Lew Rockwell Institute

The fear of nuclear war is apparently affecting some European states, despite the deeply irresponsible actions taken by their governments. A major French newspaper recently published an article claiming that French politicians are worried about the possibility of a “third world war.” It is curious to see this kind of “concern” among the French, given that Paris has been one of the most destabilizing agents in the ongoing proxy conflict between NATO and Russia.

The article exposes the reasons why French politicians fear a global escalation of violence. Citing anonymous diplomats, Le Monde claims that the French do not want to see an open confrontation between Moscow and NATO, allegedly seeking to take steps to prevent an escalation. Diplomats said that Russia could expand its military actions in retaliation for certain actions taken by the West, which would mean the start of a global war.

Obviously, the main Western escalatory move would be to authorize strikes against Russian targets far from the conflict zone. European fears of a world war are especially heightened at the moment due to the widespread debate over whether or not to authorize Ukraine to use long-range missiles against targets in “deep Russia,” which explains Le Monde’s narrative.

“[Allowing attacks against ‘deep Russia’] would mean that NATO countries, the US and European countries are at war with Russia (…) Everything must be done to avoid a third world war (…) You can’t just dismiss the possibility of the Russians expanding the scope of the war,” said one of Le Monde’s diplomatic sources.

For now, all Western countries refuse to allow such strikes. There were expectations among pro-Ukrainian militants that authorization would be announced during the recent joint visit of American and British officials to Kiev, but this did not happen. As far as the Europeans are concerned, there seems to be an even greater fear of escalation, which is why the French and Germans (who are supposedly the joint “leaders” of the European Union) do not plan to change their position on deep strikes.

“We think we should allow them to neutralize the military sites from which the missiles are fired, and basically the military sites from which Ukraine is being attacked, but we must not allow them to hit other targets in Russia, civilian capabilities naturally, or other military targets,” Macron said during a recent joint statement with Scholz in Germany.

It is curious to see this kind of fear on the part of the French. On the one hand, the fear seems absolutely rational, since Europe would be the most affected side in a direct war between Russia and NATO. It is natural that the Europeans want to do everything possible to prevent the conflict from escalating to a direct phase. With the possible exception of Poland and the Baltics which are states extremely affected by the anti-Russian madness, all European countries fear becoming targets in a situation of global conflict.

However, until recently, France itself was the biggest destabilizing agent in the conflict. Macron was the Western leader who most escalated anti-Russian rhetoric, even promising to send official French troops to fight alongside Kiev. It was precisely the fear of a direct war that made Macron reduce his anti-Russian attitudes in recent months, as Moscow made it clear that all French military personnel on Ukrainian soil would be legitimate and priority targets. Now, Macron no longer depends on his own decisions to avoid a direct war – he is at the mercy of the conscience and strategic sense of the Americans, who actually lead NATO.

It is important for Western analysts and officials to understand that WWIII has already “de facto” begun. There is a Western-led international coalition that has been attacking the Russian Federation for two years. The nature of the current conflict is absolutely international, and there are even other fronts outside Ukraine – as in the case of Western-backed terrorists attacking Russian citizens in African countries. Fearing the beginning of an open phase of the conflict is reasonable, but it is important to understand that this “world war” is already a reality – precisely because of the irresponsible actions of Western countries, including France.

Given the fear of escalation, Europeans should break with the US and NATO, seeking to free themselves from the consequences of the conflict by reestablishing ties with Russia. Unfortunately, however, European subservience is bigger than their fear. If the US authorizes deep strikes, it is likely that, despite their fear, all European countries will endorse the measure immediately.

This article was originally published on InfoBrics.

The post French Politicians ‘Fearing’ Global Escalation appeared first on LewRockwell.

Looking back, 2024 may well be viewed as insignificant compared to what lies ahead.

That 2024 could be a year of no significance does not compute given that what’s being touted as the most important election in American history is 2024’s landmark event, but in the focus of the longer lens of history, it may not matter as much as we expect.

If the election wasn’t enough, the all-time stock market highs are the cherries on top.

The issue here isn’t the people or the politics or the policies; it’s the system itself reaching its limits, having exhausted all potential for the scale of change needed to stave off collapse. To better understand this historical context, we turn to Ray Huang’s meticulous study of Chinese history, 1587, A Year of No Significance: The Ming Dynasty in Decline:

“The year 1587 may seem to be insignificant; nevertheless, it is evident by that time the limit for the Ming dynasty had already been reached. It no longer mattered whether the ruler was conscientious or irresponsible, whether his chief counselor was enterprising or conformist, whether the generals were resourceful or incompetent, whether the civil officials were honest or corrupt, or whether the leading thinkers were radicals or conservatives–in the end they all failed to reach fulfillment.”

In other words, it no longer matters who’s nominally in charge, or the policies being put in place: the system has lost the capacity to adapt radically enough to surmount the novel challenges it now faces. That the Ming Dynasty–and many other imperial regimes throughout history–faced the same limits is unsurprising when we recall that humanity is still running Wetware 1.0, the operating system that enabled our emergence as a unique species around 200,000 years ago. We are hard-wired to reach a point of hubristic, delusional faith in our own godlike powers which invites Nemesis. We’re there, but we don’t yet realize it.

There are several key dynamics at work in this systemic exhaustion of the capacity to adapt radically enough to matter. One is self-interest: everyone getting a slice of the pie–from those receiving SNAP food stamps to billionaires evading taxes–has a stake in maintaining the status quo, and so nobody wants to risk upsetting the apple cart for fear that the change might reduce or eliminate their slice of the pie.

The net result is everyone will resist any reform radical enough to actually address the overlapping crises which threaten the status quo, which is every radical reform.

Here is Huang’s summary of this same dynamic in 1587: “The bureaucratic rule of the empire had reached such an advanced stage that all the hidden needs and wants of thousands of individuals, along with their personal aspirations, were irreversibly linked to the gigantic status quo; now even an urgently needed technical reform could not be overtly attempted to disturb the delicate balance.”

This delicate balance is currently maintained by borrowing as many trillions of dollars as needed to satisfy every constituency, from SNAP recipients to billionaires. That this is unsustainable is taboo, of course, but beneath the surface, the impossibility of maintaining this delicate balance is the core driver of the extreme political polarization that makes radical reform impossible: given that the delicate balance is unsustainable, the challenge now is to settle who wins and who loses, a battle that evaporates any middle ground and amplifies polarization.

This is the heart of Huang’s study of Ming decline: the systems in place are limited by their structure such that any reform that will be acceptable to the system’s dependents will leave the system–that requires radical reform to avoid collapse–completely untouched. “Innovations” and “reforms” can only be superficial and for show.

Read the Whole Article

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Israel just turned thousands of Lebanese people into involuntary suicide bombers in the name of fighting terrorism.

At least nine people have been killed and thousands injured in an attack in Lebanon which reportedly involved pagers packed with explosives being remotely detonated around the country, often in civilian areas. An eight year-old girl is reportedly among the dead.

According to The New York Times, unnamed officials from the US and elsewhere are saying that Israel planted the explosive materials in the pagers before they reached Lebanon after Hezbollah ordered them from a Taiwanese manufacturer.

The US is denying any foreknowledge of the attack, but that’s what they always do. We’re always asked to believe that the US never knew anything about attacks conducted by nations like Israel and Ukraine until they read about it in the news, and that their massive intelligence cartel and sprawling surveillance networks never pick up any information and exist for no reason.

Take a look at where people were and who they were surrounded by when their pagers exploded.
Can you see the young child just steps away?
This was an indiscriminate attack by Israel on civilians in Lebanon, and it falls under the West’s supposed definition of terrorism.
We’ve… pic.twitter.com/L68YN6TeZA

— Dr. Sabreena Ghaffar-Siddiqui (@sabreenaGS) September 17, 2024

This was a terror attack by any possible definition. If Hezbollah had detonated a bunch of devices held by Israeli forces in public spaces without knowing who was near them when they went off, every paper in the western world would have called it a terror attack. But because it was Israelis targeting Hezbollah (a political party which is part of the Lebanese government and has many civilian members), it’s only being called “explosions”.

“Hezbollah blames Israel after deadly pager explosions in Lebanon,” reads the headline from the BBC.

“Thousands injured in Lebanon as pagers used by Hezbollah explode,” says The Washington Post.

“Exploding pagers belonging to Hezbollah kill at least 8 and injure more than 2,700 in Lebanon,” says NBC News.

No condemnations from western officials. No thoughts and prayers for the victims. No pledges to bring the terrorists to justice. Just the news media going oh wow, some pagers exploded.

Got that, kids? It’s only terrorism when the Official Bad Guys do it. When the Official Good Guys do it, it’s just giving those Bad Guys a sorely needed exploding.

if Hamas, Hezbollah, or any group or person exploded electronic devices in Israel and killed children, it would be described by the entire Western media class as a horrific act of wanton evil sadistic terrorism. Israel does it and it’s seen as an epic based move to be celebrated

— (@zei_squirrel) September 17, 2024

The unprecedented nature and scale of this attack has raised a lot of concerns from a lot of directions. We all use electronic devices in our daily lives, and weaponizing them at mass scale is naturally going to scare people.

“If it were iPhones that were leaving the factory with explosives inside, the media would be a hell of a lot faster to cotton on to what a horrific precedent has been set today. Nothing can justify this. It’s a crime. A crime. And everyone in the world is less safe for it,” tweeted NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden.

“What Israel has just done is, via *any* method, reckless. They blew up countless numbers of people who were driving (meaning cars out of control), shopping (your children are in the stroller standing behind him in the checkout line), et cetera. Indistinguishable from terrorism,” Snowden also said.

What strikes me watching all this is how gratuitously creepy it is. Israel is so creepy. Everyone already sees them as rapey genocidal baby killers, and then they have to go and commit this weird terror attack in the creepiest way possible and freak everyone out, to no clear and meaningful strategic gain. They’re so creepy they can’t stop themselves from always choosing the creepiest course of action.

Israel is gross.

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Sweden and France now ban cell phones in school.

Digitalization of youth has had serious adverse effects on physical and cognitive development. Having raised a generation of youth unable to function because they are digitalized-addicted, Sweden, France, and other European countries are eliminating cell phones from the school day.

As I have often said, the digital revolution is the third worst thing that dumbs..t humanity has brought upon itself other than nuclear weapons and American biowarfare laboratories.

Mothers harassed with trying to keep up in a men’s world substituted digitalization for motherhood. The consequences are dire.

Grandparents report that their grandchildren instead of acquiring skills wasted their period of cognitive development playing video games and scrolling cell phones. Consequently, they are incapable of working or comprehending the requirements for their survival. Their world is a world of entertainment.

