Lew Rockwell Institute

Author and human rights lawyer Dan Kovalik says the Western powers are whitewashing a terrorist regime that is imposing a reign of terror on the Syrian population.

The new rulers of Syria are presented by Western governments and media as “rebels” and “reformed militants” who are trying to bring law and order to the Arab country.

Author and human rights lawyer Dan Kovalik says the Western powers are whitewashing a terrorist regime that is imposing a reign of terror on the Syrian population.

The new rulers of Syria are presented by Western governments and media as “rebels” and “reformed militants” who are trying to bring law and order to the Arab country.

Author and human rights lawyer Dan Kovalik says the Western powers are whitewashing a terrorist regime that is imposing a reign of terror on the Syrian population.

Kovalik has just visited the country on a fact-finding mission.

He toured the capital, Damascus, as well as the outlying countryside. He witnessed firsthand minority groups living in fear of violent retribution from the now-dominant militant factions who profess an extremist version of Sharia Law.

Kovalik corroborates disturbing alternative reports filtering out of Syria of executions, lynchings and other atrocities meted out by the terrorist militia whom the West complacently calls “rebels”.

Christians, Alawites and Shia Muslims are in grave danger from the new rulers of Syria headed up by de facto leader Ahmed Hussein al-Sharaa (also known as Mohammed al-Julani). He is head of the Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) faction.

HTS evolved out of Al Qaeda, Islamic State and Al Nusra Front. All these groups are officially on the US and West’s designated terrorist list. But that designation is part of the charade whereby the Western governments have covertly sponsored these groups as proxies for geopolitical interests.

Syria’s de facto ruler al-Sharaa (al-Jolani) was up to recently on the US wanted terrorist list with a $10 million reward for his capture. Since taking over Syria in December, the US has de-listed him after Washington delegates met in Damascus in recent weeks to discuss restoring diplomatic relations and carving up the resources of the war-torn Levantine territory. The US military already illegally occupies oil and agriculturally rich land in Syria.

Germany’s Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock was also quick to travel to Damascus to greet the new regime and talk up business opportunities.

There should be no surprise in all of this. For years the Al Qaeda-affiliated terrorist groups in Syria were the proxies for the United States and its NATO allies deployed to overthrow the government of President Bashar al-Assad in a dirty covert war for regime change.

Western media are depicting the downfall of Assad as a liberation from dictatorship. That’s a tall order given that the “liberators” are terror groups that inflicted unspeakable violence on the Syrian population during the Western-backed proxy war.

Dan Kovalik attests that Al Qaeda (and its variants) is now in government in Syria – the very organization that the US and its Western allies supposedly fought against in a global “war on terror”.

He warns that Syria is facing dark and dangerous times ahead as minority communities fear for their lives. But the Western governments and media are whitewashing the terrorist regime with blood on their hands. The cover-up is made all the more urgent because the West is fully complicit in the destruction of Syria.

Kovalik is the author of several books published by Skyhorse Publishing. His titles include The Plot to Scapegoat Russia, The Case for Palestine, The Plot to Overthrow Venezuela, and No More War… How the West Violates International Law by Using ‘Humanitarian’ Intervention to Advance Economic and Strategic Interests.

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

The post Al Qaeda Rules Syria… U.S. and NATO Whitewash Their Terrorist Proxies as the New Government appeared first on LewRockwell.

Word traps and false logic don’t lead to dominance of the future or monopolistic grips on limitless profits.

The heart of the current euphoric expectations for AI is a simple but problematic proposition: the equivalence of function equals intelligence. If using natural language requires intelligence, and a computer can use natural language, then it’s intelligent. If it takes intelligence to compose an essay on Charles Darwin, and an AI program can compose an essay on Charles Darwin, then the AI program is intelligent.

The problem here is this “equivalence is proof of intelligence” is a function of word-traps and false logic, not actual equivalence; what is claimed to be be equivalent isn’t equivalent at all. In other words, the source of confusion is how we choose to define “intelligence,” which is itself a word-trap of the sort that philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein attempted to resolve using koan-like propositions and logic.

Imagine for a moment we had twenty words to describe all the characteristics of what we lump into “intelligence.” We would then be parsing the characteristics and output of AI programs by a much larger set of comparisons.

The notion of equivalence goes back a long way. As science developed models for how Nature functioned, the idea that Nature was akin to a mechanism like a clock gained mindshare.

The discoveries of relativity and quantum effects blew this model to pieces, as Nature turned out to be a very strange clock, to the point that the “Nature as a mechanism” model was abandoned as inadequate.

We have yet to reach the limits of the “equivalence is proof of intelligence” model, which is as outdated and nonsensical as “the universe is a mechanism” model. We keep finding new examples of equivalence to support the idea that a computer program running instructions is “intelligent” because it can perform tasks we associate with “intelligence” because we’re embedded in a mechanistic conceptualization of the entirety of Nature–including ourselves.

So there is much excitement when an AI program exhibits “emergent properties,” meaning that it develops behaviors / processes that weren’t explicitly programmed. This is then touted as an “equivalence proving intelligence:” this “ability to create something new” is proof of intelligence.

But Nature is chockful of emergent properties that no one hypes as “proof of intelligence.” Ant colonies generate all sorts of emergent properties, but nobody is claiming that ant colonies have human-level intelligence are are poised to take over the world.

AI programs parrot content and techniques generated by humans. Since they use natural language, we’re fooled by equivalence into thinking, “hey, the program is as smart as we are, because only we use natural language.”

The same conceptual trap opens in every purported equivalence. If an AI program can find the answer to a complex problem such as “how do proteins fold?”, and do so far faster than we can, we immediately project this supposed equivalence into “super-intelligence.”

