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How Inflation Undermines Culture And Values

Dom, 08/06/2025 - 20:43

Writes Brian Dunaway:

This column by Daniel Morena Vitonvia of The Mises Institute, posted on ZeroHedge, is among the most succinct, elegant writing I’ve seen on how inflation degrades the spiritual self. I was especially taken by these two passages:

“Saving, which is linked to sacrifice, also benefits the economy of giving, and deflation supports it – because falling prices discourage leverage, especially in households. As capital use becomes less profitable, the opportunity cost of making donations drops, which increases charitable giving both in absolute and relative terms. Inflation, by contrast, is harmful because it reduces the value of inheritances, and one of the strongest incentives to save before death is the desire to leave something to one’s loved ones. From this, it follows that one of the most powerful motivations for preserving wealth is the ability to make donations.”

And this distillation of Hülsmann, “Inflation is a hidden tax with devastating economic and moral consequences; it encourages the population to go into debt by making credit cheaper, and it penalizes saving, increasing the length of time preference. Not only that, but it is also a spiritual burden. It drives people to seek ways to protect their savings, making society more materialistic, causing people to prioritize money over happiness, and often forcing them to migrate, thereby breaking family and patriotic ties.” (Emphasis mine.)

I was really struck by the truth, “causing people to prioritize money over happiness.” When I was a young man, I used all the imagination I could muster to understand what it would be like to have great wealth. Aside from lustful adventures, what I imagined was awful. I thought to myself that I would be perpetually considering how best to protect my fortune. (I also considered that even if one creates new wealth, almost anything is psychologically normalized rather quickly, and that the greatest joys, physical and spiritual, require little to no money at all.) I recently read that William Kissam Vanderbilt (grandson of Cornelius), shortly before his death in 1920 (as reported in The New York Times), shared that “My life was never destined to be quite happy. … Inherited wealth is a real handicap to happiness. It is as certain a death to ambition as cocaine is to morality.”

I’ve often felt that unhappiness is not just fathered by evil, but a synonym for it, even more so for the perpetrator than the victim. If the love of money is the root of all evil, so it is misery even more.

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Meet the Defiant Loyalists Who Paid Dearly for Choosing the Wrong Side in the American Revolution

Dom, 08/06/2025 - 20:42

Thanks, Saleh Abdullah.

Smithsonian Magazine

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Monticello for the last 20 years

Dom, 08/06/2025 - 19:52

Thanks, Thomas Jefferson.

See here.

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58 years ago, at least Mises institute and LRC don’t forget

Dom, 08/06/2025 - 19:23

Thanks, Bruce McLane.

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Operation George Floyd: Unmasking the Multi-Layered Psyop w/ Maryam Henein

Dom, 08/06/2025 - 09:54

See here:

https://courtenayturner.com/ep-487-operation-george-floyd-unmasking-the-multi-layered-psyop-w-maryam-henein/

https://publiusnationalpost.substack.com/p/operation-george-floyd-a-multi-layered

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Complete Timeline of Marty Funkhouser and Larry David Banter & Arguments (Curb Your Enthusiasm)

Dom, 08/06/2025 - 09:53

Thanks, Johnny Kramer.

The post Complete Timeline of Marty Funkhouser and Larry David Banter & Arguments (Curb Your Enthusiasm) appeared first on LewRockwell.

I think Elon Musk just fired Donald Trump

Dom, 08/06/2025 - 09:48

Thanks, Tim McGraw.

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How AI Is Replacing Middle-Class Careers

Dom, 08/06/2025 - 09:46

Thanks, Saleh Abdullah.

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Romance in Belem

Dom, 08/06/2025 - 09:43

Writes Tim McGraw:

I wish I could still write like this:

Romance in Belem, 1990

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Why 99% of Keynesian Utopia Businesses Are About to Be Wiped Out?

Dom, 08/06/2025 - 09:33

Thanks. Saleh Abdullah.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UYBq1LRleGM

https://archive.nytimes.com/krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/10/20/rethinking-japan/

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Best Father’s Day Gifts

Sab, 07/06/2025 - 05:01

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The Gaza Crisis and the Repeal of Christianity’s Personhood Revolution

Sab, 07/06/2025 - 05:01

The relentless bombing of Gaza, with its gut-wrenching toll on civilian lives—children buried under rubble, families torn apart, entire neighborhoods reduced to ash—has become a grotesque spectacle on the global stage. The effort to bully Americans into co-signing this carnage, framed as a necessary strike against Hamas terrorists (whom Israel itself has funded and empowered), is not merely a geopolitical maneuver. It is a direct assault on the heart of Christianity’s 2,000-year legacy: the personhood revolution inaugurated by Jesus Christ. This campaign to normalize the massacre of the vulnerable will not succeed, however. The world today is too Christ-haunted, too saturated with the moral power of the victim, for such a repeal to take hold. Instead, it will backfire, exposing the fragility of empires built on scapegoating and violence. The Gaza crisis is a crucible, testing whether the West will embrace its Christian roots or reject them at its own peril.

On October 23, 2017, The American Conservative published my reflection (https://aneighborschoice.com/our-shocking-acceptance-of-state-sanctioned-violence/) on state-sanctioned violence, where I recounted a courtroom exchange that stunned a jury: “Why would I put a human being in a cage for using a blue pen? That is a nonviolent act and there is no victim.” The same question echoes now in Gaza’s smoldering ruins. Why would we endorse the slaughter of innocents to punish the guilty? The logic of collective punishment, of bombing schools and hospitals to “root out” Hamas, is the logic of the archaic sacred, where scapegoats were sacrificed to appease communal rage. This is the pre-Christian order Jesus dismantled when He stood in the place of the victim, exposing the lie that violence against the innocent can restore harmony. Yet today, powerful voices—politicians, pundits, and even some Christian leaders—demand we cheer for this bloodshed, as if Christ’s revelation never happened.

