Lew Rockwell Institute

“But we had forgotten that alongside Orwell’s dark vision, there was another—slightly older, slightly less well known, equally chilling: Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World. Contrary to common belief even among the educated, Huxley and Orwell did not prophesy the same thing. Orwell warns that we will be overcome by an externally imposed oppression. But in Huxley’s vision, no Big Brother is required to deprive people of their autonomy, maturity and history. As he saw it, people will come to love their oppression, to adore the technologies that undo their capacities to think.” – Neil Postman – Amusing Ourselves to Death

 “What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one. Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information. Huxley feared those who would give us so much that we would be reduced to passivity and egoism. Orwell feared that the truth would be concealed from us. Huxley feared the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance. Orwell feared we would become a captive culture. Huxley feared we would become a trivial culture, preoccupied with some equivalent of the feelies, the orgy porgy, and the centrifugal bumblepuppy.” – Neil Postman – Amusing Ourselves to Death

I find myself ruminating about whether there is anything myself or any other average Joe can do to make a difference in this world, controlled by psychopaths, satanists, egomaniacal billionaires, corrupt evil politicians, a cabal of greedy financiers, neocon warmongering globalists, and the propaganda entertainment complex. When a complex entity becomes too large, it becomes inefficient, bureaucratic, corrupt, and uncontrollable.

The corruption, waste, and purposeful use of governmental power to enrich politicians and their billionaire benefactors, to the detriment of the country and the average citizen, has grown to an incomprehensible and uncontainable level. Whether DOGE was a legitimate undertaking by Musk and his tech geniuses to cut wasteful spending and uncover fraud, or nothing more than a PR stunt designed to keep the MAGA army satiated with the appearance of making America great again, it appears to have sunk into the swamps of DC, foiled by the uni-party once again.

But the show must go on, and this past week’s episode of “As the Empire Crumbles” was certainly entertaining, with the most powerful politician in the world hurling insults at the richest man in the world, who responded by accusing the president of pedophilia, while calling for his impeachment and the creation of a new political party. The MAGA acolytes were flabbergasted, as their two heroes, who were going to usher in a new golden era, came to blows and have irreconcilably broken up. Who could have predicted that the two biggest egos on the planet would ultimately clash and dissolve their partnership? Many of the twitterati were convinced it was just more 4D chess, just as they believed the Q bullshit during Trump’s first term.

The world was captivated and enthralled by this trivial social media war, while NATO/Ukraine desperately attempted to initiate WW3 with their attacks on Russian airbases, the Crimean bridge, and Russian passenger trains. Thousands of tweets and hundreds of articles have been written about this Trump/Musk bickerfest, while the world is imploding and we are accelerating headlong towards a global war, initiated by the three stooges running France, U.K. and Germany, and cheered on by the likes of Lindsey Graham and Mike Pompeo.

Trump’s campaign trail promise to end the Ukraine war in 24 hours has proven to be nothing more than his predictable bloviating bullshit. It has become clear he has absolutely no sway over the EU warmongers, or his own Deep State CIA operatives carrying out the attacks on Russia, as his weak and ineffectual efforts to end the conflict start to diminish his presidency from the outset.

The Gaza genocide continues, with American financial and military support, even though Trump promised to end that conflict. Iran continues to resist efforts to stop its nuclear enrichment program. China pretends to be negotiating with Trump on tariffs but is content letting the Soros installed leftist judges across the country place roadblock after roadblock in the way of Trump’s tariff, deportation, and governmental downsizing agenda. Foreign leaders know they can wait out all of Trump’s threats by just slow walking negotiations and hoping the Republicans lose the House in 2026.

China is biding its time until they believe America is sufficiently preoccupied with its own domestic turmoil and its Ukraine quagmire, and they will initiate their inevitable Taiwan takeover. The United States has not won a war in 80 years and is in no position to wage war in Europe and Asia simultaneously. Trump professes to be for peace, but the Deep State actors controlling the government and the globalist billionaires pulling the strings will force him into WW3. That is how Fourth Turnings roll.

With the intense opposition to the Big Beautiful Bill from Musk and key Republicans in the Senate, the next few months could get messy on the fiscal front. Musk is entirely correct, calling the BBB a massive, outrageous, pork-filled disgusting abomination of congressional pork. When the mind numbingly stupid media outlets declare it will add $3 trillion to the national debt over ten years, that means $3 trillion more than the $21 trillion of additional debt already projected. And this assumes no recessions, no financial crisis, no wars, and no fake pandemics. They purposefully give the impression our national debt only goes up by $3 trillion over ten years.

I’m absolutely certain the average prole, distracted by their technological bread and circuses, has no clue our debt is on automatic pilot to increase by nearly 70% over the next ten years. The average person remains trapped in a false comfort zone, designed by their overlords, to keep them satiated with toxic foodstuff, propaganda disguised as entertainment, and believing going deeper and deeper into debt, buying trinkets and baubles makes them wealthy. Until that comfort zone is shattered by the bitter reality of the next financial implosion, the masses will do nothing to try and alter the disastrous course plotted by their overlords.

The GOP passage of $9.4 billion of DOGE cuts is nothing more than a PR stunt to convince the ignorant masses they are actually doing something about the deficit. The dopes making bets on Draft Kings and posting videos on Instagram have no concept about how ridiculously out of control our government has become. They add $6 billion to the national debt every single day, so their $9.4 of “cuts” will be gone in 37 hours. Our deficits are big, but they are not beautiful. Our deficit in FY24 was $1.8 trillion. Through the first 7 months of FY25 the deficit is $1.049 trillion. At the current rate of spending, the deficit will be $2.2 trillion by the end of the fiscal year.

Interest on the national debt is now the second biggest expenditure and has gone from $500 billion during Trump’s first term to $1.3 trillion today. These deficits are clearly unsustainable, and anything which is unsustainable will not be sustained. But the corrupt, captured politicians and insatiably avaricious Wall Street bankers will keep dancing until the music stops. Then they will use their next engineered financial crisis to take more of our money and further restrict our liberties and freedom. CBDCs and social credit scores anyone?

The real reason Trump and the GOP need to pass the big beautiful, bloated pig of a bill is because our Ponzi scheme economy depends upon the never-ending issuance of trillions in debt every year to give the fabricated appearance of stability. This is why the GOP applauds Musk’s low hanging fruit DOGE cost savings and ignores them in their outrageously corpulent budget bill. The truth is any actual reduction in government spending (36% of GDP) would ripple through an economy entirely dependent upon government largess and immediately create a massive recession and probable depression.

Ponzi schemes have to keep growing until they run out of suckers believing the bullshit underlying the Ponzi. This is where those controlling the levers of society (Bernays’ invisible government) utilize their limitless well of propaganda techniques, technological distractions, and mindless entertainment venues to keep the ignorant masses amused, delusional, and living in denial of the reality staring them in the face.

Since the 2008 financial crisis we have been muddling through economically at a 10,000 feet macro level, with periodic crisis episodes (housing collapse, fake pandemic) utilized by the powers that be to issue trillions more debt as the antidote to the initial crisis created by too much debt. At a micro level, the average American has seen a significant decline in their standard of living, as official government reported inflation has eroded 40% of their purchasing power, when in reality they have lost more than 60% of their purchasing power. The reality for the average American prole is debt slavery, either self-imposed to keep up with the Joneses or forced upon them to survive this globalist-imposed death by a thousand cuts economy.

Credit card debt of $1.3 trillion is at an all-time high, up $350 billion (35%) since 2020. The average balance on those credit cards is over $7,000 and the average interest rate on those unpaid balances is over 21%. Student loan debt of $1.8 trillion is at an all-time high, up $100 billion since 2020, with over 25% of these loans in default. Auto loan debt of $1.7 trillion is at an all-time high, up $350 billion (27%) since 2020. The average length of these loans is now 70 months. The borrower is underwater by the fifth year of these loans. Shockingly, credit card and auto loan delinquencies have been soaring in the last year, with credit card delinquencies above 3% for the first time since 2012, and auto loan delinquencies surpassed 8% for the first time since 2010. Does that sound like a consumer on solid ground?

In addition, the housing market is a disaster looking for a trigger. The Wall Street hedge funds (Blackrock) bought up millions of homes, driving prices 140% (Case Siller Index) higher than the 2012 low, while outstanding mortgage debt has risen from the 2012 low of $13 trillion to $21 trillion today. Prices are ridiculously high and mortgage rates of 7% make it virtually impossible for an average working stiff to buy even a small home. The market is frozen.