The problem is the AI program is simply parroting techniques generated by humans and extrapolating them at scale. The program doesn’t “understand” proteins, their functions in Nature or in our bodies, or anything else about proteins that humans understand.

Defining anything by equivalence is false logic, a false logic we fall into so easily because words are traps that we don’t even recognize as traps.

Wittgenstein concluded that all problems such as “is AI intelligent?” were based in language, not the real world. Once we become ensnared in language and its implicit byways and restrictions, we lose our way. This truth is revealed by words that have no direct equivalent in other languages.

One example of this is the Japanese word aware (a-waar-re), which has a range of nuanced meanings with no equivalent in English: a sweet sadness at the passage of time, a specific flavor of poignant nostalgia and awareness of time. This word is key to understanding Japanese culture, and yet there is no equivalent word in English, either in meaning or cultural centrality.

In other words–what if there is no equivalent, and the supposed equivalence is nothing more than a confusion caused by word-traps and false logic? The entire supposition that we can model human intelligence with mechanistic equivalences (intelligence is a mechanism) collapses, along with projections of “super-intelligence.”

The temptation to keep trying to equate “intelligence” and programs with mechanistic equivalence is compelling because we’re so embedded in the mechanistic model we don’t even realize it’s a black hole of false logic that has only one possible output: nonsensical claims of “intelligence” based on some absurdly reductionist equivalence.

The temptation in this mechanistic conceptual trap is to reckon that if we only define our words more carefully, then we’ll be able to “prove equivalence is real.” This too is false. Wittgenstein eventually moved away from the model of the imprecision of language is the source of all our intellectual problems. It isn’t that simple: more precise definitions only generate more convoluted claims of false equivalences.

The book The Myth of Artificial Intelligence: Why Computers Can’t Think the Way We Do (via B.J.) lays out the false conceptual assumptions holding up the entire edifice of AI.

Michael Polanyi’s classic Personal Knowledge: Towards a Post-Critical Philosophy explains that knowing is an art, a reality explored by Donald Schon in The Reflective Practitioner: How Professionals Think In Action.

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Vice President J.D. Vance defended traditional Catholic teaching regarding care for one’s own family and country before foreign immigrants, sparking leftist outrage and debate online.

During an interview on Fox News, Vance and host Sean Hannity discussed the fact that left-wing political pundits and influencers seem to care more about illegal immigrants than their fellow citizens who have been murdered or raped by illegal aliens.

“There is something very deranged in the mind of the far left in this country, where I really do think they feel more of a sense of compassion for illegal aliens who have no right to be in this country than they do for their fellow citizens,” Vance said.

“As an American leader, but also just as an American citizen, your compassion belongs first to your fellow citizens.”

“It doesn’t mean that you hate people from outside of your own borders, but there is this old school – and I think it’s a very Christian concept, by the way – you love your family, and then you love neighbor, and then you love your community, and then you love your fellow citizens in your own country and then, after that, you can focus and prioritize the rest of the world,” he explained.

“A lot of the far-left has completely inverted that, they seem to hate the citizens of their own country and care more about people outside their own borders. That is no way to run a society.”

Vance’s comments went viral on X, sparking theological discussion. Many leftist and “progressive” lay people and “theologians” slammed Vance for allegedly misrepresenting Christian teaching because they claim we are called to love everyone equally. Among those criticizing Vance was the notoriously heterodox LGBT activist Fr. James Martin.

Vance defended his statements on the order of charity and obligations, saying:

Just google “ordo amoris.” Aside from that, the idea that there isn’t a hierarchy of obligations violates basic common sense. Does Rory really think his moral duties to his own children are the same as his duties to a stranger who lives thousands of miles away? Does anyone?

Orthodox Catholic theologians and philosophers chimed in to defend Vance’s statements as a summary of traditional Catholic teaching.

“It is a Christian notion called the ‘ordo caritatis,’ the order of charity,” theology professor of Steubenville University Michael Sirilla wrote. “St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas express it eloquently and Vance summarizes it here deftly.”

Philosophy professor Edward Feser also defended Vance and wrote: “The correct view (common to Confucius, Aristotle, Aquinas, and the common sense of mankind in general) is that our social nature and its consequent obligations manifest themselves first and foremost in the family, then in local communities, then in the nation as a whole, and only after that in our relationship to mankind in general.”

Many conservative Protestants came to Vance’s defense as well.

“JD Vance is, of course, correct about the proper ordering of loves,” Calvinist influencer Allie Beth Stuckey wrote. “Allowing a stranger into your home to sleep in your kids’ beds and eat their food doesn’t make you a good person, it makes you a bad parent.”

Evangelical professor and author Nancy Pearcey also agreed with Vance, citing St. Augustine and prominent Anglican author and theologian C.S. Lewis, who reiterated the concept in his book The Abolition of Man.

“According to Lewis (and Augustine before him), we must love things to the degree they ought to be loved: it is wrong to love something too little, but it is also wrong to love something too much. We must establish a priority among the things that we love,” Pearcey wrote.

“Most important for the Christian is the love of God, followed closely by the love of family. There is something like a concentric circle of loves radiating out from each person, with the innermost circles deserving our greatest focus.”

St. Thomas Aquinas, known as the universal doctor of the Catholic Church, teaches this order of charity in his Summa Theologiae, where he states that “in matters pertaining to nature we should love our kindred most, in matters concerning relations between citizens, we should prefer our fellow-citizens, and on the battlefield our fellow-soldiers.” (Summa Theologiae II, II, Question 26)

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Harry and Meghan looked like ambulance chasers in burning Los Angeles a couple of weeks ago, but acting like virtue-signaling disaster tourists is what they do best. It does not surprise me. For those of you who don’t read comic books or gossip columns, they’re also known as the Duke and Duchess of Sussex, he a Brit and she an American of mixed race. They’ve both become richer of late thanks to the lawsuit they brought against the Murdoch newspapers in London. Enough said.