René Girard, the late Stanford professor whose mimetic theory I’ve long drawn upon, taught us that human societies are built on the scapegoat mechanism. We channel our rivalries and fears into violence against a designated “other,” believing their destruction will unify us. In Gaza, this mechanism is laid bare. Hamas’s atrocities on October 7, 2023, were indefensible, but Israel’s response—blockading, invading, and bombing with a death toll that includes thousands of children—has turned Palestinians into the West’s latest scapegoat. The narrative is familiar: “They” are the problem; “their” suffering is collateral damage; “we” must stand united in our righteous cause. This is the old pagan script, not the Gospel.

Christianity, through Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection, upended this script. The Cross revealed the victim as innocent, the mob as complicit, and the state’s violence as a sham. Mary’s Magnificat sings of this revolution: God scatters the proud, lifts the lowly, and defends the vulnerable. To co-sign Gaza’s bombing is to reject this song, to objectify Jesus as a mere symbol rather than the living truth who demands we see the personhood in every human face, especially the suffering. It is an attempt to repeal Christianity itself, to return to a world where might makes right and the weak are expendable.

But this repeal will not work. The world is too “Christ-haunted,” as Flannery O’Connor might say. The personhood revolution has seeped into our moral DNA, even among those who reject the Church. Why else do images of Gaza’s children—bloodied, orphaned, weeping—pierce our consciences? Why do global protests swell, from campuses to capitals, demanding a ceasefire? The West, for all its secular posturing, cannot escape the victim-powered ethic Jesus unleashed. Even atheists, shaped by 2,000 years of Christian anthropology, recoil at the sight of collective punishment. The more the war machine tries to drown out these cries with bombs, the louder the world’s conscience grows. This is not weakness; it is the enduring power of the Cross, which exposes violence as a lie that cannot hold.

The backfire is already evident. Evangelicals, long a bastion of uncritical support for Israel, are showing cracks of doubt. 2023 survey by Christianity Today (https://www.christianitytoday.com/2023/12/christian-views-israel-hamas-war-gaza-ceasefire-survey/) found that 42% of American evangelicals support an immediate ceasefire, and 50% acknowledge that Israel’s blockade has oppressed Palestinians. These numbers reflect a growing unease, a recognition that violence begets violence, and that dismissing Palestinian humanity—Christian, Muslim, or otherwise—betrays the Gospel. The dominant voices cheering for Gaza’s destruction are increasingly out of step, not just with global sentiment but with the nuanced convictions of many believers. The more the West ignores this, the more it risks alienating its own soul.

This crisis is a testing ground for the West’s Christian values. Will we embrace the personhood revolution—caring for the poor, the downtrodden, the scapegoated, as the early Church did? Or will we reject it, doubling down on the myth that bombs can secure peace? The stakes are existential. A civilization that sacrifices the vulnerable to preserve its power is a civilization that has already lost its way. The West, built on the Christian insight that every person bears God’s image, cannot survive if it trades that truth for the false gods of ethno-narcissism and militarism.

On my radio show, A Neighbor’s Choice, I’ve argued that true liberty is the absence of fear—fear of death, lack, or the “other.” Jesus modeled this liberty by refusing to scapegoat, by dining with sinners, by touching lepers. In Gaza, we are called to do the same: to reject the fear-driven narrative that paints all Palestinians as threats, to see their faces as neighbors, not enemies. The world watches as we decide. If we fail this moment, we do not just betray Gaza’s children; we betray ourselves, unraveling the moral fabric that holds us together.

The Gaza crisis is beyond a geopolitical tragedy; it is a spiritual test. It challenges us to live out the Gospel’s radical call to nonviolence and solidarity with the victim. The attempt to repeal Christianity’s personhood revolution will fail because the truth of the Cross is too potent, too deeply woven into our world. But the cost of that failure will be ours to bear if we choose the path of violence over the path of love. Let us choose wisely, lest we find ourselves strangers to the very values that made us who we are.

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Stranger than Fiction: Could An AOC Presidency Spark the Next Civil War?

Sab, 07/06/2025 - 05:01

Warning: The following article contains disturbing content, including the potential presidency of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and the next American Civil War.

At the peak of America’s temporary insanity, amid COVID-19 and the George Floyd hysteria, I wrote a novel that imagined a triumphant AOC in the White House, which most people found laughably implausible.

My creative muse entertained dramatic scenarios. The threat of open borders, and the Texas governor sending state troops to the Rio Grande. A raid on President Trump’s home at Mar-a-Lago. An aging President Biden dropping out of the 2024 election to be replaced by a left-wing woman of color. State-controlled censorship and a Ministry of Truth. Student loan forgiveness. Weaponization of the judicial system to target political enemies.

I predicted every one of those things in my novel States of Rebellion: The Rise and Fall of the Ocasio-Cortez Administration. Although some of the details were slightly off, my book proved sadly prophetic, albeit under Joe Biden instead of AOC.

The notion of a violent clash between opposing American states may seem farfetched, but we have seen it before. As Mark Twain said, history doesn’t repeat itself, but it often rhymes.

Out-of-touch coastal elitists underestimate the fire of liberty that still burns in the hearts of American patriots. Unlike any other country on the planet, America has a deeply ingrained spirit of freedom and independence. If constitutional rights get trampled, at some point governors, law enforcement, and military personnel will remember their oaths to support and defend the Constitution against all enemies foreign and domestic.

In many ways, America has been preparing for the coming crisis. Perhaps our collective subconscious understands what few of us mindfully recognize: that today’s opposing political factions are becoming hopelessly irreconcilable.

In recent years, America has self-segregated along ideological lines. Countless friendships, marriages, and family relationships have ended over these differences. Millions of people have voted with their feet by emigrating from blue states to red states. People are choosing sides.

I’m not saying this is a good thing, but I recognize a pattern—like the growing gulf that separated North and South in the years leading up to the Civil War—where mounting tensions and communication breakdown lead each side to demonize the other, ultimately resulting in violence.

