Lew Rockwell Institute

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The post Why They Hate Him So Much appeared first on LewRockwell.

Over the weekend President Trump ordered a massive military operation against the small country of Yemen. Was Yemen in the process of attacking the United States? No. Did the President in that case go to Congress and seek a declaration of war against the country? No. The fact is, Yemen hadn’t even threatened the United States before the bombs started falling.

Last year, candidate Trump strongly criticized the Biden Administration’s obsession with foreign interventionism to the detriment of our problems at home. In an interview at the Libertarian National Convention, he criticized Biden’s warmongering to podcaster Tim Pool, saying, “You can solve problems over a telephone. Instead they start dropping bombs. Recently, they’re dropping bombs all over Yemen. You don’t have to do that.”

Yet once in office, Trump turned to military force as his first option. Since the Israel/Hamas ceasefire plan negotiated by President Trump’s special envoy Steve Witkoff, Yemen has left Red Sea shipping alone. However, after Israel implemented a total blockade of humanitarian relief to citizens of Gaza last week, Houthi leaders threatened to again begin blocking Israel’s Red Sea shipping activities.

That was enough for President Trump to drop bombs and launch missiles for hours, killing several dozen Yemeni civilians – including women and children – in the process.

After the attack, Trump not only threatened much more force to be used against Yemen, but he also threatened Iran. His National Security Advisor Mike Waltz added that the US may start bombing Iranian ships in the area, a move that would certainly lead to a major Middle East war.

Like recent Presidents Bush and Obama, candidate Trump promised peace after four years of Joe Biden’s warmongering and World War III brinkmanship. There is little doubt that with our war-weary population this proved the margin of his victory. Unfortunately, as with Bush and Obama, now that he is President, he appears to be heading down a different path.

The Republican Party is gradually becoming a pro-peace, America first party, but the warmongers and neocons of the old line in the Party are not going to let go so easily. Unfortunately many of these dead-enders have found their way to senior positions in Trump’s Administration, with voices of restraint and non-intervention nearly nowhere in sight among his top tier of advisors.

To solve the Yemen problem we must understand it: Russian and Chinese ships, for example, are not being threatened because they are not enabling the Israeli demolition of Gaza. The slaughter there has been facilitated with US money and US weapons. It is the US doing Israel’s bidding both in Gaza and in the Red Sea that is painting a target on us and unnecessarily putting our troops at risk of retaliation.

The US government, starting with Biden and continuing now with Trump, seems eager to make this our war even though, as Rep. Thomas Massie pointed out over the weekend, Red Sea shipping is of minor importance to the US economy.

In a real “America first” foreign policy we would be following the Russian and Chinese lead and staying out of the conflict. It’s not our war. End US military involvement in the Middle East and our troubles disappear. It really is that simple.

The post President Trump: Stop Bombing Yemen and Exit the Middle East! appeared first on LewRockwell.

Pope Francis has made headlines in recent months for expressing increasing concern about the death toll in Israel’s 16-month military incursion into Gaza, even invoking the specter of “genocide,” a term that has been used for many months now by international tribunals, jurists, U.N. officials, Holocaust historians, and human rights groups to describe Israel’s brutal military campaign in Gaza.

Francis’ statements are no less valid now that a temporary and fragile ceasefire has been declared between Israel and Hamas, the principal ruling party in Gaza. Israeli soldiers have continued to kill Palestinians in Gaza and now are effectively cutting off all humanitarian aid to the area, while launching a new and brutal invasion of the West Bank, where more than three million Palestinians live. Meanwhile, President Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu threaten a new invasion, while Francis continues to speak personally to the Catholics of the area from his hospital bed.

Many English-speaking Catholics may be inclined to look askance at the stance taken by Pope Francis, given his well-established reputation for expressing sympathy with political causes associated with socialist or leftist political ideologies. Large numbers of Catholics in the United States now habitually (and often unthinkingly) place themselves under the vague rubric of “conservative,” a largely secularist and Americanist ideology that is currently dominated by unquestioning pro-Israel sentiment, bolstered by a constant barrage of propaganda in social media.

However, Catholics should be aware that, whatever his personal motives, Francis’ position on Israel and Gaza is not founded on leftist ideological premises but traditional Catholic doctrine dating back centuries on the natural law principles regarding the doctrine of just war and the treatment of foreign nations by superior powers. They also represent the Church’s clear teachings on war found in the Catechism of the Catholic Church.

Pope urges investigation into genocide

In a new book based on interviews with the pope announced on November 17, Francis speaks about the plight of refugees, particularly “those who leave Gaza in the midst of the famine that has struck their Palestinian brothers and sisters given the difficulty of getting food and aid into their territory.”

“According to some experts, what is happening in Gaza has the characteristics of a genocide,” Francis continues in Hope Never Disappoints. “It should be carefully investigated to determine whether it fits into the technical definition formulated by jurists and international bodies.”

Francis’ statements, the strongest he had made to date, were consistent with repeated expressions of concern about the sky-high civilian death toll in Gaza dating back to the earliest weeks of the war. However, he has recently shown a new determination to push the point, despite expressions of outrage from neoconservative publications like The Wall Street Journal, as well as the Israeli government and radical Zionist organizations.

Francis doubled down repeatedly during December. On the 7th, Pope Francis was publicly presented with a Nativity scene as a gift from two Palestinian artists. The scene features the baby Jesus lying on a keffiyeh, a traditional scarf used by Palestinians. During the inaugural of the scene in the Paul VI Hall, Francis urged believers to “remember the brothers and sisters, who, right there [in Bethlehem] and in other parts of the world, are suffering from the tragedy of war.” He added, “Enough war, enough violence!”

During his annual Christmas Address to the cardinals on December 21, Francis noted bitterly that Israel was continuing to harm the Palestinian Christian community as well as the rest of the civilian population of Gaza. “Yesterday the [Latin] Patriarch [of Jerusalem] was not allowed into Gaza, as had been promised, and yesterday children were bombed,” said Francis. “This is cruelty! This is not war. I wanted to tell you this because it touches my heart.”

Israel responded the following day by allowing the Patriarch into Gaza, while claiming that it had never prohibited his entry.

Then, during the Christmas Eve Angelus, Francis again denounced the cruelty of Israel’s policy in Gaza. “With sorrow I think of Gaza, of so much cruelty, of the children machine-gunned, the bombing of schools and hospitals,” said the pope. “So much cruelty!”

Francis is personally aware of what is happening in Gaza—and particularly the fate of Christians there—because, according to him, he speaks “every day” with Gaza’s only Catholic parish, Holy Family, which has been devastated by deadly direct attacks by the Israeli military.

“They tell me ugly things, difficult things” about what is happening there, the pontiff said in a recent press conference. “Please, when you see the bodies of killed children, when you see that, under the presumption that some guerrillas are there, a school is bombed, this is ugly,” he added.

On January 9, in an audience with the diplomatic corps accredited to the Holy See—and despite bitter push-back from the State of Israel for his earlier comments—Francis again decried the mass killing of civilians in Gaza and the destruction of its vital infrastructure.

Calling for a return of hostages and a ceasefire, Francis noted,

War is always a failure! The involvement of civilians, especially children, and the destruction of infrastructures is not only a disaster, but essentially means that between the two sides only evil emerges the winner. We cannot in any way accept the bombing of civilians or the attacking of infrastructures necessary for their survival. We cannot accept that children are freezing to death because hospitals have been destroyed or a country’s energy network has been hit.

Elderly Catholic parishioners targeted by Israeli snipers

Holy Family Parish made headlines in late 2023 when Israeli snipers shot and killed an elderly Catholic parishioner, Nahida Anton, who was sheltering in the parish. They then shot her daughter Samar when she attempted to save her mother by dragging her back into the parish church.

“Around noon today, December 2023, 16, a sniper of the IDF murdered two Christian women inside the Holy Family Parish in Gaza, where the majority of Christian families have taken refuge since the start of the war,” stated the Latin Patriarchate of Jerusalem in a press release at the time. “Nahida and her daughter Samar were shot as they walked to the Sister’s Convent. One was killed as she tried to carry the other to safety.”

Apart from the two women, “seven more people were shot and wounded as they tried to protect others inside the church compound,” reported the Latin Patriarchate of Jerusalem later. “No warning was given, no notification was provided. They were shot in cold blood inside the premises of the Parish, where there are no belligerents.” The Convent of the Sisters of Mother Teresa, which was staffed by nuns caring for disabled patients, was also hit by a rocket attack by an Israeli tank, rendering the mission home “uninhabitable” and damaging the electrical generator.

Over a year after the Latin Patriarchate’s protest, the Israeli government hasn’t offered an explanation for the shootings and bombing, which are far from unique; in fact, they are only one of many thousands of similar cases of sniper attacks on women and children, Muslim and Christian, that have been reported throughout the Gaza Strip on a daily basis during Israel’s 16-month incursion.