Self-flattering PR stunts are nothing new in La-La Land. For publicity-addicted freaks like Paris Hilton the catastrophe had its positive side: She got on the news posing in front of her burned-out Malibu house. The ones my heart bleeds for are those folks in Altadena, working types, as far removed from the phonies of Hollywood as Meghan and Harry from the real world. I’ve never met either one. I was a friend of his mother, Princess Di, and I believe I was the last one to speak with her before the Paris car crash that killed her.

Never mind. I’ve written about this before. Diana and I became friends after she asked to meet me at a rather grand ball in London. I was in my cups, and when she pointed at a chair next to her and asked me to “Sit here and tell me why you write that I’m a madwoman,” I missed the chair and fell under the table. She burst out laughing, bent down, and heard me mutter, “All I know is I’m mad about you.”

“Harry takes after his mother. He’s not very smart and is being played like a Stradivarius by Meghan.”

Diana was a shrewd, extremely nice girl who was completely uneducated but kind and well-meaning. She asked me over to Kensington Place for lunch a couple of times and came over to my place for three dinners I gave so she could meet pro-Diana journalists. There was absolutely no hanky-panky. She didn’t appear to me at all insightful, was always on guard, très comme il faut, but empty in a way. I knew most of her lovers, and they too were empty somehow. Tina Brown, who got a bestselling book out of the one meeting with others present she had with Di, did her homework, but it was mostly guesswork. Diana’s last boyfriend, as vile a character and liar as there ever was, proved what an empty vessel or how confused she was at the time. I always believed and still do that Charles was a spoiled shit who treated her badly and turned her into a nutcase. A man can cheat all he wants in my book, but he’s obliged to treat the wife with love, honor, and gentleness. Dumbo ears did neither and got away with even blackening her name. She was a lost soul by the time Charlie Windsor got through with her. Harry takes after her. He’s not very smart and is being played like a Stradivarius by Meghan.

A glossy monthly is the latest to “expose” the life of Meghan and Harry, but take it from me, it’s all bull, gossip picked up from desperate so-called journalists from all over. Writers for these mags have no access and don’t know those who know the people they write about. Meghan is hardly the first woman from a modest background to pull rank on people she deems inferior. That is exactly what separates people like her from people like, er…her late mother-in-law to be. It’s very simple, really. The Brits genuflect and ring-kiss royals, the rest of us do not. Meghan got a taste of Brit ass-licking and took it seriously. It doesn’t work in America, nor does it work in Britain unless you’re the real McCoy. Americans genuflect to celebrities, the Brits kneel down for royals and rock stars, whereas Greeks like yours truly only bow their heads to military heroes like Erwin Rommel and George Patton.

And let’s face it. Those claiming long-term therapy needed after working for Meghan need long-term therapy for mendacity and defamation. Exaggeration is as normal as victimhood today, especially in English-speaking countries. (It must be the water.) Both Harry and Meghan see themselves as victims, as do those who worked for them. Victims Anonymous is what I recommend for everyone involved.

This originally appeared on Taki’s Magazine.

The post The Di Is Cast appeared first on LewRockwell.

As most everyone knows, the mainstream media is hurting, big time. For many years, subscriptions and advertising revenue have been plummeting. Some of the big papers have been able to survive only by having some multimillionaire bail them out with his own money and be willing to absorb the ongoing financial losses.

Why is this? I submit that one big reason is that most Americans simply do not trust the media. They have come to see the media as just an unofficial mouthpiece for the federal government, especially the national-security branch of the government, the branch that rules the roost.

A good example of this phenomenon relates to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. The official narrative is that the invasion was an unprovoked war of aggression, much like the U.S. government’s unprovoked invasion of and war of aggression against Iraq.

But the undisputed evidence establishes beyond any doubt whatsoever the contrary. The evidence establishes that after the dismantling of the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact, NATO remained in existence, which was quite unusual, to say the least. That’s because the ostensible reason that NATO was brought into existence was to supposedly protect Western Europe from an attack by the Soviets.

Even worse, NATO began moving eastward, absorbing former members of the Warsaw Pact, and moving inexorably in the direction of Russia’s border. And this occurred in violation of promises made by U.S. officials to Russian officials that that would never happen.

Throughout the absorption process, Russian officials continually stated, “Stop it. Stop bringing your missiles, troops, weapons, tanks, and military bases closer to our border.” But U.S. officials, operating through NATO, refused to stop it. They just kept moving eastward until they finally threatened to absorb Ukraine.

As they proceeded with their absorption campaign, U.S. officials knew exactly what Russia’s reaction would be. It would be the same reaction that the U.S. had when the Soviets installed their nuclear weapons in Cuba. If the Soviets had refused to remove those nuclear weapons, the U.S. would have invaded Cuba, just as the Russians invaded Ukraine to prevent Ukraine from being absorbed into NATO.

How in the world can NATO’s absorption campaign not be considered a provocation? If that’s not a provocation, I don’t know what is. And let’s not forget: The U.S. government did much the same thing in 1979, when it provoked the Soviets into invading Afghanistan, with the aim of giving them “their own Vietnam.” National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski proudly confessed that they did that. Thus, when tens of thousands of Russian soldiers were dying on the Afghan battlefield, U.S. officials were exultant, just as they are exultant over the “degrading” of Russia’s army in Ukraine through the deaths of tens of thousands of Russian soldiers.

Yet, in account after account in the mainstream media, one continues to find the official narrative about Russia’s supposed “unprovoked” invasion of Ukraine. Given such, why would anyone trust any newspaper that continues to repeat that official narrative rather than printing only the truth about what the U.S. government and NATO did to provoke the invasion and, at the same time, condemning the official narrative?