The harmless-looking, mask-wearing Prius driver may amuse you with her “COEXIST” bumper sticker, but don’t be fooled. More and more Democrats openly condone violence—even assassination—in the furtherance of their cause. They celebrate Luigi Mangione as a hero, cheer on Hamas, and yearn for the safe return of an MS-13 wife beater. They have also become strangely enamored with the war in Ukraine that has killed hundreds of thousands of young men.

Despite their bumper stickers and sanctimonious “Hate has no home here” yard signs, there can be no peaceful coexistence between our two diametrically opposed factions. The left will not relent until MAGA is destroyed by any means possible.

Trump and his supporters breathed a huge sigh of relief last year when he and our country literally and figuratively dodged a bullet. Yet we remain a sharply divided nation. And now the leftist resistance is fighting back.

Bernie Sanders and AOC are filling arenas and raising millions from Trump-deranged Democrats who are doubling down on the crazy policies that nearly destroyed America under four years of Biden. Bernie is passing his socialist mantle to AOC, who has emerged as a leading contender for the presidency in 2028.

Now the thought of an AOC White House is not so funny.

The same Marxist-animated ideology of the Biden White House puppet-masters would be unleashed with a vengeance in an Ocasio-Cortez administration. And it very well may produce the dreaded outcome detailed in my book: the next American civil war.

Republican control of the executive and legislative branches is an extremely fragile thing. The fate of our fifty-fifty nation hinges upon a few thousand votes in fickle swing states. American memories are woefully short, and by 2028 the failures of the left’s policies will be largely forgotten in many corners.

With the departure of a multitude of MAGA voters from blue states like California, New York, Illinois, and Massachusetts, those constituencies are hardening in their resistance to Trump’s America First agenda. They will not go quietly into the night.

They hate Trump more than they love America. They demonstrate that hatred by fighting Trump’s every move, even to the shocking point of abusing the judiciary to return foreign criminal gang members to America’s streets.

They cheered on the destructive policies of a cognitively impaired Joe Biden—record-level inflation, unsustainable debt, widespread foreign disasters, a flood of illegal immigration, and failed energy policies—despite irrefutable damage to the country.

They reveal their disdain for the Constitution by calling for government censorship of speech they don’t like, by engaging in lawfare to eliminate political opponents, and by centralizing power in an unlimited administrative state. While they enjoy their own armed security, they seek to deny private citizens their Second Amendment rights.

How does this all end? AOC and her leftist followers understand Chairman Mao’s edict that power flows from the barrel of a gun. Let’s hope that the guns remain in the hands of those who support and defend the Constitution.

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Living in a World of Ongoing Shortages

Sab, 07/06/2025 - 05:01

The toilet paper shortages of 2020 may be behind us, but that doesn’t mean that everything is hunky-dory. Shortages continue to plague not only our land but the world as a whole. Entire industries are struggling to overcome the scarcity of parts and materials, while consumers are forced to forget about finding a good deal, settling for just the things they need.

As Americans, we are so accustomed to living in a world full of plenty that we’re a bit taken back by seeing store shelves that are poorly stocked. Even though our stores are better stocked right now than much of the world is accustomed to seeing, for us, it’s a bit hard to accept.

Yet this situation isn’t likely to change anytime soon. These are the long-term economic effects of the pandemic, which some warned about, but most of those in authority ignored. That wasn’t just here in the United States either; much of the world ignored those warnings. Because the supply chain for most products snakes its way through several countries, shutting down factories in one country can have a long-lasting impact on the other side of the world.

We weren’t the only country experiencing lockdowns in 2020. Some countries instituted them to a much greater extent than we did, to the point where people were going hungry because the food stores were closed. Our lockdowns were initiated in a rather selective manner, giving big businesses the advantage by calling them “essential” and their employees “essential workers.” While that was done mainly to keep food on people’s tables, it destroyed millions of small businesses while making the retail giants even stronger.

Now that businesses are supposedly open around the world again, we’re finding out the true impact of those lockdowns. Not only did it bankrupt millions of small businesses, but it shut down small parts manufacturers, keeping them from making the parts needed by assembly plants that manufacture the products you and I use every day. Manufacturing jobs can’t be done from home. And at the same time that was happening, there was a surge in the purchase of electronics, partly fueled by people working from home.

As of this writing, there are shortages of the following items:

Computer chips
Cars, including used cars and rental cars
Gasoline
Raw plastics
Truck drivers
Houses, including vacation houses
Lumber
Typical household and personal hygiene products
Furniture
Chicken, bacon, hot dogs, corn
Imported foods
Chlorine for swimming pools and fabric bleach
Labor, although the unemployment rate is currently at 5.2%
Nike shoes
School supplies

Please note that not all of these shortages exist in all areas of the country. Likewise, I’m sure that I haven’t covered everything; there’s a good chance of a shortage of something in your area, which I have missed in this list.

Where’s this all Going?

While some might say that we Americans are spoiled and living with shortages will do us good, those shortages negatively affect the economy. Let me be clear, though; when many people hear the term “economy,” they think of major corporations and millionaires. But I’m not concerned about them; I’m worried about the average American, the ones who struggle to make ends meet every day. The people affected by a downturn in the economy are the middle class and poor, including retired people on a fixed income.

Before getting into what the market is doing to prices, let me say that our current inflation hasn’t been caused by the market forces but by the government. All those trillion-dollar-plus bills that Congress passed as “COVID relief” (and which contained a lot that wasn’t COVID relief) were paid for with money borrowed from the Federal Reserve Bank. Whenever that happens, it dilutes the value of the existing money pool, starting the inflationary cycle.

The law of supply and demand applies here. As product shortages continue, we can expect the price of those products to rise. That’s on top of already existing inflation, the highest we’ve seen in several decades. This boils down to less disposable income for families, as wages won’t increase to make up for higher prices.