The New York Times, a publication with a documented history of pro-Israel bias in its journalism, has  collected testimonies and radiographic evidence from dozens of non-Palestinian doctors who treated numerous children in Gaza who were shot in the head and chest with high-power sniper rifles. The Israeli government has permitted almost no international journalists to enter, and Arab journalists have been repeatedly targeted by the military, so documenting such cases has been difficult. However, they are very much reflective of the murderous and genocidal rhetoric that has been repeatedly voiced by militant West Bank settlers, who are amply represented in Benjamin Netanyahu’s government, as well as by Netanyahu himself.

Disturbing statistics

According to statistics published by Gaza health authorities (whose estimates are generally accepted by Israeli intelligence sources), almost 58,000 Gazans, the majority women and children, have been either directly killed or are missing under the rubble following Israel’s 2023 invasion. However, a study published in the British medical journal TheLancet estimates that as of June 19, 2024, the indirect death toll caused by the destruction and blockades of food, water, electricity, and other goods had minimally reached 189,000. If the same factor of indirect deaths to direct deaths is applied to the current estimated direct death toll, the total number of deaths would now be well over 200,000, with countless more wounded, maimed, and traumatized.

The civilian population has been subject to embargoes of food and medicine resulting in countless deaths. All of the major hospitals in northern Gaza have been shut down, their patients force-marched out in freezing weather after being stripped down to their underwear, and their doctors taken off to prisons where they have been tortured, a fate that has also befallen countless other Palestinians taken prisoner by Israeli troops. The director of northern Gaza’s last hospital to be shut down, Dr. Hussam Abu Safiya, a pediatrician whose teenage son was killed at the gates of the hospital by an Israeli drone strike in October, was taken off to such a prison in December. According to his lawyer, Abu Safiya has been subjected to torture and denied medical care.

Israel’s indiscriminate bombing campaign has targeted apartment buildings, schools, and hospitals with 2,000-pound bombs, with an estimated total of over 75,000 tons of explosives, the equivalent of multiple atomic bombs, resulting in the damage or destruction of 90 percent of the housing, which proportionally exceeds the Allied bombing of Germany by a factor of nine, and also far exceeds the Allied bombing of Japan. “It is heartbreaking that many times more bombs were dropped on Gaza than on Tokyo in massive US air raids during World War II,” Japanese Prime Minister Shigeru Ishiba was quoted as saying by Japan’s NHK news service in October of last year.

Such figures are the latest and worst of a long series of atrocities and injustices against Arab Palestinians, both Christian and non-Christian, that have been denounced by the Latin Patriarchate for decades, with little interest shown from English-speaking Catholics.

Read the Whole Article

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Governments regularly claim that they favour tax reform. When this claim has been repeated so many times that virtually no one believes them anymore, they announce a tax reform, to show that they really mean it. They then reshuffle the existing taxes to give the appearance that taxation will actually be lowered.

When it becomes apparent that the reform is a sham, they often pull a rabbit out of a hat in the form of a “temporary” tax, that’s pre-legislated to end sometime in the future.

Sounds promising.

So, let’s have a look at one such temporary tax and see how things worked out.

The US government introduced the War Revenue Act of 1898—a tax on telephone use—under the claim that it was necessary to pay for the Spanish American War.

In what way does telephone use pertain to a government invading another country? Well, actually, one has nothing to do with the other. But, let’s leave that discussion for another day and see how this temporary tax played out.

The Act was repealed in 1902 but was reinstated, this time as the Emergency Internal Revenue Tax Act of 1914. The justification then given was that another war was on the way and increased taxation to pay for it couldn’t begin too soon. Telephone users needed to cough up.

It was decided by both parties to increase the tax on telephones and the War Revenue Act of 1917 was created. It hadn’t passed the debate stage until the war was over, but they decided that they’d implement it anyway, as the work had already been done. In the bargain, they introduced not only increased rates, but graduated rates.

This act was also repealed, in 1924, but was reinstated with the Revenue Act of 1932. Since that date, it has been reauthorised 29 times.

In 1941, an increase was put in place to pay for (you guessed it) another war—World War II. This was increased again in 1943, but people complained and the new law contained a provision that the increased rates would end six months after “the date of termination of hostilities in the present war.” However, the Excise Tax Act of 1947 was passed to assure that the tax would continue indefinitely.

Over the subsequent years, periodic changes were made. Although the rates went up and down like a bride’s nightie, most, not surprisingly, were upward.

As further (undeclared) wars came and went, taxation on telephone calls repeatedly needed to be increased and, regardless of the party in power, increases continued.

At long last, on 14 September, 2000, the House of Representatives took up legislation which included the repeal of the telephone excise tax. This measure passed both houses, but the fix was in. President Clinton vetoed the repeal. (The legislative branch and the executive branch have to take turns playing the bad cop, but the outcome is the same: increased taxation.)

Then, in 2006, a case was made (in the words of the Treasury Secretary), to amend the Internal Revenue Code “of an outdated, antiquated tax that has survived a century beyond its original purpose, and by now should have been ancient history.”

Finally, American citizens could wash their hands of a one-hundred-year theft of their earnings that, even at the start, was based upon a ludicrous concept.

Unfortunately… it didn’t happen.

The repeal was never enacted and Americans continue to pay for the Spanish American War today.

So, what’s the takeaway here?

Well, first off, this little history serves as a reminder that there’s nothing so permanent as a temporary government measure.

Second, although not a month goes by without one politician or another, from one party or the other, rising up in righteous indignation that a new tax or an expanded tax is absolutely necessary to continue the welfare of the American people, there is, in truth, no sincerity in their claim. They simply want more money.

Third, no amount of money is ever enough. Even if Washington, D.C., is the only part of the US that is enjoying prosperity, even if no congressman leaves office without more zeroes behind his net worth than when he went in, virtually every legislator will vote for increases in taxation.

And, fourth, there’s no such thing as tax reform. From time to time, legislators will need to trot out the idea of tax reform, and be seen to be arguing over the details, but will ultimately always do the same: the deck will be reshuffled, but somehow, taxes will rise once again.

But the overall lesson to be learned is that Government is, and has always been, a shell game. Its purpose is not to serve the electorate; it is to separate them from the fruits of their labours.

Full stop.

As former US Chief Justice John Marshall stated,

The power to tax involves the power to destroy.

More recently, Ron Holland offered the following:

Since the beginning of recorded history, the business of government has been wealth confiscation.

However, both these individuals were conservatives, and it would only be fair to ask for commentary from the liberal side. One such liberal political leader is none other than Vladimir Lenin, who stated,

The way to crush the bourgeoisie is to grind them between the millstones of taxation and inflation.

Of course, the reader may wish to consider relocating to a jurisdiction where the taxation is far lower, but if he chooses to remain in the US, EU, Canada, or other jurisdiction where the tax level is already oppressive, his plans should include temporary taxes that are unlikely to end in his lifetime.

Reprinted with permission from International Man.

The post The Endlessness of a Temporary Tax appeared first on LewRockwell.

A geo-political reading of Israel’s incipient civil war

Israel is deeply fractured. The schism has become bitter and heated as both sides see themselves to be in an existential war for the future of Israel. The language used has become so venomous (particularly in reserved channels in Hebrew) that calls for a coup and for civil war are far from uncommon.

Israel is nearing the precipice and the seemingly irreconcilable differences may soon erupt into civil unrest – as Uri Misgav writes this week, the “Israeli spring” is on its way.

The point here is that President Trump’s utilitarian and determinedly transactional style may work effectively in the secular western hemisphere, but with Israel (or Iran) Trump may find little or no traction amongst those with an alternative weltanschauung that expresses a fundamental different concept of morality, philosophy and epistemology, to the classic western deterrence paradigm of material ‘carrots and sticks’.

Indeed, the very attempt to impose deterrence – and to threaten ‘all hell breaking out’ if his injunctions are not followed – may produce the opposite to that which he seeks: i.e. it may trigger new conflicts and wars.

An angry plurality in Israel (led for now, by Netanyahu) have taken the reins of power after a long march through the institutions of Israeli society, and now have their sights focussed on dismantling the ‘Deep State’ within Israel. Equally, there is a furious push-back to this perceived take-over.

What exacerbates this societal fracture are two things: Firstly, it is ethno-cultural; and second it is ideological. The third component is the most explosive – Eschatology.

At the last national election in Israel, the ‘underclass’ finally broke the glass ceiling to win election and to take office. The Mizrahi (Jews from the Middle East and North Africa) have been long treated as the poorer, lower order in society.

The Ashkenazi (European, largely liberal-secular Jews) form much of the urban professional (and until recently) the security class. These are the élites whom the coalition of National Religious and Settler Movement displaced at the last election.

This present phase to a long struggle to power perhaps can be put at 2015. As Gadi Taub has recorded,

“It was then, Israel’s Supreme Court judges removed sovereignty itself—that is, the power of final decision over the whole realm of law and politics—from the elected branches of government and transferred it to themselves. One unelected branch of government officially holds power, against which there are neither checks, nor balances, by any counterforce”.