Consider, for example, the New York Times. On January 14, 2025, it published an op-ed by Lloyd J. Austin III, the secretary of defense, and Anthony J. Blinken, secretary of state, stating: “President Vladimir Putin of Russia appalled the world with his full-scale invasion of Ukraine almost three years ago. He planned to topple Ukraine’s democratically elected government, install a Kremlin puppet regime and expose the West as weak, divided and diminished…. The United States and its allies and partners must continue to stand by Ukraine and strengthen its hand for the negotiations that will someday bring Mr. Putin’s war of aggression to an end.”

Not one word about what the U.S. and NATO did to provoke the invasion with their absorption campaign.

Yesterday, January 30, the Times published this comment by longtime columnist Nicholas Kristof about Tulsi Gabbard’s confirmation hearing: “Asked who she blames for the Ukraine war, Gabbard said bluntly, ‘Putin started the war in Ukraine.’ After her past blather about Russia’s ‘legitimate security concerns’ and in a hearing full of her evasions, that was a reassuring acknowledgment of a reality that should be obvious to all.” [Links in original.]

So, Gabbard’s pointing to Russia’s “legitimate security concerns” regarding  having U.S. nuclear weapons, troops, and tanks on its border is nothing more than “blather.” I’m willing to bet that Kristof and the Times would not call the U.S. government’s “legitimate security concerns” during the Cuban Missile Crisis “blather.”

Also yesterday, the Times posted a news story about Gabbard’s confirmation hearing, stating, “Russia experts and intelligence experts have frequently remarked on Ms. Gabbard’s history of taking positions that defend Russian interests or cast the United States as a villain. She blamed NATO and the Biden administration for provoking Russia’s full invasion of Ukraine nearly three years ago by failing to respect ‘Russia’s legitimate security concerns.’” [Links in original.]

So, pointing out the truth about the U.S. government’s wrongful conduct equates to “defending Russian interests.” Also, notice how the Times conflates the United States and the U.S. government, as if they were one and the same thing. The fact is that the U.S. government sometimes is a villain. Example: The unprovoked U.S. invasion of and undeclared war of aggression against Iraq. Does pointing out that villainous conduct constitute “defending Russian interests.” Moreover, notice how the reporter implicitly disparages Gabbard for pointing out what NATO did to provoke Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

Of course, the distrust of the mainstream media didn’t start with its repetition of the official narrative about Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. It goes back much further — for example, to Operation Mockingbird, when much of the mainstream press was willingly and eagerly becoming assets of the CIA in an effort to save America from the Russians and the “godless communists” who were supposedly coming to get us.

And it also stretches back to the Kennedy assassination, when the mainstream media blindly accepted the ludicrous lone-nut official narrative and refused to conduct any serious investigation that would contradict that narrative.

Consider, for example, when the Assassination Records Review Board discovered in the 1990s that there had been two brain examinations as part of the JFK autopsy, the second of which could not possibly have been JFK’s brain. Wouldn’t you think that that would be something that the mainstream press would want to investigate, even if just a little bit? Nope. Nothing here, folks. Let’s move on. A lone-nut did it. That’s all you need to know.

Or consider the enlisted men who were released from vows of secrecy during the House Select Committee on Assassinations in the 1970s. They stated that they secretly carried the president’s body into the Bethesda morgue in a cheap shipping casket more than an hour before the official entry time of the Dallas casket into which the president’s body had been placed at Parkland Hospital in Dallas.

Wouldn’t you think that some mainstream newspaper would want to investigate that? After all, why would enlisted men make up such a story? Nope. Let’s move on, folks. Nothing to see here. A lone-nut did it. That’s all you need to know.

The Internet, obviously, has been the mainstream media’s worst enemy. That’s because people were now able to discover websites, podcasts, videos, and other such things that were willing to tell them the truth about their villainy of their own government. The mainstream media has been having trouble ever since.

Reprinted with permission from The Future of Freedom Foundation.

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As we approach April 30, I’ve been thinking a lot about the Vietnam War and the fiftieth anniversary of the fall of Saigon. My younger brother is married to a Vietnamese lady whose father was an officer in the army of South Vietnam. While he was captured by the advancing North Vietnamese Army and put into prison, his wife and children (including my infant sister-in-law) managed to flee by boat and eventually make their way to America. The following photograph is representative of what she and her mom and siblings went through.

Guys like my sister-in-law’s father fought hard against the communists, and they took heart that the Johnson administration gave U.S. military support to their cause. However, the trouble for the Republic of Vietnam was that its corrupt and faction-riven government was unable to counter the communist message that the Americans were, like the French before them, imperialists who didn’t really care about ordinary Vietnamese people, but wanted to exploit the resources of their beautiful and fertile country.

Many South Vietnamese families with property sent their sons to school in France, Switzerland, or the U.S. to get them out of harm’s way in Vietnam. This was the equivalent of privileged American men of fighting age getting college deferment from the draft. I was reminded of this when I read a report in the French paper Le Monde that many wealthy Ukrainians have left the country are are now living in their villas in the south of France.

In a 2017 Op-Ed in the New York Times, military historian Kevin Boylan wrote the following:

But Johnson … knew that he faced a paradox. As long as the war in Vietnam didn’t demand too much of them and they believed that victory was just around the corner, most Americans would support it. But if Johnson admitted publicly that South Vietnam could not survive without a full commitment by the United States, he knew that support would crumble.

And so, like other presidents before and after him, Johnson tried to conceal the bleak realities of Vietnam from the American people and deliberately misled them about the war’s likely duration and cost.

Perhaps the key lesson of Vietnam is that if the reasons for going to war are not compelling enough for our leaders to demand that all Americans make sacrifices in pursuit of victory, then perhaps we should not go to war at all. Sacrifice should not be demanded solely of those who risk life and limb for their country in combat theaters overseas.