This is why Trump and his GOP minions must avoid a recession at all costs by continuing to rack up $2 trillion annual deficits. A recession would result in millions of layoffs, which would mean unpaid mortgages, which would mean foreclosures and slashing of home prices, which would trigger housing collapse 2.0, which would turn the recession into a depression, causing a stock market collapse. Now you know why they are desperate to pass this big, beautiful behemoth of bilge.

The Fed is in a precarious position of their own making, with all choices pointing towards disastrous outcomes. They are already sitting on over $1 trillion of unrealized bond losses, while their Wall Street owners sit on another $400 billion of unrealized bond losses. If these entities ever have to realize those losses, our entire banking system would collapse. The Fed has cut rates by 1%, but market rates went up, as their power to mislead market players diminishes.

They have reduced their balance sheet from $9 trillion to $6.7 trillion. The last time they tried to reduce their balance sheet in 2019, the repo market spasmed and they used the Covid cover to drastically print more fiat. Trump is mocking Powell and demanding interest rate cuts. Powell is pretending to be independent, but he is praying for some kind of crisis to again set the printing presses to hyper-speed. I’m sure the ruling oligarchs are hatching a new crisis to expand their wealth, power, and control, while further impoverishing and enslaving the plebs.

It is clear at least to me, we stand on the precipice of an economic conflagration capable of putting the final nail in the coffin of this empire of debt. At the same time there are unrelenting evil forces who are frantically creating the casus-belli to initiate World War III and the massive death and destruction that would produce. The simultaneous commencement of these two events would produce the type of climax expected in the waning years of a Fourth Turning, with a final resolution expected by 2032.

Most people are blissfully unaware of the imminent demise of their comfortable existence, so addicted to their techno-gadgets and mindless social media performance art, they are incapable of critical thought regarding the dystopian world they inhabit.

“People will come to adore the technologies that undo their capacities to think” ― Neil Postman – Amusing Ourselves to Death

“If politics is like show business, then the idea is not to pursue excellence, clarity or honesty but to appear as if you are, which is another matter altogether.” ― Neil Postman – Amusing Ourselves to Death

If you ever needed proof politics is nothing but show business, it is this big, beautiful bill episode of drama, fiction, comedy, and tragedy. Excellence, clarity, and honesty have no part in this absurd psychodrama of lies, accusations, and continued downward spiral of this empire of debt. We know Huxley believed the masses could be sufficiently distracted by their own ego driven pursuits, but I don’t think even he realized how much power the technological “advances” of our times (TV based mass media, the internet, corporate/government controlled social media, Big Pharma) would be used by the ruling elite to control, manipulate, sedate, and scare the ignorant masses into voluntary subservience. Everything we are witnessing and living through is nothing more than a theater production, designed by Bernays’ invisible governing authorities to herd us towards their technological gulag, with the slaughterhouse as the other alternative.

Huxley’s 1932 dystopian vision, which he believed was more likely than Orwell’s 1949 dystopian vision of the future, and reinforced in a letter to Orwell in 1949 shortly before his death, has been the pre-dominant method used by our overlords to rule over, manipulate, and exploit the foibles of the unthinking masses. They have kept their citizens distracted with pleasures, drugged into passivity, taught to feel rather than think in government run indoctrination centers (public schools) and overloaded with so much useless trivial information, they are incapable of distinguishing between good and evil – actually believing their servitude is freedom.

While Huxley’s dystopia continues, the ruling class fears their passive mind control methods aren’t as effective in achieving their great reset agenda, and in need of some Orwellian censorship, disinformation, brute force, government intimidation, harsh mind control, and guaranteeing compliance through fear. Aren’t we lucky to be experiencing the best of both dystopian visions. Those controlling the levers of society have used the school system to create a soulless amalgamation of hedonistic mass consumers; purposeless, apathetic, with muddled brains unable to understand their unintended enslavement to the evil demons running our world and controlling their lives.

Knowing most of what we see on our screens and hear from supposed “experts”, left wing corporate media talking heads, and Fox News bimbos, is gibberish and propaganda, it is hard to distinguish real threats from clickbait, purposeful disinformation, and scare tactics designed to make you do what they want you to do. The precarious financial situation of the country is real. The danger from an AI cage built through a tech-state merger with Palantir to surveil and digitally profile everyone is real.

The threat of the Ukraine-Russia conflict morphing into WW3 is real. The desire by billionaire globalists to introduce a Great Reset, Great Taking, and CBDCs is real. The planned, funded, and executed invasion of our southern border during the Basement Dummy administration by third world dregs, with the sole intention of destroying the social fabric and finances of the country, run by the Soros/Clinton/Obama triumvirate is real.

Even with the dismantling of their USAID insurrection funding source, this week’s festivities in Los Angeles kicked off the summer of civil war. There is nothing real or spontaneous about these riots. Whenever pallets of bricks suddenly show up on streets in city centers, you know Soros and his ilk are behind the organized destruction of that particular city. The brick and bomb throwers are being paid to riot and take photo ops. This will assuredly be rolled out in our other Democrat controlled urban shitholes across the land. The governor of California and the communist mayor of Los Angeles are paid acolytes of Soros, stoking insurrection and should be arrested and thrown into the dungeons of DC, like the grandmothers and patriots who sauntered through the Capitol on January 6.

We find ourselves on the precipice of a financial, social, and military calamity, all driven by the three driving forces of this Fourth Turning: debt, civic decay, global disorder. Anyone not noticing events are intensifying, conflict is expanding, anger is building, and the world is accelerating towards that precipice at breakneck speed, is simply ignorant or their minds are so numbed by their i-gadgets and government school indoctrination, that it’s beyond their comprehension to acknowledge reality.

At this point in history, I do not believe there are enough awakened critical thinking citizens to make a difference during the waning years of this Fourth Turning. We can’t vote our way out. We likely can’t shoot our way out. We can’t buy our way out. When the majority are proud of their ignorance and believe it is superior to actual knowledge, your society is pretty much screwed.

“What is happening here is that television is altering the meaning of ‘being informed’ by creating a species of information that might properly be called disinformation. I am using this world almost in the precise sense in which it is used by spies in the CIA or KGB. Disinformation does not mean false information. It means misleading information–misplace, irrelevant, fragmented or superficial information – information that creates the illusion of knowing something but which in fact leads one away from knowing. I am saying something far more serious than that we are being deprived of authentic information. I am saying we are losing our sense of what it means to be well informed. Ignorance is always correctable. But what shall we do if we take ignorance to be knowledge?” ― Neil Postman – Amusing Ourselves to Death

The existing financial, social and political paradigms will have to collapse and be swept away for any real change to occur. The problem is it appears that is exactly what the billionaire globalist elite are trying to trigger. In the aftermath, amidst chaos, financial ruin, civil and global war, social strife, and a political vacuum, they envision establishing an authoritarian global world order, with CBDCs, social credit scores, 15-minute cities, and Big Brother level surveillance. If this vision prevails, Orwell wins the award over Huxley for the most accurate dystopian nightmare.

Our only hope resides in the hubris and arrogance of the ruling class. Once the collapse is underway, its course is unpredictable and unstable. The best laid plans have a way of going awry. This could offer an opportunity for normal rational people to make their stand. If a liberty movement, backed by the 300 million firearms residing in the red states, could re-ignite the brush fires of freedom in the minds of men, maybe we could reset the course of our country. The odds probably aren’t worse than they were in 1776. At this point, all we can do is prepare mentally, physically, and spiritually for the coming storm. Buy supplies, guns and ammo. And remember what your forefathers accomplished with far less. The choice is slavery or freedom.

“It does not take a majority to prevail … but rather an irate, tireless minority, keen on setting brushfires of freedom in the minds of men.” ― Samuel Adams

“The time is near at hand which must determine whether Americans are to be free men or slaves.” – George Washington

Reprinted with permission from The Burning Platform.

The post We Are Being Amused and Abused to Death appeared first on LewRockwell.

This year, 2025, marks 1,250 years of the German region of Westphalia, the place where a celebrated treaty was signed in 1648 which laid the legal foundations of the modern nation state. Ours is now an age of globalists, however, at least on the EU-governed continent of mainland Europe, where, at the behest of the little people’s political “betters,” all expressions of traditional national and civilizational identities are to be systematically dismantled from above—particularly that of Christianity.

This is how we ended up with a recent farcical display being staged within the (formerly) hallowed halls of Paderborn Cathedral. On May 15, a secular ceremony of thanksgiving was allowed by the area’s Catholic archbishop, Udo Markus Bentz, to be staged—seemingly without him having checked up on its content properly beforehand. While German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier stood at the pulpit and spoke of the need for “spatial and temporal orientation” in an age of profound spatial and temporal disorientation—which liberal politicians like him had helped unleash onto the world in the first place—it seems these words were insincere, at least to judge by what followed next.