We already see higher prices on some items, like lumber and meat. While the lumber industry claims that lumber prices will come back down again, it’s unlikely they’ll come back down to pre-pandemic prices. Historical data shows that when prices surge due to shortages, they rarely come back down all the way once the product is abundant.

I just recently read a report on meat prices which finally admits this, stating that the rise in meat prices we’ve seen since the beginning of COVID isn’t going to go away. If anything, we can expect to see meat prices continue to rise as costs for farmers rise as well.

Adding to the higher costs of products, shipping costs are going up as well. The global shortage of shipping is causing rising prices as well. A standard shipping container that could have been sent overseas for about $3,500 a year ago now costs $11,000 to ship. While that increase is spread out across the entire contents of that container, it’s still another addition to the product cost, adding to inflation.

That’s the thing about inflation; once prices go up on essential commodities, it forces others to raise their prices to compensate. A manufacturer of item A who has to pay more to buy material B, a product component, has to raise prices to make up for their additional costs. As they sell their products, others who need to buy them find themselves in the same predicament and raise their prices. Before long, everyone is raising their prices, causing inflation to keep growing cyclically.

If this wasn’t bad enough, we’re also looking at a worldwide shipping shortage. There is a logjam of ships sitting off the California coasts, waiting to offload. Similar sighs can be seen at many of the ports in the far east, where the ships need to be loaded. Part of the problem is that distributors are trying to make up for shortages in their warehouses caused by the lockdowns at the factories. This is causing a massive amount of orders, to the point where there are not enough shipping containers available. But those shipping containers come from a limited number of manufacturers, who can’t increase their volume.

The problem doesn’t stop there. Once the ships are offloaded, there’s a shortage of truck drivers to take those loads to their intended locations. So not only are ships stacking up offshore, containers are stacking up in US ports. It will take months, or even longer, for this all to be straightened out again.

In other words, we can expect prices to keep getting higher and higher, making it harder for us to buy the things we need.

Dealing with those Higher Prices and Product Shortages

With higher prices and product shortages a given, you and I need to figure out how we’re going to make it through the next several years without our families suffering. There are a lot of things that we can do, some conventional and some not so conventional. Each of us will have to figure out what works best for ourselves, as we each have a unique set of circumstances.

Increase Your Income

Probably the best thing that any of us can do to deal with rising costs is to increase our income. No, I’m not joking about that. While many people think that their income is outside their control, in many ways, it isn’t. You can’t control what your employer pays you, but that doesn’t mean you can’t control your income.

Today, most financial gurus will tell you that you should have multiple income streams, including some side hustle. If you depend on just your job for your income, you are highly vulnerable to what happens to that job and that company. Should the company face a downturn in its revenue, your job could be one of the victims of that downturn.

With ready access to the internet, it’s easier to start some side business than ever before. A fair number of very successful online companies began as someone’s side hustle and have now grown to the point where those people have given up their “day job,” as the revenue from their online business outgrew what they were making on the job.

Of course, it takes time to get any side business to show a profit. Don’t expect to start a YouTube channel today and be making a fortune tomorrow. As with anything else in life, the more you put into it, the more you’ll get out of it. There is no “magic” to making money online, despite what all those ads say.

If you’re already self-employed, either through a side hustle or as your full-time job, then there are always ways of increasing your income, primarily by increasing the hours you work and the number of contracts you take on. That means less free time, but then, so does running some side-hustle.

Read the Whole Article

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Elon Goes Nuclear Against Trump

Sab, 07/06/2025 - 05:01

From the Tom Woods Letter:

It began perhaps with Elon’s concerns about the tariff program, but accelerated dramatically when he came out against the so-called Big Beautiful Bill.

Thomas Massie and Rand Paul had been subjected to the usual abuse for their objections to the bill.

Some people — even some who claim to oppose budget deficits — had been piling on against Massie and Rand: why, they don’t understand the long game, they always vote no, they don’t understand that we have to spend in order to cut, whatever.

Meanwhile, what such people couldn’t answer, because there is no good answer, is why Massie and Paul would be attacked but the buffoon Randy Fine endorsed and cheered, or why the atrocious Lindsey Graham was endorsed and lauded and not a finger was laid on him after he went abroad undermining the presumed White House foreign policy.

Doesn’t matter if you’re a Trump fan or not: we can all agree there’s no good excuse for that.

But with the sudden entrance of Elon into the fray on the side of Massie and Paul, the dynamics have changed quickly.

Elon spent today reminding people what some of the key actors had said in the past:

He also recalled some of the previous words of Donald Trump himself:

Trump began hitting back, claiming that Elon cared only about EV subsidies, which were being discontinued:

Elon had in fact been advocating the elimination of such subsidies for years, calling them unnecessary:

And then Elon went nuclear:

After that last tweet, reconciliation seems pretty much impossible.

Never pay for a book again: TomsFreeBooks.com

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The ‘Golden Dome’ Is Pure Fantasy

Sab, 07/06/2025 - 05:01

Mutzig, France – First stop on my annual visit to France’s mighty Maginot Line forts is this lovely Alsatian town. Mutzig was built by the Germans 1893-1916 to defend against enemy approaches to the important city of Strasbourg. It was – and remains – the largest modern fortress in Europe.

The vast fortress, which covers over 800 acres, was never attacked during World War I by the Germans or French. But as Europe’s first important fortress made of concrete and fully electrified, it was eagerly studied by French engineers and served as a template for the Maginot Line forts two decades later.

Both world wars showed the vulnerability of fixed fortifications. An enemy will always find a way round them or discover a fatal weakness. In regard to the 200-mile-long Maginot Line, the forts did not fail. They held out to the bitter end. The reason for France’s stunning defeat in 1940 was the failure of its field army and its blockheaded generals. Interestingly, a French parliamentary deputy with the effervescent name of Perrier precisely predicted where the Germans would break through the Ardennes Forest in 1940.