Note that President George W. Bush made the exact same miscalculation in Iraq in 2003, while President Joe Biden made the same miscalculation in 2022 when he encouraged Ukrainian President Zelenskyy to choose war against Russia instead of at least trying the path of diplomacy.

The American people are, generally speaking, supportive of wars abroad as long these wars don’t demand too much sacrifice from them. A successful U.S. foreign policy requires fully acknowledging and accepting this reality.

The USA is blessed by large oceans to the east and west—patrolled by the largest navy in history— while militarily weak countries lie to our north and south. It has therefore been persistently difficult to persuade the American people that they are threatened by the likes of the North Vietnamese Army, the Iraqi Army under Saddam Hussein, or the Russian Army today.

Occasionally the U.S. government may flood the zone with propaganda and succeed in generating an initial burst of enthusiasm for military adventures abroad. However, as the war drags on without the quick victory that was promised, we Americans grow weary and question why exactly we are involved in the quarrels of people who live over 5,0000 miles away.

The loud insistence that the particular aggressor is “just like Hitler” works a bit at first, but even that trick has now lost much of its luster. Gone are the Ukrainian flags that were displayed on so many homes in my affluent neighborhood in 2022. The fervent solidarity the owners felt with Ukraine has faded over the last three years.

It’s a remarkable fact that President Bush learned nothing from Vietnam and President Biden learned nothing from Vietnam and Iraq. I hope that President Trump will be more wise.

How can U.S. foreign policy be improved so that it does good in the world instead of blundering around and getting people killed? The process must begin by correcting Washington’s credibility problem. No one in his right mind can believe a word that comes out of Washington. When Washington insists that admitting Ukraine to NATO is purely for “defensive” purposes, why should Russia—a country that suffered catastrophic invasions in 1812 and 1941—believe this? I am a taxpaying American citizen and my family has been in this country since the 1630s, and I don’t believe a single word that comes out of Washington.

To recover its credibility, Washington will probably need to get rid of its entire foreign policy establishment—especially the so-called Neocons—who haven’t gotten a single thing right in the last sixty years of blundering.

This originally appeared on Courageous Discourse.

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Concerns about societal decline and the behavior of younger generations have been expressed across many ancient cultures. Thousands of generations have looked at their spawn and despaired. Certainly, a few minutes on TikTok makes me feel despondent.

Despite millennia of hand-wringing, humanity has survived and apparently flourished, at least from a biological point of view. So what’s the Big Deal? Well, let’s start by listening to what the ancients have said to us over the eons.

In the Instruction of Ptahhotep, an Egyptian text from the Middle Kingdom period, the vizier Ptahhotep (~2000 BC) laments the loss of respect for traditions:

“Youth are corrupted by luxury, and the wisdom of the old is ignored.”

An apocryphal Sumerian proverb from about the same time expresses frustration about the younger generation:

“In those days, there was no reverence for the elder, no reverence for teachers; the young men would sit in the gate, chattering away, saying whatever pleased them.”

That gate could easily be replaced with modern SocMed. No word on what the young women were doing, but one assumes they were enablers.

Socrates (~450 BC), as quoted by Plato, allegedly criticized the youth of Athens:

“The children now love luxury; they have bad manners, contempt for authority; they show disrespect for elders and love chatter in place of exercise.”

Philosophers like Hesiod also ranted about decline in Works and Days (~700 BC), writing about the “Five Ages of Man,” where humanity declines in morality over time.

The Roman poet Horace complained (~20 BC)( about societal changes, particularly the loss of traditional Roman family values, in his Odes (Carmina):

“Our sires’ age, worse than our grandsires’, produced us, yet more wicked, soon to yield a race more wicked still.”

Cicero (~30 BC) lamented the moral decline of his era in his speeches and writings, suggesting that the youth were more self-serving and less committed to traditional Roman virtues. I’ve always pictured him as the William Buckley of the ancient world.

The grousing wasn’t limited to the Western world. Confucianism frequently bemoaned the decline of morality and respect for authority. Confucius himself (~400 BC) stated:

“The common people can be made to follow a path but not to understand it.”
(Analects, 8.9) He also dropped, “If the people have no respect, what becomes of the state?” (Analects, 3.19)

Sounds like a CCP meme. Similarly, the Book of Rites (Liji) often discusses how societal order depends on adherence to ritual and how that was being neglected by the younger generation.

The Bible is replete with wailings and lamentations about the youths. In the Book of Isaiah (3:4–5), societal disorder is linked to younger generations taking control:

“And I will give children to be their princes, and babes shall rule over them.

“And the people shall be oppressed, every one by another, and every one by his neighbour: the child shall behave himself proudly against the ancient, and the base against the honourable.”

This gnashing of teeth is not limited to the Old Testament. The Apostle Paul (2 Timothy 3:1–5) writes about the decline of morality in:

“This know also, that in the last days perilous times shall come. For men shall be lovers of their own selves, covetous, boasters, proud, blasphemers, disobedient to parents, unthankful, unholy.”

Sounds a bit like predicting the Sun will rise tomorrow.

In the Islamic world, the scholar Al-Jahiz wrote critiques of his society in his satirical essays. For example, in Kitab al-Bukhala (The Book of Misers, ~AD 820), he comments on the decline of proper behavior and the frivolity of youth compared to earlier generations. Do Islamic satirists still roam the Earth? We could use a couple.

And let’s not leave out the New World. Plenty of grousing there, too.

The Huehuehtlahtolli (The Old Man’s Speech) is a collection of speeches attributed to elders, found in Nahuatl (the Aztec language), in which they express their concerns about younger generations not respecting traditional values. The speeches focus on the importance of humility, respect for elders, and the dangers of youthful rebellion.