The child-unsafe Tower-of-Babel-Sodom-and-Gomorrah-society that the liberal-left have created for Americans has left parents at the mercy of the Child Protective Services Gestapo. Consequently, mothers have added over-protection to the plague of digitalization, and the consequence is the inability of youth to develop into confident and capable people. It leaves the youth of our time susceptible to tyranny.

In my day, we grew up in fights on the school play yard during recess, with each boy proving by his willingness to fight that he couldn’t be bullied. The teachers who were playground monitors never interfered with the right of passage unless things got out of hand. But by that time another boy had intervened by taking up the fight of the defeated kid. Bullies were short-lived on the playgrounds of my youth. Most of us grew up believing in ourselves. It is this constraint on inappropriate and unacceptable behavior that is missing today. Today Americans lack the confidence to confront the tyranny that is encompassing them. They take refuge in the fake news of their oppressors while their liberty dwindles. See here.

The post The Digital Revolution Is the Prime Enabler of Tyranny appeared first on LewRockwell.

Ludwig von Mises depicts the aim of revolutionary socialism as: “to clear the ground for building up a new civilization by liquidating the old one.” One of the main strategies in liquidating a civilization involves dismantling its legal and philosophical foundations. This role is fulfilled by activists who embark upon “sabotage and revolution” by subverting the meaning of words: “The socialists have engineered a semantic revolution in converting the meaning of terms into their opposite.”

George Orwell famously called this subversive language “Newspeak.” Peter Foster describes Newspeak as “a sort of totalitarian Esperanto that sought gradually to diminish the range of what was thinkable by eliminating, contracting, and manufacturing words.”

Mises explains that dictators express their ideas in Newspeak precisely because, if they did not, nobody would support their schemes:

This reversal of the traditional connotation of all words of the political terminology is not merely a peculiarity of the language of the Russian Communists and their Fascist and Nazi disciples. The social order that in abolishing private property deprives the consumers of their autonomy and independence, and thereby subjects every man to the arbitrary discretion of the central planning board, could not win the support of the masses if they were not to camouflage its main character. The socialists would have never duped the voters if they had openly told them that their ultimate end is to cast them into bondage. (emphasis added)

In the proliferation of Newspeak, the reinterpretation of “human rights” has proved to be one of the most powerful weapons of sabotage and revolution. Activists have seized control of a vast empire of international law, NGOs, and human rights charities with a global network of staff who monitor respect for “human rights.” They wield their significant influence in the human rights industry to undermine human liberty by redefining the meaning of “human rights” to denote the antidiscrimination principle. Under the banner of equality and nondiscrimination, they restrict free speech and other human liberties. In other words, the doctrine of “human rights” now denotes the precise opposite: the destruction of human liberty.

The “human right” to non-discrimination

Human rights no longer mean what many might suppose: the right to life, liberty, and property. The vast corpus of human rights in international law has been categorized by Karel Vašák into three: civil-political, socio-economic, and collective-developmental. These categories are said to encompass negative rights (things the state must not do, such interfering with life, liberty, or property), positive rights (things the state must do, for example, provide citizens with food, shelter, education, healthcare, etc.), and rights of solidarity between citizens such as wealth redistribution through social welfare schemes and equal participation in economic progress through measures such as the minimum wage or equal pay.

Human rights organizations monitor progress against these categories and ensure that the legal system works in favor of socialist goals and against liberty. For example, the United Nations human rights program educates the public on the need to eradicate “hate speech” and interprets “equal protection” of the law, as a fundamental human right, to mean protection from hate speech. The UN says:

Addressing hate speech does not mean limiting or prohibiting freedom of speech. It means keeping hate speech from escalating into more something more dangerous, particularly incitement to discrimination, hostility and violence, which is prohibited under international law.

From that description, it can be seen that the UN takes a concept which is well-established in the criminal law, namely, prohibiting incitement to violence, and links it to notions of incitement to discrimination and incitement to hostility, which have never before been recognized as crimes. They annex discrimination and hostility to the charge of inciting violence because, if they did not, it would be immediately clear to everyone that criminalizing “discrimination” or “hostility” amounts to nothing less than Newspeakian crimethink.

The meaning of human rights

In his article, “There’s no such thing as Human Rights,” the British journalist Peter Hitchens argues that,

Human rights do not exist. They are an invention, made out of pure wind. If you are seriously interested in staying free, you should not rely on these flatulent, vague phrases to help you.

They are in fact a weapon in the hands of those who wish to remove your liberty and transform society, though this is probably an accident. It is only in the past 50 years or so that radical judges have realised these baseless declarations can be used (for example) to abolish national frontiers or give criminals the right to vote.

In that context, Hitchens is referring not to the ancient liberties protected by Magna Carta, but to the Newspeakian rights now enshrined in human rights instruments, such as the UN Declaration of Human Rights and the European Convention on Human Rights. Human rights have been transformed into wooly concepts which merely reflect political and partisan demands.

Murray Rothbard avoids the ambiguity surrounding the meaning of human rights by defining them as property rights. In the Ethics of Liberty, he explains:

…the concept of “rights” only makes sense as property rights. For not only are there no human rights which are not also property rights, but the former rights lose their absoluteness and clarity and become fuzzy and vulnerable when property rights are not used as the standard.

In the first place, there are two senses in which property rights are identical with human rights: one, that property can only accrue to humans, so that their rights to property are rights that belong to human beings; and two, that the person’s right to his own body, his personal liberty, is a property right in his own person as well as a “human right.” But more importantly for our discussion, human rights, when not put in terms of property rights, turn out to be vague and contradictory, causing liberals to weaken those rights on behalf of “public policy” or the “public good.”

Thus, the Rothbardian interpretation of human rights denotes the universal right to self-ownership and private property that vests in all human beings.

Bureaucratic reinterpretation

In practice, the meaning of human rights is subject to interpretation by courts or other law enforcement officials. Therefore, human rights ultimately mean only what they are interpreted to mean by law enforcement, not what they may theoretically, politically, or philosophically. Lowell B. Mason, an attorney and former chair of the Federal Trade Commission explains the significance of bureaucratic interpretation by observing wryly that:

When in private practice I never told clients what the law was; I always told them what the bureaucrats thought the law was… The legality or illegality of what you do often depends not on the words of a statute enacted by your elected representatives, but on the state of the collective liver of a dozen anonymous bureaucrats.

Being well aware of this, the goal of activists is to ensure that “human rights” are interpreted so as to advance their goals. This explains the concerted efforts to depict “hate speech” as a human rights violation. In this way the commitment of states to protecting “human rights” is transformed, through the prism of the antidiscrimination principle, into an edict to prohibit hate speech. The word “hate” is interpreted to mean having the temerity to disagree with socialists, and similarly, the word “equality” is interpreted to mean wealth redistribution to achieve equality of material conditions.

Mason explains how it is possible for bureaucrats, charged with law enforcement, to reinterpret the Constitution to suit whatever they think the law ought to achieve. No matter how carefully a law is drafted, it will always require interpretation, and this is where the bureaucrats strike as they purport to be applying the “evolving” meaning of the Constitution. Mason explains:

“Of course,” he will reassure you, “the Constitution still stands as a bulwark to liberty but it is a growing instrument that adapts itself to the times, and while it has not been repealed or amended, it has necessarily been reinterpreted so that due process (as it was known in the past) no longer unduly encumbers the administration of the law.”

Through Newspeak, the Constitution itself has been reinterpreted, enabling socialists to claim that they support free speech and also support the prohibition of “hate speech.” Mises explains that this subverts the concept of freedom into its very opposite: “Freedom implies the right to choose between assent and dissent. But in Newspeak it means the duty to assent unconditionally and strict interdiction of dissent.” In that sense, the concept of “hate speech” is not compatible with free speech. In denoting any dissent as “hate,” it is the very negation of free speech and freedom of thought. Through Orwellian Newspeak, ordinary words like “liberty,” “justice,” and “equality”—values that most people would support—have been subverted and harnessed to promote socialism.

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I think so too.  One thing that was nice when I lived in Bolivia is that the things one could buy over the counter without a prescription was much larger.  I could go to a Lab and ask for a full blood test without having to visit a primary doctor and get his okay and all that.  I was there last year and got the fullest test for about 30 dollars or twenty something.  It is a wonderful feeling of freedom knowing that you are getting it for the asking and that you are avoiding the obstacle of the primary doctor visit and the problem that maybe he will disagree that you need a full test and just be willing to sign off for a partial one.  My father was very ill ina hospital last year there. The doctor told the family that his antibiotic was not working and to go try to find another one he mentioned, saying it was hard to find.  He did not write an order for it.  They looked for it all over town, found it, bought it as in ‘over the counter.’  This is only anecdotical but I met a woman this year who told me she has been taking unapproved (or still being tested) drugs for more than 20 years in Bakersfield.  She asks for her cancer treatment to be based on such drugs and the hospital gives them to her; Kern Medical is an ‘acute care’ health provider.  Perhaps certain institutions like Kern Medical give access to unapproved drugs for things like cancer.  Her cancer has been in remission since that long ago.  She said she took a variety of them, “whatever was available” and she only wanted such “alternative” treatment.  I don’t know how it is, or if it depends on each state, but maybe there is easy access to unapproved drugs through health providers like Kern Medical.

Kern Medical | Healthcare Services in Kern County, CA

Mises: “Is not the harm a man can inflict on his mind and soul even more disastrous than any bodily evils?”

It was beautiful in the 80s, 70s and before.  I really doubt Mises would have held the same position in this time.  I think right now of the condom sales company that is getting an obscene amount of air time on MSNBC (just one such example).  Scantily dressed gals appear saying how much they want him to buy the condom (small children should not watch it), a commercial unthinkable in the 70s and 80s.  It’s so unusual that I wonder if they even pay for their air time like others would have to pay.  Why would only they be interested in such air time?  In 1980-1981, oil companies had TV commercials, cornflakes did, many businesses, but no condom or sexual dysfunction products.  Today, it is basically only these that get air time.  And we’re supposed to think it’s just business and not a demonic attack against our humanity.  There are also the LGBTQ commercials.  The insinuations mixed with a product name that is hard to remember because of the scenes presented are the normal thing today.  A man enters his home.  Another man inside walks out in his red underwear and just steps out through a back door and walks dancing towards the limits of the property and it ends with the camera filming his dance from behind.  What is it all supposed to mean?  What does it have to do with “business”? What kind of higher power does this company have to get so much air time?  Who is behind such commercials?  “Freedom” is the pathway for their control of the airwaves.  But with such “freedom” (freedom would be to forbid such indoctrination), we have as a matter of fact a country with more mass murders and social pathologies than perhaps any other Western country.  Maybe the rest get these from us.

