Lew Rockwell Institute

I recently visited my brother. On a wall in his house is this small display in remembrance of our father’s war experience (see photo below). My dad was a gentle guy, he became a general practitioner who made house calls in the middle of the night. I believe he worked too hard for his patients because he not only worked everyday including weekends (from my childhood memories), but because he died of a heart attack at 42. Somehow he ended up in the Marines during WWII. He never fired his gun at a human being, though from his letters he did enjoy shooting. He was trained as a radar operator and sent to Tinian Island (the top image). He arrived there after the fighting ceased. He saw dead bodies of Japanese soldiers and took a bayonet home as a souvenir, though they were often booby trapped. The only action he saw was from Japanese aerial attacks. He did witness several crashes of American bombers returning to the base which in later life made him afraid to fly.

From top to bottom: Tinian, my dad, his unit in training camp, and a Japanese souvenir.

Many decades after my father’s passing I had a conversation about the use of the atomic bombs during the war with my mother. She saw the absolute necessity to use them to save the lives of American soldiers like my dad (though they were not a couple at that time). She showed no remorse for the tens of thousands of civilian deaths. I suspect that she was influenced by anti-Japanese propaganda though she had a love of Japanese gardens and design in general. See examples of this propaganda below. The clear goal was to dehumanize the Japanese people, depicting them as small (they were but grew taller with better nutrition after the war), sullen, buck toothed and ugly.

The war propaganda depicted Japanese people as small, sullen, buck toothed and ugly.

How to Spot a Jap (1942) pamphlet.

I have been a serious baseball fan since childhood. I know that baseball was an integral part of American culture in the 1940s as explained in this essay; Baseball in Wartime: How WWII Reshaped America’s Favorite Pastime, “Finally, WWII helped cement baseball’s role in American identity. The sport mirrored the resilience and adaptability of the American spirit. It played a role in boosting morale and national pride, both crucial during a time of global conflict. The post-war period saw baseball firmly established as America’s national pastime, a symbol of American culture and values.” Even Japanese Americans forced into concentration camps played baseball.

From the Visalia Times-Delta, “this photo shows a baseball game at Manzanar Internment Camp around 1943. In September 1942, more than 10,000 Japanese Americans were crowded into 504 barracks organized into 36 blocks at the camp after the attack on Pearl Harbor.”

These musings about my parents, WWII, propaganda and baseball were instigated by Shohei Ohtani, the Japanese baseball player now with the Los Angeles Dodgers. He is arguably the most talented player in the history of the game; hitting, pitching, running, tall and handsome. I wonder what my parents, and all of their Greatest Generation cohort, would have thought of him compared to their concept of the Japanese in 1945. Would this real Japanese person dispel the propagandist view of the Japanese people?

The most talented baseball player ever, pitches like Nolan Ryan, hits homeruns like Babe Ruth, steals bases like Maury Wills, all with movie star good looks.

Today the propaganda is of a different style than the 1940s, but it can be as virulent. Be it against Russians, Chinese, Iranians, Palestinians, or Israelis there is language (much less today in images) that degrades their humanity. The clear and present danger is that this propaganda, like those of the past, will lead to potential war crimes including the use of nuclear weapons. Everyone should think hard about the dangers of propaganda induced bigotry.

The post Bombs, Baseball, and Bigotry appeared first on LewRockwell.

Matt Smith: Doug, I’ve failed to keep up with the constant firehose of news—or more accurately, disinformation and noise—so I don’t have a long list today. But I know there were a few things that caught your attention.

Doug Casey: Well, it’s not that I’ve researched them. They are things that I’ve absorbed almost by osmosis. News items float like a layer of scum on the cesspool of media. However, a couple of things have risen to the top and were drawn to my attention.

Number one, there’s a very cute actress named Sydney Sweeney —blonde, blue-eyed, shapely. She was contracted by American Eagle to model their denim. She was featured in ads emphasizing her assets. The copy was, “Our jeans are good genes”, a pun on jeans as in blue jeans and genes as in genetic makeup.

The interesting thing is that it caused the stock of the company—American Eagle—to go from $10 to $12 overnight. It became a meme stock because of the ads that it ran.

It was a relief, finally, to see a good-looking white girl peddling jeans. I thought they’d been banned.

Matt Smith: Reminded me of something straight out of the 1990s.

Doug Casey: It was great. Now, you’d think any corporate management with half a brain would say, “Wait a minute, the market likes this approach. It helped our stock price, and maybe people will actually buy our jeans because they want to look like Sydney Sweeney.”

But no. What did they do? Defying logic, they pulled the ad because the usual suspects—leftists, Wokesters, and other psychological criminals—started howling, “Oh, this is racist, sexist, Nazi-adjacent, blah, blah, blah.” And they pulled the ad.

Lau Vegys, who writes Crisis Investing for us, did a very nice article about this (LINK).

It turns out that when DEI was popular a few years ago, the gutless corporate whores at American Eagle ran an ad featuring a morbidly obese black woman who looked like a whale, a rhino, or a hippo got stuffed into a pair of their jeans.

I mean, what’s the matter with these people? Who wants to emulate somebody that physically degraded?

I despise corporate America for all kinds of reasons—but not least because they’re stupid and self-destructive.

Matt Smith: And completely spineless.

They found something that worked—it literally added 20% to the company’s market cap overnight—and they still caved. The stock’s now come down a bit from the peak. It’s still above where it started, but it’s drifting back down… around $11.25 last I looked.

Doug Casey: I think the stock is headed way down, because the market will realize that these people are stupid, dishonest, weak—and cowardly.

Matt Smith: You’d think profit motive would eventually kick in, but most of these executives are comfortable. They’re raking in big salaries, sitting on boards, collecting stock options. They’re not trying to win—they’re trying not to lose. No guts, no conviction.

Doug Casey: I think the managements of almost all corporations are like that. Other than founding entrepreneurs, who are in a different breed of cat, the people who rise to the top climb the corporate ladder by backslapping and backstabbing, not by being productive and creative.

Matt Smith: Their goal is to avoid mistakes, which means avoiding risk, which means avoiding value creation. The whole system rewards mediocrity.

Doug Casey: They’re basically bureaucrats. The people running large corporations could just as easily work for the government. We have a revolving door between big corporations and the government. They’re the same damn people.

It makes sense on every level. Government drones, corporate ladder-climbers—the same people.

Matt Smith: And we’re watching that convergence accelerate. The corporate state is merging with the actual state. It’s not theoretical anymore—it’s just happening.

Doug Casey: It’s further reason to believe that we’re watching the continuing collapse of Western civilization.

Matt Smith: Sure looks that way. But it was still refreshing—briefly—to see something authentic sneak through.

Doug Casey: An ad featuring a healthy, good-looking girl who— unbelievably—was white with blue eyes on top of it all. Oh, can’t have that. Better strike that.

Matt Smith: Hopefully she’s not straight. That would really be the final straw—white, blonde, and straight.

Doug Casey: I’ll conjecture that she’s straight because there’s no hint of purple hair, hostility, or craziness about her in those pictures.

Matt Smith: Another thing I know was on your radar: the “success” of the tariffs. Lutnick’s saying they’re pulling in $700 billion a year if you annualize it.

Doug Casey: And he’s presenting this as a good thing. But it’s not. If he’s right, these tariffs will bring in $700 billion a year to the enemy, the State. But I don’t think he’ll be nearly as right as he thinks. The tariffs will severely reduce economic activity and prosperity. Giving the State more power, more assets—which have been extracted from the American people—is destructive.

He’s selling that as a good thing, but it’s just making the State bigger. From an ethical and philosophical point of view, Lutnick is a moron.

And then Trump wants to spend that extra money like a drunk sailor. Trump, from the goodness of his heart, wants to give away $600 to every American. It makes him look like a hero.

What’s happening is that the government takes away from some people and gives back to other people. So, who’s your daddy? The State. It’s insane, and completely backwards.

Look, Trump has done some good things. Unlike that abysmal schlemiel Biden, he’s at least talking to Putin. That’s great. If you want to avoid a nuclear war, it really helps to talk to your adversary—which the previous administration wasn’t doing. We should appreciate that on Trump’s part.

And the fact that he’s anti-woke is great. And the fact that he wants to massively deregulate—although DOGE has mostly gone away—is great. Trump has done some good things.

But on the other hand, he really is a narcissist, an egomaniac, and a megalomaniac. That makes him dangerous.

Matt Smith: And at the end of the day, he’s a statist. Sure, he wants to remake the State, but he still wants it to be powerful—and his. The $600 is just bread for the plebs. The circus is implied.

Doug Casey: That’s right. He believes whatever he does is righteous and good. He thinks he can do no wrong. That’s a dangerous attitude for the most powerful person in the world, and I think his attitude will become ever more dictatorial.

Matt Smith: Yeah, and the so-called trade deal with Europe is a perfect example. Americans are patting themselves on the back over it, saying, “We just crushed the EU.” Zero tariffs for our stuff going there, 15% on theirs. LNG exports doubling, billions more in defense sales, and $600 billion in foreign direct investment into the U.S., including moving pharma production here.

What does Europe get in return? Americans act like, “Who cares? We showed them who’s boss.”

Doug Casey: The deal doesn’t appear to make sense. What’s in it for Europe?

Matt Smith: If you connect the dots, I think the answer is fear. Scott Bessent laid it out early—this administration is using a whole-of-government approach. Military, diplomacy, trade—all aligned.

This isn’t just about selling goods. The trade agreement is clearly entangled with military commitments.

And not coincidentally, right after that deal, Trump’s deadline for Putin shifts from 50 days to 10 or 12.

So these European leaders—they’re afraid. I don’t know if you watched that interview with Tucker and that Bild reporter?

Doug Casey: I did. What a weak little Euroweenie he was.

Matt Smith: Right. But, this is a reporter who rubs shoulders with the establishment. The fear of Putin, for them, is real. Crazy, but real. So what does Europe get from the deal? U.S. protection. I think they get what they need most—which is American support against Russia.

Doug Casey: They’re like scared little kids. It’s that CIA boogeyman under the bed.

But the fact is that Putin impresses me as the most reasonable, the most rational, and the most thoughtful of all the European leaders. Russia is not going to invade Europe for all kinds of reasons. It would serve no useful purpose. It would be extremely expensive and counterproductive. Putin sees that. He’s keeping cool even though he’s being massively provoked.

These Europeans are basically—they’re psychos, frankly. And Trump is egging them on. I mean, it’s wonderful that European countries were spending only 2% of their GDP on weapons. Now, they’re ramping it up to 5%, to buy a shitload of weapons—with borrowed money. And what do you do when you have all those weapons? You wind up using them.

And the same is true of Japan, which is only spending about 1.5% of its GDP on weapons. But the U.S. and Trump are pushing them to spend 5%.