A German performance-artist group, Bodytalk, presented an extract from their musical Westphalia-Side Story, a piece of left-wing, environmentalist-related agitprop which, according to their website, bemoans how the rural portion of the region “sometimes seems like the home of the Hobbits from The Lord of the Rings” (i.e., white, conservative, German Christians).

However, in the modern, globalist era of EU-facilitated mass immigration, demographic and cultural differences between conservatives, liberals, and immigrants will have to be ironed out somehow, which is why the musical possessed “the leitmotif of ‘Flowing Borders,’” aiming to get rural and urban areas to know one another better via the medium of song and dance. Far from being a bastion of stolid religious illiberalism, why not instead rebrand the countryside from a more “global perspective” as a potential hotbed of “animal welfare” and “sustainability,” whose farmers could shift away from their traditional role of creating food toward becoming a cadre of valuable educators in fields like “nutrition/ecology/climate change” instead?

In practice, what this meant was two semi-naked topless men, in receipt of 79,500 Euros of public funding, together with one more-fully-clothed woman, prancing around the cathedral’s transept with scythes. Approaching the altar, which was fully laid with a cross and six candles, the trio produced not a holy chalice containing blessed wine or bread but a profane metal bowl from which they scooped out plucked chickens dressed in diapers. These poultry items were then juggled about in midair whilst Bodytalk sang the words “meat is meat” to the tune of Live Is Life, a 1984 hit single by the Austrian soft-rock giants Opus. As far as can be told, this was meant to discourage factory farming, or to promote veganism, or something. Who knows?

Whatever its message actually was, President Steinmeier enthusiastically applauded it; but, once footage of the performance spread online, the ordinary Catholic population of Germany did not. A petition condemning the event as “disturbing, blasphemous and profane” has gained over 26,000 signatures, demanding Archbishop Bentz reconsecrate the cathedral and condemning him for just sitting there in silence and watching events unfold. After all, as the display appeared to be an inverted parody of the Eucharist (whether intentionally or not), wouldn’t this rather imply the archbishop had just willingly attended a form of Black Mass?

Bentz and the cathedral canons have since apologized, condemning the show as disrespectful. But the question still remains: even if their carelessness meant they didn’t know precisely what was going to unfold that day, why didn’t they try to stop it once proceedings had begun? Yes, it would have been exceedingly socially embarrassing for them to have done so, but you may have thought the continued sanctity of the cathedral’s interior would have been more important to them than considerations of personal humiliation. The sight of Archbishop Bentz marching up toward the altar and ordering the dancers to cease may actually have won him some public respect, at least from actual Catholics—who, let’s not forget, the building is really supposed to be for, not professional state-subsidized chicken-tossers.

In the words of cathedral authorities’ eventual mea culpa: “The Metropolitan Chapter of Paderborn express their express regret that the performance hurt religious feelings. Such an effect was never intended and does not correspond to our claim to this place with its special religious, historical and cultural significance.”

The truly sad thing is that this statement may even have been made in all sincerity, not just with the aim of saving their own skin. There is a clear trend for facilitating unholy performances within churches across today’s West, like the time in 2023 when scantily-clad pop singer Sabrina Carpenter was allowed to parade up and down Blessed Virgin Mary Lithuanian Church in New York, acting somewhat less than a Blessed Virgin herself, cavorting amid a display of pastel-colored coffins bearing non-canonical messages like “RIP, BITCH!” on them.

As with this May’s scandal in Paderborn Cathedral, the Sabrina Carpenter debacle came about as a result of presiding church authorities failing to check out what the precise (or even vague) content of the routines scheduled to take place would be. Far worse are those times when churchmen possess full knowledge of what they will involve.

To return to Germany itself, in response to 2018 revelations about children being abused by renegade priests in the country, the German Catholic Church decided it would be good to make amends for these crimes by publicly raping the altar of Frankfurt Cathedral. Another extremely dark performance-art piece, called Verantworch:Ich (“Responsible: I”), was staged there in 2023—in front of a large audience of clergymen. Dancers dressed as demons, representing morally fallen Catholic priests, ritually tied up young women in black bondage ribbons and sexually molested them.

Once footage emerged, many devout believers criticized it as being “satanic,” but such critics rather missed the point. It was supposed to be satanic! Just as the pedophile priests had defiled the House of God symbolically, the Catholic custodians of Frankfurt Cathedral set out to defile it literally in revenge—in what amounted to an act of sympathetic magic (the old folk-medicine/witchcraft idea that “like cures like,” so you should temporarily hold a frog in your mouth to cure a croaky throat or suchlike).

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The post Defiling Consecrated Ground appeared first on LewRockwell.

[This article is a selection from Chapter 5 of Great Wars and Great Leaders: A Libertarian Rebuttal.]

Whenever anti-Semitic attitudes or acts are mentioned, de Zayas observes, Goldhagen speaks of “the Germans”—not “the Nazis,” or even “many Germans”—offering no justification at all; it is simply a polemical trick. He neglects to mention well-known facts, e.g., that everyone connected with the killing of the Jews was bound by Führer Order no. 1, as well as by special orders from Himmler, mandating the strictest silence, under penalty of death. So it should not be surprising that, for example, the former Chancellor Helmut Schmidt, during the war a Luftwaffe officer, testified that he had never heard or known anything of the annihilation of the Jews; or that Countess Dönhoff, publisher of the liberal paper, Die Zeit, should state that, despite her connections to many key people during the war, she knew nothing of the mass-killings in the camps, and that “I heard the name ‘Auschwitz’ for the first time after the war.” Goldhagen simply disregards major standard works that contradict his thesis. He claims, for example, that the German people approved of and joined in the Kristallnacht (the widespread 1938 murder of Jews and destruction of synagogues and businesses by Nazi thugs) in a kind of nation-wide Volksfest. Yet Sarah Gordon, in her authoritative Hitler, Germans, and the “Jewish Question” wrote: “there was a torrent of reports indicating public disapproval of Kristallnacht . . . [whatever the motivation] what is not in doubt, however, is the fact that the majority did disapprove . . . after Kristallnacht, the Nazis deliberately tried to conceal their measures against the Jews.”

None of the scholarly critics made much of an impression on audiences that witnessed the debates in the United States or during Goldhagen’s tour of Germany late last summer, and certainly not on sales of the book. In any case, most of them, except for de Zayas, overlooked the function performed by a work such as Goldhagen’s. While he indicts the Germans as pathologically anti-Semitic and while some of his critics retort that, no, all of Christendom, indeed, Christianity itself, is implicated in the Jewish genocide, attention is kept fixed on the supposed single great crime of the recent past, if not of all of human history to the virtual exclusion of all others. In particular, the misdeeds of Communist regimes are unduly neglected.

A decade ago, Ernst Nolte, then of the Free University of Berlin, ignited the Historikerstreit, or dispute of historians, and became the target of a campaign of defamation led by the philosopher Jürgen Habermas, by asking: “Didn’t the ‘Gulag Archipelago’ come before Auschwitz? Wasn’t the ‘class murder’ of the Bolsheviks the logical and factual presupposition of the ‘race murder’ of the National Socialists?” These are still good questions. In fact, Stalinist—and Maoist—offenses, while acknowledged, are generally downplayed and have achieved nothing remotely approaching the publicity of the Nazi massacre of the Jews. In the United States, it is possible for a person who keeps abreast of the news media to encounter references to the Holocaust virtually every day of his life. Yet who has heard of Kolyma, where more people were done to death than the present official count for Auschwitz? The figures for the victims of Maoist rule that are starting to come out of China suggest a total in the range of tens of millions. Do these facts even make a dent in public consciousness?

Moreover, there is an aspect of Stalinist atrocities that is very pertinent to the “Goldhagen Debate.” In their history of the Soviet Union, Utopia in Power, Mikhail Heller and Aleksandr M. Nekrich touch on the issue of whether the German people had full knowledge of the Nazi crimes. They state no opinion. But regarding the Soviets’ murderous war on the peasantry, including the Ukrainian terror famine, they write:

There is no question that the Soviet city people knew about the massacre in the countryside. In fact, no one tried to conceal it. At the railroad stations, city dwellers could see the thousands of women and children who had fled from the villages and were dying of hunger. Kulaks, “dekulakized persons,” and “kulak henchmen” died alike. ey were not considered human.