In the Inca Empire, Guaman Poma’s Nueva Crónica y Buen Gobierno (AD 1615) has numerous references that depict generational respect and the consequences of youth straying from their prescribed roles. He mentions how the younger generations’ rebelliousness, encouraged by the Spaniards, led to societal decline and disarray.

Sounds a bit like the old ‘pick your friends, don’t let them pick you’ speech.

If we can draw a thread from a global survey of ancient laments, we find that the real fear is collapse of cultures and civilizations, not the end of humanity. Education, elder wisdom and tradition are the means of social continuity, but the species marches on regardless.

In the past, so far as we are allowed to know, human civilizations existed in isolated pockets. Cultures were distinct from each other, and while the collapse of one might have economic reverberations in others via trade, it wasn’t a global extinction event.

According to the Generally Accepted Historical Timeline, there has never been a fully integrated global civilization before ours — ignoring Graham Hancock for the moment. It was the shared experiences of generations within distinct groups, using cultural traditions, rites and rituals, that propagated society across ages.

In every cited instance, it was youthful rebellion that was blamed for significant cultural shifts, and the subsequent loss of direct inheritance of ancient wisdom that led to societal extinction.

The Indus Valley rose and fell. Sumer rose and fell. Babylon rose and fell. The Egyptians, Greeks, Romans, Han, Mongols, Maya, Aztecs all rose and fell. Yet here we are, grousing and lamenting the rebelliousness of youth.

Great powers ascend through cultural cohesion, then collapse for lack of it. To those caught in the middle, it may seem to be The End Of The World As We Know It, but clearly the last four words of that phrase are the key to wisdom.

Bringing Hancock back in the room, we are likely only the latest of a very long line of global human civilizations, spanning millions of years, surviving dazzling Golden Ages, and horrific implosions that wiped all memory from the records.

We can blame it all on the young, but who are their teachers? We can don sack cloth and ashes over the demise of cultural virtues and values, but does that serve the purpose of perpetuation? Is it truly the rebelliousness of youth that is responsible for ultimate collapse, or the lack of discipline, conviction and resolve of their predecessors that is to blame?

Just some fat to chew on this monsoon afternoon. It’s like one of those thousand-piece single-color puzzles that make one wonder what Marion Davies was thinking.

Youth is wasted on the young.

=====

All this talk of youth puts me in the mood for My Cousin Vinny (1992). The running gag about Fred Gwynne’s pronunciation of “youths” is one of the best I’ve ever encountered. Outstanding cultural satire and comedy of manners.

This originally appeared on 

The post The Finite Ecstasy of Ignorance appeared first on LewRockwell.

Exactly three years ago and within a few hours of the Truckers Freedom convoy reaching Ottawa, it had claimed its first big scalp – it had forced the resignation of the leader of the Conservative party of Canada (CPC).

The CPC was led by Erin O’Toole, who was literally the subservient tool of the globalists. He had gone along with every tyrannical, draconian, dictatorial move of the Trudeau government. He had even appeared in a ridiculous, outrageous “all party” video with the other political parties’ leaders, asking everyone to get “vaccinated” with an untested vaccine which was already causing deadly and serious complications in the population.

As the trucks rolled into Ottawa, the apology of a leader that was Trudeau literally went into hiding – he, the multiple-vaxxed, multiple injected prime minister, supposedly contracted covid again and went into “isolation.” The CPC on the other hand, swiftly went into action – the parliamentarians of the CPC convened an urgent meeting and within a matter of a few hours, “O’Toole the tool” had been dismissed and voted out by his own party and was no longer the leader.

The libertarian Pierre Pollievere was at that time one of the few prominent politicians who actually visited the Freedom Convoy in Ottawa and then issued a scathing attack on Trudeau. A few weeks later, he was elected leader of the CPC – and is expected to be elected Canada’s next prime minister.

Over in the West of Canada, the arrival of the Freedom Convoy in Ottawa, triggered the complete lifting of all restrictions (vaccine mandates, passports, lockdowns, masks etc.) in both Saskatchewan and Alberta. Investigations and lawsuits and discovery will eventually uncover the corruption behind the sudden lifting of restrictions. Between the day in early February 2022 when all the restrictions were in place and the next day when all the restrictions were lifted, how did the science change? Did the virus go into hiding? Or was it rather the case that the governments of these two provinces suddenly realized the mighty power of the people in the peaceful, powerful and poignant arrival in Ottawa of the Freedom Convoy?

The lifting of all restrictions in the two Canadian provinces in February of 2022 as a direct result of the Truckers Freedom Convoy, led to a domino effect throughout the Western world – multiple governments and authorities in Canada, in the USA, in Britain, Germany, France – lifted their own, ridiculous and soul-sapping covid restrictions. It was a pivotal few weeks for mankind and for civilization itself. From being on the verge, on the very precipice of corporate and globalist “big brother” take over by a tyranny promising to be worse than communism, the world was instead led by our magnificent Freedom Convoy truckers into a miraculous and expanding experience of freedom, truth, liberty and hope.

Forever grateful. pic.twitter.com/AfW8T770dB

— Ryan Gerritsen (@ryangerritsen) January 19, 2025

But for the Truckers Freedom Convoy, there should be very little doubt that we would still be in the grip of lockdowns, masks, mandates – and moving rapidly on to quarantine camps, imprisonment and forced labour. Thanks to a Canadian movement that started with two Canadians in the Western Canadian prairies, the trajectory and destiny of Western civilization received a powerful nudge in the right direction, to freedom. Our debt to Tamara Lich, Chris Barber and the legions of Freedom Convoy Truckers who joined them can never be fully repaid.

