fluff, empty promises and a total distraction from the identities and nefarious agendas of our real rulers.  Since the media is all rahrahrah and no help in identifying donors, one must dig deeper to see that corporate billionaires, industry lobbyists, various political action groups including foreign entities and Zionist AIPAC control our very lives with money that walks, talks and gets serviced,…the money that covers both sides of the aisle…the same money that buys airtime for focus-group tested ads, fake journalists and selected experts….the money that disappears like chaff in the wind.

You would have to be a stupid idiot to believe-in this longest running American soap opera or the lines of highly paid actors.  It would seem to be a real reality, but look at who owns the media!  Look at who profits from the greatest bullshit story ever told!  Then look around at our dilapidated infrastructure, our homeless camped on city streets, our polluted environment, our millions of opioid and veteran suicides, poorly educated kids destined for system indoctrination at our vaunted profit-driven universities, our under-performing uber-expensive drug-based healthcare system, our disease-forming processed food industry and our untouchable money-sucking intelligence and “offense” departments.

Our country is not great!  It is a failing decadent empire, as hollow as our figureheads and depleted as the American dollar.  Greedy people have over-mined our natural resources using devious technologies while the wealthy elite parasitize our bodies, minds and labors.  Pollutants, bad drugs and bad information have reduced the cognitive abilities of the public who remain confused in an artificial reality that defies all common sense.

Since my research has centered on human health, I generally avoid politics.  But judging by our unrelenting societal anxiety and physical diseases, it became plain to see the negative health effects of sensational fear mongering, lame public policy, economic deprivation and the general disconnect of an insane narrative.

Cut through the terabytes of fraudulently designed language and look at deliberate government actions in the hard light of day.  Mainstream rhetoric and actual dirty deeds provide a mind-bending disconnect.  The 99% have no recourse in this totally rigged game of thrones. We all saw the vile creatures guilting us for not wearing masks or standing 6ft apart online…the businesses, colleges and hospital death portals that required taking dangerous/useless mRNA vaxxxines…we saw the networks stand foursquare with Fauci’s lyin “The Science”…but we have yet to see a retraction or apology…not for Covid disinformation, not for pushing the invasion of Iraq, not for the Ukraine meat grinder and not for the extermination of Palestinians with our magnificent bombs.

Only a retarded population would accept the tyranny of our fake democracy.  Creating distractions, false consensus, thoughtless compliance, psychic pain and mass stupidity IS JOB ONE of clever establishment trolls who sold their souls for a stinken job.  Shame on these double-dealing dirtbags, if only for insulting my/our intelligence!

The post ‘I Thought I Was in a Hollywood Movie?’ appeared first on LewRockwell.

In an enthusiastically received speech on July 10th to the Washington DC 75th Anniversary NATO Summit, U.S. Secretary of Defense and ‘former’ Raytheon Corporation board member Lloyd Austin strung together lies by the U.S. empire in order to reverse the imperialistic guilt of the U.S. Government for starting the Cold War in order to conquer and take over the entire world, and to pretend that instead the Cold War was and remains an ideological communist-versus-capitalist war in which the Soviet Union was the aggressor, but has now become after 2000 a war between nations that Austin calls “democracies” (which today’s America clearly is not), on the one hand, and nations that he simply assumes are not, on the other.

Appropriately for his lying ‘history’ of this war since 25 July 1945, he twice referred to its creator on 25 July 1945, U.S. President Truman, whose 4 April 1949 “Address on the Occasion of Signing the North Atlantic Treaty” (the NATO Treaty), stated:

Twice in recent years, nations have felt the sickening blow of unprovoked aggression. Our peoples, to whom our governments are responsible, demand that these things shall not happen again.

We are determined that they shall not happen again.

In taking steps to prevent aggression against our own peoples, we have no purpose of aggression against other peoples. To suggest the contrary is to slander our institutions and defame our ideals and our aspirations.