I remember an oblique reference from Mises to a public housing project in Austria which had been closed to homosexual people.  They had been expelled.  It seemed to me that he agreed and liked that normal families would now live there instead of them.  He did not embrace in that instance the idea that such couples had a right to congregate there, and obviously not the right of others to orchestrate that kind of outcome.  It’s different when it’s private, but I think it’s an example where Mises approved a policy because of the morality and decency it produced.  Would he approve a decent State that saw the social demonic attack of such “products,” recognized its effects in the unprecedented social pathologies produced, and decided to fight force with force and make things decent again?  I would like the state to say to them: “Do you still forbid foul words in your commercials, and why?  For the same reason, this list of indecent commercials will never be shown again.  It’s part of our war against terror.  You have 24 hours to get rid of all of them or all of you shall be arrested tomorrow.  This is freedom.  It’s the war against terror, you know how it is…”  I would like to see them act and speak like they did with the terror suspect in his arrest.

Would Mises approve of that?  Not if we go by that quote.  However, give him our set of facts and he would probably understand.  I can’t imagine him opposing the cancelling of such commercials.

I watched 1980s commercials sometime ago.  Beautiful commercials, their music was soothing, pleasant, the content businesslike.  There should be no “freedom” to move from that to what we are given now.  As terrorism itself shows or demonstrates, we live at a time when the supernatural realm and the natural realm, so much theorized about in all of human history, are interacting like never before, and we are attacked, and there is the need to be both wise and strong.  Anyone fighting against humanity itself is an enemy with no “freedom” to do so.  It would be wrong to call his crime something else and give him the freedom to do it.

In 2024, the answer to his question is still “yes” (and that lucky are those who never saw it).  I think he would like the cancellation of all “woke” and pervert TV commercials, like he liked it when the homosexuals who had taken over some public housing were expelled in Austria (I think this is in “Notes and Recollections”, must be there).

RE: “Questions Swirl Around Would-Be Trump Assassin’s Ukrainian Ties”

Again, a shooter was ready to kill the president.   All he needed to do is not be detected like he was.  The rest of the difficulties that should exist didn’t.  Before, anyone could climb to the roof and shoot the president.  Now, it’s like anyone could walk to the fence and shoot the president.  He wore an orange T-shirt as if to be noticed?  That’s like terrorism (people are mocked).  I don’t know if the backpacks were placed on the fence for the picture, or if he placed them like that.  There is not much shrubbery there.  Everything is abnormal about it.  That’s like terrorism always.  The authorities are best at engaging in self-praise that is out of place and dislikeable.  That’s how they are lousy.

It’s always difficult for any normal or sane person to decide to commit such an act knowing that he won’t be free for the rest of his life if he does it and survives.  So far, the key person is the witness.  It’s necessary to know his past as much as the past of the culprit.  To me, it’s 50-50 (now) that he saw what he saw, and 50-50 that the culprit was even there.  It is odd that the agent(s) who fired at him did not kill him or struck him.  According to the NYT, they aimed at the muzzle of the rifle.  They did not hit the rifle, we understand.  If the shooter had remained calm, he could have then fired in the direction of the president.  To aim at the rifle only may ensure that the shooter escapes, and then all will be contingent on someone else seeing him escape and taking his license plate number, which is too much to expect.  Is that the set procedure for it?  It was/is odd how much this agent was praised by federal and local law enforcement.  He saw the man there because he had to be looking for such a possibility.  After that, he could have shot toward the sky with this procedure.

NYT: “According to the complaint, which you can read here, a Secret Service agent patrolling ahead of Trump — who was golfing with staff members and a friend a few hundred yards away — noticed the barrel of a rifle poking out of the bushes on the edge of the course at around 1:30 p.m. After the agent fired at it, Routh fled in a Nissan S.U.V. with a stolen license plate, which the police stopped about 45 minutes later…”

The goal should be to detect and understand the supernatural role in this other terrorist attack, but they don’t notice its role in the previous attack.  Why would the culprit stick the muzzle out as if there were no agents to see it and the president was beyond view as they say?  It’s as if Trump had been visible at that moment.    Waiting there for 11 hours?  He counted with no one inspecting the surroundings?  Someone with spiritual experience should interrogate him.  These agents can’t recognize the fake videos of the previous attack.

The bodycam of the “municipal officer” who climbed the roof and went back down as soon as he saw the “rifle,” shows that it was another roof and there was no person in it.  Glad I wrote, and that LRC published, articles which exposed such details.

From seclusion, Trump could campaign as never has been done before and probably ensure a clear victory (I think so).  Online, he could debate Kamalah again (the context would give him a debate victory; it would be she who promotes him by accepting the debate).

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As individual citizens, as voters and taxpayers we have been so deeply, so consistently, so relentlessly indoctrinated, so blindly radicalized, and so thoroughly and easily subjugated and ideologically manipulated that, by now, it has become terribly challenging for any of us to even entertain any viewpoint or any opinion that is opposed to our own.

It is next to impossible for a single individual to find the strength of character or the moral fortitude to raise doubts, questions or objections against the prevalent dogmatic proclamations (arguments built upon the idea that any statement can be true and valid as long as a figure of authority declares it so – even if common sense or public opinion opposes it). It is nearly inconceivable for an ordinary person to defy convention and conformity and to embrace basic human instincts instead, by giving in to primal urges like curiosity, inquisitiveness, creativity and innovation.  It has become unthinkable, unacceptable and even unforgivable to harbor, to foster and to pursue any original thought, especially if said thought is perceived as dissenting, deviating or dismissive towards the myriads of forced narratives and “universal truths” have been imposed upon the body politic since time immemorial.

For example, no-one is allowed to question the need (or, more accurately, the lack thereof) for a State machine or for a government or for any other kind of centralized authority. It is generally taken for granted and it is seen as a “given” that some kind of central, “top down” administration has to exist, in order for any civilized society to emerge and to function. In most western nations, it is also seen as self-evident that the most efficient and effective way to choose this all-important and all-powerful leadership is to go through the democratic process and to ascertain the majority’s wishes, to be guided by the “will of the people” and to strive towards the “greater good” – or differently put, to prioritise the interests of the many over the interests of the few, to maximize the welfare, the protection and the prosperity of the “average” voter over the needs and even over the natural rights of any divergent individual – society as a whole is seen as infinitely more important than the actual human beings who constitute it.

This kind of brutally utilitarian, entirely soulless and deplorably materialistic view of mankind is truly alarming. Looking at people as mere parts of a whole, dehumanizing them by treating them as interchangeable cogs in a machine, and denying them their basic human dignity by dismissing their individuality, the unique experiences, the choices and the sacrifices that shaped them is a dangerously reductive and recklessly myopic way of looking at the world and especially trying to understand our role or our purpose in it. This unfeeling and distorted perspective, that values human achievements, feats of ingenuity or creativity, and general human progress only if they serve and further the interests of the collective inevitably reduces every individual to an inconsequential, inhuman, readily replaceable automaton, dominated and controlled by genetically pre-programmed commands and primal instincts and hardwired to value social acceptance, group membership and conformity over anything else.

This point of view is eerily and worryingly similar to the way we view an ant colony or a bee hive. We marvel at the coordination, the synchronization, the communication, the assimilation and the harmonization that these remarkable creatures demonstrate. We are impressed and fascinated by their collective behaviors, patterns and skills, and we are captivated by their capacity to act in perfect unison and to function as a single “super-organism” with a unified purpose and consolidated will. Our admiration of successful colonies and productive hives, our respect for these complex and spectacular systems, and our delight at the precision, persistence and resilience that permeates their life’s work makes it near-impossible for most people to inflict any harm upon such a collective, provided it poses no physical threat of course.

Having seen and fully appreciated the marvelous intricacies, the impenetrable cohesion and the meticulous organization of an ant colony or the seemingly spontaneous order, the efficiency and the productivity of a bee hive, the vast majority of sane, sensible people would instinctively be inclined to protect and preserve natural formations of this sort, as they stand as a testament to the power of the collective. No-one in their right mind would purposefully and unprovokedly destroy a buzzing bee hive or a dynamic ant colony. However, the same cannot be said for the individual members of systems like these. A single ant or a solitary bee enjoy no such reverence; to the contrary, they are treated as pests, they stir only feelings of annoyance or disgust and they are thus summarily and almost automatically exterminated.

This analogy holds up very well as an illustration of how the powers that be look at the individual citizen. They too seek to protect and preserve the collective, they too appreciate the “public” as a whole – after all, there can be no government if there’s no body to govern. That’s why the faceless, soulless, abstract “masses”, the “citizenry”, the “body politic”, or whatever else one chooses to call this human super-organism, is vitally important to those who seek power and control. However, no respect, or even no compassion, is extended to the individual citizen.

Much like we consider the life, the suffering and the death of the aforementioned defenseless insects to be totally insignificant and entirely irrelevant to our own lives, so do the rulers look upon the ruled. And just like most of us would not think twice before crushing an ant with our shoe, so do the powers that be feel about crushing bothersome individuals.

The only real difference is that most human collectives are controlled by the illusion of choice, the idea of self determination and the promise of personal agency. The notion that everyone’s voice is heard in the ballot box and the fantasy of “Vox Populi, Vox Dei”, despite being completely devoid of any meaning, have managed to sustain Western democracies for centuries. The public’s blind faith that “the system works”, that each vote counts as much as the next and that everyone has the same power to influence an election outcome might sound outrageously naive to the rational, clear-eyed observer, but it is this sheer wishful thinking that underpins and supports almost every western nation.

What is even more astounding is that even when the deception becomes apparent, this illusion of choice remains. In the West, we have for decades been subjected to the illusion of choice between two ideologically opposed political parties. However, everything makes a lot more sense once one realizes that the right wing and the left wing are attached to the same bird.

Every election cycle, including the one we’re in the middle of (with 2024 being the biggest election year in history based on the number of different national elections around the globe), we see this false dichotomy and yet the vast majority of the population still fall for it. Voting for the whomever presents themselves as a “conservative” means you’re either a fascist or a true patriot. Conversely, voting for left leaning parties makes you either moral and compassionate or a raging Marxist. This is an obviously childish view of the world, but it is where are presently standing in the political public dialogue. It is an intentionally bombastic, obnoxious and loud way of presenting the two choices to the average citizen and it is meant to distract them from the fact that there have actually no choice at all.