The wide ranging political earthquakes that the Freedom Convoy unleashed led rapidly to the fall of the covid tyrant leaders of many Western nations. New Zealand, Australia and Britain soon replaced their leaders. Our cousins to the South, always a stronger bastion of freedom than the rest of the world, have just changed the Biden covid cabal and sent them packing. In Canada, the tyrant in chief, the insufferable and incompetent and dangerous globalist clown Trudeau, has resigned. The long arm of the Freedom Convoy is still winning and the globalists are losing.

Not so long ago, the darkness in the Western world was so deep and the depth of depraved behaviour so well entrenched that many of us despaired of ever seeing even the faint glimmer of a beginning dawn again. But a miracle did take place – and hope did make a comeback. Who would have imagined for example, that the American Government under President Trump would declare two weeks ago, that “there are only two genders” – and swiftly move to outlaw the demonic gender changing treatments that were being perpetrated on our children? But it has happened. A slowly spreading glimmer and glow of dawn is brightening America’s skies. And it might even spread Northward to Canada.

The wonderful, awe-inspiring, American experiment of massive, widespread grassroots mobilization that was responsible for the powering into the White House of President Trump in the 2024 elections is replicable in modern nations – and in and through the new and connected world of the internet and social media. This grassroots mobilization in America has now acquired an entrenched, established presence which will be difficult to dislodge.

The grassroots mobilization that occurred on a similarly massive scale in Canada with the Truckers Freedom Convoy must also become entrenched and self-sustaining – and this shall be the subject of my next essay.

A naturally replicating and entrenched grassroots movement for freedom in Canada is after all the best tribute we can pay to the magnificent men and women of the Freedom Convoy. We must take a leaf out of the experience of our American cousins. We must get it done.

This originally appeared on Francis Christian’s Essays.

The post The Freedom Convoy appeared first on LewRockwell.

Our new president’s policies for the Middle East, are, I’m sorry to say, a disaster for those of us who support a non-interventionist foreign policy. A war between Israel and Hamas has been going on for over a year. A fragile truce is in place as I write, but who knows how long it will last?  Gaza is now a desolated area, because in its ruthless campaign to destroy Hamas, Israel has killed many civilians, destroyed their homes, and reduced others to starvation. Disease is rampant, but hospitals have been bombed, impeding a medical response to the outbreak of disease. Here is an account by the renowned historian Adam Tooze of what has happened over the past year: “Before the onslaught, Gaza was a compact space with clusters of dense urban settlement. It is comparable in population and size not to Khartoum, Sudan’s capital, but to neighboring Omdurman, Sudan’s second metro area. Omdurman has a population of 2.3 million spread over 230 square miles. In Gaza 2.1 million people live in 139 square miles. Into the most densely populated parts of Gaza’s urban areas, the Israeli military have unleashed extraordinary firepower. Already in December 2023 John Paul Rathbone, the Financial Times security correspondent, concluded that Israel was inflicting on Gaza one of the heaviest and most concentrated bombardments in military history. By April 2024 Euro-Med Civil Rights Monitor put the figure for munitions used at 70,000 tons of explosives. For sake of comparison that is ten times greater than the tonnage dropped in the notorious bombing raid on the German city of Dresden in February 1945. It is four and half times the explosive force of the atomic bomb that annihilated Hiroshima in August 1945. In November 2024 the Environmental Quality Authority of the Palestine Authority estimated that in barely more than a year, the Israeli bombardment of Gaza had delivered no less than 85,000 tonnes of explosives. The result in Gaza is destruction of an intensity rarely seen in the history of warfare. It is unimaginable in Sudan’s civil war, which is fought with far less military equipment. Nowhere in Sudan has suffered anything like the concentrated destruction meted out to Gaza. What has enabled this concentration of firepower are not only Israel’s own resources but unstinting US aid. Enthusiastically promoted by the Biden administration and supported by huge majorities in Congress, this has accounted for a very high share of the munitions dropped.

Across Gaza more than half of all buildings have been damaged. In Gaza city the share is over 80 percent. Unsurprisingly, the havoc extends to Gaza’s 12 universities, all of which have been completely or partially destroyed. At the same time, the intensity of fire and the orders of the IDF have brutally displaced virtually the entire population, making it impossible for normal life to continue. If education and scholarship have continued – and they have – it is only due to the dauntless determination and bravery of Palestinian faculty and students. Not only is the damage to the education system clearly far more comprehensive than that suffered in Sudan, or anywhere else in the world, but the kind of communications networks that allow educational researchers to assess the scale of the damage in Sudan in relatively precise terms, no longer exist in Gaza. It is a scene of total ruination.”

It is obvious what America should do in this situation or rather not do. It isn’t our job to impose a peace settlement, but we must cut off all American financial aid and shipments of arms and missiles to the area. We should try to end the ties between AIPAC and Congress. We should certainly not do anything to abet Israeli Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu’s plans to take control of Gaza and to expel large numbers of Gazans.

Trump has so far done the reverse of this. He has gone so far as to suggest cleaning out the entire Gaza area, emptying it of all its residents. Why should America support the inhuman plan to deprive a people of their homeland? Here is an account of Trump’s proposal: “Well that didn’t take long. President Trump has said he wants to “clean out” Gaza and relocate its population to US client states Egypt and Jordan, which would of course be a textbook case of ethnic cleansing. It would also align perfectly with longstanding Israeli agendas to remove Palestinians from their homeland so that their territory can be seized and settled by Jews. Speaking with the press on board Air Force One on Saturday, Trump said he talked to Jordan’s King Abdullah II about taking in large numbers of Palestinians from Gaza, and said he plans to speak with Egypt’s president Abdel Fattah el-Sisi about doing the same. ‘I’d like Egypt to take people and I’d like Jordan to take people,’ Trump told reporters, saying ‘the Gaza Strip is a real mess’ and ‘literally a demolition site’. ‘You’re talking about probably a million and a half people, and we just clean out that whole thing,’ Trump said.”

