Lew Rockwell Institute

“Death only reveals the vacuity that was always there.” – C.S. Lewis, A Grief Observed

A few weeks ago as I was scrolling through my many emails, I stopped at an article in the online version of the New York Times called “HOW COVID REMADE AMERICA,” and clicked to open it. The article was accompanied by several photos taken during the COVID-19 psyop.

Then the unthinkable happened. The first photo I saw showed a large city park with dozens of white circles painted on the fresh green grass, indicating where two (at most) people could gather without risking contaminating, or getting contaminated by, those within any of the other circles nearby. Suddenly, and all over again, I started boiling over with rage.

Who on earth came up with this idea? Who on earth could have possibly complied with it and thought they were doing the right thing? Who on earth could have thought any of this had anything to do with “the science” that all the obedient guinea pigs in that deadly experiment had worshipped as if it had divine attributes? Looking at that photo and at the other photos brought the utter stupidity and sheepish compliance of so many billions of people in those terrible times—and my anger about it all—right back into my life as if it was all still happening right now.

I felt sick to my stomach. It made me so angry and, at the same time, so sad. There, alone in my house, I wanted to scream and cry in the same breath. Howl, I think that’s the word for it. I’ve been thinking that I’ve been suffering from a kind of post-traumatic stress disorder. Looking at these photos that accompanied the litany of lies—people sitting in their cars and allowing medical professionals in fully armored hazmat suits shove those long swabs up their noses painfully close to their frontal lobes to test for the asymptomatic presence of a virus that was supposedly so dangerous that it easily spread in the air all around us; the emptied shelves in grocery stores because of panic buying and forced factory closures; masked children outside in a park on a sunny day; the vacant office buildings and empty city streets—and gauging my reaction to them, confirmed my self-diagnosis.

We popularly refer to moments like this as being “triggered.” We make fun of snowflakes being triggered by, say, Trump’s presidential victory that sent many college students across the nation scrambling to “wellness spaces” for a good cry as they piled on the pounds with free cookies and milk. But being triggered is a real phenomenon. Ask war veterans. Ask abuse victims. Ask car accident survivors. A traumatizing event enters the body and lodges in places out of reach of normal consciousness. Until, that is, something happens in the world around us that brings those memories welling up from the unconscious—unwelcomed, unwanted, unavoidable—and into the here and now. A photograph. A sound. A dream. A scene from a movie. A person from your past you catch a glimpse of on a city street. And when that happens the traumatizing event is relived all over again and in real time but only in the mind in a kind of endless and inexpugnable film loop.

There were subheads, equally disturbing, describing how “it” (the virus) remade America: “It broke our faith in public health.” “It shattered our cities and disordered society.” “It shackled the U.S. with debt.” “It destabilized and undermined politics almost everywhere.” “It scarred children.” “It left us sicker.” But there was not any “it” that rained down upon us with so much destruction. It was “they,” and I’m not talking about woke pronouns. I’m talking about the complicity of the New York Times and an entire global army of media apparatchiks for creating the panic about a virus out of thin air by lying about how deadly it was. They and their nefarious collaborators bear the responsibility for the annihilation of so much life on earth and of what we hold dear.

I remembered seeing people being arrested while strolling on beaches or in parks; a cowering, elderly woman in a grocery store signaling at me to pull my mandated mask up over my nose (I was so oxygen-starved and furious that I wanted to ram my cart into hers right there in the condiment aisle); the heinous outdoor seating at restaurants on cold New York City streets; the blocking of my Facebook posts alerting my few hundred contacts about the war that had been launched against us; a friend insisting that everyone invited to her 50th birthday party, which was now going to be held outdoors, wear a mask (I was invited and did not go); seeing people alone in their cars with a mask on; being disinvited to weddings of friends and members of my extended family who were requiring all attendees to be jabbed “out of an abundance of caution”; fake president Joe Biden’s televised, maniacal speeches scolding scofflaws like me to get injected with the bioweapon or else….

***

While looking for a certain book I wanted to write about for this edition of Underlined Sentences, I found A Grief Observed. When the thin volume caught my eye, sandwiched between two bigger books, I knew right away that I wanted to write about it instead of the one I had been looking for. Call it a happy accident. Synchronicity, as Carl Jung might say. I’ve been wanting to write about grief for some time now, so my stumbling upon this book seemed to have a meaningful if not causal connection. It was as if my desire and this book had mysteriously found one another. As if I had not chosen it but rather it had chosen me.