No matter who wins, the State machine keep humming along unperturbed. Sure, you might see some inconsequential and largely symbolic popular policies passed into law, like a tax cut here or an extra welfare benefit there, but the things that really matter, the decisions, the funding, the structural management of the country is totally unaffected. Wars, division, government powers and control, suppression of free speech, they all keep growing, along with the size of the State machine itself.

We saw this in recent European elections. The media at time claimed this year’s vote to be historic and all-defining in Belgium, France and in the UK. They turned out to be nothing of the sort. The people voted for the right in the first two examples and for the left in the latter case. Absolutely nothing changed in all cases, both wars are still ongoing, ECB-created inflation is still raging, individual freedoms are still being disregarded. The example of France, is particularly illuminating, as the popular vote was essentially ignored when previously warring parties entered into a coalition to block them from taking charge.

What voters fail to consider time and time again, is that the choice they are given is the same as the one Henry Ford gave to his customers when it came to selecting a color for their new car: “they can have whatever color they want, as long as it is black”.

It is entirely irrational to expect a different result when we keep doing the same thing over and over. Participating in this circus, turning against our neighbors and allowing ideological obsession to blind us to common sense and human empathy is not the way forward. The only sustainable path for reasonable, freedom loving people is to seek like-minded individuals and just “opt out” of this irreparably corrupt and unsalvageable system. The moment we all understand that the true enemy is not to our left nor to our right, but has been crushing us with his boot from above the entire time, is the moment we can start to regain control over our own lives.

For further information, please visit: www.claudiograss.ch

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Why does the US government hate the American people? Why does the US government try to destroy us?

The Anti-White American Democrats are Incapable of Understanding that an illegal alien does not become part of a national community by unlawfully entering it, any more than a thief becomes an owner of property by stealing it.

What has happened to America when the entirety of the media, the entirety of the Democrat Party, the entirety of the universities, Homeland Security (sic) not only welcome but also facilitate the immigrant invasion that is overrunning the United States while Washington, abandoning its own borders, fights for Ukraine’s?

The national print and TV media describe the over-running of Springfield by immigrant-invaders as a restoration of a declining city, restoring property values, and enriching the culture. Every bit of information to the contrary is dismissed as fake news.

Wake Up White People. Your Existence Is Being Erased.

How is the Department of Homeland Security Protecting Our Security by Flying into Our Country at Our Expense Immigrant-invaders from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua, and Venezuela?

DHS restarts migrant flights from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua and Venezuela – weeks after halting program over ‘fraud’ concerns | 29 Aug 2024 | The Department of Homeland Security said Thursday it is resuming migrant flights into the US from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua and Venezuela — one month after putting the program on pause due to potentially massive “fraud.” Under the Harris-Biden administration, the program had brought up to 30,000 migrants from those four nations into the U.S. every month under two-year work permits, so long as they passed a vetting process. Nearly half a million migrants had already received advance travel authorizations and then made their own arrangements to enter America via the humanitarian parole process before it was paused in mid-July. Around that time, an internal DHS report found thousands of sponsors allegedly committing fraud by listing fake Social Security numbers, home addresses or phone numbers — some of which belonged to dead people. See here.

Whitewash: UK University Removes ‘Anglo-Saxon’ From Curriculum

UK University Removes ‘Anglo-Saxon’ From Curriculum | 1 Sept 2024 | In a Black Lives Matter-inspired move, a British university has cancelled the term “Anglo-Saxon” from its curriculum. The University of Nottingham has removed “Algo-Saxon” from courses on history and literature to push back against “nationalist narratives.” According to The Telegraph, a masters-level course, Viking and Anglo-Saxon Studies, has been renamed as Viking and Early Medieval English Studies. Another module, a literature course originally named “A Tale of Seven Kingdoms: Anglo-Saxon and Viking-Age England from Bede to Alfred the Great” has been recast as “Early Mediaeval England from Bede to Alfred the Great.” Also, the university reportedly said that it will seek to “problematize the term ‘Viking’” as well.

The post Springfield Ohio Is Just the Beginning appeared first on LewRockwell.

The war is lost, and the struggle to keep the ‘enforced pretending’ going is breaking through, to be seen by all as a false reality.

Israel is entering the next phase of its war on Palestine by completing its takeover of the Gaza Strip – from the northern border to the Netzarim corridor. It is likely that they intend for this area to then gradually be made available for Jewish settlement and annexation to Israel.

In a piece titled, “Annexation, Expulsion and Israeli Settlements: Netanyahu Gears Up for Next Phase of Gaza War”, the Editor of Haaretz, Aluf Benn, writes, were the takeover to proceed, “Palestinian residents who remain in northern Gaza will be expelled, as suggested by Maj. Gen. (res.) Giora Eiland, under threat of starvation and under cover of “protecting their lives””. Netanyahu and his supporters will see this move, Benn suggests, as a lifetime achievement: Expanding Israel’s territory for the first time, after 50 years of Israeli withdrawals. This will be the Israeli Right’s ‘Zionist response’ to 7 October.

This extraordinary shift was actuated – not just through military operations – but by the stroke of a pen: the appointment of Col. Elad Goren as head of the humanitarian-civil effort in Gaza, which effectively, makes him ‘Governor of Gaza’ for years to come.

Less noted in the western Mainstream media is the harsh reality that, in the course of the twenty months in which the current Israeli government has been in power, Ben Gvir has armed a 10,000 strong settler vigilante movement that has been terrorising Palestinians in the West Bank. The police in the occupied territories already answer to Ben Gvir’s authority.

What is missing from this appreciation is that whilst Ben Gvir has been assembling the ‘State Of Judea’s novel army’, Finance Minister Smotrich, who heads the Administration of the Territories, has revolutionized the situation for Jewish settlers and Palestinians in the West Bank. Authority in the West Bank has been turned-over to a closed, Right-wing messianic movement that answers only to a single man: Smotrich (the Governor of the West Bank in all but name).

In what Nahum Barnea describes as a stealth pincer-movement deployed by Smotrich, one arm of power has lain with his authority as finance minister; the second arm consists in the power delegated to him in his capacity as second minister in the Defence Ministry. Smotrich’s, and the Israeli government’s objective – laid out in Smotrich’s ‘Decisive Plan’ in 2017 – has not changed: to induce the collapse of the Palestinian Authority; to prevent the establishment of a Palestinian state; and to give the seven million Palestinians who live between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea a choice: to die fighting; to immigrate to another country, or to live forever as vassals in a greater Israeli state.

Have no doubt, ‘the Decisive Plan’ for Palestinians is well underway – terrorising West Bankers to quit their land; the destruction of social infrastructure in the West Bank (as with Gaza); and through a harsh financial squeeze on Palestinian society – as in Gaza.

Netanyahu’s obfuscation about the likely future of Gaza needs little further explanation. The Palestinians in northern Gaza will face the fate of the Armenians in Nagorno-Karabakh: They were expelled overnight from the region a year ago, in a rapid move by Azerbaijanis. The world saw this, and simply ‘moved on’ – in the Israeli understanding of history. Netanyahu preferred to stay with a ‘small lie’ about Gaza’s future, rather than say the big truth out loud.

With Netanyahu’s statement last week on U.S. Fox News ‘that no deal for the release of hostages from Gaza is in the making; nor even close to being sealed. And by adding that the positive vibes (mostly emanating from Washington) were ‘false narratives’, Netanyahu effectively launched the next phase in Israel’s war: Military action in the north of Israel, aimed at creating the conditions for the return of its displaced residents. These three Israeli components (north Gaza, the West Bank, and Lebanon) mesh together. In fact, they are interlinked:

In the absence of a ‘diplomatic agreement’ in which Hizbullah would be removed from the border region (and to not return), Israel, by force of logic, has but two options: a Gaza ceasefire that might pacify its northern border, or a deliberate escalation in the north, with all its ramifications.

The notion that Hizballah would be ‘coaxed’ away from Lebanon’s border was always ‘pie-in-the-sky’. The prospects for a Gaza deal, the mediators now say, are ‘next to zero’, so Israel’s attention has turned northwards.

General Gantz, Chair of the National Unity opposition party – in Washington for the Middle East America Dialogue (MEAD) summit – and a critic of Netanyahu’s government, nonetheless seemed reconciled to the inevitable: “The story of Hamas is old news”, he said. “The story of Iran and its proxies all around the area and what they are trying to do is the real issue … The military focus should shift from Gaza to Lebanon”, adding that “we’re late on this”. “The time for [action in] the north has come”.

U.S. General Kurilla, who commands U.S. forces in the region, arrived at the weekend in Israel – his second visit in a week – to complete ‘coordination with the IDF in anticipation of any possible retaliatory Iranian and Hizbullah attack’.

Washington, though committed to support Israel in any conflict with Iran or Hizbullah, nonetheless is worried. Senior American officials expressed fear in recent days that a full-scale war against Hezbollah will lead to huge damage to the Israeli home front, especially if Iran and others from the Resistance Alliance join in.

Iran’s acquisition of advanced Russian defence materiel has severely complicated the picture for the U.S.: It may prove to be a game-changer when paired with Iran’s stock pile of advanced strike missiles. Modern war has passed through a revolution. Western air dominance has been check-mated.

The U.S. (unwisely) is committed to engage in any conflict that extends to Lebanon and Iran – and this, per se, likely would threaten Kamala Harris’ election prospects, as anger mounts amongst Muslim voters in key U.S. swing states.

There is also more than a hint of suspicion in Washington that Netanyahu would relish both hurting Biden–Harris, and throwing the election to Trump.

Netanyahu’s ‘Great Victory’ plan to clear Greater Israel of Palestinians is unfolding, however crushing Hizbullah remains outstanding. Are all these ‘victories’ remotely feasible? No. They risk rather, the collapse of Israel (as authoritative commentators such as Major-General Brick have made clear). It is however feasible, that Netanyahu will try to execute it. The Kahanist spirit lives on, and is today mainstream in Israel.

This prospect casts the dark pall of a huge black swan circling overhead the Middle East, for the months until the U.S. election.

So too, does the Ukraine war contain the seeds of an unexpected unpleasant surprise.

President Putin this week, at the Vladivostok Eastern Economic Forum, suggested that the Ukraine war too, is at an inflection point – on a par with that of the Middle East: Russia has turned the tables on the U.S. through its response to the Kursk incursion into Russia.

Russian forces seized on the the folly of Ukraine’s deployment of its crack brigades and prized Western armour into a forested, lightly populated, confinement cage – and settled down to a leisurely ‘turkey-shoot’.