There has been no outcry for the Russian people to seek atonement and no one speaks of their “eternal guilt.” It goes without saying that the misdeeds of Communism, in Russia, China, and elsewhere are never debited to internationalism and egalitarianism as those of Nazism are to nationalism and racism.

Pointing to Communist crimes is not meant to “trivialize” the destruction of European Jewry, nor can it do so. The massacre of the Jews was one of the worst things that ever happened. But even supposing that it was the worst thing that ever happened, couldn’t some arrangement be worked out whereby Communist mass-murders are mentioned once for every ten times (or hundred times?) the Holocaust is brought up? Perhaps also, if we must have publicly financed museums commemorating the foreign victims of foreign regimes, some memorial to the victims of Communism might be considered, not on the Mall itself, of course, but maybe in a low-rent area of Washington?

If the crimes of Communism go relatively unmentioned, what are we to say of crimes committed against Germans? One of the most pernicious legacies of Hitler, Stalin, and Mao is that any political leader responsible for less than, say, three or four million deaths is let off the hook. This hardly seems right, and it was not always so. In fact— the reader may find this incredible— there was a time when American conservatives took the lead in publicizing Allied, and especially American, atrocities against Germans. Historians and high-level journalists like William Henry Chamberlin, in America’s Second Crusade and Freda Utley, in The High Cost of Vengeance pilloried those who had committed what Utley called “our crimes against humanity”— the men who directed the terror bombing of the German cities, conspired in the expulsion of some twelve million Germans from their ancestral lands in the east (in the course of which about two million died—see de Zayas’s Nemesis at Potsdam), and plotted the “final solution of the German question” through the Morgenthau Plan. Utley even exposed the sham “Dachau trials” of German soldiers and civilians in the first years of the Allied occupation, detailing the use of methods “worthy of the GPU, the Gestapo, and the SS” to extort confessions. She insisted that the same ethical standards had to be applied to victors and vanquished alike. If not, then we were declaring that “Hitler was justified in his belief that ‘might makes right.’ ” Both books were brought out by the late Henry Regnery, one of the last of the Old Right greats, whose house was the bastion of post-World War II revisionism, publishing works like Charles Callan Tansill’s classic, Back Door to War.

Keeping the Nazi period constantly before our eyes serves the ideological interests of a number of influential groups. That it benefits the Zionist cause, at least as many Zionists see it, is obvious. It is highly useful also to the advocates of a globalist America. Hitler and the crying need for the great crusade to destroy him are the chief exhibits in their case against any form of American “isolationism,” past or present. Any suggestion that our Soviet ally in that crusade was guilty of even greater offenses than Nazi Germany, that the United States government itself was incriminated in barbarous acts during and in the aftermath of that war, must be downplayed or suppressed, lest the historical picture grow too complex.

The obsession with the never-ending guilt of the Germans also advances the ends of those who look forward to the extinction of the nation-state and national identity, at least for the West. As the philosopher Robert Maurer argues, it inculcates in the Germans “a permanent bad conscience, and keeps them from developing any normal national self-awareness.” In this way, it functions “as a model for the cosmopolitan supersession of every nationalism,” which many today are striving towards. Ernst Nolte has recently suggested another strategy at work, aiming at the same goal. Nothing is clearer than that we are in the midst of a vast campaign to delegitimize Western civilization. In this campaign, Nolte writes, radical feminism joins with Third World anti-Occidentalism and multiculturalism within the Western nations “to instrumentalize to the highest degree the ‘murder of six millions Jews by the Germans,’ and to place it in the larger context of the genocides by the predatory and conquering West, so that ‘homo hitlerensis’ ultimately appears as merely a special case of ‘homo occidentalis.’ ” The purpose is to strike at “the cultural and linguistic homogeneity of the national states, achieved over centuries, and open the gates to a massive immigration,” so that in the end the nations of the West should cease to exist.

There seem to be cultural dynamics operating that will intensify rather than abate the present fixation. Michael Wolffsohn, an Israeli-born Jew who teaches modern history in Germany, has warned that Judaism is being emptied of its religious content and linked solely to the tribulations of the Jews through history, above all, the Holocaust. More than one commentator has noted that as the West loses any sense of morality rooted in reason, tradition, or faith, yet still feels the need for some secure moral direction, it increasingly finds it in the one acknowledged “absolute evil,” the Holocaust. If these claims are true, then the growing secularization of Judaism and the moral disarray of our culture will continue to make victims of the Germans and all the peoples of the West.

The post Remembering the Crimes of Totalitarian States appeared first on LewRockwell.

International Man: Palantir is a data analytics and AI company known for its work with governments, particularly in defense, intelligence, and law enforcement.

Critics argue it enables mass surveillance, predictive policing, and military applications. A significant portion of its revenue comes from classified government contracts, and some allege ties to the Deep State.

What is your perspective on Palantir?

Doug Casey: When Palantir was founded in 2003, all the initial funding came from Peter Theil and In-Q-Tel, an investment arm of the CIA. The US government and its agencies are by far its biggest customers, along with foreign governments and large corporations. Its revenues have grown around 40% annually since it went public in 2020.

The nature of Palantir’s clientele underlines what I’ve been saying about fascism as an economic system: Almost every country in the world is fascist—the economic system characterized by a total melding of the interests of government and large corporations.

Remember that Benito Mussolini coined the word “fascism” and defined it to mean the integration of the State with privately owned business. It’s different from socialism, where the State owns the means of production.

Fascism makes it possible for businessmen to become wealthy by catering primarily to the needs of the State, as opposed to the public. Corporations, by their nature, focus on creating wealth. That wealth becomes available to their shareholders, their managers, the State, and the apparatchiks in government who help the corporation. Fascism is naturally much more efficient than socialism, which always and inevitably generates losses. While fascism can look like capitalism, its prime interest is serving the State—not serving either consumers or workers.

Palantir is the Platonic ideal of a fascist business. It caters exclusively to the State and large corporations, to manipulate the public.

International Man: If Palantir’s viability relies heavily on government contracts and support, can it genuinely be classified as a legitimate private enterprise?

Doug Casey: In the Constitution, State intervention in the economy is justified with just a few words in Article 1, Section 8. The Commerce Clause gives Congress the power “to regulate Commerce with foreign Nations, and among the several States, and with the Indian Tribes.” And the General Welfare Clause, which grants Congress “the power to lay and collect taxes to pay the debts and provide for the common defense and general welfare of the United States.” It’s quite a leap from those little clauses to the government essentially controlling the entire economy.

Companies like Palantir rely on the government and big business—not the people—for their revenue.

Palantir has grown like a cancer since its founding, but that growth has really metastasized under Trump. That’s rationalized by the fact that, if the US is going to round up the 10 or 20 million migrants who are in the US illegally, it needs to find out who they are. So Trump strongly supports “REAL ID,” which facilitates the government knowing exactly who everybody is, where they came from, where they live and work, who they associate with, and everything else about them. That will make it easy to extract the migrants from society. Everyone’s “papers” must be in order. But to do this, legitimate Americans will need the same ID.

The very name of the company, Palantir, is a tip-off. In Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings, the Palantir is a stone that allows the viewer to see everything about the past, present, and future. You couldn’t hide from it. Peter Thiel chose that name for a reason.

That’s what the company is supposed to do: integrate data from everywhere. Right now, the data of government agencies is basically siloed. What one agency or department knows is not readily available to another. But Palantir will integrate and centralize all of it, plus everything they can scrape from corporate and other private data banks. This is extremely dangerous. Super dangerous. This thing is going to be a truly all-seeing eye.

Does Trump understand this? Or is he just a thoughtless useful idiot? Once the infrastructure for integrating all government data, plus what they can scrape from the internet, corporations, public cameras, cell phones, and you-name-it is in place, it’s pretty much game over.

Even if the Trump regime doesn’t use it in a genuinely nefarious way, as the Democrats claim he will, there’s no guarantee that the next president won’t use it. In fact, it’s almost certain the next president will. Once you have a tool, you use it. Anyway, the Deep State has a life of its own, independent of the two parties. The data that Palantir is putting together will definitively centralize political and economic power within the Washington Beltway.

International Man: The Israel Defense Forces use Palantir’s AI to identify and target locations in Gaza, the US Department of Defense employs it for drone surveillance analysis, and the Los Angeles Police Department has adopted Palantir’s predictive policing tools to forecast crime trends. And Palantir is creating a Federal database on American citizens.

Where is this going?