Matt Smith: Yeah, and they signed on to the same 15% tariff deal.

Doug Casey: So what’s going on? Is the U.S. looking to fight and “win” a global thermonuclear war against both Russia and China?

Matt Smith: It sure looks like military cooperation is baked into these trade deals. The same European leaders who trashed Trump earlier are now falling in line. My guess is, in return, there were some promises made about what would happen with Ukraine that they were happy with.

Doug Casey: The Europeans are encouraging his naturally narcissistic tendencies. None of this is good.

And the question is: What are the Russians going to do in the face of all this? The West is idiotically backing the Russians into a corner. And if you back even a mouse—forget about a bear—into a corner, it will fight.

Matt Smith: Eventually, yeah.

But the surprising part is—wouldn’t we have expected that response already?

I mean, even Biden drew supposed red lines: “If we send Abrams tanks, that’s too far.” Then, “If we send F-16s, that’s too far.” And here we are—we’ve blown through all those red lines.

There have even been direct attempts on Putin’s life—allegedly—via drone strikes. But Putin still hasn’t escalated. Officially, it’s still a “special military operation.” He’s refusing to call it war.

Doug Casey: Well, I don’t mean to sound like a Putin fan. What I’m saying is that leaders of great states almost must be criminal personalities. But of all the people out there, Putin is the most prudent and the most rational. I’m sure he sees what’s going on, and does not want to start World War 3. Unlike the NATO people.

Matt Smith: He absolutely doesn’t.

And that restraint is being used against him.

I wrote an article recently that International Man will re-run on Monday. It’s about DARPA and one of their lesser-known programs—”Theory of Mind.” It’s a concept centered around understanding how your adversary thinks, modeling their decision-making, and shaping it.

They use AI, mass surveillance, data profiling—on not just the adversary but their entire circle of influence—to create predictive models. And then they apply strategies designed to provoke certain responses without triggering escalation.

Ukraine’s a great example. Even when Ukraine briefly invaded Russian territory, it didn’t cross a line that caused a dramatic Russian counter. That’s Theory of Mind at work.

Palantir—spun out of DARPA—has been the tip of the spear in implementing this. It was originally created to do things the U.S. government couldn’t legally do. So they had a private company do it instead.

And it’s public knowledge that Palantir’s been directly involved in targeting decisions in Gaza by the IDF. We know for sure the U.S. has used it in Iraq, Syria, and Yemen—all within the last year.

So this tech is out there being used in the field right now. And think about how weird all the conflicts have been—how lines have been pushed so far, but they haven’t escalated. This is what Theory of Mind was all about.

In fact, I would say—to give you an idea of what it does to an adversary—Palantir was a key vendor during COVID, allegedly just providing real-time feedback on the population.

During COVID, the general public—not just in the U.S. but everywhere—was the adversary. So with these systems everything is gamed out—where can they push, where do they have to stop pushing, what messaging needs to go out from the leaders, what messaging should be on social media.

In real-time, it gives them information on how the situation should be managed.

From my perspective during COVID, as an American living in America at the time, I felt like the population was under attack. But the way these tools work is that they create real confusion among what they label as adversaries—in this case, all of us—that you’re not sure if you’re being attacked, and if you are being attacked, who exactly is attacking you.

It creates this confusion in the mind of the adversary and even helps shape the adversary’s thoughts through officials’ statements, the press, and social media.

I think this Theory of Mind type warfare has been driving everything we’ve seen since 2020.

Doug Casey: It makes perfectly good sense because it all comes down to psychology. Sun Tzu, in the fifth century BC, said war is all about psychology—understanding how your enemy thinks and knowing yourself.

Yes, you’re quite correct. And there must be many, many reasons why these gigantic data centers are accumulating unbelievable amounts of disparate information, sorting it out, and then putting it together to predict what the average person might be thinking and how he’s reacting.

Matt Smith: Right. And under Trump, Palantir’s footprint has exploded.

The DoD has doubled its contract with Palantir. ICE has signed a deal with Palantir. DHS, the Social Security Administration, the IRS, and the Department of Transportation have all signed contracts with Palantir.

Take all that government data and combine it with commercial data—the scope of data they’re ingesting now is beyond belief. Not just your emails and phone calls, your bank transactions, and online history. Every location you’ve ever been with your phone is available for purchase commercially. That’s not a conspiracy theory—that’s a fact.

All of the data gets fed into building digital twins of us—simulations of how each individual behaves. And then they simulate against those avatars in their AI systems and implement actions against the adversary directly or indirectly to shape their perceptions.

To DARPA, we’re all adversaries by default—until proven otherwise.

Doug Casey: Oh, it’s actually worse than that. Because the people who control Palantir have not only made billions and billions of dollars on Palantir stock, but they have lots and lots of ways to become even richer by using all this information as insiders. Not necessarily insider trading, but just by having information on everybody and everything. It’s rather dystopian.

Matt Smith: Exactly. Here’s a small example—hard for us to know who did it, but you can see the trades. Trump announces a new tariff—this time on copper. Two or three minutes before he says anything publicly, someone makes a massive trade and walks away with a fortune.

That’s not an accident.

And, look, I said earlier this year that the Biden administration felt like it was looting and pillaging on the way out—which they were. But now it looks like Trump’s people are doing it too—just in a different way.

They’re front-running trade announcements, launching meme coins, starting investment funds, and gaming the system via private market mechanisms.

Different methods, same outcome—plunder.

Doug Casey: Well, fear not, because Trump is planning to distribute $600 to everybody. It’s nice to toss a few pennies to the plebs.

Matt Smith: And the people will say thank you.

Doug Casey: Oh, yes, and it’s absolutely perverse. As a laissez-faire capitalist I’ve never believed that the rich get richer and the poor get poorer. That only happens in heavily state-directed systems. But that’s exactly what we’ve got now.

The rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poorer because we don’t live in a capitalist system. As I’ve explained in the past, we live in a fascist system—a word which is totally misunderstood and misused.

Listen, I thought we were going to end our conversation today on a happy note, because I always like to look at the bright side.

Matt Smith: Well, the sun’s out. It’s winter here in South America, but it’s still a beautiful day.

I don’t follow sports, so I’ve got no cheerful sports story to share.

Doug Casey: Pro athletes are just hired gladiators anyway—for whatever city or team that pays them

Matt Smith: But there is some good news: our book is finished—at least the writing. It’s in typesetting now and heading to print soon. We’re just weeks away.

I think it’s going to be a book like no one’s ever held before—both for the content and how it’s put together. It’s meant to be useful, but also, we’re trying to make it beautiful.

Doug Casey: I don’t know if I like that word “beautiful.” Trump uses it way too much. He’s degraded the word.

Nonetheless, it’ll be a big, beautiful book.

Matt Smith: It is a Big, Beautiful Book, actually. But, I’m not letting them ruin our language. Screw them!

Doug Casey: That’s right.

Matt Smith: All right, Doug—we’ll leave it there for today.

Doug Casey: Thanks, Matt.

Reprinted with permission from International Man.

The post Corporate Cowardice, Government Surveillance, and the Creeping Fascism appeared first on LewRockwell.

There is no shortage of Internet forums filled with energetic contributors all predicting the imminent collapse of the West.  Communicating about current events, culture, war, and the economy, a multitude of anonymous speakers publicize their worries every day.  Western governments — increasingly insecure, hostile to tradition, and unmoored from any abiding principles — have decided that the best way to project strength is to silence critics.

As European governments more overtly embrace censorship and criminalize speech, the incremental push toward a regulated online system requiring authenticated digital identities promises a future when only government-engineered narratives will be approved for public expression.  Society will lose another “pressure release valve” as the Western Establishment welds shut the ventilators of public debate — hoping to trap citizens’ combustible grievances deep underground.

This century has been eye-opening for many reasons.  Technological innovation has weakened institutional control over public opinion and empowered regular people to question authorities in meaningful ways.  Among the important revelations that have subsequently come to light is the inescapable conclusion that Western governments are not at all committed to free speech.  For many Westerners who lived through the Cold War, this has come as a bit of a shock.

The principal distinction that supposedly separated the Soviet Union from the “free” West, after all, was that the former maintained a “closed” system managed by a strong central government, while the latter restrained government power and ensured protections for citizens’ personal liberties.  In the Soviet Union, government apparatchiks constructed and disseminated official “truths.”  In the U.S.-led West, no government had a legitimate monopoly over truth.

Yet what do we see today?  Western governments are in a tizzy over so-called “disinformation” and “misinformation.”  Again, for those who lived through the Cold War, government attempts to classify information as “good” or “bad” stinks of Soviet communism.  Hunting down foreign “disinformation” was an obsession for the Soviets.  Children were taught from an early age to report anyone (even parents!) heard uttering “incorrect” opinions.  It was a crime against the State to publicly express “misinformation,” and many people lost their lives for doing so.  A stark dividing line, we thought, separated the West from the Soviets: Communists controlled speech, while Western citizens were encouraged to speak their minds.

To see Western governments recycle the same Soviet vocabulary in a totalitarian quest to police language is disheartening.  Those who fought to defend the West from communism did not put their lives on the line so that future Western governments could oversee “disinformation” boards, “hate speech” police, or censorship committees.  The Soviets used similarly oppressive tools to subjugate citizens behind the Iron Curtain for seventy years.  A “Digital Curtain” monitoring what Westerners say is no less threatening.

During the Cold War, Westerners took pride in repeating some version of this statement: I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.  There was no parenthetical caveat along the lines of, unless what you’re saying may be designated by the government as misinformation, disinformation, malinformation, or toxic hate speech.  The inclusion of such a glaring exception would have entirely nullified what it means to defend free speech.  Any Western government that claims to protect free speech while simultaneously asserting the power to determine what kinds of ideas may be expressed out loud shares a common spirit with the former Soviet Union.

Societies wise enough to protect the public expression of an individual citizen’s thoughts understand that government agents are the natural aggressors from whom citizens need protection.  When governments intercede in the public forum to police what can and cannot be said, they will always claim to be doing so for the public’s own good.  Tyranny is forever clothed in the garments of benevolence.  Depending upon governments to secure free speech is like hiring wolves to guard the sheep.  Neither survives.

What Westerners have learned during the interregnum between the Cold War’s conclusion and the emerging censorship State being constructed today is that Western governments were never faithful stewards of the public’s natural liberties.  They told us that they were for free speech and against Soviet-style oppression, but they didn’t mean real free speech.  They meant speech relatively aligned with the governments’ own interests.