According to the CIA-edited and written Wikipedia (which blacklists (blocks from linking to) sites that aren’t CIA-approved), in its article “List of wars involving the Soviet Union”, during the entire time-span between “1944-1960s”, that list includes only these wars:

Anti-communist insurgencies in Central and Eastern Europe[citation needed]

Guerrilla war in Ukraine (Part of World War II from 1944 to 1945)

Guerrilla war in the Baltic states

Anti-communist resistance in Poland (1944–1953)

Listed as the aggressors in them were:

Soviet Union

East Germany

Polish People’s Republic

Czechoslovak Socialist Republic

Hungarian People’s Republic

Socialist Republic of Romania

People’s Republic of Bulgaria

Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia

Those were the nations that the Soviet Union had liberated from Hitler.

Listed as the defenders (not the aggressors) in these wars were:

Ukrainian Insurgents

Polish Insurgents

Estonian Insurgents

Latvian Insurgents

Lithuanian Insurgents

Bulgarian Insurgents

Those ‘insurgents’ (or ‘guerillas’) were predominantly — and in some nations almost entirely — the forces that were fighting on Hitler’s side in his Operation Barbarossa to conquer the Soviet Union.

When Truman, in his 4 April 1949 “Address on the Occasion of Signing the North Atlantic Treaty”, asserted that “Twice in recent years, nations have felt the sickening blow of unprovoked aggression,” he never made clear which of those wars by the Soviet Union defending itself against Hitler’s Operation Barbaross invasion constituted those “Twice in recent years, nations have felt the sickening blow of unprovoked aggression.” It wasn’t Hitler who had done the “unprovoked aggression”? And that was America’s President right after the passionate opponent of Hitler, FDR, died.

Already at the founding of NATO, this creation by the nazi Truman was an extension from Operation Barbarossa by Truman’s United States Government, in order to take over the world, starting with taking over Russia, which had been America’s most important ally during WW2 under President FDR.

Both FDR and Churchill acknowledged that the coming victory against Hitler was more by the Soviet Union than it was by even the entirety of The West. Near the beginning of FDR’s lengthy fireside chat to the nation on 28 April 1942, he said: “On the European front the most important development of the past year has been without question the crushing counteroffensive on the part of the great armies of Russia against the powerful German Army. These Russian forces have destroyed and are destroying more armed power of our enemies — troops, planes, tanks, and guns — than all the other United Nations [by which he at that time was referring only to the U.S. and the UK’s empire, because he hadn’t yet even met Stalin] put together.” (NOTE: He was already using the phrase “United Nations” with the objective in mind for all of the world’s nations to view themselves as having been saved by the U.N. that FDR was intending ultimately to replace all empires and to be the sole source of international laws.) Near the War’s end, on 19 September 1944, Churchill telegrammed to Stalin “that it is the Russian army that tore the guts out of the German military machine and is at the present moment holding by far the larger portion of the enemy on its front.” As the History Channel’s article “Operation Barbarossa” summed-up: “On 22 June 1941, German forces began their invasion of the Soviet Union, … the most powerful invasion force in history, … 80% of the German army … [plus] 30 divisions of Finnish and Romanian troops. … By the time Germany officially surrendered to the Allies on 8 May 1945, 80% of its casualties during WW2 had come on the Eastern Front [the Soviet Union].” Even Wikipedia’s “Operation Barbarossa” said “The failure of Operation Barbarossa reversed the fortunes of the Third Reich.[30]” However, on 8 May 2020, U.S. President Donald Trump tweeted “On May 8, 1945, America and Great Britain had victory over the Nazis! America’s spirit will always win. In the end, that’s what happens.” So goes the myth (which is cited by both Democratic and Republican politicians), but certainly not  the history.

Furthermore: what was Truman referring to by his “Twice in recent years, nations have felt the sickening blow of unprovoked aggression”? He never said, but why did he call the Soviet Union’s victories against Hitler “unprovoked aggression”? It had been Hitler — and not Stalin — who invaded in Operation Barbarossa, and Stalin — not Hitler — who were defending there. This is how much of an American nazi Mr. Truman had become so soon after he had made the decision on 25 July 1945 for the U.S. Government to take over the entire world. If anything is “sickening” in that statement by him, it is Truman himself.