Doug Casey: It’s most regrettable, but also inevitable. That’s because anything that can be imagined—including dystopian things predicted by science fiction—can probably be done in the real world. Anything that can be done probably will be done. And now that the technology exists, it is, in fact, being done.

Palantir is centralizing all the data in society. And with the growth of the State taking an increasingly large percentage of GDP—from perhaps 5% 125 years ago to close to 50% today—we’re well on our way toward becoming a police state. Newton’s First Law of Motion states that an object in motion tends to stay in motion. This trend has been in motion for many years, and it’s accelerating.

This is the perverse thing about DOGE, the Department of Governmental Efficiency, which seemed like a good idea at the time. It’s the tyranny of good intentions. Cutting waste seems like a good thing. But the State, as an institution, corrupts everything it touches. When it’s tending toward tyranny, efficiency is the last thing you want.

Companies like Palantir are changing the very nature of the US. In years past, if you made a mistake that damaged your reputation, you could go to a new town and try again. But now, anything on your permanent electronic record is with you forever. We may devolve into a high-tech version of the Hindu caste system, where once you’re classified in a certain way, that’s where you stay.

Palantir will make it easy to identify libertarians, classical liberals, free thinkers, and other potential enemies of the State. You’d better be careful about what you say. It may be why journalist Glenn Greenwald prefers to live in Brazil. His writing has proved embarrassing to the Powers That Be, and he may not want to be easily available when AI, aided by Palantir’s data bank, decides to round up the usual suspects. This is why I’ve said, for years, that a prudent person will diversify as the US, the Anglosphere, and Western Europe devolve.

Will Americans soon be classed by risk, the way Palantir has classed Gazans? The total information awareness that Palantir will give the government will certainly help them find some bad guys. But who’s a bad guy can be very arbitrary, as many people in England and Germany who are being jailed for what impresses me as innocuous speech are discovering.

International Man: Peter Thiel, a co-founder of Palantir, often presents himself as a libertarian. However, his actions and true allegiance appear to align with the Deep State and secretive international organizations like Bilderberg. What about Thiel?

Doug Casey: It’s clear that Thiel has a thorough intellectual understanding of the principles of libertarianism. But it doesn’t appear that he’s translated intellectual understanding into the world of what’s moral, what’s right or wrong. It’s long been said that power corrupts, and Thiel, who is said to be worth over $20 billion at this point, has an immense amount of both financial and political power.

Perhaps he reasons that this technology has a life of its own. I certainly think it does. If so, it’s going to grow almost independent of who is involved. After all, that’s what Artificial Intelligence and its immense data centers are all about; they’re almost independent entities at this point. Perhaps Thiel thinks that, since it’s going to happen anyway, it’s better that it be under the control of the quote-unquote “good guys” as opposed to someone else.

I can understand that, but it’s fallacious reasoning. It didn’t matter whether the Sorcerer’s Apprentice was a good guy. The Deep State, which will control Palantir, is itself out of control. I don’t think there’s any way we can put the genie back in the bottle. It augurs for a dystopian future.

International Man: Palantir’s market capitalization has skyrocketed from about $50 billion a year ago to approximately $300 billion today, surpassing the valuations of major companies like Coca-Cola and General Electric.

What are your thoughts on this extraordinary growth, and what are the investment implications?

Doug Casey: That’s shocking and perverse. Coke and GE have been around for a century, producing valuable products that people want and need. Palantir has products that are actively destructive, but the market loves it. Lenin was right when he said that the capitalists would sell their enemies the ropes used to hang them.

Let’s look at Palantir both as a company and as a stock. Since it went public in 2020, it’s run from $10 a share to $135 a share. Its current price-to-earnings ratio is 500-1, and its price-to-sales ratio is 100-1—these are outlandish numbers. It does a billion or two billion shares a day in volume.

This is fantastic growth, but what’s really interesting is that the stock took off in June of 2024. It’s gone up about six or seven times in just a year. What’s disturbing is that most of the move coincides with the election of Donald Trump.

The stock is grossly overpriced by all traditional parameters. But its valuation shows that the market believes its business will keep growing rapidly. It can go a lot higher; it could be the next Nvidia. I don’t want any part of it for lots of reasons, not least that its success is a proxy for the collapse of personal freedom and Western Civilization. Of course, here I’m not speaking as a speculator but as a moralist… sorry, sometimes it just can’t be helped…

On the bright side, there’s an old saying in the market: “High tech equals big wreck.” So perhaps the evil thing will self-destruct.

The Praetorian agencies of the US government are all about gathering data. They use it, directly and indirectly, not just to control the public in general, but powerful individuals in particular. They’re able to control the leaders of both governments and corporations. If they know something about you, they can use that information to intimidate you. And if you aren’t intimidated, they can use it to ruin your life.

So, the wrong people, the kind of people who are drawn to agencies like the CIA, NSA, IRS, FBI, and a score of others, have control of all the data and all the power. They’re not good people, and they won’t use all this data, money, and power in benevolent ways.

So, be afraid. Be very afraid.

Reprinted with permission from International Man.

The post Palantir: The Intersection of Government and Corporate Power appeared first on LewRockwell.

Most patients with chronic pain will typically first be recommended a variety of pain medications and physical therapy, then once those fail, steroid injections, and then a joint surgery. Unfortunately, each step in this process is often ineffective at addressing the patient’s pain or creates a variety of complications that make their situation even more unbearable. For this reason, it is critical to understand the risks of each part of this process and the safer alternatives that can permanently alleviate joint and spinal pain.

Note: persistent or recurrent pain after spinal surgery, back pain following spinal surgery is referred to as “Failed Back Surgery Syndrome” and affects between 10-40% of people who receive a spinal surgery.

Common Spinal Pain Generators:

In most cases, joint pain has a cause that must be identified to treat it. For example, when treating spinal pain, we find it is critical to address:

• Tight muscles—rarely recognized despite being common (particularly of the iliopsoas and quadratus lumborum—two large and frequently tight muscle groups which directly attach to the lumbar spine). Physical therapists typically focus on strengthening rather than stretching/releasing tight muscles.
• Misalignment—requires adjustment and lifestyle corrections. A common cause of misalignment are uneven leg lengths which tilt the pelvis and hence the spine (and can be corrected with an appropriate heel lift).
• Ligamentous laxity—often the primary cause of spinal arthritis, muscle tightness, and disc problems as tight ligaments are necessary to ensure bones stay in the correct location and do not impinge tissues.
• Disc herniation—not the most common cause of back pain but sometimes a significant contributor (and frequently used as a justification for disastrous spinal surgeries). In most cases, disc herniations result from vertebrae bending too far forward, which pushes the discs back and compresses the nerves behind them.

• This can frequently result from a weakening of the spinal ligaments or poor posture which eliminates the natural backwards curve in the neck and low back.

• Note: tight muscles, joint misalignments, and ligamentous laxity also create issues in other regions of the body (e.g., the knees).

Additional Pain Generators:

• Trapped emotions: chronic stress and emotional distress frequently exacerbate pain (and in some cases are the primary cause of back pain). Dr. Sarno for example, addressed back pain through psychotherapy and generated a large following as his approach helped many (but not everyone).
  Note: we frequently find a direct release of trapped emotions (rather than psychotherapy) is necessary to address chronic emotional trauma.
• Nervous system dysregulation—over-activation of the sympathetic nervous system alongside under-activation of the parasympathetic system exacerbates pain.
  Note: A common effect of unresolved trauma is fight-or-flight system over-activation.
• Chronic inflammatory conditions (e.g., dietary allergies, mold toxicity, Lyme disease, spike protein injuries) often worsen pain patterns.
  Note: many individuals have found that eliminating dietary food allergens resolves arthritis.
• Scars from surgeries can frequently generate significant autonomic dysregulation and pain, and frequently, treatment of those scars yields dramatic improvements.
• Altered brain pain processing—often due to chronically over-activated nerves or microstroke injuring the thalamus (which otherwise dampens pain signals). In these instances, small stimuli can be extremely painful.

Systemic Medications

Since joint or spinal pain has multiple causes and diagnosis is time-consuming, physicians typically prescribe pills or refer patients elsewhere rather than address the root causes of their pain. Common medications include NSAIDs, Tylenol, Steroids, Gabapentin (or Lyrica), and Opioids—all with major issues.

Note: due to the high rate of addiction which follows opioid prescriptions (and the societal damage that follows), more and more, the government has moved to restrict opioid prescriptions. Because of this, patients in significant pain who will only respond to opioids, despite their best efforts, often cannot get these drugs and instead are given another ineffective option (e.g., NSAIDs), hence making it imperative that effective non-opioid solutions for pain be made available to the public.