While Western governments have long championed their countries’ newspapers and broadcast stations as exemplary models for a free press, they hide the ways that government agents often apply pressure to “independent” news publications to keep Western citizens from learning unsanctioned — and potentially explosive — truths.  Some news groups — such as the British Broadcasting Corporation and the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation — are explicitly taxpayer-funded, government-run operations.  Even privately-run news publications, however, are corralled through a system of broadcast regulations, licensing agreements, national security laws, and not-so-subtle government threats.  As much as the Soviet Union deserved to be denounced for its steady stream of State-produced propaganda, the West has always operated its own version of a State press.

If you go back in time to watch old network news shows from the second half of the twentieth century, modern eyes and ears immediately see and hear how manufactured broadcast news always was.  In the United States, three national anchors on three prestigious networks all repeated similar scripts for decades.  They covered the same stories.  They shared the same points of view.  They produced the same “narratives.”  Three decades after the widespread adoption of the personal computer and the communication revolution unleashed by the Internet, however, the same news sources that Americans trusted decades ago now sound remarkably fake.  The illusion of an independent news media keeping government power in check has been permanently shattered.

It is easy to condemn governments responsible for gulags and mass murder as intrinsically evil.  It is far more difficult to recognize tyranny when governments psychologically manipulate and enfeeble their citizens.  Manufacturing the public’s consent to be harmed is much like an abusive spouse or parent conditioning members of the household to feel responsible for their own beatings.  When governments subdue citizens’ minds, victimized citizens wear invisible chains.  Conversely, when citizens begin thinking for themselves, they see the abusive behaviors of their government much more clearly.

A significant shift in social consciousness has occurred this century.  Citizens have come to understand that all forms of government naturally gravitate toward tyranny.  Therefore, preserving personal freedom starts at home.  The struggle against government coercion is a kind of never-ending cold war.

The most troubling sign for the West’s future is Western governments’ stubborn refusal to listen to their citizens.  They are still stuck in last century’s paradigm when governments easily controlled public opinion.  Shocked that they are no longer capable of subtly manipulating the masses with appeals to authority and a steady diet of carefully crafted network news, Western governments would rather demonize free speech than accept limits to their power.

In essence, Western governments that once defined themselves as protectors of liberty and enemies of tyranny now openly scorn free expression and defend censorship.  They pursue the old Soviet model while labeling their opponents “extremists.”  The problem for Western governments, however, is that those being demonized give no indication that they will yield.

Right now Western news publications and government-controlled broadcasters are busy talking about the Russia-Ukraine war, the Israel-Hamas war, and the looming China-Taiwan war.  But there is another war shaping up much closer to home between Western governments and their citizens.  It concerns the very foundations of Western civilization.  It concerns the public’s right to reject Establishment narratives and determine its own future.  It concerns a basic question: What does it mean to be a free nation?

Either citizens will reclaim control over their governments, or governments will succeed in silencing their citizens.  That’s the preeminent contest of the twenty-first century.

This article was originally published on American Thinker.

The post What Does It Mean To Be a Free Nation? appeared first on LewRockwell.

“Work expands to fit the allotted time,” the saying goes. And that education is no exception holds a lesson: Some will say when pondering homeschooling, “I’m not qualified to teach my kids.” But, informs homeschooling advocate Brett Pike, it’s not just that you can teach your kids — and splendidly.

It’s that you can do it in a fraction of the time schools do.

In a Friday X video post, Pike relates the story of parents Aaron and Kaleena Amuchastegui. The Amuchasteguis were typical Americans who believed in the “system.” You send your kids to school, they ascend through the grades, go to college, and then start a career. But as luck would have it, they at some point found themselves needing to teach their elementary-school daughter at home for a couple of weeks.

Well, it was the parents who learned the biggest lesson.

That is, they found they could teach their girl all the prescribed material in just one hour a day.

This revelation completely changed their lives. It inspired them to write a book, too: The 5-Hour School Week: An Inspirational Guide to Leaving the Classroom to Embrace Learning in a Way You Never Imagined.

Time for What Matters

It wasn’t just that the Amuchasteguis saved time, either. Pike, who hosts the YouTube channel Classical Learner, reports that the Amuchasteguis’ daughter actually improved educationally. (For example, after just the two weeks of homeschooling, she was finally able to spell and pronounce her last name.)

(Fake news alert: That was a joke.)

The girl did improve, though, and, what’s more, the time saved could be used for ancillary activities. The Amuchasteguis could, consequently, more effectively cultivate their daughter’s interests. She became a successful entrepreneur while just a teenager, states Pike. “All of a sudden,” he relates, “cooking and gardening and field trips became amazing opportunities for learning. And that’s what homeschool families understand.”

“You don’t need that much time for formal education,” he continues. This “leaves so much more time for less formal things that your children love, they look forward to.”

Apropos here, the inefficiency matter takes me back to a conversation I had decades ago. My best friend and I both attended the Bronx High School of Science in New York City. “Bx Sci,” as it’s known, is a somewhat famous “elite” institution known for academic rigor. (Students must pass an entrance exam to attend.) The intellectual level — i.e., average IQ — of the students certainly was impressive, too. To this day, my fellow classmates are still the most intelligent large group of people among whom I’ve ever circulated. Despite this, around our high-school days’ conclusion, my buddy and I both had the same realization.

We agreed that we could have easily absorbed the entire four-years’ academic load in six months.

We were correct, too.

Now, in fairness, though, a critic may point out that the above is anecdotal. So what do the data show?

It’s No Contest

Whatfinger news answers this question. Along with posting Pike’s video, the site presents an article that contrasts homeschooling with government schooling. To summarize, according to Whatfinger:

• Public schools’ inefficiency is explained by bureaucracy, the need for “crowd control,” and emphasis on ideological issues. Actual learning time is limited.
• Homeschooling is a commonsense-oriented solution to government education’s declining standards, woke indoctrination, and union agendas. It stresses academic rigor, a better sense of virtue, and liberty.
• Home School Legal Defense Association (HSLDA) data demonstrate that homeschoolers score 15 to 30 percentile points higher than government-school students on standardized exams, regardless of income or parental education.
• The tailored, efficient homeschooling model surpasses government schools’ one-size-fits-all mandates.
• The Heritage Foundation (2008) reports that homeschoolers’ median test scores are in the 70th to 80th percentile; government-school students languish in the 50th. Moreover, the gains for black homeschoolers are especially robust.
• National Review attributes the 15- to 30-percentile point advantage to avoiding government schools’ “social-welfare” distractions, such as “gender” ideology lessons.
• The Federalist cites homeschoolers scoring 31 to 37 percentile points above government-school kids, countering “lazy parent” criticisms.
• Daily Wire states that homeschoolers excel on difficult tests owing to one-on-one instruction free from “leftist curricula.”
• Homeschoolers average 22.8 on the ACT (vs. 21 for government-schoolers), reached the 77th percentile on the Iowa Test, and surpass SAT averages, according to Heritage.
• National Review points to homeschool graduates’ superior college readiness and graduation rates.
• Critics’ claims of lacking socialization or rigor are debunked by evidence. Homeschoolers do not live in bubbles. They have co-ops, church programs, play dates, siblings, organized sports, and other extracurricular activities.

Read the Whole Article

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China’s long term planning has allowed it to acquire some serious advantages which it now uses to counter economic and other attacks on it.

The refining of rare earth metals and the production of magnets from them is only one of several advantages it gained. These metals are not really rare. They are usually byproducts of large extractions of other minerals. But their refinement was considered to be environmentally dirty. It is only profitable at a large scale. Over the last two decades China has managed to create a near monopoly in it.

Rare earth magnets, while small in size, end up in a myriad of products. They are cheap but essential and difficult to replace.

As soon as the Trump administration tried to put high tariffs on China the country hit back. The export of rare earth products were stopped until a licensing process had been put into place.

The products are now considered to be dual-use items. China will allow the export of them for civilian purposes but it denies their use for the production of weapons. It wants to prevent to be hit by U.S. missiles which have ‘Made in China’ labeled parts in them. It is difficult to blame it for that.

Today’s Wall Street Journal has nice write up on the issue:

China Is Choking Supply of Critical Minerals to Western Defense Companies – WSJ via MSN

Earlier this year, as U.S.-China trade tensions soared, Beijing tightened the controls it places on the export of rare earths. While Beijing allowed them to start flowing after the Trump administration agreed in June to a series of trade concessions, China has maintained a lock on critical minerals for defense purposes. China supplies around 90% of the world’s rare earths and dominates the production of many other critical minerals.
…
While companies have tried to find alternative sources of these minerals in recent years, some of the elements are so niche that they can’t be economically produced in the West, say industry executives.
…
In addition to the more recent export controls on rare earths, China has since December banned sales to the U.S. of germanium, gallium and antimony—which are used for things like hardening lead bullets and projectiles, and to allow soldiers to see at night.

It is astonishing how many military products use these metals:

More than 80,000 parts that are used in Defense Department weapons systems are made with critical minerals now subject to Chinese export controls, according to data from defense software firm Govini. Nearly all of the supply chains for key critical minerals used by the Pentagon rely on at least one Chinese supplier, Govini said, meaning restrictions from Beijing can cause widespread disruptions.

Since stepping up export controls earlier this year, China has begun requiring companies to provide extensive documentation of how they will use the rare earths and magnets they import. Chinese regulators often demand sensitive information, such as product images and even photos of production lines, to ensure none of the materials go to military use, say Western buyers.

One Western company that supplies Chinese-made rare-earth magnets to both civilian and defense companies says its requests for imported magnets have recently been approved for many civilian purposes—but rejected or delayed for defense and aerospace.

Especially hit are drone makers who provide for the war in Ukraine. Light weigh drone motors need rare earth magnets to run.

There is little the U.S. can do to argue against China’s licensing process. At least as long as magnets for civilian purposes continue to be sold:

China exported 352.8 metric tons of rare earth magnets to the US in June, according to data released by the GAC. Reuters reported that China’s exports of rare earth magnets to the US in June soared to more than seven times their May level.

The corresponding value of rare earth magnets exports to the US was $16.08 million in June, compared with $2.42 million in May, data from the GAC showed.

In general, China’s exports of rare earths to foreign countries expanded in June, maintaining a growth momentum from the previous month.

In June, China exported 7,742.2 metric tons of rare earths, according to the GAC, up 32 percent from the previous month and 60.3 percent from June 2024.

China’s exports of rare earths in June climbed to the highest volume since 2009, Bloomberg reported on Monday, citing official data.

The U.S. weapon industry is now in a bit of a panic. China is hunting down smugglers who try to circumvent its prohibitions. Alternative sources are simply not there.

The Pentagon is countering China’s move by financing new production lines in the U.S.:

The Department of Defense has awarded grants to expand production of niche materials, including $14 million in funding last year to a Canadian company to produce germanium substrates used in solar cells for defense satellites. In July, the Pentagon took an even bigger step when it agreed to pay $400 million for a stake in MP Materials, the operator of the largest rare-earths mine in the Americas, which is rapidly scaling up its magnet manufacturing capacity.