Though vulnerable, the fixed defenses of the Maginot Line were hugely popular in France and wildly overestimated because they involved huge construction projects for many of the villages and factories along France’s eastern border with Germany. Just as New Deal make-work projects boosted the United States during the Great Depression.

We see a similar mania in the response to President Donald Trump’s plan to create a national ‘golden dome’ defensive shield to protect the nation from assorted nuclear threats. In many ways, it’s a re-run of President Ronald Reagan’s Star Wars missile shield which never got off the ground but was extremely popular among the public.

Frederick the Great of Prussia noted, ‘he who defends everything, defends nothing.’ As true today as it was in the 18th century.

A national missile defense system to cover the entire nation would be impossibly expensive for a nation already deeply mired in debt. The always powerful military-industrial complex will see Trump’s golden dome fantasy as a second Christmas though the basic technology has yet to be proven.

One wonders if the proponents of this defensive system have noticed that Russia has developed ballistic missiles that can alter course, change altitudes and switch targets? Or that China has ICBM’s aboard freighters in the Pacific. What about evolving electronic countermeasures that can fry enemy communications and guidance systems?

It would be far more prudent for the US to pursue disarmament talks and effective inspection regimes with its rivals than pie in the sky defensive systems that will certainly enrich military companies but fail to protect North America. What’s more, having even a partial anti-missile system will likely make the US more aggressive and prone to wars.

Better to spend the trillions on curing cancer or blindness than on space wizardry. Alas, we have a view of what awaits us. This week, Trump banned people from 12 mostly Muslims nations and imposed restrictions on 7 nations. Good work Mr. President. You and your New York City construction buddies have now made enemies of a quarter of the world’s population.

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Epstein, Israel, ISIS, Palantir

Sab, 07/06/2025 - 05:01

Amid the inevitable giant ego clash between Elon Musk and Donald Trump, Musk tweeted that the president “is in the Epstein files,” saying “That is the real reason they have not been made public.”

As we have discussed previously, it is a known fact that Trump is on the Epstein flight logs and has been obstructing the release of the Epstein files. It is also a known fact that Jeffrey Epstein worked with Israeli intelligence and was running a sexual blackmail operation, and that Trump has been bending over backwards to give Israel everything it wants while stomping out American free speech that is critical of Israel’s actions in Gaza.

“I’ve known Jeff [Epstein] for fifteen years. Terrific guy,” Trump said in 2002. “He’s a lot of fun to be with. It is even said that he likes beautiful women as much as I do, and many of them are on the younger side.”

There’s no reason to take seriously anything Elon Musk says during a textbook case of narcissistic collapse, but for the record if anyone in Washington is likely to have been blackmailed by Epstein it’s Donald John Trump.

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Israel has admitted to arming ISIS-linked gangs as proxy forces in Gaza, throwing some cold water on the fuzzbrained narrative that the west is backing Israel to help defeat Islamic extremism. Israel is backing these forces in order to sow chaos and strife with the goal of advancing its ethnic cleansing objectives in the Palestinian territory.

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Lately whenever I talk about Israel’s ethnic cleansing agenda I get Israel supporters telling me “They’re not doing ethnic cleansing! They’re just making the Palestinians leave Gaza because they don’t want them there!” Which is yet another reminder of how stupid Israel apologists are, because the forced mass expulsion of an undesired ethnic group is precisely the definition of ethnic cleansing.

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I have this conversation every single day:

Me: Here’s evidence of Israel doing something evil.

Israel supporter: All Hamas has to do is surrender and release the hostages and this ends immediately.

Me: No that’s false, Israel is openly saying the slaughter will continue until all Palestinians have been ethnically cleansed from Gaza regardless of whether Hamas surrenders or the hostages are released. Here’s a pile of evidence showing that this is the case.

Israel supporter: Yeah well that’s what happens when you start a war you can’t win. Next time don’t do terrorism.

Me: You were just claiming Hamas can end this at any time by making different decisions. Now that you know Hamas is powerless to stop Israel’s ethnic cleansing atrocities you have pivoted to saying all Palestinians deserve mass murder and ethnic cleansing. Sounds like you’ll just support Israel no matter what it does regardless of facts or morality.

Israel supporter: ANTISEMITE ANTISEMITE ANTISEMITE ANTISEMITE

❖

I keep meaning to talk about how the Trump administration is reportedly granting oligarch Peter Thiel’s odious company Palantir a central role in a massive authoritarian expansion in government surveillance powers which would see American data compiled and tracked across multiple government agencies.

For those who don’t know, Palantir is a CIA-backed surveillance and data mining tech company with longstanding ties to both the US intelligence cartel and to Israel, and has already been playing a crucial role in both the US empire’s sprawling surveillance network and Israeli atrocities against Palestinians.

This is being framed by the political/media class as a Trump policy, but it’s obviously a US empire policy. These sweeping surveillance powers are intended to remain in place long after Trump is gone, regardless of who happens to be in office.

❖

We are being asked to believe that individuals becoming violently radicalized by the ongoing genocide in Gaza is of greater concern than the ongoing genocide in Gaza.

No. That isn’t going to happen.

Perhaps the best way to stop people from committing acts of violence in response to the genocide in Gaza would be to cease actively fucking facilitating the fucking genocide in Gaza.

❖

Palestine supporters: Here’s a video that just came out showing Israel massacring Palestinian civilians again.

Israel supporters: Okay, so, two thousand years ago…

❖

The world waking up to Israel’s depravity reminds me of the moment I first saw how nasty and abusive my ex was. That first glimpse when I finally let myself see the sadism and ill will he had for me was the beginning of the end.

Maybe the world is beginning its own moment of clarity.

__________________

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How Shadow Banks Rule the World

Sab, 07/06/2025 - 05:01

In any alternative media space, you are sure to find much talk about US dollar dominance, as well as optimistic forecasts of its imminent decline. This is also true in the radical right, where nationalists pine after an end to US imperial hegemony and the rise of a more multipolar world.