Trump is sympathetic to Netanyahu’s efforts to expand Israeli settlements into Gaza. Why should America support such a blatantly unjust policy? “U.S. President Donald Trump on Monday rescinded sanctions imposed by the former Biden administration on far-right Israeli settler groups and individuals accused of being involved in violence against Palestinians in the occupied West Bank, the new White House website said. The website said Trump rescinded Executive Order 14115 issued on Feb. 1, 2024, which authorized the imposition of certain sanctions ‘on Persons Undermining Peace, Security, and Stability in the West Bank.’ Trump’s decision is a reversal of a major policy action by former President Joe Biden’s administration which had slapped sanctions on numerous Israeli settler individuals and entities, freezing their U.S. assets and generally barring Americans from dealing with them. As much of the world’s attention has focused on the war in Gaza, growing violence by Israeli settlers against Palestinians in the West Bank and land grabs in the occupied territory have raised concern among some of Israel’s Western allies.”

According to The Times of Israel newspaper, Trump also has removed a temporary hold on shipping “bunker buster” bombs to Israel : “US President Donald Trump said on Saturday night that he had lifted a hold put in place by former president Joe Biden on a shipment of 2,000-pound bombs for Israel. “A lot of things that were ordered and paid for by Israel, but have not been sent by Biden, are on their way!” Trump wrote on his social media app Truth Social, without providing further details. Also Saturday, Trump said to reporters aboard Air Force One, “We released them (the bombs). We released them today. And they’ll have them. They paid for them and they’ve been waiting for them for a long time. They’ve been in storage.”

Trump is also very favorable to AIPAC, and Miriam Adelson, Sheldon Adelson’s widow, who supports an “Israel First” foreign policy is personally close to Trump and was a major donor to his presidential campaign: “Viewers tuning in early to broadcasts of US President Donald Trump’s inauguration ceremony on Monday could catch a glimpse of a woman with long white hair standing next to Hillary Clinton and speaking animatedly with Trump’s chief of staff, Susie Wiles. The woman was Miriam Adelson, the pro-Israel megadonor who helped propel Trump to both electoral wins and who hosted an inaugural ball alongside Mark Zuckerberg, the Meta CEO who has more recently engaged with Trump. Adelson, 79, born in Tel Aviv and raised in Haifa, is a major funder of pro-Israel political activity and a prolific donor to Jewish causes, carrying on a legacy she built with her late husband, casino magnate Sheldon Adelson. Adelson gave Trump’s campaign at least $100 million in October, making her the third biggest donor to his campaign, after Elon Musk, who is playing a key role in the administration, and the reclusive billionaire Timothy Mellon.”

Let’s do everything we can to urge Trump to stay out of the Middle East, to end sending money there, and to stop supporting Israeli expansion. Stay out!

The post President Trump and Peace in the Middle East appeared first on LewRockwell.

Ep. 249: Confirmation Hearings RECAP! Canada-U.S. TRADE WAR? Bureaucrats Sue Trump! Viva Barnes Live

The post Ep. 249: Confirmation Hearings RECAP! Canada-U.S. TRADE WAR? Bureaucrats Sue Trump! Viva Barnes Live appeared first on LewRockwell.

Thanks, John Smith

CBS Colorado

The post High school coach in Colorado suspended after reports of antisemitism, unsportsmanlike behavior appeared first on LewRockwell.

Thanks, Wayne Goodfellow. 

Insightful interview of Liz Truss, the former Prime Minister of the UK. Mark Carney was Governor of the Bank of England when she was PM and he just about destroyed the UK with his monetary policies. And now he is promoting zero carbon when CO2 is the gas of life itself through a process called photosynthesis. In other words, zero carbon represents a war against humanity and all life on this planet. It is truly diabolical yet Carney is the front-runner to lead the Liberal Party of Canada. 

The post Former Prime Minister Liz Truss on Mark Carney appeared first on LewRockwell.

David Martin 

See this

See my two related articles “Seth Rich Confidant” Escaped to Russia and Seth Rich Equals Vince Foster? 

The post Time to Uncover Who Killed Seth Rich appeared first on LewRockwell.

Click Here:

Ben Bartee

The post Tulsi vs. The Duopolistic Blob: Senate Showdown Notes appeared first on LewRockwell.

Click Here:

Haaretz.com 

The post Hasbara Hitch: Pro-Israel Social Media Bot Goes Rogue, Calls IDF Soldiers ‘White Colonizers in Apartheid Israel’ appeared first on LewRockwell.

Thanks, Bruce McLane.

The post Whitney Webb Triggers Weinstein Tantrum With Facts About Trump appeared first on LewRockwell.

Writes Ginny Garner:

Jacob Hornberger, founder of Future of Freedom Foundation, is skeptical that the long awaited records on the JFK assassination will finally be declassified and released. Hornberger points out that the EO Trump signed did not call for the actual release of those documents (and those related to the RFK and MLK assassinations) but called for a plan to release the documents. Hornberger expects the CIA to once again push back against this and that any released information will not contain any smoking gun, but he hopes he is wrong. 

The post Skepticism on JFK Assassination-Related Records Release appeared first on LewRockwell.

Thanks, David Martin. 

The post How the Bishop Who Scolded Trump Enabled Gaza Genocide appeared first on LewRockwell.

Thanks,  John Frahm.

Gateway Pundit

The post Legacy Media Caught Peddling More Fake News appeared first on LewRockwell.

Click Here:

Jon Fleetwood

Monkeypox Outbreak Occurs After Moderna Begins Testing Monkeypox mRNA Shot in U.K. Clinical Trial

The post 147 Million Poultry Slaughtered Since 2022—Culled appeared first on LewRockwell.