In the first quarter of 2025 MP Materials had a revenue of $61 million while incurring losses of $23 million.

As China has already captured the global civilian market for magnets it can produce at scale and with profits. The U.S. company will likely only have a very limited range of customers who will have to pay very high prices.

One wonders what other potential high impact intermediate products China has managed to silently monopolize.

Reprinted with permission from Moon of Alabama.

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People say government is corrupt.  If it were corrupt it would be acting in ways contrary and detrimental to its purpose, and it would be possible to right the course.  In truth, it acts in ways that befit its nature.

Today’s governments are states, ruling by legal coercion.  There is another, unacknowledged “government” that works to govern our behavior peacefully, and it’s usually called the free market.  But to states, the market whether free or otherwise is the farm from which they extract wealth and distribute it according to their perceived needs.   States are plundering gangs that wouldn’t exist without something to plunder — a market.  But can markets exist without states?

We might never know.  States will not step aside — the set-up is far too lucrative for those in charge.  So we watch as it runs off the rails in its myopic pursuit of power.

Given this arrangement, how is it possible states can maintain their grip on the minds of its captives?  From the perspective of those under its thumb it is an elaborate interwoven mix of claims accepted as truths.

Let’s touch on a few.

Captives view everything government does as the fruits of democracy, as if the world around them came into being by free choice at the polls.  Democracy is how people maintain their freedom, they believe — it’s their check on state power.  Every Fourth of July they wave their sparklers in government’s honor, as if today’s rulers were intellectual descendants of the revolutionaries of 1776, rather than the counter-revolutionaries of 1787.  Government schools have done their job.

The state watches as some of its captives shoot and rob each other, and propose that it’s only right to make it difficult for everyone to acquire guns.  The thugs cheer and the crime rate goes up.  And states feel uncomfortable with their captives owning guns.

Some captives try to stick the Bill of Rights in government’s face. The Bill of Rights is a tourist attraction. Who sweats a document sequestered in the National Archives? Even so, who interprets and enforces the Bill of Rights?  Elected stiffs from Woodrow Wilson onward, as well as a few appointed ones, have been telling them the Constitution is alive. In other words, their rights are also living and no longer absolute.

Some captives still refer to government officials as their servants.  How many politicians have the demeanor of servants?  Politicians respect money and votes.  Since most voters aren’t organized, it’s the politicians’ rich supporters who help pull the levers of power.

Captives believe it’s only logical that the state should have complete control of the military, police, and courts. What saints do they know personally who could be trusted with such power? And how will the state fund these various functions? Through voluntary trade on the market? Why should it mess with production and exchange when all it has to do is nudge them with a gun?  The state is a monopoly of crime, a fact too shameful for them to admit.

Almost all captives complain about high taxes.  But the state posts signs to assuage their grief: “Your tax dollars at work.”  And it points to the military and its global presence, stirring patriotic fever.  Thus, some captives console themselves with what taxes provide, failing as always to look at the alternatives.

If they had better schooling they might know something about Randolph Bourne, who in 1918 wrote the following:

The modern State is not the rational and intelligent product of modern men desiring to live harmoniously together with security of life, property, and opinion. It is not an organization which has been devised as pragmatic means to a desired social end. All the idealism with which we have been instructed to endow the State is the fruit of our retrospective imaginations. What it does for us in the way of security and benefit of life, it does incidentally as a by-product and development of its original functions.

But the captives, some of them, still have hope for freedom under state rule.  They revive the memory of the Gipper, their sole purported savior in recent history, who promised to get government off their backs.  He pledged to abolish the departments of Energy and Education.  Somehow it didn’t happen.  And rather than ditch the bankrupt Ponzi scheme called Social Security, he followed Alan Greenspan’s advice and increased taxes to postpone the bankruptcy. During the Gipper’s eight-year reign, the federal debt almost doubled and civil liberties diminished.  Oh, those aching backs.

But wait — many captives point to Abe Lincoln as a freedom fighter.

Let’s see.  No Union lives were lost during the Confederacy’s 36-hour shelling of Fort Sumter, an incident provoked by Lincoln ‘s ordering the fort reprovisioned instead of abandoned. A month earlier, he had ignored a Confederate peace commission that had traveled to Washington , D.C. to negotiate a peaceful secession. But Lincoln had his ‘incident,’ got his war, and some 800,000 people died, including civilians and slaves.

The end of slavery was never Lincoln ‘s objective, as he repeatedly stated, but rather one of the byproducts Bourne refers to. By 1840, the British Empire had ended slavery peacefully through compensated emancipation. During the 19th Century, dozens of other countries ended slavery without war. If manumission was Lincoln ‘s goal, why did the master statesman need a long, bloody war to achieve it? Lincoln invaded the South to regain lost tariff revenue when the southern states seceded. Lincoln, in other words, murdered and imprisoned people to carry on his policy of predation, aka Union mercantilism.

Moving ahead a half-century, President Wilson imposed a maximum 20-year prison sentence for anyone criticizing the government during World War I. “Civil liberties” were synonymous with treason.  “Make the world safe for democracy”?  Why not “Make the world safe for freedom”?  Why did Wilson ship a million conscripts packed like sardines overseas to join a war that had already killed five million men?

World War II was different – the so-called Good War, even if it was the costliest conflict in human history. Civilian deaths outnumbered military deaths by over 16 million and total deaths on both sides exceeded 72 million. The Good War saw the guys in white hats set the precedent for dropping nuclear weapons on mostly civilian populations. Who was being defended when we incinerated two hundred thousand people whose leaders had earlier asked to negotiate a conditional surrender, a condition we ultimately agreed to?

Was the State defending its citizens during the build-up to war when FDR neglected to tell Pearl Harbor commanders Short and Kimmel an attack was imminent? Twenty-four hundred troops lost their lives in that attack to join a war the president promised we would never join. The man who made the promise had an eight-point provocation plan to get Japan to attack us.

Did the war in Vietnam stop communism in its tracks and keep other dominoes from falling? The only thing it stopped were the lives of 58,209 American soldiers and several million Vietnamese civilians. And these figures don’t include countless others who suffered and perished from Agent Orange exposure.

Were their trillions of dollars in taxes at work on 9-11 defending Americans from terrorist hijackers? And did they get their money’s worth later, when the president invaded a country posing no threat to their security and having no connection to the attacks?

They grumble about inflation and never mention its role in the State’s growth and wars. They come out of college believing the Federal Reserve is our number one inflation fighter. Ironically, it’s true but only because the Fed is the sole source of inflation. It’s a little like saying Al Capone was Chicago ‘s number one crime fighter.

So there you have it — the State in a nutshell.  It is systemically anti-freedom but poses as its defender.  And the captives buy it.  The only way they can eliminate their overlords is with ideology, but the state has the majority of ideologists, both left and right, on its side.  They’ll have to educate themselves and enough others to pose a threat. And they’ve been trying since 1576 if not earlier.

You would think freedom would be an easy sell but it isn’t.  We keep trying because we can’t live without it.

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As a retired U.S. Air Force officer, I firmly believe in civilian control of our military. This country should be a nation of laws — not of special interests, oligarchs, or kings. Before committing our forces to battle, Congress should always declare war in the name of the people. Our military should indeed be a citizen-soldier force, not an isolated caste driven by a warrior ethos. And above all, the United States should be a republic ruled by law and shaped by sound moral values, not a greed-driven empire fueled by militarism.

Yet when I express such views, I feel like I’m clinging to a belief in the tooth fairy, the Easter Bunny, and Santa Claus. It feels idealistic, naïve, even painful to think that way. Yes, I served this country in uniform for 20 years, and now, in the age of Donald Trump, it has, as far as I can tell, thoroughly lost its way. The unraveling began so long ago — most obviously with the disastrous Vietnam War of the 1960s and 1970s, though in truth this country’s imperial desires predated even the Spanish-American War of 1898, stretching back to the wanton suppression of indigenous peoples as part of its founding and expansion.

A glance at U.S. history reveals major atrocities: the displacement and murder of Native Americans, slavery, and all too many imperial misadventures abroad. I knew of such realities when I joined the military in 1985, near the end of the Cold War. Despite its flaws, I believed then that this country was more committed to freedom than the Soviet Union. We could still claim some moral authority as the leader of what we then referred to as “the free world,” however compromised or imperfect our actions were.

That moral authority, however, is now gone. U.S. leaders fully support and unapologetically serve an ongoing genocide against the Palestinian people in Gaza. They sell weapons to nearly every regime imaginable, irrespective of human rights violations. They wage war without Congressional approval — the recent 12-day assault on Iran being just the latest example. (The second Trump administration has, in fact, launched almost as many air strikes, especially in Yemen and Somalia, in its first five months as the Biden administration did in four years.) Those same leaders have been doing a bang-up job dismantling the America I thought I was serving when I took that oath and put on second lieutenant’s bars four decades ago. That America — assuming it ever existed — may now be gone forever.

FUBAR: A Republic in Ruins

My fellow citizens, America is FUBAR (a term that dates from World War II). We are not faintly who we claim to be. Rather than a functioning republic, we are an ailing, flailing, perhaps even failing empire. We embrace war, glorify warriors, and profit mightily from the global arms trade, no matter the civilian toll, including tens of thousands of dead and wounded children in Gaza, among the latest victims of U.S.-made bombs, bullets, and missiles.

Signs of moral rot are everywhere. Our president, who would like to be known for his budget cuts, nonetheless giddily celebrates a record trillion-dollar war budget. Our secretary of defense gleefully promotes a warrior ethos. Congress almost unanimously supports or acquiesces in the destruction of Gaza. Images from the region resemble bombed-out Stalingrad in 1942 or Berlin in 1945. Meanwhile, for more than two decades now, America’s leaders have claimed to be waging a successful global “war on terror” even as they fuel terror across the globe. What do they think all those U.S. weapons are for — spreading peace?

My wife and I cope through dark humor. We see news on cuts to Medicaid, the mentally ill in the streets, and crumbling infrastructure, and quip: “But Bibi [Netanyahu] needs bombs. Or Ukraine does. Or the Pentagon needs more nukes.” That’s why Americans can’t have nice things like health care. That’s why all too many of us are unhoused, in debt, out of work, and desperate. In 1967 — yes, that’s almost 60 years ago! — Martin Luther King warned of exactly this: America’s approaching spiritual death through militarism (aggravated by extreme materialism and racism). That death is visibly here, now.

Washington is not even faintly committed to “peace through strength,” a vapid slogan touted by the Trump administration, and an unintentional echo of George Orwell’s dystopian “war is peace.” It is committed instead to what passes for dominance through colossal military spending and persistent war. And let’s face it, that warpath may well end in the death of the American experiment.