On that date, 25 July 1945, Truman told the Soviet Union’s leader Joseph Stalin that the U.S. Government would not recognize the legitimacy of its control over the countries that it had conquered from Hitler unless the U.S. Government is granted veto-power over the Soviet Union’s decisions regarding those Governments (both their internal and external affairs); and, in Truman’s letter that night to his wife, Bess, he even gloated over this, by saying:

Russia and Poland have gobbled up a big hunk of Germany and want Britain and us to agree. I have flatly refused. We have unalterably opposed the recognition of police governments in the Germany Axis countries. I told Stalin that until we had free access to those countries and our nationals had their property rights restored, so far as we were concerned there’d never be recognition. He seems to like it when I hit him with a hammer.

Suddenly, the amicable relationship between the U.S. and U.S.S.R., which had prevailed throughout FDR’s three terms in office, and which had won WW2 for the Allies, and which FDR had been planning to continue afterward under the U.N. that FDR had been carefully planning during August 1941 till his death on 12 April 1945, ended in a crash of mutual hostility, because Stalin couldn’t accept Truman’s demand, any more than Truman would have accepted a similar demand from Stalin about the nations that America and its colonies such as the UK had conquered in Europe. Stalin (like FDR would have done if he had survived) made no such demand upon Truman or anyone else, and from that date forward Stalin recognized that unless he could change Truman’s mind on this (which never happened), the U.S. Government would be at war against the Soviet Government. It turned out to be (on the American side at least) a war not actually between capitalism versus communism (as Truman propagandized it to be) but instead between the U.S. against the entire world — to take all of it — as was made clear when U.S. President GHW Bush started, on 24 February 1990, secretly instructing his stooge leaders, such as Helmut Kohl and Francois Mitterrand, that their war against the soon-no-longer-communist Russia would secretly continue until it too becomes a part of the U.S. empire.

Furthermore: whereas there was lots of friction between FDR and Churchill because FDR was an impassioned anti-imperialist and Churchill was an equally impassioned imperialist, FDR’s relationship with Stalin was superb, because both of them were equally impassioned anti-imperialists — about which fact Truman and his followers have been lying constantly.

The current war inside Ukraine — about which Mr. Austin’s speech largely focuses — started with U.S. President Barack Obama’s coup there in 2014, but had been in preparation ever since the Truman Administration. I detailed that fact here.

Austin’s speech was loaded with lies, but I will stop here, because that’s enough to demonstrate his propagandistic intent.

Reprinted with permission from Eric’s Substack.

The post U.S. SecDef Lloyd Austin’s NATO Speech Lies appeared first on LewRockwell.

“If the entire political and media elite can manufacture the lie for 4+ years that candidate now-President Biden isn’t cognitively impaired, what else might they have lied about and are lying about now?” — Stephen Miller

You can’t deny that “Joe Biden” did his goodest last night facing down a half-dozen pre-selected reporters representing blob-adjacent news orgs such as Reuters and NPR at the post-NATO meetup damage-control event billed as a “news conference.” Only a week after he declared himself to be the “first black woman vice-president,” he pivoted to correct the record, telling the DC press corps that he’d “picked Vice-president Trump to be vice-president. . .” and everyone in the room saw that they were back in that mortifying scene in The Caine Mutiny when the confused and incompetent Captain Queeg reaches for the ball bearings in his pocket.

At the end of the harrowing hour, he minced his way offstage, leaving his Party of Chaos evermore sore perplexed as to how they might lever this burnt-out old hack out of the nomination they foolishly secured for him months ago. It ain’t gonna be easy, as “JB” repeatedly insisted he had no intention of stepping aside, despite the forces mustering against him in Congress, the media, and Hollywood. Even CNN is turning on him. Meanwhile, the #VeepTrump clip went viral on social media. So much for damage control.

You understand, don’t you, what a fiasco the 75th Anniversary DC NATO meetup itself was? Everyone in the room, including the key prime ministers and presidents, could sense how flimsy the alliance now appears, as led by our maundering near-zombie president. Like “Joe Biden,” NATO’s raison d’être has been exposed as badly out-of-date and dangerously unhinged. Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg kicked things off declaring that “Ukraine is on an ‘irreversible’ path to NATO.” This controverts what everybody in NATO knows is Mr. Putin’s clearest red line, and is therefore either a jape or a bit of recklessly provocative idiocy.

The truth of the matter is this: following its transition out of the failed Soviet experiment thirty years ago, Russia was never a threat to its European neighbors. All the talk of Vladimir Putin seeking to reassemble the old USSR empire was knowingly false, as is the chatter now about Russia looking to invade Europe. What Russia actually sought was to be regarded, once again, as a normal European nation able to conduct normal business with the rest of Europe. The USA wouldn’t allow it.