Often though, this hope is little more than wishful thinking, with unlikely challengers to US power much overhyped. This is especially true concerning US dollar hegemony, a topic that is ripe for misunderstanding at the best of times.

It’s important to keep in mind that people have been forecasting the decline of the dollar ever since it attained its status as global reserve currency. As far back as 1960, the economist Robert Triffin was warning of an “imminent threat to the once-mighty US dollar”. Understanding the reason for Triffin’s pessimism, and why it turned out to be misguided, is crucial to understanding today’s global monetary system and the enduring dominance of the dollar.

Triffin’s concerns were more informed than most: his “Triffin dilemma”, as it came to be known, highlighted an inherent problem with a country’s national currency also serving as the reserve currency of choice for the international system. The country supplying the world with the reserve currency has to produce a surplus of money, thereby creating a trade deficit. In other words, the supplier country needs to be continually losing money to fill up the reserves of other countries and make the currency a low-risk option to hold as a reserve. But if the supplier country becomes too indebted to the rest of the world in this scenario, then its currency ceases to be such a low-risk asset, and that’s the dilemma.

After World War II, the US sent lots of dollars abroad through the Marshall Plan, military spending, and the American middle-class importing lots of foreign goods. So how did the domestic US dollar get around Triffin’s dilemma? It didn’t.

Enter the Eurodollar

Triffin’s dilemma was especially a problem for the US dollar because it was backed by gold. After all, what would happen when the world needed more dollars than US gold reserves could back? Much like the kind of collapse that would happen if everyone tried to withdraw their money from banks at the same time, the whole system faced implosion if the US could not keep its foreign dollars backed up with gold.

The standard story is that this problem was resolved in 1971, when Richard Nixon ended the Bretton Woods international system and finally decoupled the US dollar from gold. But by this point, private banks had already long replaced gold exchange and quietly adopted a new form of exchange, extricated from any reserves or real currency, this was a truly global, offshore economic system outside the purview of central banks. This was the Eurodollar system. In this context, “Euro” is used as a synonym for “offshore” rather than referring to actual euros. So, the Eurodollar system is the shadow, offshore money system denominated in US dollars.

No one is really sure of how the Eurodollar system emerged (more on that later), but by the late 1950s there had been a huge growth in US dollar deposits in European banks, mostly in the City of London. With pre-war practices, these deposits would have been remitted to the central bank or deposited to the banks’ accounts in the U.S., but gradually, banks began to use these dollar deposits to issue loans denominated in US dollars. By 1959, the economist Paul Einzig reported that

The Eurodollar market was for years hidden from economists and other readers of the financial press by a remarkable conspiracy of silence. I stumbled on its existence by sheer accident in October 1959, and when I embarked on an enquiry about it in London banking circles several bankers emphatically asked me not to write about the new practice.

Britain’s economic goal of making London a center for international financial capital manifested in deregulation and comprehensive secrecy protections; this gave the city a competitive edge against other European countries, and put it and its web of British offshore territories at the very centre of this emerging system.

Since the election of Margaret Thatcher’s Conservative government in 1979, Britain has undergone a great experiment. Economically, the UK became the exemplar of neoliberalism in Europe. Politically, the UK has quietly transitioned to a postnational state, undergoing one of the greatest demographic transformations in the West.

As the Eurodollar market exploded, it became the lifeblood of the global economy, quickly fulfilling a need banks had for an international currency system. Banks could now transact rapidly and efficiently across countries and continents without the need of a physical currency, an innovation that helped unleash economic activity. The Eurodollar system functioned like an early cryptocurrency, existing as a digital ledger and communications network rather than a traditional currency.

Driving the global economy is a kind of bankers virtual currency, created by and used to satisfy the demands of banks, a series of claims and liabilities exchanged between banks to meet their monetary needs. How can you travel to Indonesia and make an instant withdrawal from an ATM, withdrawing from your local bank back home? Only with a vastly complex and efficient communications network connecting the global banking system.

The Eurodollar was the emergence of this system, and central banks have little control over it. For all the scare-mongering from libertarians about “Fed money-printing”, it is international bankers — outside the regulations of the US Federal Reserve — who are the ones in control of creating the US dollar supply on international markets. Big commercial banks create Eurodollars using the offshore system without the backing of the Federal Reserve. This is done through fractional lending, where dollar deposits are used as collateral to loan out a higher amount of dollars.

Again: private banks create money out of thin air by creating debt

Discovering money creation rests with private banks is a revelation that tends to shock people and send them into a state of denial — surely the state would not outsource something this fundamental to private actors.

But don’t take my word for it, a source as good as the Bank of England wrote in a report titled “Money creation in the modern economy” that:

Most of the money in circulation is created, not by the printing presses of the Bank of England, but by the commercial banks themselves: banks create money whenever they lend to someone in the economy or buy an asset from consumers. And, in contrast to descriptions found in some textbooks, the Bank of England does not directly control the quantity of either base, or broad money. Of the two types of broad money, bank deposits make up the vast majority – 97% of the amount currently in circulation. And in the modern economy, those bank deposits are mostly created by commercial banks themselves.

So international bankers have created a shadow money system, with the Eurodollar system functioning as a kind of “dark energy” of the global economy, ever-present but unseen, something which the US Federal Reserve or any other central bank can do little to control. In fact, no one even knows how much money exists in the Eurodollar system, with estimates measuring it in anything from tens to hundreds of trillions. As the economist Fritz Machlup once told a meeting of his colleagues:

We don’t even know enough about the Eurodollar market to say that it should be controlled.

If you want to visualise what this shadow money system looks like, this is an attempt at illustrating all the instruments involved in the supply of the US dollar:

Still confused? You’re not alone. If this illustrates anything, it’s that the federal reserve and central banking is just a small part of the story. This enormously complex web developed over decades through private institutions, satisfying the need for a truly global money system unconstrained by national barriers.