Moscow refused the bait to draw down Russian reserves on the Donbas front to deploy into Kursk. And Putin clarified, with quiet confidence, in Vladivostok that Zelensky “accomplished nothing from the Kursk offensive. The Russian forces have stabilised the situation in Kursk and started pushing the enemy from border territories, whilst the Donbass offensive has made impressive territorial gains”.

For the sake of clarity, Putin said the enemy is suffering very heavy losses, both in manpower and equipment. This situation, he underlined, could lead to the collapse of the front in the most critical areas, and result in the complete loss of combat capability of its entire armed forces.

Putin may insist that, as always, he is open to dialogue; but his words at the end of that sentence were stark – a collapse, “which is what we were striving for” (referring to the complete loss of Ukrainian combat capability). These are seven key words.

To extrapolate, with the complete collapse of combat capability almost certainly comes the unravelling of the political architecture that is uniquely levered upon those military capabilities – and not on any political legitimacy.

What Moscow cannot foresee is how, or in what form, that unravelling might take.

The Kiev political structures likely will continue their zombie existence, albeit one stripped of their raison d’être for as long as the Biden Administration can manage it – for the sake of saving face until elections.

President Putin may ‘talk the talk’ of mediation, but Moscow well understands that the power structure in Kiev was drawn from the pool of racist ant-Slavs, precisely to block any accord with Moscow. Mediation is bound to be rebuffed – that was Washington’s purpose in empowering the Stefan Banderista bloc from the outset.

An unravelling of the Kiev political structures, however, probably renders all the ‘would-be mediators’ unnecessary.

Put frankly, a new (cleansed) dispensation in Kiev likely would conclude that it has little option other than capitulation on the battlefront, to offer formal neutrality and limits to future militarisation. And Moscow is quite able to discuss ‘that’ with Ukrainians, without ‘help’ from outside.

Of course, a chorus will arise that the U.S. will not be able to accept the complete collapse of Ukraine’s military capabilities – In the run-up to the November elections, that is quite true (rhetorically). That is why Putin keeps the ‘mediation narrative’ alive.

There is the BRICS summit ahead (in Russia, in late October) which needs managing. The West will push mediation until the last, in order to keep the existing Russophobic Kiev regime on life support for as long as possible – and to keep the frozen-conflict notion to the fore in the mind of some BRICS attendees. However, the frozen-conflict proposal is a trap to lay foundations for a future platform of pressures on Russia.

The U.S. and UK intelligence service chiefs may toy with the idea of striking deep inside Russia with ATACMS, but the resort to measures (frankly) aimed to terrorise the Russian civilian population, and to undermine Putin’s popularity, serves more to underline western strategic failure. Yet again, the West has failed to stand up a credible military force to overthrow a target, even one painted in full demonic hues.

The war is lost, and the struggle to keep the ‘enforced pretending’ going is breaking through, to be seen by all as a false reality.

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

The post Closing Hatches Before Rains Founder the Western Vessel appeared first on LewRockwell.

Some claim that IXXI was an “inside-job,” a “false-flag” operation in which the World Trade Center buildings were brought down by high-tech explosives, not by planes, and orchestrated by governing elites, not Muslims. Is such a claim debatable? Should one even consider it a possibility?

There are certain convictions that a Christian should never question or doubt. God is love and evil never triumphs, for example. No matter how much hatred and evil we encounter and experience in the world, we are never justified in seriously doubting this truth. By divine Faith, we are obliged to believe that every act of hatred and evil will somehow result, by God’s miraculous grace, in more love and good in the world than if these acts had never occurred. God is love, and all that happens, all that happens, are only the various expressions of His love for us. Of course, God does not will our hateful sins, but He transforms them and their effects into good. We might have a thousand difficulties reconciling our subjective experience with this rather incredible truth, but these can never justify one single doubt.

The set of unquestionable truths includes not only supernatural ones but also self-evident and natural truths, as well as those truths directly derived from them, the truths of the natural law, and the truths of man’s universal and particular experience of the world and himself. That things are, and I can know them; that truth exists, and I can discover it; that I have an immortal soul, and that it will be judged; that one must do good and avoid evil; that something cannot be and not be at the same time in the same respect; that nothing in this created world can satisfy me; that the United States of America was founded in 1787; that the earth is round.

Then there are those truths that are intrinsically debatable. Convictions about these matters should be held rather loosely, even when we are convinced of their truth, and they should be perpetually questioned, not because these are necessarily bad or false convictions, but because these are, unlike the self-evident or common sense truths and facts of nature, or the revealed supernatural truths of supernature, inherently debatable. We could be wrong about them. These are the convictions we have regarding matters of human history, personal actions, and interpretation of particular experiences, such as the precise causes of historical events, the details of scientific theory, judgments of character, and deliberations of prudence. We may indeed have the right opinion on one or more of this sort of issue, but it must be seen as just that—an opinion, however well grounded. There are simply no non-debatable, unassailable reasons to hold mere opinions to be non-negotiable and indisputably true, unless of course, they are transformed from opinions into knowledge (for the best analysis ever written on how this may occur, read Plato’s Republic). But some opinions can not be so transformed. But until then, there is no unimpeachable authority, including the authority of the opinions themselves, that obliges us to hold any of these opinion-level convictions without some level of epistemological doubt. On the contrary, it would be an act of disobedience and impiety to truth not to place these kinds of convictions under critical scrutiny and subjective doubt.

Unfortunately, it is just these types of convictions about which absolute certainty cannot be possessed, or at least with much more difficulty than one presumes, that are often held with the most intransigence and naïve fidelity by many Americans. So, is the mainstream media and government narrative about IXXI one of these opinions, or is it a non-debatable fact?

How do you react to the idea that IXXI may not be what you think it is, that it might indeed be an “inside job?” Is it with immediate disdain and disbelief at the mere possibility of a government cover up of this matter? If so, why? Think about your reaction. Is it logical? Is it coherent with your other beliefs? Is a government that protects and even endorses (some elements of it do) the murder of unborn babies and covers it up with propaganda capable of lying about 3000 murders? Is it absolutely unthinkable that powerful elements in our government would kill their own people if it meant securing and preserving their power?

What is the best explanation for all three (yes three, not two) towers collapsing into their footprints at what looks like virtually freefall speeds? Isn’t a controlled demolition a plausible explanation? It would have taken weeks or even months to plan, but is that outside the realm of possibility? If you watch the videos with an open mind, the buildings appear to turn to dust in mid air, and there are other anomalies that the official narrative does not and cannot explain. See this.

Read the Whole Article

The post Is IXXI Debatable? The Problem of Idolatry appeared first on LewRockwell.

Whenever Pope Francis holds an interview on a plane, Catholics have learned to buckle up for turbulence. But on his way back from Singapore last Friday, after a lengthy trip to Southeast Asia and Oceania, the Holy Father answered a question pertaining to American politics with uncharacteristic and refreshing clarity—though not without a touch of his off-the-cuffism, which often seems to cover more ground than orthodoxy does.

Francis shot straight in telling Catholic America it has a choice between two evils this election, for both candidates hold an evil position regarding human life. This is absolutely the case with Kamala Harris and not necessarily the case with Donald Trump—but the pope has spoken truly regarding the American culture of death and the Catholic political attitude.

The pope’s rough critique of Trump and Harris has really made the rounds in the news platforms with a swirling that we haven’t seen since “Who am I to judge?” And it is strange, since what Francis said directly contradicts the prevalent messaging on abortion. But what he also said about migration, second only to abortion, may have been enough to further the Left’s narrative, and hence their strategy, to secure the White House.

Included here is the entire exchange between Anna Matranga of CBS News and Pope Francis, as most sources are simply quoting it in fragments throughout their columns:

AM: Your Holiness, you have always spoken in defense of the dignity of life. In Timor-Leste, which has a high birth rate, you said you felt life pulsing and exploding with so many children. In Singapore, you defended migrant workers. With the US elections coming up, what advice would you give a Catholic voter faced with a candidate who supports ending a pregnancy and another who wants to deport 11 million migrants?

PF: Both are against life: the one that throws out migrants and the one that kills children. Both are against life. I can’t decide; I’m not American and won’t go to vote there. But let it be clear: denying migrants the ability to work and receive hospitality is a sin, a grave sin. The Old Testament speaks repeatedly of the orphan, the widow, and the stranger—migrants. These are the three that Israel must care for. Failing to care for migrants is a sin, a sin against life and humanity.

I celebrated Mass at the border, near the diocese of El Paso. There were many shoes from migrants, who ended poorly there. Today, there is a flow of migration within Central America, and many times they are treated like slaves because people take advantage of the situation. Migration is a right, and it was already present in Sacred Scripture and in the Old Testament. The stranger, the orphan, and the widow—do not forget this.

Then, abortion. Science says that at one month after conception, all the organs of a human being are present. Everything. Having an abortion is killing a human being. Whether you like the word or not, it’s murder. The Church is not closed-minded because it forbids abortion; the Church forbids abortion because it kills. It is murder; it is murder!

And we need to be clear about this: sending migrants away, not allowing them to grow, not letting them have life is something wrong, it is cruelty. Sending a child away from the womb of the mother is murder because there is life. And we must speak clearly about these things. “No, but however…” No “but however.” Both things are clear. The orphan, the stranger, and the widow—do not forget this.

AM: In your opinion, Your Holiness, are there circumstances in which it is morally permissible to vote for a candidate who is in favor of abortion?

PF: In political morality, it is generally said that not voting is ugly, it’s not good. One must vote. And one must choose the lesser evil. Which is the lesser evil? That lady or that gentleman? I don’t know; each person must think and decide according to their own conscience.

Contrary to what some Catholics are arguing on social media, the pope gives solid answers here, and all Catholic Americans should take note as this regards the moral choice between our more-or-less evil presidential candidates. A strong adjective there—to be clear, the choice involves evil, which is not to say that Donald Trump and Kamala Harris are necessarily evil people (that is for the Lord to judge), but evil lurks on their tickets.

Pope Francis called that spade a spade, with advice according to the Church’s long-standing position. When faced with two political candidates who are not aligned with Catholic fundamentals, it is permissible to cast a vote against the candidate who would do the most harm. Pope Francis is reminding us of our religious and civic duty, therefore, to act against the greater evil by choosing the lesser.

Thankfully, our pope has spoken unconditionally and forcefully about the abortion crisis. You don’t hear people call abortion murder every day, and it is invigorating to hear it from the pope. His stance on immigration is also largely correct, though he may go too far suggesting the position of the Trump campaign is gravely sinful. Context is obviously important in weighing immigration cases and situations. While abortion is always evil, immigration laws can be good.