In the optic of the Right, the self-awarded power of Judicial Review, gave to the Court power, Taub writes,

“to prescribe the rules of the political game – and not just its concrete results”. “Law enforcement then became the huge investigative arm of the press. As was true of the “Russiagate” hoax, The Israel Police and State Attorney were not so much collecting evidence for a criminal trial as they were producing political dirt for leaks to the press”.

The ‘Deep State’ in Israel is a consuming point of contention for Netanyahu and his cabinet: In a speech at the Knesset this month – as one example – Netanyahu savaged the media, accusing news outlets of “full cooperation with the deep state” and of creating “scandals”. “The cooperation between the bureaucracy in the deep state and the media didn’t work in the United States, and it won’t work here”, he said.

Just to be clear, at the time of the last general election, the Supreme Court was composed of 15 Judges, all of whom were Ashkenazi, bar one Mizrahi.

Nevertheless, it would be wrong to see the war of the rival blocs as some arcane dispute about the usurpation of executive power – and a lost ‘separation of state powers’.

The struggle is rooted rather, in a profound ideological dispute about the future and character of the State of Israel. Will it be a messianic, Halacha state obedient to Revelation? Or, in essence, will there be a democratic, liberal, largely secular ‘state’. Israel is shredding itself on the blade of this debate.

The cultural component is that the Mizrahim (loosely defined) and the Right view the European liberal sphere as barely truly Jewish. Hence their determination that the Land of Israel should be wholly immersed in Jewishness.

It was the events of 7 October that absolutely crystalized this ideological struggle, which is the second key factor largely mirroring the general schism.

Israel’s classical security vision (dating from the Ben-Gurion era) was configured to provide an answer to the enduring Israeli dilemma: Israel cannot impose an end to conflict on its enemies, yet at the same time, it cannot maintain a large army in the long term.

Therefore, Israel – in this optic – had to rely on a reserve army that needed adequate security warning before any war occurred. Advance intelligence warning of coming war therefore, was a paramount requirement.

And that key presumption blew apart on 7 October.

The shock and sense of collapse arising from 7 Oct led many to think that the Hamas attack had irrevocably broken the Israeli concept of security – the policy of deterrence had failed and the proof of that was that Hamas was not deterred.

But here, we approach the crux of the Israeli internal war: What was destroyed on 7 Oct was not just the old security paradigm of the Labour Party and the old security elites. It did that; but what arose from its ashes was an alternative weltanschauung that expressed a fundamentally different concept in philosophy and epistemology to the classic deterrence paradigm:

“I was born in Israel; I grew up in Israel … I served in the IDF”, says Alon Mizrahi;

“I was exposed to it. I was indoctrinated this way, and for many years of my life I believed it. This represents a serious Jewish problem: It is not just [a matter of one mode of] Zionism … How can you teach your children – and this is almost universal – that everyone who is not Jewish wants to kill you. When you put yourself in this paranoia, you give yourself permission to do anything to everyone … It is not a good way to create a society. It is so dangerous”.

See here in the Times of Israel an account of a High School presentation (post-7 Oct) on the Morality of Wiping out Amalek: A student raises the question: “Why do we condemn Hamas for murdering innocent men, women, and children – if we are commanded to wipe out Amalek?”

“How can we have normality tomorrow”, Alon Mizrahi asks, “if this is who we are today”?

The National Religious Right is leading the charge for a radical change to the Israeli concept of security; they no longer believe in the classic Ben Gurion paradigm of deterrence – particularly in the wake of 7 October. Nor does the Right believe in reaching any settlement with the Palestinians – and absolutely does not want a bi-national state. In the concept of Bezalel Smotrich, Israel’s security theory henceforth must include a continuous war against Palestinians – until they are expelled or eliminated.

The Old (Liberal) Establishment is outraged – as one of its members, David Agmon (former IDF Brigadier-General and former bureau chief to Netanyahu), articulated this week:

“I accuse you, Bezalel Smotrich, of destroying religious Zionism! You are leading us to a state of Halacha and Haredi Zionism, not religious Zionism … Not to mention the fact that you joined the terrorist Ben Gvir, who diverts lawbreakers, hillbilly boys, to continue breaking the law, who attacks the government, the judicial system, and the police under his responsibility. Netanyahu is not the solution. Netanyahu is the problem, he is the head of the snake. The protest should act against Netanyahu and his coalition. The protest should demand the overthrow of the malicious government”.

Netanyahu is in one sense secular; but in another, he embraces the Biblical mission of Greater Israel – with all its enemies annihilated. He is, (if you like a label) a neo-Jabotinskyist (his father was private secretary to Jabotinsky), and, in practice, exists in a relationship of mutual dependency with figures like Ben Gvir and Smotrich.

“What do these people want?”, asks Max Blumenthal; “What is their ultimate goal?”

“It is apocalypse”, warns Blumenthal, whose book Goliath traces the rise of Israel’s eschatological Right:

“They have an eschatology that is based on the Third Temple ideology – in which the Al-Aqsa Mosque will be destroyed and be replaced with a Third Temple and traditional Jewish ritual will be practiced”.

And in order to bring that about, they need a ‘Big War’.

Smotrich always has been frank about this: The project of ultimately removing all the Arabs from the ‘Land of Israel’ will require an emergency – a ‘big war’ – he has said.

The big question is: Do Trump and his team grasp any of this? For it has profound implications for Trump’s methodology of transactional deal-making. ‘Carrots and Sticks’ and secular rationality will carry little weight amongst those whose epistemology is quite different; those who take Revelation literally as ‘truth’, and who believe it commands complete obedience.

Trump says he wants to end the conflicts in the Middle East, and bring about a regional ‘peace’.

His secular, transactional approach to politics, however, is wholly unsuited to resolving eschatological conflict. His bravura style of threatening ‘all hell will break out’ if he doesn’t get his way will not work, when one or other party actually wants Armageddon.

“All hell break out”? ‘Bring it on’, might well be the response Trump gets.

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

The post The Kingdom of Judea vs. The State of Israel appeared first on LewRockwell.

It’s as simple as this: the orgy of judicial lawfare put on by blob-adjacent Democratic Party seditionists trying to make the USA ungovernable is looking to get swatted. Hubris is a harsh mistress, but Nemesis is more like the gods’ re-po man, and he comes to the door with attitude, meaning bidness. Blob judges will get flushed out of their humid conclaves naked and find themselves, astoundingly, in the FO zone of FAFO-land.

Do you think AG Bondi is playing tiddlywinks in Main Justice or that Kash Patel is just sitting there buffing his nails over at 935 Pennsylvania Avenue NW? Where did we get the idea that federal judges can just act with impunity, jerking around the public interest like some show-off with a yoyo?

Case in point: Judge James Boasberg, head honcho of the DC federal district court stepped into the FAFO waiting room over the weekend when he ordered two planeloads of deported toxic human trash known as Tren de Aragua, bound for jail in El Salvador, to return to the USA. Mr. Trump’s White House refused, saying the planes were already over international waters, outside the judge’s jurisdiction. Dem-blob lawyer Mark Zaid made the predictable next move, claiming that the matter will be grounds for Impeachment No. 3 against Mr. Trump post the 2026 midterm election. But, of course: strategery!

The general purpose in this latest phase of lawfare is to choke the federal courts with so many restraining orders and injunctions that the White House lawyers find themselves locked into an endless Chinese fire drill of counter-filings, motions, writs, and appearances. It’s all that the so-called “resistance” has left, what with DOGE breaking up the racketeering operation that has funded the Dem’s defense of the blob for a decade. By which I mean the government funding of non-governmental orgs (ha!) to distribute payola to Dem foot-soldiers who do all the dirty work of protecting the rogue bureaucracy in a circle-jerk of power and payoffs. This includes the dirty work of Dem-blob lawyers such as Mark Zaid, Norm Eisen, Mary McCord, Marc Elias, Barbara McQuade, Joanna Lydgate et al.

The history of Judge Boasberg in particular presents a disturbing picture of a tool covering-up every act of the shadowy blob’s war against American citizens. Boasberg presided in the FISA court that fraudulently enabled the FBI’s Crossfire Hurricane operation to attempt ousting newly-elected Donald Trump in 2017, and the many RussiaGate pranks that followed. As chief judge of the DC District, he oversaw the Jack Smith Special Counsel op and all the cases associated with it, including the Mar-a-Lago raid and the J-6 case in Tanya Chutkan’s crooked court. Boasberg allowed the prosecution of J-6ers under the unlawful use of the corporate fraud obstruction statute, 18USC§1512c2, a.k.a. the Enron law. He presided over the trial of Ray Epps, the shady character recorded on video repeatedly urging J-6 protestors to “go into the Capitol.” Boasberg gave Epps a suspended sentence while grandmothers who merely “paraded” through the rotunda between velvet ropes that day got sent to jail.

What can be done about judges like Boasberg? The prevailing view is: not much. I’m not so sure that’s true. While Rep. Brandon Gill (D-TX) announced last week that he will file articles of impeachment against Boasberg, a two-thirds majority would be required to convict him in any eventual Senate trial, so fuggeddabowdit. But federal judges are not immune from criminal investigation and prosecution, which is where AG Bondi and FBI Director Patel ought to come in. What’s probably standing in plain sight is a RICO conspiracy involving the aforesaid lawfare artists — Norm Eisen & Co — and the federal judiciary to deliberately bury the executive branch under burdensome fraudulent process, impede the executive branch’s ability to carry out its constitutional duties, and to obstruct justice.