The Mediocrity of Our Generals

In this era of creeping authoritarianism and mass surveillance, perhaps the U.S. is lucky that its generals are, by and large, so utterly uninspired. Today’s American military isn’t open to the mercurial and meteoric talents of a Napoleon or a Caesar. Not in its upper ranks, at least.

One struggles to name a truly great American general or admiral since World War II. That war produced household names like George C. Marshall, Dwight D. Eisenhower, George S. Patton, and Chester W. Nimitz. In contrast, America’s recent generals — Norman Schwarzkopf and Colin Powell of Desert Storm fame, Tommy Franks in Iraq in 2003, David Petraeus and Stanley McChrystal of the “fragile” and “reversible” Iraq and Afghan “surges” — have left anything but a legacy of excellence or moral leadership, not to speak of decisive victory. At best, they were narrowly competent; at worst, morally compromised and dangerously deluded.

Mind you, this isn’t a criticism of this country’s rank-and-file troops. The young Americans I served with showed no lack of courage. It wasn’t their fault that the wars they found themselves in were misbegotten and mismanaged. Twenty years have passed since I served alongside those young troops, glowing with pride and purpose in their dedication, their idealism, their commitment to their oath of service. Many paid a high price in limbs, minds, or lives. Too often, they were lions led by donkeys, to borrow a phrase once used to describe the inept and callous British leadership during World War I at bloody battles like the Somme (1916) and Passchendaele (1917).

Today, I fear that America’s lions may, sooner or later, be led into even deeper catastrophe — this time possibly a war with China. Any conflict with China would likely rival, if not surpass, the disasters produced by World War I. The world’s best military, which U.S. presidents have been telling us we have since the 9/11 attacks of September 2001, stands all too close to being committed to just such a war in Asia by donkeys like Donald Trump and Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth.

And for what? The island of Taiwan is often mentioned, but the actual reason would undoubtedly be to preserve imperial hegemony in the service of corporate interests. War, as General Smedley Butler wrote in 1935 after he retired from the military, is indeed a racket, one from which the rich exempt themselves (except when it comes to taking profits from the same).

A disastrous conflict with China, likely ending in a U.S. defeat (or a planetary one), could very well lead to a repeat of some even more extreme version of Trump’s Make America Great Again campaign, amplified and intensified by humiliation and resentment. From the ashes of that possible defeat, an American Napoleon or Caesar (or at least a wannabe imitator) could very well emerge to administer the coup de grace to what’s left of our democracy and freedom.

Avoiding a Colossal Act of Folly

War with China isn’t, of course, inevitable, but America’s current posture makes it more likely. Trump’s tariffs, his bombastic rhetoric, and this country’s extensive military exercises in the Pacific contribute to rising tensions, not de-escalation and rapprochement.

While this country invests in war and more war, China invests in infrastructure and trade, in the process becoming what the U.S. used to be: the world’s indispensable workhorse. As the 10 BRICS countries, including China, expand and global power becomes more multipolar, this country’s addiction to military dominance may drive it to lash out. With ever more invested in a massive military war hammer, impetuous leaders like Trump and Hegseth may see China as just another nail to be driven down. It would, of course, be a colossal act of folly, though anything but a first in history.

And speaking of folly, the U.S. military as it’s configured today is remarkably similar to the force I joined in 1985. The focus remains on ultra-expensive weapons systems, including the dodgy F-35 jet fighter, the unnecessary B-21 Raider bomber, the escalatory Sentinel Intercontinental Ballistic Missile, and Trump’s truly fantastical “Golden Dome” missile defense system (a ghostly rehash of President Ronald Reagan’s “Star Wars” proposal, vintage 1983). Other militaries, meanwhile, are improvising, notably in low-cost drone technology (also known as UAS, or uncrewed autonomous systems) as seen in the Russia-Ukraine War, a crucial new arena of war-making where the U.S. has fallen significantly behind China.

The Pentagon’s “solution” here is to continue the massive funding of Cold War-era weapons systems while posing as open to innovation, as an embarrassing video of Hegseth walking with drones suggests. America’s military is, in short, well-prepared to fight a major conventional war against an obliging enemy like Iraq in 1991, but such a scenario is unlikely to lie in our future.

With respect to drones or UAS, I can hear the wheels of the military-industrial complex grinding away. A decentralized, low-cost, flexible cottage industry will likely be transformed into a centralized, high-cost, inflexible cash cow for the merchants of death. When the Pentagon faces a perceived crisis or shortfall, the answer is always to throw more money at it. Ka-ching!

Indeed, the recent profit margins of major military contractors like Lockheed Martin, Boeing, and RTX (formerly Raytheon) have been astounding. Since 9/11, Boeing’s stock has risen more than 400%. RTX shares are up more than 600%. Lockheed Martin, maker of the faltering F-35, has seen its shares soar by nearly 1,000%. And Northrop Grumman, maker of the B-21 Raider bomber and Sentinel ICBM, two legs of America’s “modernized” nuclear triad, has seen its shares increase by more than 1,400%. Who says that war (even the threat of a global nuclear war) doesn’t pay?

Meanwhile, the Pentagon’s war budget, soaring to unprecedented levels, has been virtually immune to DOGE cuts. While Elon Musk and his whiz kids searched for a few billion in savings by gutting education or squelching funding for public media like PBS and NPR, the Pentagon emerged with about $160 billion in new spending authority. As President Biden once reminded us: Show me your budget and I’ll tell you what you value. Far too often, America’s leaders, whatever they’ve said in their election campaigns, have valued weapons and wars over almost anything else.

What Is To Be Done

I’ve written against warriors, warfighters, and U.S. militarism since 2007. And yes, it often feels futile, but silence means surrender to warmongering fools like Hegseth, Senator Tom Cotton, and the farrago of grifters, clowns, toadies, con men, and zealots who inhabit the Trump administration and much of Congress as well. The fight against them must go on.

All leaders, military and civilian, must remember their oath: loyalty to the Constitution, not to any man. Illegal orders must be resisted. Congress must impeach and remove a president who acts unlawfully. It must also reassert its distinctly lost authority to declare war. And it must stop taking “legal” bribes from the lobbyists/foot soldiers who flood the halls of Congress, peddling influence with campaign “contributions.”

For tyranny to be stopped, for a catastrophic war with China (and who knows what else) to be avoided, America must have profiles in courage, not cowardice. Yet even despair is being weaponized. As a retired colonel and friend of mine wrote to me recently: “I don’t even know where to start anymore, Bill. I have no hope for anything ever improving.”

And don’t think of that despair as incidental or accidental. It’s a distinct feature of the present system of government.

Trump and Hegseth are not faintly what the founders of this country envisioned when they placed the military under civilian control. Yet power ultimately resides in the people (if we remember our duties as citizens). Isn’t it high time that we Americans recover our ideals, as well as our guts?

After all, the few can do little without the consent of the many. It’s up to the many (that’s us!) to reclaim and restore America.

Reprinted with permission from TomDispatch.com.

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My father grew up in Florida, and most of his friends were Cuban. He often heard from them how wonderful Cuba had been before Fidel Castro’s revolution. My father once asked one of his friends how Castro managed to take over the county. He told him it was simple: first they would take over a factory. Then, they would remove the manager of the factory and replace him with the janitor. The reason for this was that the janitor could never become the manager in normal times but only because of the revolution. Thus, the janitor would defend the revolution to the death, so as to keep his new position of power at all costs.

This is how the Castro regime has survived in Cuba. There is only one problem, however. Revolutionaries are a rare breed. Disciplined, high-functioning, cunning, and, above all, fanatically devoted to the cause for its own sake, they are simply too few in number. True revolutionaries are always few in number. A handful can make a revolution, but they cannot see it to fruition.

Instead, they have to pass on the job to the former janitors, who will never abandon the cause but are incapable of ruling competently. The revolution inevitably collapses. Or, if they somehow manage to keep power, as in Cuba, they condemn those under their control to a sort of living death of malicious incompetence.

Readers of Crisis Magazine have likely heard that the new archbishop of Detroit has terminated professors Eduardo Echeverria, Ralph Martin, and Edward Peters from Sacred Heart Major Seminary in that diocese. You may recall that earlier this year he also decimated the diocesan Latin Masses in Detroit, which were the most numerous in the country. This comes on the heels of revelations that at least one of the official reasons for banning the Latin Mass was based on a patently false claim. These professors were no traditionalists, but they were well-known “conservative” theologians clearly opposed to the theological tendencies of the last pontiff.

The “Detroit Massacre” is a sign that the Catholic Church has entered the janitorial phase of its own revolution. This began in the 1960s, and the original Progressive faction in the Church that began it has largely passed from the scene. Perhaps the only remaining member of the original cohort is Cardinal Kasper. But the days when a true revolutionary, such as Hans Küng, at least had a brain and some level of competence are long gone.

Instead, we have nonentities such as “Tucho” Fernández and whoever ghostwrote Traditionis Custodes raised to positions for which they are wholly unqualified. But they are willing to do whatever it takes to advance the revolution, which is why they were raised up in the first place. That is why men such as James Martin are promoted and protected while three distinguished professors are fired from their positions with no explanation and no warning. No doubt, more “janitors” will soon replace them.

Such is almost certainly the case with the archbishop of Detroit. It is clear he was chosen with a mandate to put an end to the “rigid” tendencies, theological and otherwise, in that diocese. The new bishop of Detroit once suggested, when he was bishop of Tucson, Arizona, that canonical penalties be used against Catholic federal agents who enforced the current administration’s immigration policies. I do not mean he actually cares about the issue of immigration. Rather, he knew who was in power and what kind of signal he needed to send to be promoted.

And he is delivering. What strikes one about this is how brazen an exercise of power it is. A couple of sites have confirmed the bishop fired these three men without notifying either the rector of the seminary or the board of directors about his decision. My guess is that they would have tried to prevent the dismissal of the professors, so he bypassed them. This tracks with the method of Traditionis Custodes, which resorted to an outright lie to get the desired result. The ends justify the means because the revolution takes precedence over everything—that and remaining in power.

One hopes that this would be a wake-up call to those Catholics who, for whatever reason, still deny that such a revolution is taking place. To those who find this idea too shocking to contemplate, I would urge you not to be taken in by the usual suspects, the midwit Internet Torquemadas who attack anyone who dares question this ongoing demolition of the Catholic Faith. A person on  wrote that the firing of these professors was fine because some seminaries purged professors under John Paul II. My response is that those seminaries did not purge enough of them. Seminary professors should be fired if they teach anything approaching heresy.