Read the Whole Article

The post Picking Our Poison With Pope Francis appeared first on LewRockwell.

Editor’s note: The following statement has been taken from an X post by Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò originally published on September 13, 2024.

“I am the way, the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through Me.” (John 14:6)

Bergoglio, with his ungodly statements addressed to young people in Singapore that “all religions are a path to God,” offends the Majesty of God, betrays Divine Revelation, tramples on the principal Mysteries of our Faith and nullifies the redeeming Sacrifice of the Son of God, Our Lord Jesus Christ.

NEW: #PopeFrancis on inter-religious dialogue:
“Every religion is a way to arrive at God. There are different languages to arrive at God but God is God for all.
But my God is more important than your god, is that true?
There is only 1 God & each of has a language to arrive at… pic.twitter.com/TMHRDjEuJ9

— Michael Haynes (@MLJHaynes) September 13, 2024

His lying words are particularly insidious because they are addressed to the new generations, whom Bergoglio deceives into believing that it is possible to be saved without recognizing that Jesus Christ is the Son of God, the Only Savior, and that His Church is the only ark of salvation. I am the door (Jn. 10:9) said Our Lord of Himself. To deny this truth is to apostatize from the Faith and to trample on the Cross. To do so from the highest Threshold is a scandal of unprecedented gravity, surpassed only by the fearful or complicit silence of the majority of the Episcopate.

The “passio Ecclesiæ” is accomplished in the betrayal of a usurped authority, of a new Sanhedrin equally apostate.

This originally appeared on Lifesite News.

The post Bergoglio Saying ‘All Religions Are a Path to God’ Is Apostasy appeared first on LewRockwell.

On Sunday, September 15, a casual afternoon round of golf turned into a chaotic scene, when  a man was spotted with a rifle near where former president Donald Trump was golfing.

Authorities now believe the suspect, Ryan Wesley Routh, was planning to assassinate Trump –  just over two months after another assassination attempt on the former president, in Pennsylvania.

Routh’s numerous online statements are at times indecipherable; at others, he sounds like a virulent Washington D.C. neocon – a man who prioritizes radical, ideologically-motivated military interventionism in foreign conflicts at the expense of traditional diplomacy.

“Routh seems to embody the feverish insanity of the Neocons and their intelligence apparatus allies, their revulsion for diplomacy and their preference for violence-assassination and war- as the instruments for US global hegemony,” said Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

Once Routh’s location in bushes near the golf course became known, he fled by foot before driving off in a black Nissan SUV.  Local police apprehended the suspect from his vehicle and took him into custody without a struggle. Law enforcement later confirmed that Routh was armed with an AK-47 style weapon and scope. He was also in possession of a GoPro camera, which suggests he planned to document his crime.

Unlike the suspect in the first attempted assassination of Trump, who on July 13 fired shots at the former president during a rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, Routh did not fire any shots, according to multiple news agencies. He is a 58 year old with a criminal record, whereas the Pennsylvania shooter, Thomas Matthew Crooks, was 20 years old. Routh was carrying an AK-47 style rifle; Crooks fired from an AR-15.

Through his writings and actions, Routh made his motive abundantly clear. The suspect sought to take Donald Trump’s life because of his policy to bring a peaceful settlement to the Russia-Ukraine war. He was passionately pro-Ukraine, traveling there to, as The Epoch Times reports, “assist in the conflict” by recruiting volunteers for the International Legion.

Routh’s beliefs about the war in Ukraine, and other conflicts, not only puts him at odds with Trump but also with Kennedy, who shares the former president’s desire to end the Ukraine war.

The shooter, then, can be  linked to the neocon project, supported most prominently by former Republican vice president Dick Cheney.

Cheney recently endorsed Kamala Harris and the majority of Democrats have welcomed that endorsement. The united neocon front in Washington is now a political bulwark intent on turning up the temperature on foreign conflicts.

Was Routh the Democrats’ patsy?

During his time in Ukraine, Routh was interviewed by Newsweek and The New York Times. He opened up about his grievances against Trump due to the former president’s promise to bring an end to the Ukraine-Russia conflict.

In 2023, Routh self-published a book about how Ukraine needs a more aggressive military posture vis-a-vis Russia. In the book, he also advocates for Iran to assassinate Trump. Routh’s advocacy for Iran to do harm to Trump is both disturbing and seemingly out of place, given Routh’s fanatically anti-Russian sentiments.

Routh also openly bragged about trying to recruit Afghan fighters to join Ukraine’s forces and more bizarrely attempted to recruit Afghans to join the police force of Haiti, according to a 2023 post on X.

Read the Whole Article

The post The Second Assassination Attempt on Trump: Profile of a Neocon Terrorist appeared first on LewRockwell.

It feels so, so good to be back. And, as usually happens upon returning from a brief internet break, there is no end of things to write about.

The main thing is the second assassination attempt against Donald Trump, just nine weeks after the first. A very strange man named Ryan Wesley Routh allegedly hid in the bushes with a rifle while the forty-fifth President was playing golf in West Palm Beach yesterday afternoon. He got off several shots before the Secret Service returned fire. He later fled and was arrested. There will obviously be much more to say about this in the coming days.

A secondary, more amusing matter, is the resignation of that enormously irritating EU Commissioner Thierry Breton. This is the man best known for the threats he sent to Elon Musk last month, after Musk dared to organise a Twitter space with Trump. As I noted earlier, Breton has long been loathed even within the Eurocracy as an egotistical self-promoter. His resignation comes after Ursula von der Leyen asked Emmanuel Macron to nominate somebody else for his post. The most hilarious thing is that Breton posted his resignation directly to Twitter – the website that he believes is a grave threat to European democracy, but from which he cannot disentangle himself, because it is also such a great source of attention for mediocre losers like him.

There are other matters too, but before I can get to any of them, I must get this piece on the changing politics of mass migration in Germany off my chest. This is the most important issue facing Europe right now – more important than the folly of the energy transition, more crucial even than the fading memory of pandemic repression.

For nearly ten years, migration has felt like one of the most intractable problems in our entire political system. However crazy the policies, however contradictory and irrational, there was always only the towering mute wall of establishment indifference. It felt like the borders would be open forever, that we would have to sing vapid rainbow hymns to the virtues of diversity and inclusivity for the rest of our lives.

Suddenly, it no longer feels like that. Over the past weeks, a perfect storm of escalating migrant violence and electoral upsets in East Germany have changed the discourse utterly.

The cynical among you will say that none of this matters, that the migrants are still coming, that our borders are still open, and of course that’s true – as far as it goes. But it’s also true that there’s an order of operations here. A lot of things have to happen before we can turn return to a regime of normal border security, and I suspect they have to happen in a specific sequence: 1) Migrationist political parties have to feel electoral pressure and taste defeat at the ballot box first of all. 2) Then, as the establishment realises they are up against the limits of their ability to manipulate public opinion, the discourse around mass migration will have to shift, to deprive opposition parties of Alternative für Deutschland of their political advantage. Specifically, the lunatic oblivious press must begin to question the wisdom of allowing millions of unidentified foreigners to take up residence in our countries. This will then open the way for 3) the judiciary to revise their understanding of asylum policies and begin to interpret our laws in more rational, sustainable ways.

In Thüringen and Saxony, we have already had the electoral defeat of 1), and we will soon have more of it in Brandenburg. As a consequence of 1), we are now seeing some powerful glimmerings of 2). This is very important, because as the press expands the realm of acceptable discourse, a great many heretofore tabu thoughts and opinions are becoming irreversibly and indelibly conceivable.

Ten years ago, diversity was our strength, infinity refugees were our moral obligation and there were no limits to how many asylees we could absorb. Since August, not only Alternative für Deutschland but also that offshoot from the Left Party known as the Bündnis Sahra Wagenknecht, the centre-right Christian Democrats, a substantial centrist faction of the Social Democrats, and many others beyond whatever “the extreme right” is supposed to be, agree that migration is in fact an enormous problem. They also agree that our moral obligations to the world’s poor and disadvantaged are finite, and that there are indeed clear limits to the number of asylees Germany can support. What is more, they are saying all of these things in the open.

—

To understand what is happening and what is at stake, we must review the dynamics of mass migration to Europe. They go something like this:

First, the European Union cannot effectively stop migrants from the developing world at its own borders. The reasons – whether the Eurocrats can’t, or they won’t, or they don’t care, or they don’t know how, or they haven’t been sufficiently incentivised – don’t really matter.

What does matter, is the fact that the failure of of the Eurocracy to limit migration is gradually undermining the credibility of the EU itself. This is because nation states are much better at border security than international bureaucratic behemoths. Should a major EU member state decide that it has had enough of mass migration and elect to close its borders, the migrant pressure on other EU states would increase.

These other states would then have a powerful motivation to take a similarly hard line, and there would be a chain reaction – a race to the bottom, in which EU nations strive to outcompete each other in disincentivising migration and sealing their borders against asylees. A sufficiently fierce reaction could substantially undermine the authority of the EU itself, and would certainly spell the end of the Schengen Arrangement.

Germany, despite all its recent crises and setbacks, is still the dominant industrial nation of the EU, and also its most populous state. By keeping its borders open and enticing migrants with generous benefits, Germany hopes to reduce migrant pressure on its neighbours and prevent the anti-migration chain reaction from getting off the ground. This is why German politicians are so quick to equate any flavour of migration restrictionism with hostility to the EU. Smaller countries like Denmark and Hungary can shut their doors to migrants, because the added pressure on the rest of Europe is minimal. Germany, however, is different; the structural integrity of the entire system depends on German borders remaining open.

The problem is that the snake has begun to eat its own tail. The energy crisis and the lunatic anti-nuclear and anti-carbon radicalism of the Greens have taken a huge bite out of German prosperity. Open borders have lost their appeal, Alternative für Deutschland are pounding at the door, and no amount of staged public freakouts about “the extreme right” can restore the balance.

Look at the polls: Fully 82% of West Germans and 84% of East Germans believe the state should limit migration. A majority across almost every major party, including 55% of Green voters, agree that migration must be restricted.1 Huge majorities of East and West Germans support deporting criminal migrants, reducing the benefits of asylees whose applications have been rejected, weakening family reunification provisions and cutting down the potential pool of asylees by increasing the number of those nations designated as secure countries of origin. On many of these issues you see a general convergence of opinion, with West Germans gradually adopting the anti-migration views of their supposedly backward and anti-democratic East German counterparts, who in this area as in many others are simply less prosperous, less insulated from geopolitical trends and therefore more likely to be at the forward edge of political opinion.