NSAIDs

NSAIDs (e.g., ibuprofen, naproxen) temporarily reduce pain but only partially, leading patients to overuse them—often dangerously, as NSAIDs are toxic at high doses (which frequently occur since NSAIDs are taken for pain and are available over the counter). Many consider NSAIDs among the most hazardous drugs in the U.S. because:

• They are the leading cause of drug-related hospital admissions—often due to heart attacks, strokes, bleeding, and kidney failure.
• Kidney damage is a significant risk. One study found a 20% increased risk of kidney disease from NSAIDs; others found up to 212%. Amongst kidney failure patients, 65.7% were found to be chronic NSAID users.
• NSAIDs raise cardiovascular risks. NSAIDS also increase the risk of heart attacks and death (e.g., extensive studies have found between a 24-326% increase1,2,3). Two of the worst ones, Vioxx (Merck) and Celebrex (Pfizer), were designed to reduce stomach bleeding but instead caused heart attacks and strokes. Merck hid data on Vioxx’s risks; eventually it was withdrawn after an estimated 120,000 deaths. Celebrex, still on the market, has been linked to 75,000 deaths. Merck’s handling of Vioxx later informed how pharma pushed the HPV vaccine and mRNA vaccines.
• Gastrointestinal bleeding is common and often fatal. In 1999, over 16,000 Americans died from it. NSAIDs also cause small bowel damage in over 50% of chronic users—often undetected—leading to “small bowel enteropathy” and possibly chronic illness through gut permeability.
• They impair healing, especially of ligaments, creating long-term re-injury risk.

Trials alleging the benefit of NSAIDs are frequently intentionally deceptive and frequently create the illusion of a benefit where none exists. What this means is that many patients ruin their lives with drugs that did almost nothing for them in the first place.—Peter Gøtzsche

Unfortunately, NSAIDs remain amongst the most commonly prescribed drugs, and are frequently given for musculoskeletal injuries.

Note: the dangers of NSAIDs are discussed further here.

Tylenol

Tylenol (acetaminophen) is one of the few over-the-counter alternatives to NSAIDs and is generally considered safer, though often ineffective for severe pain. Still, it carries serious risks:

• Liver Toxicity: Overuse leads to 56,000 ER visits, 2,600 hospitalizations, and 500 deaths annually in the U.S. due to Tylenol toxicity.
• Fever Suppression: Tylenol reduces fevers, which are key immune defenses. Suppressing them can worsen or prolong infections—a pattern observed during COVID-19. Many parents of vaccine-injured children reported symptoms (e.g., autism) appeared after using Tylenol to suppress high post-vaccine fevers, explored in this 2021 paper.

Gabapentin and Pregabalin

Gabapentin (Neurontin) was originally approved to treat epilepsy—a small market. After approval, Pfizer aggressively pushed it for unapproved uses, especially neuropathic pain, despite limited evidence. The federal government fined Pfizer nearly $1 billion for illegal promotion.

While less toxic than NSAIDs, side effects for these drugs are common and include: lethargy, dizziness, sedation, and cognitive impairment, as well as rarer but serious reactions like respiratory depression and hypersensitivity. Gabapentin can also be habit forming.

Note: since gabapentin and pregabalin (Lyrica) only work for specific types of pain (e.g., neuropathic pain), they typically do very little for most patients’ pain. However, they are widely prescribed because they lack many of the severe risks associated with other pain reducing drugs, and as a result, many are placed on inappropriate prescriptions for them.

Corticosteroids

Initially hailed as a wonder drug, corticosteroids like prednisone and hydrocortisone gradually were discovered to have significant side effects (e.g., weight gain, adrenal suppression, heart attacks, diabetes, insomnia, and psychiatric effects). Since corticosteroids trigger tissue breakdown, they also often greatly weaken the body’s structural integrity, impair wound healing and weaken collagen synthesis.

Furthermore, corticosteroids double one’s risk of fracture (especially vertebrae), with 12% of users reporting fractures. Steroids cause 5-15% bone loss yearly, and 37% of long-term users experience vertebral fractures. High doses increase vertebral fracture risk fivefold. Higher doses also cause avascular necrosis in 6.7% of users. Likewise, they greatly impair wound healing, collagen

Note: the primary drugs used to treat Osteoporosis (bisphosphonates) have severe side effects have severe side effects including making the bones more likely to break. In turn, one of the few approved uses for bisphosphonates is steroid-induced bone loss.

Since both collagen, ligaments (which are composed of collagen) and bones are weakened by steroids, chronic use leads to joint weakening and chronic pain. Because of this, we frequently encounter patients who achieved a temporary alleviation of joint pain (e.g., in the spine or knee) who then have their condition worsen and require surgery. Unfortunately, this side effect is rarely disclosed to patients, leading to many surgeries that could have been prevented.

Note: in many cases, if joint pain is instead treated by strengthening the ligaments (e.g., with nutritional supplementation or prolotherapy), the pain will resolve and future surgeries can be prevented.

The Surgery Funnel

Surgeries often have risks that patients don’t learn about until after complications occur, which is problematic since you can’t “undo” surgery. For this reason, patients should seek unbiased second opinions from doctors who aren’t being paid to do a proposed surgery.

Unbearable pain (e.g., in a joint) is one of the strongest motivators for surgery, and spinal surgeries are the most common elective surgery I’m consulted about. Unfortunately, since spinal surgeries are one of the most profitable areas in medicine, there’s reluctance to consider if risks outweigh benefits or if safer and more effective alternative exist, and over the years I’ve become increasingly skeptical of them, as while some are necessary and help patients, many are not.

Likewise, despite trillions spent on spinal pain (e.g., in 2016, 134.4 billion dollars was spent on neck and low back pain in the USA), most patients remain stuck with chronic pain and experience significant side effects from treatments.

Note: there have been numerous newspaper investigations of spinal surgeons who recklessly performed large volumes of unnecessary surgeries, killing or injuring many of their patients who were nonetheless protected by their hospitals because of how much revenue they generated.

Read the Whole Article

The post What They Don’t Tell Us About Treating Pain appeared first on LewRockwell.

The parasites have been feasting for so many decades that they’ve lost the ability to discern reality: their survival now depends on feeding on other parasites.

Let’s conduct a thought experiment. First, set aside all the usual economic-ideological certainties, mythologies and filters–capitalism and free markets are the fountains of endless wealth, socialism is the answer, etc.–and then look at our culture not as a monetary-economic machine but as an ecosystem of parasites and hosts. From this perspective consider this statement:

Now that the parasites have consumed the host, they only have each other to feed on.

In this scenario, the US consumer is the host and industries, cartels and corporations are the parasites (along with local governments, whose tax revenues are drawn from transactions and bubble wealth valuations), seeking to “maximize shareholder value” (i.e. profits) by any means available without killing the host.

The problem is the “profit motive” knows no limits and lacks the mechanisms to detect the host is about to keel over. In the natural world, parasites are in a feedback loop with the hosts they’re feeding on, as the death of the host means the death of the parasites.

In our culture, the parasites assume the host is immortal, due to the Federal Reserve and federal government’s ability to create money out of thin air and distribute it to the host. The parasites can suck as much wealth as they want from the host and the host may stumble but will never collapse because the Fed and Treasury will inject another few trillion dollars into the host to keep it slogging along.

But these injections aren’t a true measure of the host’s health. These financial injections can keep the patient alive but comatose, which suits the parasites just fine, but that doesn’t mean the patient is healthy and immortal.

Greed is infinite but the host is not. The host needs to be physically healthy and financially healthy to support a host of voracious parasites, and neither of these conditions apply.

Over 73% of US adults (i.e. the host) are overweight or obese, conditions which greatly increase the risks of a range of chronic illnesses. Only 26% of the adult populace is normal weight. To call this “healthy” is delusional.

Financially, the bottom 60%–some 200 million people–are on fumes. A strong case can be made (based on wages’ share of the economy and astronomical wealth inequality) that the bottom 80%–275 million Americans–are on fumes, but some percentage holds fast to the delusion they’re still “middle class,” i.e. financially secure and reasonably wealthy, due to the bubble valuations of stocks and housing.

Consider these statistics, courtesy of the St. Louis Federal Reserve database (FRED). (Statistics are the latest available in May 2025, and are rounded: $107.7 is $108, etc.)

Of America’s total household net worth of $160 trillion, the top 1% of households own $50 trillion, or 31%.

The top 10% own $108 trillion, or 67%.

The bottom 50% own $4 trillion, or 2.5%.