Do not get sidetracked concerning arguments about authority. This conflict isn’t about authority. It is about what authority is for: the service to divine, unchanging truth revealed once for all in Jesus Christ and handed on to be guarded by the Church, or protean diktats subject to the whim of whoever holds power. The battle is between those who think that truth is something authority can only safeguard, not create, and those who believe authority can transmute heresy into orthodoxy by fiat (or those who want everyone else to believe this, as to forward their designs).

The bishop fired Echeverria, Peters, and Martin because they objected, however politely, to the toying with heresy that characterized the reign of Pope Francis. Francis was quite explicit that he wanted to alter the Church’s fundamental beliefs. This is the obvious implication of the constant refrain that Vatican II’s reforms are “irreversible,” as everyone knows the Progressive interpretation of that council is a revolutionary one. Lest we forget, the last pontiff issued or approved documents which suggested that

1) sex outside marriage is sometimes not sinful for subjective reasons,

2) homosexual couples can be “blessed,”

3) all religions are willed by God, and

4) the old Mass is somehow intrinsically harmful.

I find it hard to believe a person sincerely convinced of these sentiments is a Catholic Christian in any meaningful sense of the term.

Read the Whole Article

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Yesterday, August 4, Nima and I discussed on Dialogue Works the three iron constraints on the US government that seem to guarantee the world is heading into catastrophic  war.

One constraint is the US foreign policy doctrine of US hegemony over the world, known as the Wolfowitz Doctrine:  The principle goal of US foreign policy is to prevent the rise of any country that can serve as a constraint on US unilateralism. This doctrine targets Russia and China.

As President Trump recently declared to the Atlantic magazine, ” I run the country and the world.” This is a statement of hegemony.

Another constraint is the US military/security complex, a heavy political campaign contributor, which needs enemies, such as Russia, China, Iran, to justify its massive budget and power.

A third constraint is the blackmail power over the US and entire Western world of Epstein’s honey-trap Mossad operation that has films of  members of the ruling  class having sex with underaged persons. 

Wrapped up in these chains, no Western leader can undertake action to avoid war.

Russian President Putin has contributed to the coming catastrophic war by his ignoring of provocations in the hope that in the end he would secure a mutual security agreement with Washington that would end the tensions that threaten both countries.  Putin’s hopes were fruitless, because they ignored the Wolfowitz doctrine, the power of the US military-security complex, and Israel’s blackmail power over the government in America. 

In A.P.J. Taylor’s history, The Origins of the Second World War, Taylor points out that the war, which no one intended, including Hitler, resulted from diplomatic blunders, the consequences of which no one understood.

Today the same kind of blunders are being repeated, building tensions instead of reducing them.  To these tensions Trump adds egomania, which is blinding.  The failure of leadership will end in disastrous war.

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What follows is a revised and updated version of an essay from my 2020 book, Seeking Truth in a Country of Lies.  

“The greatest evil is not now done in those sordid ‘dens of crime’ that Dickens loved to paint…But it is conceived and ordered (moved, seconded, carried, and minuted) in clean, carpeted, warmed, and well-lighted offices, by quiet men with white collars and cut fingernails and smooth-shaven cheeks who do not need to raise their voice.”
– C. S. Lewis, author’s preface, 1962, The Screwtape Letters

American history can only accurately be described as the story of demonic possession, however you choose to understand that phrase. Maybe radical “evil” will suffice. But right from the start the American colonizers were involved in massive killing because they considered themselves divinely blessed and guided, a chosen people whose mission would come to be called “manifest destiny.” Nothing stood in the way of this divine calling, which involved the need to enslave and kill millions of innocent people that continues down to today. “Others” have always been expendable since they have stood in the way of the imperial march ordained by the American god. This includes all the wars waged based on lies and false flag operations. It is not a secret, although many Americans, if they are even aware of it, prefer to see it as a series of aberrations carried out by “bad apples.” Or something from the past. Most know nothing about it, for they have never opened a history book.

Our best writers and prophets have told us the truth: Thoreau, Twain, William James, MLK, Fr. Daniel Berrigan, et al.: we are a nation of killers of the innocent.  We are conscienceless. We are brutal. We are in the grip of evil forces.

The English writer D. H. Lawrence said it perfectly in 1923, “The American soul is hard, isolate, stoic and a killer. It has never yet melted.” It still hasn’t.

When on August 6 and 9, 1945 the United States killed 200-300 thousand innocent Japanese civilians with atomic bombs in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, they did so intentionally. It was an act of sinister state terrorism, unprecedented by the nature of the weapons but not by the slaughter. The American terror bombings of Japanese cities that preceded the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki – led by the infamous Major General Curtis LeMay – were also intentionally aimed at Japanese civilians and killed hundreds of thousands of them.

Is there an American artist’s painting of Tokyo destroyed by the firebombing to go next to Picasso’s Guernica, where estimates of the dead range between 800 and 1,600?

In Tokyo alone more than 100,000 Japanese civilians were burnt to death by cluster bombs of napalm. All this killing was intentional. I repeat: Intentional. Is that not radical evil?  Demonic? Only five Japanese cities were spared such bombing. Sixty-seven cities were fire-bombed.

As a conclusion to such bombings, in August 1945 the atomic bombings were an intentional holocaust, not to end the war, as the historical record amply demonstrates, but to send a message to the Soviet Union that we could do to them what we did to the residents of Japan. President Truman made certain that the Japanese willingness to surrender in May 1945 was made unacceptable because he and his Secretary-of-State James Byrnes  wanted to use the atomic bombs – “as quickly as possible to ‘show results’” in Byrnes’ words – to send a message to the Soviet Union.

So “the Good War” was ended in the Pacific with the “good guys” killing hundreds of thousand Japanese civilians to make a point to the “bad guys,” who have been demonized ever since. Shortly after, in September 1945 the U.S War Department made plans to wipe out the U.S.’s ally, the Soviet Union, with a massive nuclear strike aimed at 66 major cities. Professor Michel Chossudovsky documents it here.

Satan always wears the other’s face.

Many Baby Boomers like to say they grew up with the bomb. They are lucky. They grew up. They got be scared. They got to hide under their desks and wax nostalgic about it. Do you remember dog tags?  Those 1950s and 1960s?  The scary movies?

The children of Hiroshima and Nagasaki who died under our bombs on August 6 and 9, 1945 didn’t get to grow up. They couldn’t hide. They just went under. To be accurate: we put them under. Or they were left to smolder for decades in pain and then die. But that it was necessary to save American lives is the lie. It’s always about American lives, as if the owners of the country actually cared about them.  But to tender hearts and innocent minds, it’s a magic incantation. Poor us!

Fat Man, Little Boy – how the names of those atomic bombs echo down the years to the now fat Americans who grew up in the 1950s and who think like little boys and girls about their country’s demonic nature. Innocence – it is wonderful! We are different now. “We are great because we are good”; that’s what Hillary Clinton told us. The Libyans can attest to that. We are exceptional, special. The 2020 election was said to prove that if we can defeat Mr. Pumpkin Head and restore America to its “core values,” all will be well.

Now that they were restored with Biden’s support for the U.S. proxy war against Russia via Ukraine and the Israeli genocide of the Palestinians, delusionary Trump 2024 voters might be learning that those core values are bipartisan. “We are great because we are good,” goes the mantra. We kill, therefore we are. There is a straight line from the nuclear bombing of Japan to the arrant U.S. support for Israel’s genocide of the Palestinians.

Perhaps you think I am cynical. But understanding true evil is not child’s play. It seems beyond the grasp of most Americans who need their illusions. Evil is real.  There is simply no way to understand the savage nature of American history without seeing its demonic nature. How else can we redeem ourselves at this late date, possessed as we are by delusions of our own God-blessed goodness?

But so many Americans play at innocence. They excite themselves at the thought that with the next election the nation will be “restored” to the right course. Of course there never was a right course, unless might makes right, which has always been the way of America’s rulers. Today, as in 2016, Trump is viewed by so many as an aberration. He is far from it. He’s straight out of a Twain short story. He’s Vaudeville. He’s Melville’s confidence man. He’s us. Did it ever occur to those who are fixated on him that if those who own and run the country wanted him gone, he’d be gone in an instant? He can tweet and tweet idiotically, endlessly send out messages that he will contradict the next day or minute, but as long as he protects the super-rich, accepts Israel’s control of him, and allows the CIA-military-industrial complex to do its world-wide killing and looting of the treasury, he will be allowed to entertain and excite the public – to get them worked up in a lather in pseudo-debates. And to make this more entertaining, he will be opposed by the “sane” Democratic opposition, whose intentions are as benign as an assassin’s smile.

Look back as far as you can to past U.S. presidents, the figureheads who “act under orders” (whose orders?), as did Ahab in his lust to kill the “evil” great white whale, and what do you see? You see servile killers in the grip of a sinister power. You see hyenas with polished faces. You see pasteboard masks. On the one occasion when one of these presidents dared to follow his conscience and rejected the devil’s pact that is the presidency’s killer-in-chief role, he – JFK – had his brains blown out in public view. An evil empire thrives on shedding blood, and it enforces its will through demonic messages.

Resist and there will be blood on the streets, blood on the tracks, blood in your face.

Despite this, President Kennedy’s witness, his turn from cold warrior to an apostle of peace in the final year of his presidency, remains to inspire a ray of hope in these dark days. As recounted by James Douglass in his masterful JFK and the Unspeakable, Kennedy agreed to a meeting in May 1962 with a group of Quakers who had been demonstrating outside the While House for total disarmament. They urged him to move in that direction. Kennedy was sympathetic to their position. He said he wished it were easy to do so from the top down, but that he was being pressured by the Pentagon and others to never do that, although he had given a speech urging “a peace race” together with the Soviet Union. He told the Quakers it would have to come from below. According to the Quakers, JFK listened intently to their points, and before they left said with a smile, “You believe in redemption don’t you?” Soon Kennedy was shaken to his core by the Cuban missile crisis when the world teetered on the brink of extinction and his insane military and “intelligence” advisers urged him to wage a nuclear war. Not long after, he took a sharp top-down turn toward peace despite their fierce opposition, a turn so dramatic over the next year that it led to his martyrdom. And he knew it would. He knew it would when he gave his extraordinary American University Commencement Address on June 10, 1963.