Exactly why remains partially mysterious. Surely, post-1991, it was in the interest of US military contractors to maintain their Cold War revenue streams. To do that, a foreign hobgoblin had to be invoked — and perhaps China was not the best candidate, since it had begun manufacturing everything on sale in the Walmart — so Russia, with practically no export economy, was cast in that role. And the politicians, too, surely liked creaming off their share of that military-industrial revenue stream, so they went along policy-wise, with figures like John McCain and Lindsay Graham leading the charge. But the US intel blob and State Department had darker motives, driven by an animus that has slowly revealed itself to be insane — just as the Democratic Party has turned obviously insane, adopting a playbook that could have been written by Franz Kafka.

Being likewise insane, the intel blob and the neocons at State harbored an unappeasable hatred toward Russia that, since the Soviet collapse, allowed no accommodation and gelled into a naked avarice for seizing the resources of Russia with a long-term plan to subvert the Russian state, break it up the way they broke up Serbia in the 1990s, and direct a corporate looting operation of Russia’s oil and mineral riches. Ukraine was the doorway they had to go through to get that done.

And so, the blob and State neocons overthrew democratically-elected Viktor Yanukovych in 2014, and installed Poroshenko followed by Zelensky. Veep “Joe Biden” was given the Ukraine “portfolio,” making him a sort of viceroy, and he took full advantage, plopping his son Hunter on the board of Burisma, the huge Ukrainian natgas company that American oil and gas companies drooled over. Hunter managed to milk the Ukrainian government for tribute to the Biden Family bank accounts far above the roughly million-dollar-a-year salary he grifted from his no-show job on the Burisma board. (Hunter also apparently dabbled in a set of bioweapons labs set up in Ukraine by the CIA.) Thus, along with the sheer insanity of the CIA and State Department, the Biden family had a deep and criminal involvement in Ukraine that had to be concealed.

That degenerate relationship has been revealed since the discovery of the laptop that Hunter stupidly left in a Wilmington computer repair shop, and all the disclosures that have followed — including the sedulous recovery of bank records for the many shell companies the Bidens used to conceal their moneygrubbing in Ukraine and other foreign lands. When Mr. Trump first scented it in the fall of 2019, they impeached him for it. But now that he threatens to return to the White House, the blobists and the Bidens are running out of options to evade an accounting for all this mischief. That desperation is what drives disintegrating “Joe Biden” to remain president and to continue pressing the malevolent and foolish proxy war against hobgoblin Russia and its vilified president, Mr. Putin. So, now you know.

Reprinted with permission from Kunstler.com.

The post The Cover Your Ass Olympics appeared first on LewRockwell.

The executive branch of the United States of America, for almost four years now, has been in the nominal hands of President Joseph R. Biden – a man who was suffering from serious senility even before he took office, and whose mental capacity has declined even further in the time since. There are abundant indications that much or all of Biden’s presidency has been an unacknowledged regency, with a small circle of close advisers and relatives effectively directing the actions of the presidential office. While all elected politicians are to varying degrees the vehicles for other political interests, they nevertheless exercise formal power directly and personally. Biden, however, does not have the capacity to govern on his own; instead, an unelected and partially anonymous Biden Regency has been ruling in his stead. This is a highly unusual state of affairs, and one deserving of far more commentary.

Since 27 June, evidence for the Biden Regency is everywhere, if you know how to look. Numerous reports shed light on the regency’s extent, its tactics and internal functioning and even its relationship to the broader executive:

As I said in an earlier post, it is paramount that regents control access to their charge, because like mentally infirm kings throughout history, Biden is highly impressionable and easy to manipulate. Should somebody else get his ear or secure a claim to ruling on his behalf, the existing regents would find themselves on the outs almost immediately. Thus, as I noted in an earlier post, we have Seymour Hersh’s unconfirmed report that Biden is effectively “a captive,” who has little understanding of what is going on around him. He calls old friends, pleading that his administration is “in chaos,” and his staff eagerly block his access to outsiders. They have exercised this tight control since the beginning of Biden’s presidency, which would suggest that the regents govern not so much by telling Biden what to do or by issuing orders on his behalf, as they do by presenting the president with a highly manipulated model of the world that nudges him towards the desired decisions.