The top 1%–3.4 million people–are worth 12.5 times what the bottom 50%–170 million people–are worth.

Statistics like these are difficult to grasp, as they are abstractions. A real-world analogy helps us understand what the numbers mean.

Consider a vast expanse of desert. Divide this enormous space in half. On one side, there are the 19 wealthiest families in the U.S., who own a net worth of $2.6 trillion. This is larger than the GDP of Italy ($2.4 trillion, with a population of 59 million).

On the other side, there are 110 million Americans, 65% of the bottom 50% of the populace (170 million). These 110 million Americans also have a net worth of $2.6 trillion.

It’s difficult to fit 110 million people into the vast parcel, as this is the combined population of California, Texas, Florida and New York–the four most populous states in the U.S..

Read the Whole Article

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Well it looks like the US is on the precipice of war with Iran again.

US officials are telling the press that they anticipate a potential impending Israeli attack on Iran while the family members of US military personnel are being assisted with evacuation from bases in the region.

This comes as Tehran issues a warning that it will strike all US military bases within range of its missiles if it comes under attack. There are reportedly some 50,000 US troops in 10 bases which could come under fire should this occur.

The US is also evacuating its embassy in Iraq, and has authorized the departure of non-essential personnel from its embassies in Kuwait and Bahrain.

Asked by the press about the evacuations, President Trump said, “They are being moved out because it could be a dangerous place, and we’ll see what happens. We’ve given notice to move out.”

Trump is openly declaring a willingness to strike Iran if nuclear negotiations fall through, while saying he is now “much less confident” that any deal will be made.

“If they don’t make a deal, they’re not gonna have a nuclear weapon; if they do make a deal they’re not gonna have a nuclear weapon too,” the president said in an interview published on Wednesday, adding that “it would be nicer to do it without warfare, without people dying.”

If the US backs an Israeli attack on Iran and then Iran retaliates by killing a bunch of US military personnel, we could be looking at a full-scale direct war between the US and Iran.

As I’ve said in this space many times before, this would be the absolute worst-case nightmare scenario for the middle east, unleashing horrors that dwarf all the other terrible abuses currently happening in the region. As Trump’s now-Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard said in 2019 (back when she publicly opposed Trump’s warmongering), “What is important that the American people know is a war with Iran would make the war in Iraq look like a cakewalk.”

It’s so stupid that this keeps happening. This could all be avoided by the US simply ceasing to support the genocidal apartheid state of Israel no matter what it does. The fact that Washington has continued to pour weapons into Israel despite all its warmongering and genocide since 2023 means the US supports everything that Israel has been doing.

If a war with Iran does occur, you will doubtless hear western pundits and politicians trying to spin this as America getting “drawn into” another war in the middle east, or Trump being tricked or manipulated into war. But make no mistake: the US could have turned away from this path at any time, and still can.

If this Pandora’s box is opened, it will be because the US empire knowingly chose to open it.

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The post Staring Down the Barrel of War With Iran Once Again appeared first on LewRockwell.

On a cruise in the Aegean—the first time in 20 years—I am reminded that contending with adversaries lies at the heart of the human condition. For millennia, the lands and islands that are now the territories of Turkey and Greece have been contested by a bewildering array of tribes with conflicting tribal and religious identities.

Many of the places I have visited were the scenes of conflict between the Knights of Saint John and the Ottoman Turks. The following photo is of a little church that was built around 1407 in Bodrum Castle by the Knights of St. John.

The Knights constructed the castle out of the ruins of the Mausoleum at Halicarnassus, also knowns as the Tomb of Mausolus. They called their fortification the Castle of St. Peter.

After the Knights were kicked out of Bodrum in 1523 by Suleiman the Magnificent, the chapel was converted into a mosque and a minaret was added. The minaret was fired upon and struck by a French warship cannon in 1915, but later rebuilt.

When I was growing up in the United States in the 1980s and 90s, it sometimes seemed like “We the People” had overcome the faction and strife that had characterized the human condition for so long. This was an illusion. Clearly humans have a strong and enduring predilection to conflict with each other.

While on my modern Aegean odyssey, I have often thought of the ancient Greek hero Odysseus, and the first lines of Homer’s epic poem about his adventures.

Sing Muse, about that man, skilled in all ways of contending, who wandered

So many ways after he sacked the sacred citadel of Troy.

It was Odysseus’s idea to build the Trojan Horse to penetrate the city walls. His gift for coming up with such clever devices is what enabled him to get home to Ithaca, overcoming all the obstacles thrown in his way during his ten-year odyssey. Homer depicts him as tough, resourceful, clever, cheerful, eloquent, and wise.

Whenever you are feeling overwhelmed by all of the adversarial humans and circumstances in the world, think of Odysseus and how—no matter how great the adversary or formidable the obstacle—he always figured out a way to prevail. He is a timeless classic of a man who contends with an adversarial world.

This article was originally published on Courageous Discourse.

The post Skilled in All Ways of Contending appeared first on LewRockwell.

In a Tuesday speech at Fort Bragg, President Donald Trump declared that “people that burn the American flag should go to jail for one year,” something Trump proceeded to state he is working with United States senators to bring about.

Twenty-two years ago this month, members of the United States House of Representatives were debating on the House floor whether they should approve H. J. Res. 4, a proposed constitutional amendment that would have empowered the Congress to “prohibit the physical desecration of the flag of the United States.” During the debate, Rep. Ron Paul (R-TX) argued that the proposed constitutional amendment, which he described as “very unnecessary and very dangerous,” should be rejected. Paul said the attempt to “force values on people” through the proposed constitutional amendment was inconsistent with respect for liberty. “Values in a free society,” Paul stated, “are done voluntarily, not through coercion and certainly not by the law.” The law, Paul further noted, is backed by guns.

After the debate on the House floor, a vote by House members approved H. J. Res. 4. The Senate, however, did not end up voting on it.

Watch Paul’s House floor speech here:

This article was originally published on The Ron Paul Institute.

The post Ron Paul Rewind: Don’t Ban Flag Burning appeared first on LewRockwell.

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The post Jeffrey Sachs: Ukraine/Russia Dangerous New Escalation, & the Dark Forces Pushing for War With Iran appeared first on LewRockwell.

Although even Pope Leo XIV acknowledges that mass immigration is a “huge problem,“ a recent “Pastoral Note to Migrants” issued by Michigan’s Catholic bishops is an embarrassing combination of fallacy, contradiction, doctrinal subversion, begged questions, conflict of interest, and hypocrisy.

To start, the letter from the bishops ignores the elephant in the room: the violation of immigration law is a crime. Since the bishops subsequently claim that “The Catholic Church affirms the rule of law….” they must prove that current immigration law is unjust if they seek to continue supporting mass immigration in violation of the law.

The Catechism of the Catholic Church (CCC) 2241 lays out the proper disposition of immigrants to their new country and the right of a receiving country to determine the conditions for entry. Furthermore, the Catholic social teaching of Pope St. John Paul II urged the sincere participation of citizens in the cultural, economic, and social life of a civil community—not merely taking advantage of promises of free stuff (transportation, health care, food, services, housing) without contributing anything. To ignore this balance is an injustice to working Americans who themselves may be struggling.

When some newcomers seek to subvert the existing legal system by substituting Sharia or by illegally voting in a presidential election, how is it not reprehensible? Adding insult to injury, Catholic Charities supports “crucial care” funding that includes free chartered flights into the country for so-called asylum seekers—people who may never have thought to enter the United States without such services. Bishop Emeritus Joseph Strickland pointed out that 80 percent of immigrants would not qualify for asylum or refugee status. Even worse, Catholic Charities’ free legal advice includes instruction on how to remain silent when questioned by immigration authorities. Is this honorable?

The bishops also ignore theologian and Doctor of the Church Thomas Aquinas, who quotes Aristotle in recommending that immigrants should wait three generations before full admission into a community lest they meddle in hurtful ways (Summa Theologiae, I-II, q. 105, a.3).

Emotional Blackmail

Instead of addressing these pertinent issues, the bishops decided to change the subject and exploit the emotional aspects of poverty and hunger. This move was completely unnecessary because assistance to those suffering from genuine hunger and thirst can just as easily be provided in one’s country of origin without the social disruption, risk, and high cost of intercontinental travel required by immigration. Moreover, the immigrant assistance addressed in CCC 2241 is itself limited to “those who cannot have a means of livelihood in their country of origin.” Given the lack of documentation for the vast flood of immigrants, was there even an attempt to determine how many really suffered such a fate?