Would you like to know if correspondence exists between these parties? Mr. Patel can ask them to produce it, and if they fail to, there’s a strong possibility that DNI Director Tulsi Gabbard can root it out of the NSA’s server farm. Depositions can be demanded. The lawfare lawyers will have to hire lawyers — just as all the targets of “Joe Biden” and Merrick Garland were obliged to lawyer-up when they were systematically persecuted from January, 2021 to January, 2025. The meters will run, ka-ching, ka-ching. It will be interesting to see who is footing the bill for that. You can be sure that it will be found out. Reid Hoffman? George and Alex Soros? Note: Dan Bongino was sword in as Deputy Director of the FBIat 8:00 o’clock this morning. Nemesis is open for bidness.

The lawfare gang would love all of this to ramp into a king-hell constitutional crisis. Could happen. Let them try. They don’t hold any of the levers of power the way they used to. A lot could go wrong for them. Welcome to FAFO-land.

Reprinted with permission from JamesHowardKunstler.com.

The post Welcome to FAFO-Land appeared first on LewRockwell.

Here is from the transcript by MSNBC, of their broadcast on 17 January 2025 of President Joe Biden’s final interview (which was the prior day, by the Democrat Lawrence O’Donnell, on his “The Last Word” show) — it included one of the decrepit Biden’s ever-increasing number of unintentional slip-ups saying the truth that he never had intentionally revealed during his prior and less-decrepit period (and, of course, his interviewer, this Democrat, O’Donnell, simply ignored what the President had just said, instead of diving into it so as to perhaps get more details about this crucially important matter):

“The Last Word With Lawrence O’Donnell – Jan. 16 | Audio Only”

21:42

[O’DONNELL]: WHEN THIS WAR STARTED, THERE WAS A TREMENDOUS TENSION ABOUT THE POSSIBILITY OF NUCLEAR CONFRONTATION,

21:48

THE POSSIBILITY OF VLADIMIR PUTIN USING NUCLEAR WEAPONS. DID YOU HAVE ANY DIRECT COMMUNICATION

21:55

WITH VLADIMIR PUTIN TO DETER HIM FROM USING NUCLEAR WEAPONS?

[BIDEN]: WELL, I DID.

22:00

WHEN HE STARTED TALKING ABOUT TACTICAL, I THOUGHT THIS GUY WANTS TO USE TACTICAL NUCLEAR WEAPONS. NO.

22:06

I DON’T WANNA DO THAT. I DON’T DO THAT. NUCLEAR WEAPONS,

22:11

TACTICAL NUCLEAR WEAPONS IN EUROPE SCARES THE HELL OUT OF EVERYBODY, INCLUDING THE RUSSIANS, INCLUDING THE RUSSIANS.

22:18

AND SO WHAT I, I MADE IT CLEAR TO HIM, LOOK,

22:23

HE SAID TO ME THAT WHAT HE WANTED WAS: HE WANTED TO MAKE SURE THAT THERE WERE NO NUCLEAR WEAPONS IN EUROPE,

22:30

I MEAN, IN, UH, IN UKRAINE; THAT, UH, THERE WAS, THEY WEREN’T A MEMBER OF NATO;

22:36

AND, UH, THAT, UH, THEY WOULD NOT BE, UH, UH — AND HE,

22:41

HE STARTED OFF ONE OF THE CONVERSATIONS BY SAYING: I KNOW YOU CAN TAKE ME OUT TOMORROW. I KNOW YOU CAN TAKE THEM OUT TOMORROW FROM UKRAINE.

22:48

YOU CAN STRIKE MOSCOW. YOU CAN STRIKE. I SAID, THAT’S NOT A PROBLEM. WE’VE ALREADY TAKEN THE NUCLEAR WEAPONS OUT.

22:55

SO I TOOK THEM ALL OUT.

Ukraine is far nearer to The Kremlin than ANY other country is: around 300 miles or 500 kilometers away; and THIS is the reason why Russia will not allow Ukraine to be in NATO: It has the closest of all borders to The Kremlin.

Here is — with full documentation in its links, so that you can immediately see the evidence for any assertion you might doubt — the actual history of how the war in Ukraine actually started on 20 February 2014 and ultimately produced Russia’s invasion of Ukraine on 24 February 2022 — and all of it has to do with America’s determination to place its nukes a mere five minutes away from Moscow, and Russia’s determination to prevent that from ever being able to happen. Putin has done a terribly poor job of making clear to the public the reason why he invaded Ukraine on 24 Febuary 2022; but, as you will see from the evidences that are linked-to in the following, this — the distance to Moscow — is the reason why he did. Ukraine was far too close to Moscow. Putin needed to do this in order to protect Russia from the United States — to prevent a 5-minute blitz nuclear attack decapitating Russia’s central command. And it ALSO was the reason why the U.S. Government was so determined, for so many decades, to get Ukraine into its NATO military alliance against Russia. Putin didn’t only need Biden to remove America’s nukes from Ukraine — he knows that American Presidents come and go — he needed something irrevocable. Biden isn’t saying there that NATO will formally announce “Ukraine is banned from ever entering NATO.” Putin and all of Russia NEED that public and formal commitment. The historical truth is the exact opposite of what has been (and still is) touted by the media in the U.S. and in its colonies, as having been the case; America has been the aggressor, all along. This history is the exact opposite of the U.S.-empire myth about it; so, here it is — this is the historical truth about the matter:

The Ukrainian war started after the democratically elected President of Ukraine (an infamously corrupt country), who was committed to keeping his country internationally neutral (not allied with either Russia or the United States), met privately with both the U.S. President Barack Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in 2010, shortly following that Ukrainian President’s election earlier in 2010; and, on both occasions, he rejected their urgings for Ukraine to become allied with the United States against his adjoining country Russia. This was being urged upon him so that America could position its nuclear missiles at the Russian border with Ukraine, less than a five-minute striking-distance away from hitting the Kremlin in Moscow.

The war in Ukraine started in 2014, as both NATO’s Stoltenberg and Ukraine’s Zelensky have said. This war was started in February 2014 by a U.S. coup which replaced the democratically elected and neutralist Ukrainian President, with a U.S. selected and rabidly anti-Russian leader, who immediately imposed an ethnic-cleansing program to get rid of the residents in the regions that had voted overwhelmingly for the overthrown President. Russia responded militarily on 24 February 2022, in order to prevent Ukraine from allowing the U.S. to place a missile there a mere 317 miles or five minutes of missile-flying-time away from The Kremlin and thus too brief for Russia to respond before its central command would already be beheaded by America’s nuclear strike. (As I headlined on 28 October 2022, “NATO Wants To Place Nuclear Missiles On Finland’s Russian Border — Finland Says Yes”. The U.S. had demanded this, especially because it will place American nuclear missiles far nearer to The Kremlin than at present, only 507 miles away — not as close as Ukraine, but the closest yet. This shows how crucial to the U.S. Government’s strategic planning it is, that America must place its nukes into position for a decapitating first-strike blitz annihilating Russia’s central command so as to prevent any retaliation. It displays how crazy with power-lust America’s Deep State actually are. As America’s leading expert on nuclear weapons, the physicist Theodore A. Postol, of MIT, had argued on 20 December 2014, the U.S. Government was developing a radical new technology strictly for the purpose of enabling a decapitating blitz first-strike against The Kremlin. Then, on 1 March 2017, he announced that it was now operational and being installed, and that “it creates exactly what one would expect to see, if a nuclear-armed state were planning to have the capacity to fight and win a nuclear war by disarming enemies with a surprise first strike.” Furthermore, the Government was lying about it to the public, portraying it “to the public as an effort to ensure the reliability and safety of warheads in the US nuclear arsenal, rather than to enhance their military capabilities” to first-strike-annihilate The Kremlin.)

Ukraine had been neutral between Russia and America until Obama’s brilliantly executed Ukrainian coup, which his Administration started planning by no later than June 2011, culminated successfully in February 2014 and promptly appointed a rabid anti-Russian to impose in regions that rejected the new anti-Russian U.S.-controlled goverment an “Anti-Terrorist Operation” to kill protesters, and, ultimately, to terrorize the residents in those regions in order to kill as many of them as possible and to force the others to flee into Russia so that when elections would be held, pro-Russian voters would no longer be in the electorate.

The U.S. Government had engaged the Gallup polling organization, both before and after the coup, in order to poll Ukrainians, and especially ones who lived in its Crimean independent republic (where Russia has had its main naval base ever since 1783), regarding their views on U.S., Russia, NATO, and the EU; and, generally, Ukrainians were far more pro-Russia than pro-U.S., pro-NATO, or pro-EU, but this was especially the case in Crimea; so, America’s Government knew that Crimeans would be especially resistant. However, this was not really new information. During 2003-2009, only around 20% of Ukrainians had wanted NATO membership, while around 55% opposed it. In 2010, Gallup found that whereas 17% of Ukrainians considered NATO to mean “protection of your country,” 40% said it’s “a threat to your country.” Ukrainians predominantly saw NATO as an enemy, not a friend. But after Obama’s February 2014 Ukrainian coup, “Ukraine’s NATO membership would get 53.4% of the votes, one third of Ukrainians (33.6%) would oppose it.” However, afterward, the support averaged around 45% — still over twice as high as had been the case prior to the coup.