So hope is not all lost. There are great souls like JFK to inspire us. Their examples flash here and there. But to even begin to hope to change the future, a confrontation with our demonic past (and present) is first necessary, a descent into the dark truth that is terrifying in its implications. False innocence must be abandoned. Carl Jung, in “On the Psychology of the Unconscious,” addressed this with the words:

It is a frightening thought that man also has a shadow side to him, consisting not just of little weaknesses – and foibles, but of a positively demonic dynamism. The individual seldom knows anything of this; to him, as an individual, it is incredible that he should ever in any circumstances go beyond himself. But let these harmless creatures form a mass, and there emerges a raging monster; and each individual is only one tiny cell in the monster’s body, so that for better or worse he must accompany it on its bloody rampages and even assist it to the utmost. Having a dark suspicion of these grim possibilities, man turns a blind eye to the shadow-side of human nature. Blindly he strives against the salutary dogma of original sin, which is yet so prodigiously true. Yes, he even hesitates to admit the conflict of which he is so painfully aware.

How can one describe men who would intentionally slaughter so many innocent people?  American history is rife with such examples up to the present day. The native peoples, Hiroshima, Nagasaki, Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Syria, Gaza, Ukraine, Iran, etc. – the list is very long. Savage wars carried out by men and women who own and run the country, and who try to buy the souls of regular people to join them in their pact with the devil, to acquiesce to their ongoing wicked deeds. Such monstrous evil was never more evident than on August 6 and 9, 1945.

Unless we enter into deep contemplation of the evil that was released into the world with those bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, we are lost in a living hell without escape. And we will pay. Nemesis always demands retribution, as the ancient Greeks said. We have gradually been accepting rule by those for whom the killing of innocents is child’s play, and we have been masquerading as innocent and good children for whom the truth is too much to bear. “Indeed, the safest road to Hell is the gradual one,” Screwtape, the devil, tells his nephew, Wormwood, a devil in training, “the gentle slope, soft underfoot, without sudden turnings, without milestones, without signposts.”  That’s the road we’ve been traveling, as Trump’s second term is showing us, as he facilely and recklessly talks of nuclear war and makes moves that make it more likely.

The projection of evil onto others works only so long.  We must reclaim our shadows and withdraw our projections.  Only the fate of the world depends on it.

Reprinted with the author’s permission.

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There’s a story – it may be true – that Nixon (back when he was president) thought it would be a fine idea to make the North Vietnamese and the nuclear-armed Soviets who backed them believe he was irrational and volatile enough to push the button, so as to bluff them into kowtowing.

History repeats because human nature never changes.

Our Nixon seems to also believe it’s a fine idea to convey to the Russians that he just might push the button. Only this time, the Russians might just do it first. Trump’s announced sending of nuclear-missile-armed submarines close to Russia means the Russians would have less warning and less time to react to a first-strike. This no doubt makes the Russians uneasy. It probably makes them more likely to consider a first strike as a preemptive measure – and why not? The United States is run by a cabal that regularly engages in such, though not yet with nuclear weapons and (naturally) not yet against a nuclear-armed nation. The cabal that runs the United States prefers to rain conventional death on nations that can’t do much about it, such as Iran (on behalf of Israel).

But you see the point. Or rather, the hypocrisy. No doubt the Russians see it and tire of it. We – Americans are supposed to not see it and hate the Russians because they see it (and tire of it).

What, exactly, is Trump hoping to accomplish by bellowing demands and authorizing overtly threatening things such as edging our underwater nuclear “deterrent” closer to Russia, the better-to-nuke-them-with? This is something his senile grifter predecessor never did and that’s a measure of just how strange things have become. One of the main reasons people voted for Trump was to end the god-damned wars rather than incite worse ones. Why is he pushing the Russians to push the button? It cannot be Because Democracy, since the Ukrainians are ruled by a dictator who cancelled elections. It isn’t because America is threatened in any way by the Russians hashing things out with a former Russian province. It certainly isn’t because the American people are demanding it. Politically, it is idiotic because it (like the Epstein Business) is alienating people who supported Trump. There is no “upside” that makes any good sense.

So, why?

Well, because war is the health of the state. It not only shuts up those who raise questions about what the state is up to, it places them in the position of being enemies of the state. Herman Goring, the head of the German Luftwaffe and probably one of the smartest of the leadership cabal of the Third Reich, explained it thusly:

Naturally the common people don’t want war neither in Russia, nor in England, nor for that matter in Germany. That is understood. But, after all, it is the leaders of the country who determine the policy and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy, or a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship. Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the peacemakers for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same in any country.

Indeed, it does. Indeed it will.

Trump is in trouble. He needs a diversion, one big enough to shut people up about the Epstein Business as well as other emulsifying shit-storms, including the “fake news” about the jobs that haven’t been created and general enshitification of life in this country for average Americans, who are paying $100 for two plastic bags of groceries and double or triple what they used to pay for insurance and forget buying a new house if you are a first-time buyer.

A war would serve. It worked for The Chimp. It always works. Which is why it’s what they always do whenever it looks like the public is getting tired of the schtick.

This article was originally published on Eric Peters Autos.

The post The Nixon Strategy appeared first on LewRockwell.

Thanks, John Frahm.

Activist Post

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Rick Rozoff wrote:

Spokesperson for the Cincinnati police chief said that the middle-age woman savagely beaten is a “Russian, who fled back to her country,” though she was born and raised in Ohio. Echoing the claim of the chief perpetrator’s mother days earlier.

Fox is the only non-local news source reporting on the week-long story at all.

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Thanks, John Frahm.

Reclaim the Net

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Click Here:

Eugyppius

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Tim McGraw wrote:

Bataan Death March, 

My Mom, who is 93, told me this story years ago. Mom had driven her black Jaguar sports car from Kansas City up to southern Minnesota to visit her relatives. Mom told me the oil light came on somewhere in Iowa, so she pulled into a gas station. The mechanic looked under the hood and told my Mom that he didn’t have a clue how to fix the British car.

My Mom drove on to southern Minnesota with no problems.

Mom stayed in Minneapolis and drove out to the small towns of her relatives. There, she found out that her Uncle Scrubby had died. Mom told me that Uncle Scrubby was a good guy. He was always kind. They called him Scrubby because he was short.

Uncle Scrubby had joined the Army before WWII. He was in the regular Army and stationed in the Philippines when the Japanese invaded. His company surrendered to the Japs and then had to endure the Bataan Death March. 

Uncle Scrubby spent WWII in a Japanese POW camp outside of Manila. I think the fact that he was short and needed fewer calories of food to live kept him alive. 

After the war, Scrubby was shipped home. His widow told my Mom that Uncle Scrubby was a skeleton. He slowly put on weight and went to work in the small town.

Scrubby’s widow told my Mom that every night for over 60 years after the war, Scrubby would scream in his sleep.

The post Grand Uncle Scrubby appeared first on LewRockwell.

Whenever I talk about things like tariffs, Trump supporters appear in my comments to tell me that Europe has gotten a free ride for long enough and that it is time we learned to pay our way. I find it a little frustrating to read this, because in Europe it does not feel like we are getting a free ride at all. In fact it seems like the opposite: The most common complaint on the populist German right is that our political class refuses to represent our interests and will not stop carrying water for the Americans.

I recognise that I’ll never be able to put this right, but it’s worth trying, because it is important to understand the world as it is. The truth is that the United States is an imperial power. Generally speaking, it does not give foreign nations free rides and it does not hand out unearned favours. There is however a lot of confusion here, because hardly anybody bothers to describe honestly the geopolitical strategy pursued by the United States or the nature of the American empire. Western liberalism cannot conceptualise imperial politics, and while empire generally benefits political elites on both sides of the Atlantic, it is not necessarily or always in the interests of ordinary Americans or ordinary Europeans, which is yet another reason not to talk about it.

The Americans and the British before them expended enormous effort to preempt the emergence of a dominant power on the European Continent that might challenge their successive naval empires. They fought two world wars to stop Germany from becoming just such a power. This great struggle ended in 1945 with Western Europe as a fully subjugated imperial province. Since then, the Americans have coordinated the NATO alliance and guaranteed the security of European countries not out of charity, but because Europe is their provincial possession. As a rule, they have not wanted Europe to assume full responsibility for its own defence, because a world in which America no longer guarantees the security of Europe is a world in which Europe is no longer an American province. It’s that simple.

To fend off the Soviets, the Americans nevertheless rebuilt and rearmed the nations of Western Europe. Everyone involved in this project had to come up with a way to allow the Germans to become a dominant economic power again, without displacing the United States or provoking the hostilities of wary postwar neighbours like France. One solution here was the European Union, which promoted economic interdependency as a counterweight to nationalist concerns. Another solution came at the cultural level, where Germany sought to allay European anxieties over possible Teutonic aggression by developing a national cult of historical guilt for World War II, which steadily blossomed into a full-blown civic religion. This exercise in self-effacement has grown more and not less extreme over time, in part as a response to nervousness about the consequences of German reunification. Many voices on the right like to portray Germans as victims of an externally imposed guilt regime, but the truth is that we did most of this to ourselves. The German left in particular has profited from and encouraged this mindset from the beginning.

German political self-effacement had one unexpected feature, in that it proved to be contagious. Within a generation of 1945, many of the victorious allied powers were striving to develop their own historical guilt cults after the German example, in each case centred around a national original sin like slavery or colonialism. Just as the German political class found it expedient to foreground collective European concerns at the expense of a more narrowly construed German nationalism, so did the broader West develop an overarching obsession with global issues and the plight of the developing world. This has caused the proliferation of a lot of silly people in our political culture, a lot of profoundly stupid organisations, and at least two cancerous ideological systems in the form of climatism and migrationism. We have had a nearly incalculable gift in the form of 80 years of peace, which may yet be offset by the equally incalculable costs of the lunacies this peace has encouraged.

Trump’s greatest geopolitical ambition is to reorient American foreign policy away from Europe and the minor rivalry with Russia, towards East Asia and the far greater rivalry with China. This pivot entails a demotion of provincial Europe in the pecking order of empire. The Americans will want Europeans to pay more for their place in the broader imperial system, and they will be inclined to extend the Europeans fewer benefits. That is what a lot of the low-resolution MAGA rhetoric about free-riding Europeans adds up to, it is the meaning of Trump’s demands that European nations massively increase NATO spending, and it has been an important subtext in the tariff negotiations too. So far, NATO member states and the EU have folded to Trump’s demands with very little resistance, despite their extravagance.

The truth is that we could fund our own defence for less than 5% of our collective GDP, but this is as yet unthinkable, because European independence would spell the end of our present system. Basically, there can be no united Europe without the Americans. If and when the Americans leave, some European nations will pursue closer trade relations with Russia; others will oppose them in this. It has been four generations since any major European nation plotted an independent geopolitical agenda; the very idea is a nightmare for our rulers, and many of the resulting alliances would remind people of unfortunate early 20th-century geopolitical configurations. This is primarily why European leaders have developed such a fanatical obsession with the war in Ukraine. For the moment, the conflict defines Russia as an external threat and suppresses all discussions about the different national interests of EU member states. It is yet another way for Germany’s political class to practice their conventional self-effacement in favour of notional pan-European interests.