It’s been five years since governments around the world shut down their nations and mandated lockdowns, school closures, and ultimately, in many instances, injections with a bioweapon peddled as a vaccine, and began what would become the death of the world as we’d known it brought down by the greatest of all crimes against humanity. That’s not the only thing I am grieving.

A Grief Observed is a brief and poignant memoir about the loss of a woman who Lewis—an aloof professor and theologian (first at Oxford University then at Cambridge University), a prolific and influential writer, and a devout Christian—met late in life and who died of cancer not long after they had married. Although they had known each other for only eight years, and four of those years as a married couple, Joy Davidman Gresham had come from America and changed Lewis’ life forever: He fell deeply in love for the first and, as fate would have it, the only time, in his life. And he despaired when she died.

In the days immediately following her death, Lewis wrote cursive journal entries in several exercise books for children. And what he wrote in those four books would become A Grief Observed, in which he writes: “I not only live each endless day in grief, but live each day thinking about living each day in grief.”

Douglas Gresham, the younger of Joy’s two sons, both of whom had eventually come with her to England to live with Lewis, writes in his introduction to my copy of the 1994 edition of A Grief Observed: “The book is a man emotionally naked in his own Gethsemane. It tells of the agony and the emptiness of a grief such as few of us have to bear, for the greater the love the greater the grief, and the stronger the faith the more savagely will Satan storm its fortress.”

***

For the past five years, I’ve lived in grief and have thought about living in grief. What I’m grieving is a different kind of loss from the one that brought Lewis to his knees, yet also deeply personal. I’m grieving the loss of trust and of the people who had broken my trust in them. As the COVID-19 psyop swept o’er the land, I trusted my friends and colleagues to see the evil hoax for what it was, as I did, and to ignore it or rise against it and just say no. To do the right thing and carry on.

But they didn’t. The heart of the matter for me was not what the governments around the world did to us; it’s what so many billions of people, including most of those closest to me, allowed the governments around the world to do to us. It was their uninformed and sheepish and, in some instances, enthusiastic, compliance that felt to me like a stab in the back. We all go through life with crosses to bear. I’ve had—and have—several. But this one—the anger I’ve felt because of this mass compliance—would become, and remain, my gravest, heaviest, and most persistent cross for the past five years.

Curiously, though, with the coming of warmer weather and longer days here in the Northeast where I’ve lived most of my life, I thought I had finally made some kind of tenuous peace with this wretched betrayal of not only myself, but also of all of us who knew better—and, indeed, against the very essence of our shared humanity. I’d started to tap into the energies and introspections of the Christian Lenten season to change something inside me, as Jesus always calls on us to do but during these forty days are asked to pay particular attention.

Over the past five years, I might have passed through the five stages of grief famously described by Elizabeth Kubler-Ross in her book, On Death and Dying: What the Dying Have to Teach Doctors, Nurses, Clergy and Their Own Families: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. I was beginning to find myself at the fifth stage of an uneasy acceptance with the way things had gone with the COVID-19 psyop, although not without intermittent flare-ups of all the other stages, especially the anger. That’s the one that has most persistently dogged me in my attempts to move on. Never in my life have I felt so angry for so long.

I have turned to some familiar ancient and timeless wisdom for guidance. I have continued to remind myself of a memorable teaching from my years of Buddhist study and practice, which I have noted in previous columns: Harboring anger against someone is like drinking poison and expecting the other person to die.