In other words: what Obama did was generally successful: it grabbed Ukraine, or most of it, and it changed Ukrainians’ minds regarding America and Russia. But only after the subsequent passage of time did the American billionaires’ neoconservative heart become successfully grafted into the Ukrainian nation so as to make Ukraine a viable place to position U.S. nuclear missiles against Moscow (which is the U.S. Government’s goal there). Furthermore: America’s rulers also needed to do some work upon U.S. public opinion. Not until February of 2014 — the time of Obama’s coup — did more than 15% of the American public have a “very unfavorable” view of Russia. (Right before Russia invaded Ukraine, that figure had already risen to 42%. America’s press — and academia or public-policy ‘experts’ — have been very effective at managing public opinion, for the benefit of America’s billionaires.)

Then came the Minsk Agreements (#1 & #2, with #2 being the final version, which is shown here, as a U.N. Security Council Resolution), between Ukraine and the separatist region in its far east, and which the U.S. Government refused to participate in, but the U.S.-installed Ukrainian government (then under the oligarch Petro Poroshenko) signed it in order to have a chance of Ukraine’s gaining EU membership, but never complied with any of it; and, so, the war continued); and, then, finally, as the Ukrainian government (now under Volodmyr Zelensky) was greatly intensifying its shelling of the break-away far-eastern region, Russia presented, to both the U.S. Government and its NATO military alliance against Russia, two proposed agreements for negotiation (one to U.S., the other to NATO), but neither the U.S. nor its NATO agreed to negotiate. The key portions of the two 17 December 2021 proposed Agreements, with both the U.S. and with its NATO, were, in regards to NATO:

Article 1

The Parties shall guide in their relations by the principles of cooperation, equal and indivisible security. They shall not strengthen their security individually, within international organizations, military alliances or coalitions at the expense of the security of other Parties. …

Article 4

The Russian Federation and all the Parties that were member States of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization as of 27 May 1997, respectively, shall not deploy military forces and weaponry on the territory of any of the other States in Europe in addition to the forces stationed on that territory as of 27 May 1997. With the consent of all the Parties such deployments can take place in exceptional cases to eliminate a threat to security of one or more Parties.

Article 5

The Parties shall not deploy land-based intermediate- and short-range missiles in areas allowing them to reach the territory of the other Parties.

Article 6

All member States of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization commit themselves to refrain from any further enlargement of NATO, including the accession of Ukraine as well as other States.

And, in regards to the U.S.:

Article 2

The Parties shall seek to ensure that all international organizations, military alliances and coalitions in which at least one of the Parties is taking part adhere to the principles contained in the Charter of the United Nations.

Article 3

The Parties shall not use the territories of other States with a view to preparing or carrying out an armed attack against the other Party or other actions affecting core security interests of the other Party.

Article 4

The United States of America shall undertake to prevent further eastward expansion of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and deny accession to the Alliance to the States of the former Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.

The United States of America shall not establish military bases in the territory of the States of the former Union of Soviet Socialist Republics that are not members of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, use their infrastructure for any military activities or develop bilateral military cooperation with them.

Any reader here can easily click onto the respective link to either proposed Agreement, in order to read that entire document, so as to evaluate whether or not all of its proposed provisions are acceptable and reasonable. What was proposed by Russia in each of the two was only a proposal, and the other side (the U.S. side) in each of the two instances, was therefore able to pick and choose amongst those proposed provisions, which ones were accepted, and to negotiate regarding any of the others; but, instead, the U.S. side simply rejected all of them.

On 7 January 2022, the Associated Press (AP) headlined “US, NATO rule out halt to expansion, reject Russian demands”, and reported:

Washington and NATO have formally rejected Russia’s key demands for assurances that the US-led military bloc will not expand closer towards its borders, leaked correspondence reportedly shows.

According to documents seen by Spanish daily El Pais and published on Wednesday morning, Moscow’s calls for a written guarantee that Ukraine will not be admitted as a member of NATO were dismissed following several rounds of talks between Russian and Western diplomats. …

The US-led bloc denied that it posed a threat to Russia. …

The US similarly rejected the demand that NATO does not expand even closer to Russia’s borders. “The United States continues to firmly support NATO’s Open Door Policy.”

NATO-U.S. was by now clearly determined to get Ukraine into NATO and to place its nukes so near to The Kremlin as to constitute, like a checkmate in chess, a forced defeat of Russia, a capture of its central command. This was, but in reverse, the situation that America’s President JFK had faced with regard to the Soviet Union in the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis, when the U.S. would have invaded Cuba if Khrushchev wouldn’t agree to a mutually acceptable settlement — which he did, and so WW3 was averted on that occasion. But whereas Khrushchev was reasonable, Obama and Biden were not (they wanted to checkmate Russia); and, so, we again stood — and under Trump might still stand — at the brink of WW3, but this time with a truly evil head-of-state (Biden — no better than Obama), who might even be willing to go beyond that brink in order to become able to achieve world-conquest.

Russia did what it had to do: it invaded Ukraine, on 24 February 2022 (just as America would have invaded and taken over Cuba if Khrushchev had not agreed to the deal that JFK proposed during the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis).

On 29 October 2022, I headlined “NATO wants to place nuclear missiles on Finland’s Russian border — Finland says yes”; and reported that if Finland hadn’t said yes, then the U.S. would have made sure that at least one of NATO’s member-nations would have said no to (i.e., vetoed) Finland’s joining. The U.S. Government controls NATO, and would have been able to do that (and routinely does wrangle votes within NATO for a U.S. objective). This Government started the war in Ukraine because a blitz decapitation-strike annihilating Russia’s central command is what the war in Ukraine (only 317 miles away from The Kremlin) has been about, ever since the war in Ukraine started on 20 February 2014.

The investigative historian Carleton Meyer presented, on March 15th, an excellent 12-minute video history of the U.S. Government’s hiring of Nazis and ‘former’ Nazis after World War Two in order to ultimately achieve what the U.S. Government and its European colonies almost achieved but now appear extremely unlikely to achieve (and you can also see about this my 7 April 2024 article “How & Why the UK, U.S., and Canada, Governments imported Nazis into Canada”): the usage of the former pro-Nazi organizations in Ukraine so as to enable the U.S. empire to add Ukraine to the U.S., Govenment’s list of colonies — and the closest border of them all to Russia’s central command. The title of Meyer’s video is : “Provoking Russian Intervention – Part 26 of The Anglo-American War on Russia”. That brief video places into the broader historical context of post-WW2 American history, the more-recent detailed history of the Ukraine war that I have documented in the present article (and, differently, in my 7 April 2024 article just referred-to).

All of this must be understood within the even broader context of the way that the U.S. empire functions; and this was brilliantly explained in a 16-minute video, by the author of the 2004 confessional book I Was an Economic Hit Man, “John Perkins at Thistle Hotel London in 2012”, which video summarizes and goes even beyond that best-selling and by-now-classic book. Natural resources have, thoughout history, been craved by imperialists and caused them to invade foreign countries; and no country is even nearly so rich in natural resources as Russia is. That’s what the phrase “natural resources curse” actually refers to, but imperialistic Governments define it instead as being the corruption within the unacquired-but-sought-after lands themselves, though this corruption is usually to a large extent greatly spurred-on by (or even mainly created by) the imperialist power itself, in the process of its acquiring the colony. And Russia is refusing to become acquired. Putin is refusing to be checkmated by the U.S. Government — refusing to allow Russia to be exploited by its enemies (such as John Perkins describes, from his personal experience, having carried out in other countries).

The U.S. regime knows that it is evil, and merely lies about it. The reason why it always lies about itself is that it ‘justifies’ its aggressions by saying that it is a democracy and the leader of ‘the free world’, while the nation it’s targeting for ‘regime-change’ is instead an “autocracy” or a “dictatorship.” But the truth is that, regardless of what the targeted-for-takeover country is, the aggressor is actually the U.S. Government itself, not the one it’s trying to take over. It is the U.S. Government that needs to be “regime-changed” and replaced by a totally new Government that ADHERES TO the U.S. Constitution — instead of (like the one we’ve had since 1945) routinely violating or even ignoring it.

The problem in America isn’t the Democrats versus the Republicans (such as the billionaires’ media portray it) but the billionaires versus the public; and it is the billionaires who must be pulled down and replaced by authentic democracy if ever Constitutional rule is to become restored in America.

This originally appeared on Eric’s Substack.

The post Biden Admitted That America Had Been Planning To Blitz-Nuke the Kremlin. appeared first on LewRockwell.

What has happened to the Western World that causes it to deny and bury its successes because the successes allegedly embarrass nonwhites? See this.