As in many other cases, Trump’s policies with respect to Europe represent the culmination of forces and trends that are much bigger than his presidency. The era of unchallenged American global hegemony is over with, and in this environment being a province of the American empire will just become a steadily worse deal for Europe as a whole.

This article was originally published on Eugyppius- A Plague Chronicle.

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Predicting the collapse of a country is like reading between the lines of history, economics, and politics. Some nations, however, are walking on thin ice, where even a small additional burden could lead to their downfall. In this article, we’ll explore 10 countries facing severe risks that could put them on the brink of collapse by 2027. Some of these might surprise you.

1. Lebanon: A country where nothing works anymore
Once hailed as the “Switzerland of the Middle East,” Lebanon is now in absolute economic chaos. Hyperinflation, currency collapse, and political corruption have brought the state to its knees. Ordinary citizens struggle to secure basic needs like food and fuel. Can Lebanon still be saved, or will it follow the fate of nations that fragmented into smaller entities?

2. Afghanistan: Taliban isolation and hunger
Since the Taliban regained power, Afghanistan has plunged into international isolation. Its economy is collapsing, people are starving, and humanitarian organizations cannot meet the overwhelming needs. If the situation doesn’t improve, the state risks fragmentation into territories controlled by armed factions.

3. Haiti: From freedom to a nation ruled by gangs
Haiti has been grappling with a crisis for years. With no functioning government, armed gangs dominate cities. Add to that natural disasters like earthquakes and hurricanes, and you have a recipe for complete collapse. Can Haiti ever rise again?

4. Sudan: A nation in perpetual conflict
Sudan’s civil war between the army and militias is spiraling into catastrophe. Thousands are dead, millions are displaced, and famine looms large. If the conflict continues, Sudan could disintegrate into smaller regions controlled by local warlords.

5. Venezuela: From riches to rags
Home to some of the world’s largest oil reserves, Venezuela has been in freefall for years. Hyperinflation, food shortages, and mass emigration have devastated the nation. Could Nicolás Maduro’s regime fall, or will Venezuela remain stuck in this “frozen collapse” for decades?

6. Myanmar: A coup that crushed hope
The 2021 military coup plunged Myanmar into chaos. Protests, uprisings, and ethnic conflicts have become the norm. If the military junta doesn’t relinquish power, the country risks breaking into warring regions.

7. Yemen: A nation where survival is a battle
Yemen is the epitome of disaster. Its civil war between Houthi rebels and the internationally recognized government has raged for years. Millions suffer from hunger and disease. If the conflict isn’t resolved, Yemen could vanish as a functioning state altogether.

8. North Korea: Behind the curtain of isolation
Kim Jong Un’s regime appears solid, but what if it isn’t? Economic sanctions, famine, and a possible power struggle after his death could lead to an unexpected collapse. If that happens, the chaos could be unimaginable.

9. Pakistan: Battling economic and political storms
Pakistan is grappling with an economic crisis deepened by debts and political instability. Extremism, corruption, and worsening relations with neighbors could weaken the country to the point of losing control over its regions.

10. Somalia: A collapse that never ended
Somalia has been a failed state for decades. The terrorist group Al-Shabaab still controls large swathes of territory, while the central government remains weak. Without minimal international support, total disintegration seems inevitable.

Why Do Countries Most Of Time Collapse?
Normally, the collapse of a state is always the result of a combination of factors:

• Economic instability: Hyperinflation, overwhelming debts, or resource shortages.
• Political corruption: Weak governments unable to address crises.
• Civil conflicts: Wars, ethnic tensions, or regional uprisings.
• Climate change: Worsening conditions, natural disasters, and resource depletion.
• International isolation: Sanctions or loss of foreign support.

Can Any of These Countries Be Saved?
History shows us that even nations on the brink of collapse can change course with the right leadership, international assistance, or societal unity. While rescue is possible, these cases will require far more than just hope.

Which other countries do you think are at risk? Let’s discuss.

Beyond the most vulnerable states, there are also numerous other countries that could face significant challenges if their situations do not improve.

Read the Whole Article

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EDITOR’S NOTE: This story has been updated with new FBI documents recently discovered, and subsequently is being republished on August 1, 2025. Primary source documents used in the story have been notated and added to the ‘End Notes’

One of the enduring mysteries of the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing case is the little-known but well-documented and indisputable fact that Timothy McVeigh and the “others unknown” involved in the attack used two different Ryder trucks in the later stages of the bombing plot.

What happened to this second truck, where it was obtained (FBI documents indicate that the FBI may have believed it was purchased at auction—more on those documents in a moment), and its final purpose remains unknown today.

Dozens of witnesses in Kansas observed two distinctly different Ryder trucks between April 11th and 18th — both parked at both Geary Lake and the Dreamland Motel.

One of the trucks was smaller, described frequently as faded yellow in color, with either no visible Ryder logo or one that was barely visible, and with a cab-overhang on the front part of the truck.

The other of the two trucks was described as much larger—the 20-foot model—and appeared cleaner and newer. This was the truck rented from Elliott’s body shop on the 17th that was ultimately used to deliver the bomb.

The Smaller “Second Truck”

The second truck, with a few exceptions, is generally omitted from most contemporary accounts of the bombing, yet its existence is confirmed within numerous FBI documents.

A half dozen people at the Dreamland Motel—where McVeigh stayed the week before the bombing—place McVeigh parking the smaller Ryder truck at the motel on Easter Sunday and Fri/Sat—days before the larger bomb truck was rented at Elliott’s on Monday the 17th.

The Dreamland Witnesses

Consider the following account from Apache helicopter mechanic Shane Boyd. Boyd stayed in room #28 at the Dreamland Motel for several weeks in April 1995 while he was working at nearby Ft. Riley. Boyd told FBI SA Mark Bouton that around 6:00 AM on Friday, April 14th, he saw a Ryder truck with a steel-framed trailer pulling out of the Dreamland Motel’s parking lot.1 Boyd also told the FBI that he is sure he saw the Ryder truck parked at the Dreamland Motel again on Saturday the 15th and Easter Sunday. 2

Consider also the accounts of Dreamland residents David King and his mother, Herta King. The Kings both saw the smaller Ryder truck the weekend before the bomb truck’s rental. FBI special agents Robert Knox and Leslie Gardner interviewed David King on April 27 regarding activities in and around the motel. King told the FBI that on Easter Sunday, his mother, Herta, visited him at the Dreamland around half past noon. King stated that both he and his mother saw a yellow Ryder truck parked directly in front of his room that Sunday afternoon.3

Herta King later testified at the McVeigh trial that she saw the Ryder truck parked at the Dreamland on Easter. She stated that she was friends with the motel owner, Lea McGown, and that they had even discussed the truck being there on Easter. King testified that Lea McGown told her “it doesn’t make sense that a truck was there on Sunday, if McVeigh rented it on Monday.”4

Indeed, it doesn’t make sense. Consider, then, what does make sense: the truck seen before the 17th was a different truck. This is what the evidence suggests. Supporting this theory is David King’s statement that he saw two different Ryder trucks at the Dreamland. King’s observations are crucial for understanding the multiple Ryder truck sightings that occurred before Monday, April 17th.

On April 16th, Easter, King saw the older “faded yellow” Ryder truck parked at the Dreamland. King then noted a change in the truck from Sunday to Monday: on Monday, McVeigh arrived driving a “brand new” and “more aerodynamic” model Ryder truck.5 This was the bomb truck that was rented from Elliott’s, and its appearance was distinctly different, much larger than the truck King and his mother had seen that weekend.

King also saw McVeigh and two other men attaching a trailer to the new Ryder truck and engaging in some activity with the truck and trailer. King recalls this because the Ryder truck blocked access to his parking spot. He noted that something was inside the trailer wrapped in a dirty white canvas tarp: “It was a squarish shape, and it came to a point on top, about three or four feet high,”6 King told the New York Times.

Witness Connie Hood described a similar scene involving the older Ryder truck that weekend: it had a trailer attached and a group of guys working there. Hood told McCurtain Gazette reporter J.D. Cash, “I saw John Doe No. 2 with McVeigh in the parking lot, and a couple of other guys were helping them. They were working on that old truck they had. There was a trailer hooked to the truck that afternoon, and it had a lot of stuff in it. I couldn’t tell what because a tarp covered the trailer.”7

Witness Shane Boyd also observed a trailer attached to the older model truck that weekend. Whatever its purpose, it seems the trailer was moved from the older truck and then attached to the new one when McVeigh showed up with it on Monday.

In addition to Shane Boyd, Herta King, David King, and Connie Hood, the owners of the Dreamland Motel also noticed the other older model truck. Motel owner Lea McGown and her son, Eric, described the truck to the FBI and reporters, and their accounts were published in the newspaper.

It was shortly after an Easter lunch when the McGowns saw McVeigh trying to park the Ryder truck.8 Lea McGown’s recollection to reporters was vivid, saying, “He backed in jerky, jerky, jerky. Like somebody who doesn’t know how to drive a truck. I thought he was going to smash my roof!”9

Upon watching this, Lea McGown sent her son, Eric, to tell McVeigh to move the truck to the open area in front of the office. Eric McGown got a good look at the truck as he did and described it in detail:

“It was medium-sized. It wasn’t one of the newest models. It was not so rounded. It had a different compartment for the one cab, and it had the trailer portion.”10

Consistent with other sightings of this second truck, it had a trailer attached, looked older, with faded and worn yellow paint, and had no writing on the back.

The Geary Lake Witnesses

Alongside the Dreamland witnesses, a handful of people observed a Ryder truck parked at Geary Lake days before the bomb truck was rented.

According to the official story, McVeigh built the bomb with Terry Nichols at Geary Lake on April 18th. However, witnesses interviewed by the FBI reported seeing a distinct yellow Ryder truck at Geary Lake fishing park for four straight days the week before: on the 11th, 12th, 13th, and 14th.

The FBI roadblock at Geary Lake gathered testimony from multiple credible witnesses who recalled seeing the truck parked there every morning on their way to work, with some also spotting the truck in the evening during their commute home.

Two of these witnesses were Kansas real estate agent Georgia Rucker11 and retiree James Sargeant12, with the latter spending the week from the 11th to the 14th fishing at the lake each morning. Sergeant testified at trial that “it’s pretty hard to forget something you see four days in a row” – much less something so out of place as a yellow moving truck parked at the shoreline. Rucker said much the same, spotting the truck parked at the lake each morning on her commute that week.

Perhaps the most interesting account from the Geary Lake witnesses is that of Robert Nelson. Nelson testified that he drove into Geary Lake on April 17th or 18th—he wasn’t sure which day. It was there that he saw the Ryder truck, surrounded by several vehicles, and a group of four to five men.13

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