Read the Whole Article

The post In the Face of Escalating Migrant Crime and Dimming Electoral Prospects appeared first on LewRockwell.

Yesterday the Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahoo threatened to fire his Defense Minister Yoav Gallant:

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was set to oust Defense Minister Yoav Gallant from his position, a senior political official said on Monday. Netanyahu planned to add Gideon Saar’s New Hope party to the coalition adding four seats to his Knesset majority.

The move raised concern among the families of hostages currently held in Gaza because of Saar’s position opposing a deal with Hamas that would see hostages freed. Stocks fell and gas prices spiked amid expectations of the government reshuffle.

The rift between Netanyahu and Gallant has widened in recent months after the defense minister opposed the prime minister’s refusal to agree to a deal that would free hostages. The position of the Defense Ministry, the IDF, Shin Bet and Mossad is that Israel can deal with the security risks that would emerge from such a deal and that the release of hostages must be a priority.

Gallant, despite being as radical as Netanyahoo, is the only asset the U.S. government still has in the cabinet:

U.S. officials are concerned over the possible Gallant ousting, claiming he is the ‘only adult in the room’ in Netanyahu’s government after the relations between the prime minister and U.S. President Joe Biden have again soured …

Gallant is opposed to several of Netanyahoo’s policies:

• He wants a ceasefire deal in Gaza that would allow the hostages to be freed. Netanyahoo rejects a ceasefire.
• He wants to prevent a law that would exempt Haredi men from military service. The Ultraorthodox members of the cabinet press Netanyahoo to pass the exemption.
• He is skeptical about an attack on Hezbollah in Lebanon. Other parts of the coalition are pressing for it.

After being threatened to be fired Gallant conceded on the last point:

In the shadow of the attempts to remove him and replace him with the chairman of the New Hope Party Gideon Sa’ar, Defense Minister Yoav Gallant changed his tone Monday and in a closed security discussion \ with Netanyahu he said: “I kept talking about escalation or negotiating an agreement [with Hizbullah], but there is no possibility of reaching an agreement. There is only one option: to go full force and use all our military power in order to bring the residents of the north home.”

Since October 8, a day after the Hamas operation to snatch more hostages, Hezbollah has been firing missiles towards Israeli settlements along the Lebanese border. Following that the Israeli government evacuated at least 60,000 people from the border zone.

It was the first time that Israel conceded something like a buffer zone within its borders.

After 11 months the 60,000+ people have become a burden for the economy. Away from their homes and places of work the people are unproductive. On top of that the state has to cover the costs of their food and lodging.

After last nights meetings the Israeli government declared that the return of the settlers to north would now be a major war aim. This makes an imminent war with Hizbullah much more likely:

Right now is the closest Israel has been to a full war with Hezbollah since October 7.
…
The Jerusalem Post has received indications behind the scenes, at both the political and military levels, from sources who, although beforehand were pouring cold water on the public statements, are now signaling that these statements are serious.

Their reasons highlight how realities have changed a lot over the course of the war.

Throughout, the main reason not to enter into war with Hezbollah was to avoid distractions that might handicap the IDF from its goal of taking apart all 24 of Hamas’s battalions in Gaza.

Gallant declared Hamas’s last battalion in Rafah defeated on August 21, nearly a month ago.

In reality neither has Hamas been defeated nor has the killing of Gazans by Israeli forces stopped. The genocide continues as to daily losses on the Israeli side of the war.

But Hizbullah is a more and more pressing issues. Soon bad winter weather will set in which will disallow the full use of drones and air force assets on which Israeli forces depend.

It is either now or after waiting another four months.

Netanyahoo and his cabinet seems to be under the illusion that a war with Hizbullah is winnable. Despite all Israeli trickery with booby trapped pagers it is not. Hizbullahs well protected missile arsenal is likely to overcome all Israeli defenses. Israel is likely to end up on the losing side of any such conflagration.

A war could easily be avoided. Hizbullah has promised to end the current strife as soon as a durable ceasefire is signed between Israel and Gaza.

Netanyahoo’s rejection of any permanent ceasefire in Gaza makes an Israel attack on Lebanon, and the following losses, an inevitable consequence.

Reprinted with permission from Moon of Alabama.

The post Israel’s Threat To Wage War on Hizbullah Is Getting More Serious appeared first on LewRockwell.

Ned Ryun has written a new book, American Leviathan, and I was fortunate to get my hands on an advance copy.

If you don’t know Ned, he’s the founder of American Majority and Voter Gravity, grassroots organizations that specialize in fighting the culture war at the local level and electing America First conservatives.  On cable news channels and in his writing, he’s an eloquent defender of the Constitution, limited government, and the American Republic as the Founding Fathers intended.  I highly recommend that you read American Leviathan and share it with friends — especially friends who struggle to see clearly the stakes of the ideological war now raging.

How did we get to this point in time, when American leaders broadly repudiate the principles behind the Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution, and an unaccountable, unconstitutional bureaucracy rules over the American people?  How is it that both major political parties routinely ignore the will of voters and seem beholden to the administrative state?  Why do prominent politicians — from Dick Cheney and Mitt Romney to Kamala Harris and Barack Obama — express an almost religious devotion to expansive government when our country was founded upon an inherent distrust of government power and a commitment to see such power forever chained?  Why have the most prestigious news organs rejected free speech, embraced censorship, and become little more than propagandistic parrots for the State?  It’s a long story, but it’s a story that must be understood in order for the American people to see with clear eyes what they’re actually fighting.

In American Leviathan, Ryun succeeds by making what is complicated quite comprehensible.  He takes a century and a half of mostly forgotten history and political debate and boils down all the sordidness into a digestible, if unpleasant, meal.  He traces the origin of the administrative state to a group of American intellectuals who were fascinated with Hegel’s philosophical defense of authoritarianism and the absolute power of the Prussian king.  He pinpoints the rise of the Uniparty in the overlapping policy preferences of leading Republicans, Democrats, and socialists at the beginning of the twentieth century.  He recounts how progressive Republicans, such as Robert La Follette and Teddy Roosevelt, advocated for radical expansion of government and rejection of long-respected constitutional constraints that mirrored many of the wishes of progressive Democrats, such as Woodrow Wilson and The New Republic founder Herbert Croly.  Together, these various thought leaders (at times hostile to one another as they advanced similar goals) initiated what Ryun calls a “Progressive Statist movement” demanding a fundamental transformation of the American system of government and the elevation of the State at the expense of Americans’ individual liberties.

Ryun defines the administrative state, the national security state, and the Deep State as distinct entities reflecting varying degrees of power, privilege, secretiveness, and incompetence, but he recognizes all of these unelected factions as parts of the same beast: the Leviathan.  With that appellation, he refers to the political treatise Leviathan, from seventeenth-century philosopher Thomas Hobbes, whose inclination toward a strong, centralized government emerged during the chaos of the English Civil Wars.  In the Old Testament, Leviathan is a sea serpent and demon associated with the sin of envy.  The monster eats the souls of those who are damned because they remain too attached to the material world to reach God’s realm and receive His grace.  Although the biblical Leviathan epitomizes chaos, Hobbes used the idea of a terrifying creature composed of myriad souls as a metaphor for an all-powerful State constantly shaping citizens and feeding from their individual energies.  The frontispiece to Hobbes’s Leviathan shows a monarch clutching the symbols of earthly power in one hand and spiritual power in the other.  The monarch’s body is formed from hundreds of faceless individuals who, through their actions to support the king, embody the State.  At the top of the illustration is a Latin quote describing Leviathan from the Book of Job: “There is no power on earth to be compared to him.”  It is in this sense that Ryun describes the American Leviathan.

Read the Whole Article

The post Slaying Leviathan appeared first on LewRockwell.

One of the few areas where liberty made gains in the COVID lockdown era was the increase in homeschooling. Many parents started homeschooling out of frustration with the failure of “virtual learning” to provide children with a quality education.

Other parents withdrew their children from government schools when virtual learning allowed them to discover how teachers and administrators were prioritizing political indoctrination over education.

According to the John Hopkins University’s Homeschool Hub, 5.8 percent of American children were homeschooled in the 2022-2023 school year. While this is a decline from the COVID-era high of 11.1 percent, it is still an almost 50 percent increase over 2019 when 2.8 percent of American school-aged children were homeschooled.

More proof of homeschooling’s continued popularity is provided by the Census Bureau ‘s Household Pulse Survey. According to this survey, the number of homeschooled children increased from 3.6 million in the 2022-2023 school year to 4 million this year.

As more parents become aware of how government schools short-change education in favor of indoctrination by incorporating “woke” subjects like critical race theory, transgenderism, and “green new deal” propaganda disguised as “climate science” into the curriculum, more parents will turn to homeschooling. The conservative counter to “woke” education is the mandating of “patriotic” education, which is code for promoting the neoconservative line that all of America’s wars were justified and America has a right and duty to use its military might to spread democracy. This may cause even more parents to abandon government schools.

The decision of some schools to allow biological boys to play girls sports and use girls’ locker and restrooms is also causing many parents to flee government schools, especially since some schools do not even inform parents the school is “honoring” their child’s request to be identified as transgendered.

As Colin Hroncich, education policy analyst at the CATO institute, put it, “When parents can choose where and how their children will be educated, they’re no longer at the mercy of politicians and bureaucrats. That means they don’t have to rely on political battles when it comes to education.”

Another reason homeschooling is popular is the increasing number of resources and opportunities available to homeschooling parents and children. Homeschooling families have access to a variety of extracurricular activities and educational resources designed to help homeschooling children get the most out of the homeschooling experience.

Parents looking for a homeschooling curriculum that provides their children with a well-rounded education that incorporates the ideas of liberty should consider my online curriculum. Instead of indoctrinating students with critical race theory, transgenderism, or neoconservatism, my curriculum provides students with a solid education in history, literature, mathematics, and the sciences. It also gives students the opportunity to create their own websites and internet-based businesses. This provides students with “real world” entrepreneurial experience that will be useful to them no matter what career path they choose.

The curriculum is designed to be self-taught, with students helping and learning from each other via online forums.

Starting in fourth grade, students are required to write at least one essay a week. Students are required to post their essays on their blogs. Students also take a course in public speaking.

The curriculum does emphasize the history, philosophy, and economics of liberty, but it never substitutes indoctrination for education. The goal is to produce students with superior critical thinking skills.

If you think my curriculum may meet the needs of your child, please visit www.RonPaulCurriculum.com for more information.

The post Homeschooling Is Still Gaining Popularity…Thanks To Woke ‘Educators’ appeared first on LewRockwell.