For decades the majority of Western intellectuals, “artists,” and university professors have worked assiduously to demonize Western accomplishments as accomplished via looting of superior non-white cultures.  Not long ago a Swedish anti-white activist made a “documentary” “proving” that the original inhabitants of Sweden were black. How blacks survived such low vitamin D absorption from such weak sunshine he did not say.  

It did not matter.  The Western intellectual world was delighted at this “proof” that the accomplishments attributed to whites were really an appropriation of black accomplishments.

The problem with this satisfaction is that there are no black or non-white precedents for Shakespeare from whom Shakespeare can be said to have stolen his work.  The solution is to deep-six Shakespeare for being a racist for embarrassing non-whites with the sublimity of his art.

We have reached the point in Western Civilization to the extent it still exists at which success is equated with “white supremacy.” As the Western intellectuals have arranged it, the only way the West cannot be racist is to be a failure.  This is why everywhere in the West the governments are making the Western countries into Sodom and Gomorrah Towers of Babel. 

For decades  Shakespeare, who in my student days was the example of the best use of the English language, is today portrayed in university courses as a racist, sexist, homophobic, white supremacist.

In Shakespeare’s day there was no such thing as a white supremacist. But facts are not a component of Western “scholarship” today.  The purpose of Western scholarship is denunciation of “racist” Western civilization.

Anti-western intellectuals use criticism as a weapon. Its object is an enemy it wants not to refute but to destroy.  Criticism is no longer an end in itself but simply a means. It essential pathos is indignation. Its essential task, denunciation. Criticism is hand to hand combat, and in such a combat the point is not whether the opponent is noble, equal or interesting, the point is to strike him.

Those of you who are well educated will recognize that I am quoting Karl Marx on the purpose and use of criticism. My use of Marx does not mean that I am a Marxist.  It is my illustration that Western intellectual and liberal-left professors are, whether they have sufficient education to realize it, utilizing Marx’s tools for overturning a society.

For years American and British universities that are homes to Woke academics have refused to teach Shakespeare, thus depriving an English B.A. degree of content. Shakespeare, say the dumbshit professors, is racist, because he allegedly links beauty with whiteness.

The London theater  has initiated “anti-racist” seminars to discuss “decolonizing” Shakespeare’s plays.

So, what are white ethnicities confronted  with?  

They are confronted with being coerced by their own governments and intellectuals into accepting white inferiority. Whites can only justify their existence by submitting to the rule of non-whites. Jean Raspail correctly described Europe’s demise in 1973 in The Camp of the Saints.

If you haven’t read this book, you do not know your future.  It is independent of Trump, Macron, Putin, Zelensky. It is happening despite any Trump regime deportations of immigrant-invaders.

The simple fact is that white people are doomed, because their intellectuals, schools and governments have convinced them that they are racists guilty of racism, and that justice requires white ethnicities to accept second class citizenship in law.

The post The British Repudiate Shakespeare Because His Success ‘Benefits the Ideology of White Supremacy’ appeared first on LewRockwell.

On May 4 2014 I wrote about the February coup aftermath in Ukraine:

Two days ago a mob, supported by the fascists Right Sektor, killed over 30 federalist Ukrainians in Odessa by pushing them from their camp into a building and then setting fire to it. Those who escaped the massacre, not the perpetrators, were rounded up by police. Today pro-federalism people besieged the police headquarter in Odessa until the police released those it had earlier arrested.
…
The U.S. plan for Ukraine seems to be to bait Russia into an occupation. This would destroy EU-Russia relations, embolden NATO and help the U.S. to keep the EU as a secondary partner under its control. There would be lots of economic upsides for the U.S. in such a situation. Selling more arms and increasing energy market shares are only the starters.

There are two reasons to believe that this plan will fail:
…
Without Russian intervention and without German support the U.S. campaign against Russia is unlikely to reach its secondary target of isolating Russia. The primary target, Sevastopol harbor in Crimea, was already lost when Russia reunified with the island.

What is left to do then for Washington is to create more chaos in Ukraine and to hope that somehow out of total chaos some new chance may arise to stick it to Russia. For lack of real direction that strategy is also unlikely to succeed.

I was unfortunately wrong with the last sentence though it took the U.S. eight more years to succeed.

But it is the first paragraph I what to refer to today. The current two most popular pieces on the website of Strana are echoing it (machine translation):

From the first story (machine translation):

Demyan Ganul, who was killed today in Odessa, is a well-known radical activist, a native of the “Right Sector”. Later he founded his own organization “Street Front”.

Ganul was known since 2014, when he participated in the events of May 2, when dozens of people were killed in the House of Trade Unions. Later, he organized actions against Odessa residents, who laid flowers in honor of the burned-out anti-Maidan activists.
…
Ganul is also widely known for fighting in Odessa with “imperial” and Soviet monuments – to Catherine, Pushkin, and Soviet soldiers. He disrupted concerts of Russian performers, and also harassed residents of the city who spoke out for the Russian language.

Recently, Ganul actively “fought” against those who criticized the mobilization.

The most scandalous case occurred this summer, when Ganul beat up an Odessa fitness trainer after he criticized the recruiting office. After that, the coach disappeared and ended up, presumably, in the ranks of the Armed Forces of Ukraine, where he was bullied and probably raped.

Ganul himself, as far as is known, did not fight and was engaged in volunteering. But not without scandals. In 2023, he was beaten up, as reported, by the military of the “Foreign Legion” – because Ganul collected money for a car, but did not give it away.

Ganul celebrated each anniversary of the May 2 massacre by posting pictures of himself eating a shashlik, i.e. burned flash.

The guy was a Nazi, a brute and a thug.

He was shot on the street with a pistol. When he was down on the ground the killer put another bullet into his head (vid) to make sure that he was dead. The murderer then walked away.

There are many such Nazis in Ukraine who are too coward to take part in the war but ‘volunteer’ in support of police. They are the muscles needed to run various extortion rackets.

During his lifetime, Ganul was a scandalous person and had numerous conflicts. And not only with pro-Russian circles.

The motives for Ganul’s murder may not lie in the political sphere at all.

The victim has been engaged in volunteering since 2014, and also worked part-time as an “activist”, organizing actions against Odessa businessmen, politicians and city authorities.

For example, he actively supported the Odessa businessman Degas, who is in conflict with the Mayor’s office.

In addition, there have long been rumors in the city that Ganul is actually engaged in reket – looking for “victims” – cafes, restaurants, fitness clubs where you can find fault with something, for example, the staff speaks Russian. And then “helps” the owners of establishments.

In other words, he had many enemies. And not only for ideological reasons.

The other most popular news item at Strana relates to yesterday’s judgment by the European Court for Human Rights against the authorities of Ukraine:

In the case of Vyacheslavova and Others v. Ukraine the Court held that there had been violations of the right to life/investigation on account of the authorities’ failure to do everything that could reasonably be expected of them to prevent the violence in Odesa on 2 May 2014, to stop that violence after its outbreak, to ensure timely rescue measures for people trapped in the fire, and to institute and conduct an effective investigation into the events. It also held that there had been a violation of the right to respect for private and family life in respect of one applicant concerning the delay in handing over her father’s body for burial.

The courts press release describes the struggle that led to the case:

Maidan activists started setting fire to the tents. A group of pro-Russian protesters on the roof of the Trade Union Building threw Molotov cocktails at the crowd below; pro-unity activists retaliated by throwing Molotov cocktails at the building. Gunshots were reportedly fired from both sides.

Despite numerous calls to the fire brigade, which was less than 1 km away, the fire service regional head instructed his staff not to send any fire engines to Kulykove Pole without his explicit order.

At 7.45 p.m., a fire broke out in the Trade Union Building. The fire extinguishers in the building did not work. The police called the fire brigade, to no avail. Some of the people in the building including Mr Dmitriyev (application no. 59339/17) tried to escape by jumping from the upper windows. He survived the fall and was taken to an ambulance. A number of people fell to their deaths, including the son of Ms Radzykhovska (application no. 59339/17) and the son of Ms Nikitenko (application no. 47092/18). Video footage shows pro-unity protesters making makeshift ladders and platforms from a stage in the square and using them to rescue people trapped in the building. Other video footage shows pro-unity protesters attacking people who had jumped or had fallen.

The regional head of the fire service finally ordered fire engines to be sent to the scene. Fire ladders were used to rescue people from the upper-floor windows. Firefighters entered the building at around 8.30 p.m. and put out the fire. The police arrested 63 anti-Maidan activists who were still inside the building or on the roof. They were released two days later, when a group of several hundred anti- Maidan protesters stormed the local police station where they were being held.

The fire claimed 42 lives.

There are several others well know perpetrators of the May 2 massacre, like Demyan Ganul, who are still running free in Ukraine. Their unrestricted activities underline the necessity of denazification in Ukraine.

May the ECHR judgment and the death of Demyan Ganul give some solace to the victims of the May 2 2014 massacre.

Reprinted with permission from Moon of Alabama. 