Those regents closest to their charge have an interest in publicising their position, because it is difficult to wield unacknowledged power. Thus we find this amazing Washington Examiner report from 2022 about the efforts of Jill Biden to establish elements of presidential ceremony for herself:

The Marine Corps band was instructed last fall to come up with an entrance theme for the first lady, a source told the Washington Examiner. The band now has in its repertoire an original composition titled “Fanfare for the First Lady.” The song … is essentially Jill Biden’s personal “Hail to the Chief,” in that it is to be performed and repeated at official White House functions, from her first appearance until she is ready to speak. …

The band was “rushed” to provide the entrance song for the first lady, the source said, adding the Marine Corps band submitted a few options for the White House’s consideration. The first lady’s handlers settled eventually on the original piece “Fanfare to the First Lady.”

The song is apparently terrible, but I can’t find any online recordings to confirm. Jill Biden’s press secretary naturally denies the story and insists that the Marine Corps band came up with the idea on their own. Because the Biden Regency is an unacknowledged political arrangement, the first lady cannot be too open with her pretensions, but there are probably risks in being too hidden about them as well. It’s important, for example, that outsiders know who speaks for the president and who has the final word.

Although Biden is the tool of others, he must still enact the presidential office, and not only in public, but also – incredibly – within the confines of his own White House. His public appearances and private meetings are therefore tightly choreographed theatrical events, until recently staged with the total complicity of the press:

… [T]here have been clear signs throughout his term of Biden being increasingly stage-managed, with lists of talking points, names of questioners and drawings of where he should walk presented to him by aides. Ahead of closed-door Cabinet meetings that Biden attends, it is customary for Cabinet officials to submit questions and key talking points that they plan to present in front of Biden ahead of time to White House aides, two sources with direct knowledge told CNN.

These procedures are necessary so that the president’s regents can pre-formulate how Biden will discuss policy with and direct his own subordinates. This means that the Biden Regency must be a very confined group; even at the highest levels of government, Biden has to perform his own presidency:

“The entire display is kind of an act,” one of those sources told CNN. “They would come and say, ‘Hey, the president is going to call on you about 25 minutes in, and ask this question. What are the bullet points you’ll respond with?’”

The second source, who echoed that same description, said when Biden attends Cabinet meetings, they are “not free-wheeling, and pretty well-orchestrated.” And the meetings themselves are infrequent, with one Cabinet secretary telling CNN they are uncertain of Biden’s condition because they so rarely see him.

In fact, the last full Cabinet meeting took place on October 2, 2023. Sources also said Cabinet meetings during the Obama years, which Biden attended as vice president, were not pre-scripted this way.

Since the public fiction of Biden’s mental competence collapsed, Biden’s regents themselves appear in these stories. Intriguingly, with the exception of Jill Biden, they are almost always anonymous:

… [S]ources blamed the president’s inner circle of advisers and family for what they said has become a painstakingly choreographed daily operation designed to prevent him from being in unscripted settings for extended periods of time.

“There’s this general sense of just, unbelievable holding your breath every time he does an event, every time he’s with people,” one top Democrat in close touch with Biden’s inner circle of advisers told CNN. This person added that some of those advisers have privately acknowledged: “This is going to get worse.”

That Democrat was blunt about how the president’s closest advisers have responded to any criticism or concerns expressed about the president – including his age and fitness: “Everyone who expresses any level of suspicion or contrary views? They call everyone and they beat the s*** out of them and say: ‘Stay on message.’”

The Biden Regency have fought ruthlessly to keep their charade going for a very long time, and until recently opposing them was very dangerous. Now they are on the defensive, and many are free to air their long-accumulated grievances. This is surely one reason that the tide turned so fiercely against Biden after his public humiliation. Now the press will no longer overlook Biden’s gaffes, and a growing number of his opponents know precisely how to discredit the Biden Regency – by forcing ever more unscripted public appearances on the president, like the news conference yesterday evening. These then become occasions for articles like this one, on “Biden’s false and misleading claims.”

Read the Whole Article

The post The Curious Case of the Biden Regency appeared first on LewRockwell.