But in the process of decoupling the dollar from Federal Reserve reserve control, bankers have given themselves the power to create unsanctioned and unregulated money. This translates to enormous power to override national government’s monetary policy and fulfill many of the roles most people assume central banks and their governments are handling:

Because Eurocurrencies give private financial institutions the unrestricted ability to expand the availability of a particular currency, the country whose currency is the target of the Euroinstrument no longer has exclusive control over its money supply.

…

Furthermore, the lack of reserve requirements on Eurodollars creates a potentially infinite money multiplier, potentially leading to an infinite degree of inflation, all without the input of the Federal Reserve or the U.S. Treasury. Thus, the power to control the number of dollars (or dollar-equivalent instruments) in the market has been taken out of the exclusive control of U.S. authority and diffused among foreign banking institutions.

Discussion around economics is still heavily focused on central bank monetary policy and government programs like Quantitative Easing, which helps maintain the illusion that it’s still accountable, elected representatives with the final say.

It’s understandable we are biased to focus on government institutions: it has always been understood that monetary sovereignty is a prerequisite for political sovereignty. But it is now clear that governments have quietly surrendered a great degree of monetary sovereignty to the private interests running the international banking system — one of the most significant and revolutionary political changes ever, yet one hardly discussed.

It’s shocking to discover the scope and influence of this system, and to discover everything presented here has been out in the open for years, strangely ignored or overlooked by popular economists, financial analysts and politicians alike. Yet some esteemed economists like Paul Einzig and Milton Friedman did identify and study this system, and both also wrote of a grand “conspiracy of silence” by the global banking cartel to hide its existence. Since most economic analysis still ignores it, we are left with an always partial view of how the economy functions.

Read the Whole Article

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Trump Administration Furthering Control Grid

Sab, 07/06/2025 - 05:01

It seems that on a daily basis we get more bad news coming out of the Trump administration indicating that this administration is as committed to implementing a control grid as the previous administration. It was on day two of the Trump administration when it announced Stargate and its ten gigantic facilities being constructed to house AI databases. When announced, this scheme touted AI as being able to use mRNA and create individual specific ‘vaccines’ to target cancer. Unfortunately, mRNA causes cancer, and the AI database centers will be used to control Americans.

The project in Abilene, Texas, spans approximately 875 acres. Needless to say, these gigantic energy sucking construction projects were already in motion before trump came into office. This AI infrastructure will be used to control Americans and possibly run whole departments of government.

Recently, it was revealed that the Trump administration is contracting Peter Thiel’s Palantir to create a digital database on every single American. This coincides with recent news that the FDA approved the new mNEXSPIKE vaccine. This COVID mRNA injection will target those over 65 and those with preexisting conditions. In other words, culling the weakest among us.

This comes about a month after the Trump administration has stated that it will start implementing the Real ID. Congressman Thomas Massie has pointed out that the we will not understand the true threat of the REAL ID until everybody is in the new digital database. That is when you will see ‘vaccine passports digital tracking, CDBC, and so on.

The GENIUS Act which passed the House regulates stablecoins, which are digital assets pegged to a fiat currency like the U.S. dollar. Critics argue that the GENIUS Act could indirectly serve as a mechanism to impose CBDC-like controls through private stablecoins by tightly regulating centralized stablecoin issuers, the government could exert significant control over digital financial transactions, mimicking the controls a CBDC would provide without formally creating one.

Disturbingly, Greg Reese reports that Palantir’s AI technology is used to score Palestinians from 1-100 as a potential enemy and select targets for bombing. Greg Reese states:

“Both these AI systems use Palantir’s advanced surveillance technology to track every person’s phone records, social media, and movement patterns. Palantir’s tech is used by the US military and local police departments. It is the premier tool for mass surveillance.”

Reese goes on to state:

“Palantir has significant ties to the CIA, starting in 2004, when the CIA’s venture capital arm, In-Q-Tel, gave Palantir $2 million dollars. Palantir’s Gotham platform was developed by and for the CIA. Initially, the CIA was Palantir’s sole customer for several years. Palantir is the CIA’s surveillance tool.

And now, Palantir is to create a system for the federal government that will monitor every American under an AI system. Linking Social Security, the IRS, and immigration into one centralized system. It will be using its Gotham software, developed by the CIA, to track and condition human behavior.”

It appears that one side wants a Communist/Socialist style control grid, with government monitoring, and the other side wants a fascist style control grid with corporations doing the monitoring. Democrats cared nothing about civil liberties during the Biden/Harris reign of terror, but now are concerned about the surveillance state. Many Republicans that spoke about against the Biden era tyranny are silent on this database issue.

Fortunately, many other Republicans are speaking out. Personally, I see a big divide between the high information and the low information Trump voters. The high information voters are unhappy about many of these police state issues.

There have been hints that there may be more false flags designed to take away liberty and maybe get us into another war. Dr. Paul Alexander recently reported on the Trump administration’s border chief warning about another 911 style attack. Don’t fall for it. I wrote three articles last year about this issue of the deep state engaging in false flag operations to take away our liberty and get us into a Mideast war.

The United States borders have been wide open since the 1980s, at least. After the 911 false flag operation and two unpatriotic wars were started, the borders of the United States were closed for a few weeks then they were opened wide. The Jihadist threat was clearly exaggerated. I can think of a dozen ways off the top of my head where 10 or 20 committed people could terrorize the whole country.

It did not happen.

This is very odd when you consider that the delivery system of a weapon of mass destruction coming from the third world is not an ICBM, it is an immigrant, legal or illegal.

Trump’s big beautiful bill was a big government type’s pipe dream adding around 30 trillion to the debt. It cut some domestic spending but boosted the DOD budget to over a trillion dollars and poured a ton of money into DHS. It also has a prohibition on states regulating AI for 10 years. Slightly problematic, hopefully it will die in the Senate. Note: the House passed the bill, but will vote again because of changes made in the Senate.