The post Echoes of the May 2, 2014, Odessa Massacre appeared first on LewRockwell.

The last time we went through a great reset was when the Covid-19 pandemic shut down the world in 2020. Great meaning “remarkable in magnitude,” as defined by Merriam Webster, not great as in how we commonly use it as “good.” For many it was far from great—brutal, even. Heartbreaking, challenging, a time of loss and confusion. Still, we can’t deny that our nation and world went through a reset of indescribable proportions.

Whether or not you’ve noticed that our country is going through its own reset—which is impacting the world at large—it seems to me that many of us are also going through our own personal resets, great or otherwise. Instead of just haphazardly dealing with life and circumstances as they come our way, what if we thoughtfully approached the different areas of our lives to see where we might shore up any weaknesses, while we’re able? What if we considered that our own personal reset was, in a sense, part of a revolution?

For me, the past month just about knocked me out and I quickly realized that I had not been properly prepared in a few areas. World events aside, I worked at my publishing job every day for more than three weeks straight to meet some aggressive deadlines, and also endured some major transitions on my team that left me both heartbroken and overworked with no help toward meeting those deadlines, pushing me once again into an unsustainable survival mode. This, while also navigating some highly unusual personal and financial situations. I felt like the systems and institutions I had relied on for years—or decades, in some cases—were no longer a source of stability, and I was beginning to feel like I was living in an alternate reality. In short, I was mentally and physically depleted.

Can you relate on some level?

Now that the dust is beginning to settle (at least in my work life), I’m suddenly in need of a decently sized, if not great, reset for myself. This calls for a look at my life and lifestyle. If you feel called for something similar, I invite you to join me on this little exploration.

Why bother?

Because, according to the great wisdom of Switchfoot, “We were meant to live for so much more.”

Lightheartedness aside, let’s not forget that. There’s more available than merely surviving—and it’s also okay if that’s all we’re doing right now.Subscribe

What We Can Borrow from the Pandemic Reset

Whether or not you’re ready for a major life overhaul, it seems to me that with our nation going through a massive transition, we’ll need to individually and collectively consider how to navigate these times. I sense the need for us to—shall we say—“get ahead of things” while we’re still able. Because when I think back to what the pandemic forced upon us, a few things come to mind as far as major lifestyle shifts that may prove to be useful now.

• Forced Slowdown: Lockdowns and restrictions forced many of us to slow down, spend more time at home, and re-evaluate our priorities. This led to a greater appreciation for simple pleasures, like spending time with family, connecting with nature, and pursuing hobbies.
• Increased Focus on Health and Well-being: The pandemic heightened awareness of health and well-being, leading to increased interest in exercise, healthy eating, and mental health practices.
• Strengthened Local Connections and Community: With travel restricted, many people rediscovered their local communities, supporting local businesses and building stronger connections with their neighbors. There’s a renewed appreciation for local communities, with people seeking connection and support close to home.
• Increased Intentionality: This time prompted many people to live more intentionally, making conscious choices about how they spend their time, who they connect with, and what they prioritize.
• Greater Flexibility and Adaptability: The experience of navigating a global crisis has increased people’s resilience and adaptability. They’re more prepared to embrace change and adjust to new circumstances.

The pandemic undoubtedly had a significant impact on how we live, work, and connect with each other. It has accelerated some existing trends and created new ones, shaping the landscape of lifestyle in the years to come—and these shifts offer opportunities for us to design lives that are more aligned with our values and priorities—even when our nation’s values are in flux and perhaps contradict our own. Still, hope is not lost; this is a chance to not only create a lifestyle that’s comfortable or successful, but a life that is meaningful, fulfilling, and sustainable.

When to Reset: Recognizing the Signals

I find it next-to-impossible to want to reset in the middle of a major transition or during a crisis. It’s enough to just get by and to do the critical jobs at hand. Knowing when to initiate a reset is just as important as knowing how. It’s not always about waiting for a full-blown crisis to hit (in fact, I recommend you don’t wait until then; try to get ahead of it, if you can—hence my writing this today). Often, subtle signals indicate that a recalibration is needed, and this is a reminder to not ignore them.

If you’re smackdab in the middle of one of life’s storms, now might not be the time. Consider bookmarking this page for later when you’re ready. But if, like me, you’re able to catch your breath and “let the snow globe settle,” (as my husband likes to say), then maybe it’s time to take a simple inventory.

Sometimes it’s obvious when there’s an area of life that’s plain out of whack and in dire need of a reset. Other times, it can simply feel as though something is “off”—just not quite right. In those times, I like to visit the Wheel of Life chart, which, according to Positive Psychology, “came from industry pioneer Paul J. Meyer in the 1960s to help people realize their goals.” Perhaps you’ve heard of this before as it’s a popular tool used by coaches and therapists and professionals in the personal growth space. My husband, who works as a professional coach, has used this in his practice with his clients, but we’ve been using this together long before then. Some professionals, like author and coach Brendan Burchard in his High Performance Planner, recommend doing this weekly as a way to help you to stay on top of priorities, making minor adjustments as needed instead of major overhauls in an emergency.

I feel like we need to keep things uncomplicated these days, and find the Wheel of Life a simple yet useful tool to help gain clarity when everything seems chaotic or when I don’t know where to begin—like now. I’ve discovered that oftentimes it’s maybe only one or two areas that have gone off the rails that make it feel like everything else is in crisis. Hopefully, you’ll discover a couple of key areas that—when given a little time and attention—will create more peace and fulfillment, and spill over to all areas of your life, providing an overall sense of balance and harmony.

The segment names for the areas can vary, and there are dozens if not hundreds of models available online, but I’ve created a simple traditional model below for you to print out and use to get you started. Feel free to add your own categories for those things that are important to you. This could include things like home environment, community contribution, creativity, political activism, or even a specialized metric that you want to track.

Before you fill this out, let’s take a look at some key indicators or signs across these areas of life that may be telling you it’s a time for a reset.

Career/Work

Signs: Persistent dread of work, consistently working more than forty hours per week, chronic lateness, decreased productivity, frequent conflicts with colleagues, a feeling of stagnation, role or process confusion, a persistent sense of overwhelm, feeling like you can just never get back on track let alone ahead, or when work consistently drains your energy instead of providing fulfillment, it’s time to reassess.

Money & Finances

Signs: Financial anxiety, living paycheck to paycheck despite adequate income, accumulating unnecessary debt, neglecting savings, feeling a sense of helplessness regarding your financial situation, or when financial stress consistently impacts your well-being, it’s time to take control and reset your financial habits.

Health (Physical & Mental)

Signs: Unexplained fatigue, frequent illnesses, changes in sleep or appetite, increased irritability, persistent sadness or anxiety, neglecting exercise, or using unhealthy coping mechanisms, when your physical or mental health is consistently compromised, or when you receive a professional diagnosis or lab results outside of normal standards, it’s a clear signal to prioritize well-being.

Partner/Love Relationship

Signs: Decreased intimacy, frequent arguments, communication breakdowns, feeling emotionally distant, a sense of resentment, romantic curiosity about other people, or when the connection with your partner feels strained or lost, it’s time to refocus on the relationship.

Family & Friendships

Signs: Feeling isolated or lonely, neglecting social connections, experiencing frequent conflicts, feeling burdened by relationships, feeling a lack of emotional support, not having anyone to have meaningful conversations with, or when your social connections are a source of stress rather than support, it’s time to reset your social life.

Personal Growth

Signs: Feeling stagnant or unfulfilled, losing interest in hobbies, lacking motivation, feeling a sense of purposelessness, or when you feel a disconnect from your passions, it’s time to reignite your sense of purpose.

Fun/Recreation

Signs: Never having time for leisure activities, feeling constantly stressed or overwhelmed, losing your sense of humor, feeling like life is all work and no play, or when you consistently neglect activities that bring you joy, it’s time to prioritize fun and relaxation.

Read the Whole Article

The post Now Is The Time For a ‘Great Reset’ appeared first on LewRockwell.

On Tuesday’s episode of the Peter Schiff Show, Peter Schiff tackles the chaotic state of the markets following another round of tariff increases from President Trump. Peter critiques the logic behind tariffs, examines the unraveling of consensus trades like the AI investment frenzy, and highlights potential pitfalls facing American investors who have placed misguided faith in dollar strength. He also reflects on the recent turbulence in the stock market, warning listeners about the dangers of overlooking fundamental economics in favor of politically-driven narratives.

Opening with an overview of the recent turmoil in the stock market, Peter puts the market drop into historical context, underscoring how perception can overshadow reality when analyzing market moves:

But anyway, so the stock market yesterday was a big drop. The Dow at one point was down over 1,000 points, which I know is not that much when you’re talking about a Dow above 40,000. So a 1,000 point drop in the Dow is not what it used to be a couple of decades ago. Remember, the ’87 stock market crash, the big crash, was 508 points because the Dow was 2,800 or something like that. But we’ve had a lot of 1,000 point drops in the Dow, but they always grab the headline because it still sounds like a lot. It’s a big number.