The exploitation of emotion-laden words like “empathize,” “anxiety,” and “fear” not only obscures the illegitimacy of their position but it is entirely one-sided (i.e., card stacking, an informal fallacy). Why don’t the bishops extend the same attitude to the thousands of U.S. citizens whose properties along the border and elsewhere are overrun by waves of immigrants lured by promises of free stuff? Why no empathy for taxpayers, the victims of child- and sex-trafficking (vastly increased by this policy), and those whose neighborhoods have been transformed by the overwhelming incursion of immigrants?

Current Immigration Law and Tacit Deception

The bishops urged elected officials to “work for a humane immigration system.” The tacit assumption here is that the lawful immigration process that Trump seeks to restore (which Democrats abandoned), is somehow inhumane. But that begs the question: Compared to what? The Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965—in effect for 60 years—is widely recognized as one of the world’s most radically accommodating to immigrants. It has been long criticized as too generous—transforming the social fabric of the country by permitting a vast influx of immigrants who neither understand nor value America’s unique freedoms.

So, why assume that a decades-old policy is inhumane? This is particularly galling when Vatican City itself increased its own restrictions, fines, and imprisonment penalties for unauthorized entry on December 19, 2024: “Anyone convicted of illegal entry will be banned from entering Vatican territory for a period of up to 15 years.” Hypocrisy seems to have found a home with Michigan’s bishops on this issue.

Subsidiarity Ignored

Catholic social teaching is grounded in the concept of subsidiarity (CCC 1883-1885, 2209). This means that the smallest, most local social institution (usually the family) should resolve problems first. Why? Because the institutions closest to, most intimate with, and most likely to understand all of the details and parties involved are best equipped to get the job done successfully, efficiently, and with minimal disruption.

Along with subsidiarity comes a warning: larger, more remote social institutions must not interfere with the primacy of local social units. Knowing this, why do the bishops take the opposite approach? In effect, they are prioritizing a vast, faceless, remote bureaucracy that is itself funded by the most massive tax-and-spend bureaucracy in the history of mankind (the U.S. government)—not to mention its copycats in Lansing. And the bishops don’t even offer the thinnest tissue of an excuse for violating this principle.

Read the Whole Article

The post A Catholic Lawyer Responds to the Bishops About Mass Immigration appeared first on LewRockwell.

The Stars and Stripes we proudly fly ain’t the one I pledged allegiance to as a kid.

It seems obvious that at the top of the pole today should hang the Israeli flag since they have parasitized our nation, corrupted congress, the media, The Donald and even many confused “Christians.”  Our once iron-clad Bill of Rights is no more when one cannot criticize 20+ hyper-expensive years of Mideast destruction on behalf of Israel much less an ongoing genocide in Gaza.

Why else would the U.S. government continue to fund the destruction of Gaza and the “solution” to Israel’s overpopulation problem?

Or bomb Yemen and threaten Iran?

Or continue to support Zelensky and obsolete NATO while threatening Russia?

Or stage a Soviet style military parade,…on Flag Day???

Just watching network dorks and douchebags who are always wrong or lying support this insanity,.. makes a little puke rise in my throat.

Don’t they realize our militaristic foreign policy wasted trillions that actually could have made America great and prosperous,… and that World Peace and Cooperation wouldn’t cost a nickel?

Or that resultant inflation, loss of self expression/connectedness/loneliness are key health problems causing anxiety and despair which fuel our epidemic of addiction, suicide and chronic disease?

On Down the Flagpole

Below the Star of David should hang a Nascar-style flag bundle of high paying sponsors; the “defense” industry, Wall Street, Big Pharma, Big Ag/Big Food,…not to mention “Silly-con Valley” subversives and their AI scams designed to control public perception and micromanage people.

Almost as egregious but no less deadly are the endless cheery drug commercials and come-ons for Fruit Loops, fast foods and soft drinks.

Oh how I despise washed-up celebrities lending their images to endorse a wide range of sketchy products and rip-offs!

Only idiots argue political theater while ignoring the fact that the U.S. has become the 4th Reich, a National-Socialist-Fascist nation purely aligned with industry, oligarchs and Zionist Neocon traitors.

All information is controlled, even to the extent that lifesaving treatments are “forbidden.”

Laws and lawyers protect the system and elite criminals over their victims.

Universities project authority favoring corporate sponsorship.

Employers seize overseer power over workers, as do institutions and all top-down chain-of-command organizations.

Police wear military armor and work in heavily armed gestapo-like SWAT teams.

Travel is a pain in the ass.  We are all digitized, face recognized, tracked, thought-surveilled and DNA registered.

The Patriot Act has outlived “terrorism” if that was ever a real thing.

And Why?

My faith in our “democratic republic” began to wane after the flaky official story of the JFK assassination, took a nose-dive during the VietNam debacle and died on 9/11.

My faith in the domestic narrative went south with an endless string of phony events and injunctions designed to isolate/weaken/divide the public far beyond the pivotal strangulation of the economy and dollar.

Did NGOs fund the BLM/ICE riots or was it deep state spycraft?

Was the response a dress rehearsal for martial law?

An incomplete list of lies and psyops and devious decrees designed to weaken the populace and enforce compliance;

That racism and white supremacy exist and are really really bad.

That animal fats and cholesterol generate heart attacks.

That sunshine creates skin cancers.

That numerous highly questionable vaccines are mandated in the interest of public health.

That fluoridation, mercury fillings, thousands of chemicals and pharmaceuticals are safe and effective.

That grain based foods and animal agriculture are healthy, and that natural cures like chiropractic and Vitamin C are quackery.

That a toxic psychological and biological environment is another conspiracy theory and remains at “safe” levels.

After a lifetime of observation I could see;

That we came under control of behind-the-scenes evil actors bent on world domination.

That the press, media and speech are controlled to hide their dirty deeds through secrecy and disinformation to keep Joe Sixpack working ever harder.

That promoting enemies and doing wars provided a feeding-frenzy for greedy-sharks killing and crippling millions of naive “patriots” and innocents abroad.

There is no honest government Of/By/For the people, but an empire controlled by dark forces always promising fun and ice cream.

What they really pulled-off is a world of broken dreams!

Let’s see their true colors.

The post The Falsest of Flags; Gimme True Colors! appeared first on LewRockwell.

Not only is Robert Barnes a master litigator and top-notch attorney but one of the most in depth, articulate, well read and street-smart experienced political analysts in the nation. Whether it involves the institutionalized criminal machine cartels of the Democrats and Republicans or the deep state, he is a true polymath reminiscent of Murray N. Rothbard in his power elite analysis of Realpolitik.

At VivaBarnesLaw.Locals.com Robert Barnes hosts a wonderful series of video podcasts, Hush Hush (drawing its title from reference to Danny DeVito’s character Sid Hudgens’ investigative/gossip rag in the neo-noir classic film, L.A. Confidential ), where he masterfully delves into and elucidates upon a wide range of fascinating mysteries/conspiracies from beyond the mainstream gatekeeper perspective of establishment court history or the regime media.

The post Hush Hush Before Hush Hush: Robert Barnes Exposing Robert Mueller appeared first on LewRockwell.

Thanks, John Smith. 

MoneyWise

The post Massachusetts landlord took on a second job to pay his bills during 2-year battle with ‘professional tenants’ appeared first on LewRockwell.

Thanks, John Smith. 

The Guardian

The post The Guardian view on Iran’s nuclear programme: Trump undid a crucial accord. A new deal is urgently needed appeared first on LewRockwell.

Thanks,  John Frahm.

InfoWars

The post Did You Know That A Consortium Of European Royalty / Central Banks Conducted A Secret Coup Against America In 1947? appeared first on LewRockwell.

Tim McGraw wrote:

I’ve never been to Lake Superior. Wish I had. Beautiful in summer. Deadly in winter. The Human Rights Museum in Winnipeg, Manitoba, is very cool. Every politician, bureaucrat, soldier, and policeman should visit it. Lawyers should be forced to spend six months there mopping the floors.

The post Driving Across Canada, Art We There Yet? appeared first on LewRockwell.

Thanks, John Smith. 

The Cradle

The post BIAEA an ‘instrument for Israel,’ secret documents seized by Iran reveal appeared first on LewRockwell.

Thanks, John Smith. 

The Telegraph

The post Marco Rubio condemns UK sanctions on Israeli ministers appeared first on LewRockwell.

TimM wrote:

Howdy Lew,

Brion McClanahan covers what most fail to grasp when it comes to Trump’s deploying National Guard and Marines to LA.

The post Trump channeling his inner Lincoln appeared first on LewRockwell.