Elon Musk has come out against the bill, although not because of the AI provision, however, he has spoken in the past that AI needs to be regulated. Musk claims that it is because it is a big government spending bill. Must recently Musk went nuclear on Trump posting on X:

“Time to drop the really big bomb:

@realDonaldTrump is in the Epstein files. That is the real reason they have not been made public.

Have a nice day, DJT!”

It is impossible to know what started this dispute and if it is really about the big government spending in the bill or if it is really about not getting a promised government contract. Or quite frankly if it is a real dispute and not staged. Going nuclear with the Epstein comment on the part of Musk tends to make me believe this is a real dispute as that will have negative political fallout. Of course, this could have been preplanned as an attempt to get Palantir’s J.D. Vance installed as President.

If we take it at face value and view it as an actual dispute that is getting really ugly, then it is a reflection of the growing anger among high information Trump voters in the big government spending as well as the apparent implementation of a technocratic control grid along with continued biowarfare against Americans in the form of mRNA injections.

It seems as if one side is allowed in to further certain elements of the Uniparty globalist agenda. Then the other side is let in to move the agenda further down the field. Common sense Americans need to resist the infrastructure for tyranny regardless of which party promotes it. If Republicans and Democrats that claimed that they are against the surveillance state did so when their own party was in power too, then we probably would not be so far down this yellow brick road to serfdom…

This article was originally published on Mind Matters and Everything Else.

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Can Reality Any Longer Be Acknowledged?

Sab, 07/06/2025 - 05:01

The attack on Russian strategic forces by Ukraine, with or without President Trump’s knowledge and with or without help from Washington and the British, could have been the most dangerous event in East-West relations during my lifetime. The reason is that recently revised Russian war doctrine states that an attack, even by a non-nuclear country, on the Russian strategic triad requires a strategic response. Strategic usually means nuclear or at least a disabling response.

Putin dodged the responsibility (more later), but no one knew for certain that he would. In other words, whoever is responsible for the attack on Russia’s strategic bombers subjected Ukraine, Europe, the US to the possibility of nuclear attack, depending on whom the Russians decided was responsible. This person or persons is a madman, a maniac who must be identified and removed from his position. Try to imagine how it is possible for, say Zelensky, to launch an attack that could result in nuclear war between the US and Russia. How can control over whether or not the US faces nuclear war be in the hands of Zelensky? If Zelensky is responsible, the US and NATO have a massive failure in command and control. If Trump or someone in the Trump administration gave the green light, they should be removed for committing the most potentially dangerous act during my lifetime.

The extraordinarily reckless and extremely dangerous attack on Russia’s nuclear triad is being treated by all concerned as a nothing event, a mere terrorist act, not an act of war. The fact that there is no acknowledgement in Washington, Europe, Moscow, or the media of the seriousness of an attack on Russian strategic forces, and thereby no measures put in place to prevent such dangerous acts, means either full scale, not proxy, war between Russia and the West or Russia’s surrender. Perhaps Putin would like to surrender in order to avoid nuclear war, but he won’t be permitted to surrender.

Putin took the lead in burying the seriousness of the attack on Russia’s nuclear triad. By designating the attack a “terrorist act” he evades the responsibility that Russian strategic doctrine imposes on him for a strategic response.

Nothing of consequence has happened, says the President of Russia. Amen say Washington and Europe. Therefore, whoever is responsible for the attack knows that the next attack can go further. It too will be unacknowledged as an act of war.

How many times can Putin pretend that attacks on Russia’s sovereignty, which is what attacks on Russia’s nuclear triad are, are mere terrorist events before he discredits himself with the Russian people?

The purpose of the recent revision of Russian strategic doctrine was to discourage or prevent attacks by Western proxies such as Ukraine on Russian strategic forces. It failed because Putin has taught the West not to take him seriously. He is ever ready to turn the other cheek. Now Putin has shown that he will not acknowledge attacks on Russian strategic forces as anything other than a terrorist event, not an act of war. So Putin has negated Russian strategic doctrine. It means nothing. Now that the West knows this, Russia can expect escalating provocations. All of Putin’s good intentions have ended in disaster, and a major war will be the consequence.

It could be that Russia is doomed. Decades of successful Western propaganda have turned most of the Russian professional and intellectual class into Atlanticist Integrationists. They think that Russia belongs as part of the West and are willing to make concessions of sovereignty to be part of the West. Clearly this point of view is strong in the Kremlin and the Russian Foreign Ministry.

The zionist American neoconservatives are very much aware of this Russian weakness, and they are adept at taking advantage of it. They don’t have to do much, because Putin does their work for them.

Putin has declared Ukraine to be conducting terrorism, not war, against Russia. Putin’s declaration also absolves Washington and Europe for any responsibility.

Here are English language Russian headlines of Putin’s hiding from reality that apparently he is unable to face up to. Or perhaps he is not yet ready, being at work constructing a powerful military that US/NATO cannot resist.

“‘Illegitimate Kiev regime’ turning into terrorist organization” – Putin

“The latest terrorist acts carried out by Ukraine in Russia are the outcome of decisions made by the Ukrainian political leadership.” Putin added that “the decisions to carry out such crimes were, of course, made in Ukraine” by the political leadership in Ukraine. In other words, Washington and Europe have no responsibility for the act of war, which is not an act of war, but merely terrorism. See here.

In other words, the Kremlin has said that Washington and Europe have nothing to do with the attack on Russia’s strategic triad, and that Ukraine is merely creating terrorist incidents, not making war against Russia. See here.

I find it hard to believe that Putin is this stupid. My bet is that he is not yet ready. He keeps the minor Ukraine conflict going while he builds up to remove NATO from Russian borders.

Trump can remove the coming conflict by giving Putin the mutual security agreement Russia has been requesting for years. This would be the costless solution, but Trump is not really in power, and the power and profit of the US military/security complex needs the Russian Enemy.

So, how will a devastating war be avoided? Information such as I have just presented is banned by the official narratives.

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