The volatility was largely triggered by new tariff announcements. Peter voices concern over Trump’s latest tariff hike on Canadian aluminum and steel, outlining the downstream consequences for American businesses and consumers:

But we got some negative positive news on tariffs. First Trump is going to double the tariffs on Canadian aluminum and steel from 25% to 50%, which is a big problem for every company that needs steel and aluminum to make something. Those are important parts of automobiles, housing, appliances, aircraft. We use a lot of those metals, and now they’re going to be a lot more expensive. Trump announced that. The markets didn’t like that.

Peter argues that the widespread optimism around tariffs inflating the U.S. dollar was fundamentally flawed from the start. He reiterates his earlier warnings, now proven accurate, that protectionist tariffs would ultimately weaken, rather than strengthen, the dollar:

I said that as the dollar was rallying, and everybody was saying, ‘Oh, the dollar is going to go up because Trump’s going to impose tariffs, and the tariffs are good for the dollar.’ I kept saying, ‘No, they’re not.’ They’re not good for the dollar. Now that we actually have the tariffs and they’ve started, the dollar is tanking. Part of the reason that people thought that foreigners will pay the tariffs is they said, ‘Well, the dollar is going to go up, and so those imports are going to be cheaper because of the currency, and that will offset the tariff because the dollar will be so much stronger that we’ll get these products cheaper.’

Continuing his critique of misguided investment narratives, Peter takes aim at the crypto craze, ridiculing the notion that countries competing to amass Bitcoin constitutes sound economic policy:

The other nonsense they were saying is it’s going to be like a race, like an arms race. Once the U.S. starts buying Bitcoin, well, then every country is going to want to buy it. It’s going to be a race to see which country can get the most Bitcoin. That’s the race that you want to lose, right? Because whatever country has the least Bitcoin wins, right? Whoever has the most loses because you blow money buying nothing.

Peter emphasizes that the tide is turning in the marketplace, claiming vindication for his long-held view favoring foreign markets, commodities, gold, and gold mining stocks over U.S. domestic equities:

The entire Trump trade is reversing, and it’s playing out the way I believed it would in favor of foreign markets, commodities, gold, gold mining stocks, the opposite of what people expected. … People said, you know, I’m not worried now, Trump’s going to pay down the debt, the problems are solved, Trump’s going to make America great again, I don’t want to invest abroad. I don’t think I’m going to buy US stocks, and the absolute worst thing you could have done, because not only did you buy into the peak of an overvalued US market, and you’re already down considerably, but you’ve missed out on the rise in the foreign stocks, in gold stocks, and it’s just getting started.

Further illustrating the illogic of punitive trade barriers, Peter scrutinizes Trump’s hostile rhetoric against Canada, highlighting the inefficacy of such retaliations:

Donald Trump earlier today said that he was going to destroy– because he got really pissed off at Canada because they retaliated with some tariffs and then they threatened some export tariffs on energy, electricity, which comes from Canada down here. He got particularly offended and he said something like, ‘I’m going to destroy Canada. It’s going to be biblical. It’ll be in the history books. I’m going to destroy Canadian manufacturing.’ Well, how is he going to do that? Assuming that Trump made it impossible for Americans to buy anything coming out of Canada, it wouldn’t destroy Canadian manufacturing.

Finally, Peter reiterates his call to action, urging the U.S. to reject isolationist tariffs and instead focus on fostering genuine economic competitiveness rooted in sound fiscal policy, deregulation, and free markets:

What we need to do is to make America a more competitive place to manufacture without the tariffs. Then people will make the investments if it’s not artificial. We can’t be dependent on a barrier to competition. Of course, again, those barriers end up making a lot of our companies less competitive globally because now they have to buy their imported parts at a higher price and now they have to export it, and they’re not as competitive as foreign producers. We have to make America attractive on its own.

This originally appeared on SchiffGold.com.

The post We Can’t Rely on Trade Barriers appeared first on LewRockwell.

There’s a great moment in Henry James’s short story The Aspern Papers, when the reader realizes that the narrator—who seems like a cultured and sympathetic scholar—is actually a ruthless and deceptive weasel. Because James was such a cool and subtle writer, the reader doesn’t see it coming until the old woman whose privacy the narrator is plundering declares that he is a scoundrel. At that moment the reader realizes, “Holy smokes, the lady is right. This guy is a self-serving jerk.”

Years ago I knew a very brave Austrian journalist who covered Iraq after U.S. forces withdrew and let ISIS walk into the place and turn it into hell on earth. Listening to his tale of horror, I asked myself, “Is it possible that Saddam Hussein—for all of his tyranny—was, relatively speaking, the good guy, while we Americans—who wrecked the place and turned it over to devils—are the killer angels?

I had the same thought years later while visiting wounded soldiers at the VA Hospital in Palo Alto. They were just a few of the tens of thousands of men who’d sustained traumatic brain injuries in Iraq and Afghanistan. By the by the time I visited them in 2012, they been largely forgotten by their people, while their families—often young mothers with children—were left to deal with the wreckage. We, the American public, had moved on from Iraq and didn’t want to hear about it anymore.

I got to be pals with their treating psychiatrist, who told me privately over dinner that most of his medical colleagues at the VA were, in his experience, the most dishonest careerists he’d ever encountered.

Recently I’ve been following the news that, since the “bad guy” Assad was overthrown in Syria, the place has been taken over mostly by former Al Qaeda terrorists. Again, who is the “bad guy”—Assad or the U.S. who supported a band of homicidal fanatics?

Then there is the news the U.S., British, and German intelligence agencies have known all along that SARS-CoV-2 was engineered in a lab with U.S. biotechnology, mostly developed by Professor Ralph Baric at UNC Chapel Hill. Over the years, Baric has received hundreds of millions of grant money from Anthony Fauci’s NIAID. Again, who are the bad guys?

Now we come to the ultimate question, the mere posing of which will likely cause a large cohort of Americans to lose their minds—namely, is it possible that we (the United States) are the bad guys in this showdown with Russia over Ukraine?

By all accounts, Vladimir Putin has long been one the most moderate, pro-Western politicians in Russia. Oh, I know, I know, Putin is a ruthless character with a shady KGB background.

On the other hand, do the American people really think that an idealistic liberal who listens to NPR and just wants everyone to be friends is going to assume power in Russia and govern the vast, multi-ethnic, multi-religion country? The 19th century Czar, Alexander II, was an idealistic, liberal chap who freed the serfs in 1861. In return, a student revolutionary assassinated him.

Since World War I, when we celebrated that the “Yanks are comin’” (bearing Spanish Flu) to save the world from Prussian militarism, we Americans have become far too conditioned to believe—in the most unexamined way—that we are the good guys, and that the rest of the world is infested with bad guys.

Is it possible that we (the U.S.) are the bad guys?

The Swiss psychiatrist, Carl Jung, once pointed out that none of us can grow up and achieve full moral maturity unless we are willing to examine our own dark side and consider that maybe we are not as nice as we think we are. Maybe our desire to congratulate ourselves for our virtue causes us to overlook our own vices and selfishness.

The idea was comically captured in the following British skit.

This originally appeared on Courageous Discourse.

The post Are We (the U.S.) the Bad Guys? appeared first on LewRockwell.

Comments open on YouTube

The post Rick Sanchez: Fired and Threatened With Jail for Refusing to Spout Zelensky’s Talking Points appeared first on LewRockwell.

Trump has been issuing executive orders left and right and targeting many federal agencies. However, there is one agency that Trump has not announced any cuts: the Drug Enforcement Administration or DEA. As much as I am opposed to practically every agency of the federal government, getting rid of the DEA should be high on the list of anyone who treasures individual liberty, personal and financial privacy, and private property.

The post The One Agency that Trump Won’t Cut appeared first on LewRockwell.

The post Barnes and Baris Episode 89: What Are the Odds? What is Wrong with the California Republican Party? Plus, the Need for Reforming the Judicial Branch is Becoming More Evident appeared first on LewRockwell.

The post Pardon Me? Trump Blasts Biden’s ‘Auto-Signed’ Get Out Of Jail Free Cards appeared first on LewRockwell.

Thanks, Gail Appel.

I watch this video frequently, this man predicted the future and still some people dismiss this at their peril

– Roy Ben-Tzvi

Read on Substack

The post Warning from the UAE appeared first on LewRockwell.

Thanks, Mike Sanders.

Live Science

The post Mice administer ‘first-aid’ to friends — even trying to bring the dead back to life appeared first on LewRockwell.

Gail Appel wrote:

Hi Lew,

Carl Sagan was once iconic, particularly among liberals . A brilliant American.

Add Sagan to the wise men whose warning fell upon deaf ears.

Huxley,Orwell,Welch,McLuhan,Serling,Asimov, Vonnegut… they tried.They were right and the liberals are no longer liberal. They’ve become what we were warned of.

See this.

The post Carl Sagan’s Final Warning on the Importance of Scientific Skepticism appeared first on LewRockwell.

Thanks, Andy Thomas.

From David Patrick Harry’s podcast (Eastern Orthodox).

The post Fake Christianity: Paula White and Christian Zionism appeared first on LewRockwell.