The presidential “debate” last week had two outcomes – a thousand new cat memes, and Springfield, Ohio as a new political ground zero. Not exactly what the Harris/Walz front hoped for, hence a second assassination attempt on Trump?  Who will throw the blob a life preserver?

The deep state, neoconservatives of both parties for 40 years, is betting on the least bad choice for continued unconstitutional war profiteering and oligarch-imperialism – and they see a financial clock ticking, if not a nuclear one.  The despicable Cheneys have emerged to endorse this least bad choice, in their deep-state wisdom.  As Tulsi Gabbard explains to Democrats who haven’t figured it out yet, a vote for Harris is a vote for Dick Cheney.  Are there no self-respecting Democrats left in the US?

Is Dick Cheney endorsing continued war, with joy, or simply the joy of continued war? Either way, it is a sign that the blob is internally disintegrating, not solidifying.

With the paired atrocities of the Federal Reserve and explosive government overspending, people cannot get what they want and need with the fiat they have.  Dreams are delayed and abandoned – whether a reliable income that will support three hots and a cot, or raising children, or building a business, or buying a home or seeing that their kids get an education – starting with government kindergarten and its absurd premises. In none of these areas is the federal government “helping” anyone but bureaucrats and the blob.  The American dream is denied because of federal confiscation of nearly 40% of the GDP, every day, much of it spent on reducing your lifespan and liberty, and the lifespan and liberty of billions of people around the world.

The flailing has begun. This election season is running out of time for a successful assassination, or a successful steal in the five or six important counties that matter to “our democracy.”  We have the DC war on any contra with an X or Telegram account saying, filming, or writing anything that counters one of their increasingly rushed and irrational state narratives.

The lies repeatedly told from the White House are legion – and some of them are kind of fun, like no cats have ever been harmed by the deep state’s immigration policy.  A more serious lie is that what’s going on in Gaza for the last 11 months is “NOT A GENOCIDE.”  Anyone with a smart phone on the planet can take a look at the US Legal Code that defines “genocide.”  Even if your only news comes from CNN or MSNBC, facts reveal the White House is not only lying, but violating of its own binding law with billions in aid to Israel fueling and funding this genocide. Whether you want to kill Gazans or not, whether you agree or not with US policy – no one who can read the law can deny the USG is lying to you.

It’s that simple.

DC cannot tell the truth about US-Israel pari-mutuel parasitism, or any other foreign policy it pursues. The pro-war brain worm has infected the blob, and destroyed its collective cerebral cortex.  War addicts, like all addicts, lie.

It is not a crime to point out the nature of the DC parasitism, to comment on the deep state brain worm, and to discuss and publicize the lack of higher order thinking in Washington.  It is not a crime to share the reality of US domestic and foreign policy, and connect the dots. But instead of defending its position, the blob has instead criminalized free speech and banned critical thinking.  Washington, instead of putting in the hard work of manufacturing consent has lazily decided it will simply force us to comply.

To silence, to arrest, to ban, and to attack – with words or bullets – is the choice of a weak, and a very panicked deep state.  While Americans are just now starting to wonder who is running their country, the rest of the world distinctly sees a hollowed-out empire run by a politically incestuous, self-appointed “team” of increasingly substandard intellect, bereft of recognizable ethics.  All of this offers us a fresh look at Jefferson’s “Tree of Liberty” letter.

DC fears a coming loss of resources, legal prosecution for known and suspected crimes.  More than loss of control, they fear the sheer unpredictability of a second Trump presidency. Trump’s public resistance to being told what to do by people he believes to be driving the country into the dirt, in conjunction with a global ability for everyone, including the populist and liberty movements to rapidly share images and analysis with their allies, is a real danger to any authoritarian construct.  Thus we see a whack-a-mole approach to silencing state critics, be it by imprisoning Julian Assange or Ross Ulbricht, or charging and trying to arrest Pavel Duran and RT/Sputnik and its directors, and calling for suit and sanction of Elon Musk, for both his social media platform and his global satellite system.

Our dying authoritarian regime is battling national and global fire teams, squads, platoons and companies – to use US Marine terminology.  These “units,” like real Marines, seek to “overcome, improvise and adapt” and they can operate independently, or in concert.  They constantly build on their skill sets, and importantly, are honed and shaped by the real world in which they practice and operate.

A good example of this phenomenon has occurred in the Red Sea. In the last 11 months, the Houthi have caused the US Navy to expend nearly $1 Billion in missiles alone, plus destroying eight MQ-9 Reaper drones.  Despite this cost and effort by Washington, freight traffic there remains collapsed and vulnerable.  Yet, even as the US strategy has expensively failed, the deep state has no alternative strategy, no way to save face.

Information “warfare” against authoritarian states operates the same way.  It launches volleys of factual information, blowing holes in the hull of the prevailing state narrative. It never quits. DC believes that loudly complaining about the damage to the hull by information terrorists, and arresting and prosecuting and kicking down the doors, stealing the livelihoods and liberty of those they see as “information enemies” will somehow address the problem.

Two decorative impeachments, innumerable kangaroo court cases, and two assassination attempts have been conducted to stop Donald Trump from returning to the White House.  More efforts will be made – not because his stated second-term intentions will save or sink the country, but because he channels an enormous and often amorphous public curiosity about blob itself. Asking a good question, whether it is answered or not, is always a crime in a state such as ours.

When Jefferson talked about the Tree of Liberty, just over two centuries ago, he saw that truth – widely shared, debated, and eventually understood by a whole country – is the only remedy that can heal the relationship between people and government. He noted, “What country can preserve its liberties if their rulers are not warned from time to time that their people preserve the spirit of resistance? [italics added]”

Instead of reactionary obedience to the state, we must challenge it, expose it, and at times, laugh at it.  The alternative to free and bold criticism today is the spilling of the blood of patriots tomorrow – something our so-called “leaders” in deep state extremis are most certainly considering.

The post Has the Blob Reached a Tipping Point? appeared first on LewRockwell.

One of the most interesting commentators on the legal-political scene is the attorney Robert Barnes. Whenever Barnes discusses economic analysis and predictions he relies on Jeff Snyder, who in turn bases his reasoning on investigation of the Euro-dollar international system of exchange. In this video Snyder explains what the Euro-dollar system is. My takeaway from Snyder’s video is that the Euro-dollar system is a fractional reserve banking system based on Euro-dollars not backed (controlled) by the Federal Reserve. Thus, they are not Federal Reserve notes; i.e., US dollars. Snyder believes that Euro-dollars are the real worldwide currency (a good thing) that allow international movement of capital and goods.

Screen shot from Snyder’s video.

In this video Tom Woods and Bob Murphy discuss inflation predictions and the relative lack of inflation after the Federal Reserve’s injection of money into the banking system after the 2008 financial crisis. Murphy explains that many Austrian economists, himself included, predicted more price inflation than actually occurred. I also expected more inflation. My post hoc analysis attributes the lower posted official inflation statistic to an understanding of the statistic itself. That is, the measure did not include the particular assets which were bid up by the created money, not in basic products for people because they didn’t get any of the new money, but to stocks and other speculations, parked in the banks, and of relevance here, the money went overseas.

Thus, in understanding the current economy and international geopolitics the Euro-dollar system might be a key element that most analysts miss. However, when listening to Snyder, or Barnes following Snyder, several questions arise that are critical to assess the true impact of this system. I hope these questions might be addressed by Snyder, Barnes, or anyone else who might come across this article.

My questions:

• Am I correct that Euro-dollars are not the same as US dollars (Federal Reserve notes)?
• If the Federal Reserve does not back the Euro-dollar system who does? That is, a fractional reserve system is sure to fail eventually without a government fiat backstop.
• Can Euro-dollars be used equivalent to Federal Reserve notes in the USA?
• Are Euro-dollars considered to be equivalent with Federal reserve note dollars in exchange for goods on the international market, in effect making the FRN dollars worth less in terms of real goods?
• Can the US government control Euro-dollar international exchanges through the SWIFT system?
• Are Euro-dollars included in any of the common money supply measures used for the US economy? (For example, see this classic article by Dr. Salerno.)
• If Euro-dollars are FRN dollars, what is their percentage of total dollars?

The post My Euro-Dollar Questions appeared first on LewRockwell.

From the Tom Woods Letter:

It’s hard to know exactly what the most bizarre or disturbing aspect of the second attempt on Donald Trump’s life in a matter of two months is, but certainly in the running are the blasé responses of Kamala Harris and Tim Walz.

Bear in mind that this is the second time Trump has been shot at. (I might add that had Harris been the intended victim, we’d still be hearing about how “white supremacy” and “racism” had created the conditions for such a thing. But when it’s Trump? Meh.)

Here’s Harris:

“I have been briefed on reports of gunshots fired near former President Trump and his property in Florida, and I am glad he is safe. Violence has no place in America.”

Here’s Walz:

“Gwen and I are glad to hear that Donald Trump is safe. Violence has no place in our country. It’s not who we are as a nation.”

Guys, the man has been shot at twice in two months. This has never happened to any political candidate in American history. And all you can summon are these anodyne remarks about violence being bad?

You’d almost think two assassination attempts in two months wasn’t all that unusual. Hey, sorry you were shot at again! Just one of those things, I guess. See you on the campaign trail!

The would-be assassin, Ryan Routh, appears to be a deranged Ukraine partisan. That’s an issue in itself.

To be sure, it’s hard for them to reconcile their Trump-is-Hitler rhetoric with “I’m sorry someone tried to shoot him.”

(If Trump were Hitler, I think we would have noticed during his first term — but when he left office the fundamentals of the federal regime were pretty much unchanged.)

Things are escalating, folks, and nobody knows where they’ll go. I am very much the stay-and-fight type. Any other approach goes against every fiber of my being.

But I’m also the protect-my-family type, which means I have been thinking lately about a Plan B.

My wife and kids can tell you: despite my love for travel, I am at heart a homebody. I like to try new things, yes, but at the end I’m refreshed by coming back to what’s familiar: familiar food, familiar sights, familiar faces.

But now I feel like: if I’m just one election away from the regime targeting people like me, maybe I get my Plan B in place before such a thing happens.

So I recommend the Expat Money Summit, which is free, and which features top experts on relocation as well as measures short of relocation: second passports, financial diversification, international real estate, etc.

It’s hosted by my longtime friend and expat expert Mikkel Thorup, a man whom I myself have turned to with my own questions. And I’m also presenting at the Summit.

It’s entirely online, so you can watch from your home.

Time to think about serious things, folks. Get your complimentary ticket here:

https://www.ExpatMoneySummit.com

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