As if that simple phrase were not enough to remind me of anger’s toll, there’s this lesson about love as taught by Paul in his Letter to the Corinthians, a lesson many of us are familiar with because it is frequently recited during wedding ceremonies and which I’ve been reading from time to time these days: “If I speak in the tongues of mortals or of angels, but do not have love, I am only a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal. And if I have prophetic powers and understand all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have all faith, so as to move mountains, but do not have love, I am nothing. If I give away all my possessions, and if I hand over my body so that I may boast, but do not have love, I gain nothing.” (1 Corinthians 13: 1-3)

Then there’s this teaching from the mouth of Jesus himself that I’ve also been re-reading in my Bible: “You have heard that it was said, ‘You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy.’ But I say to you: Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, so that you may be children of your Father in heaven; for he makes his sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the righteous and on the unrighteousness. For if you love those who love you, what reward do you have? Do not even the tax collectors do the same? And if you greet only your brothers and sisters, what more are you doing than others?” (Matthew 5:43-47)

Above all, there are Jesus’ dying words as he hangs in excruciating pain on the cross: “Father, forgive them; for they do not know what they are doing.” (Luke 23:34)

What are ordinary, imperfect mortals like me supposed to do with all these timeless, perfect wisdom teachings about forgiveness and love in the midst of the immense brokenness and deadly ignorance of the world in which we’ve found ourselves? One commentator in his blog called Christian Art has these sage words of advice: “Many of us might struggle to identify anyone we’d consider an ‘enemy.’ We often reserve that term for war situations or for people we intensely dislike. However, if we broaden the definition to include anyone who has hurt, upset, or wronged us (even in minor ways) perhaps a few faces come to mind? When Jesus asks us to love these people, He isn’t calling for warm, fuzzy feelings. He appeals to our will, not our emotions. At the very least, we can choose to wish the best for those we find difficult. How do we do this? Through prayer. Praying for someone we struggle with is not only an act of love but also a step towards healing—both for us and, potentially, for them.”

I’ve been praying the last five years, but mostly for myself, to be honest. I’ve prayed for spiritual healing, divine intervention. Not that I’m all that skilled in praying. No matter. As Lewis himself writes in his 1963 book Letters to Malcolm: Chiefly on Prayer: “I have a notion that what seem our worst prayers may really be, in God’s eyes, our best…. God sometimes seems to speak to us most intimately when He catches us, as it were, off our guard.”

I pray to be caught off my guard. I pray for a spontaneous remission of the cancer of my wrath. I pray because I’ve sometimes felt that I’ve been slowly dying, both inside myself and to the world around me. I pray because I’m also grieving my former self, a self that no longer is. Just like someone who dies no longer is. In my body I am here and appear not much different than I was five years ago. But I sometimes hardly recognize the man inside.

The insane lockdowns may have passed but I’ve continued to isolate myself more than I did before the COVID-19 psyop, and not because I’ve ever been afraid of contracting a supposedly deadly virus that posed no threat to any normally healthy person. It was because I became fed up with anyone and everyone who fell for the ruse, which happened to be nearly all of my old friends and colleagues. And the bitterness lingers like a bad dream that I can, unfortunately, recall in astonishing detail simply because it went on for so long and destroyed so much. Only it was not just a bad dream.

Like a refugee is forced to flee his home country that’s been taken over by a murderous despot and his henchmen and to take up his life in a new country, I’ve felt like an exile even though I’ve never left my home. And now I’m trying to find my footing in this strange, new world that surrounds me.

For the America I once knew is no more. In March 2020, it had been sacked and plundered in a coup d’état run by a shadow state, known by many as the deep state, an unelected bureaucratic cabal of a military-industrial-pharmaceutical-media complex that is accountable to no one. And where I live in the Hudson Valley of New York, a bastion of liberals, who with the invasion of the COVID-19 psyop had suddenly and, to me, inexplicably, abandoned their once proud heritage of supporting free speech, individual sovereignty, and world peace—and among whom I once counted myself—have left me feeling as if I am living behind enemy lines.

For they support none of this now and instead shoot their misguided arrows of blame for all the ills of the nation at the wrong target, thereby missing the mark. It bears noting here that the Greek word for “sin” is “hamartia,” which means “to miss the mark” or “to fail in one’s purpose.” It is commonly used in the New Testament, which was originally written in Greek, to describe various forms of wrongdoing or moral failure. Or, in a word, sin. Which has nothing to do with any sort of lascivious life we normally envision when we think of a sinful world. This sort of sin is far more subtle, as evil often is. It is the sin of ignorance.

***

“You never know how much you really believe anything until its truth or falsehood becomes a matter of life and death to you,” Lewis writes in A Grief Observed. “It is easy to say you believe a rope to be strong and sound as long as you are merely using it to cord a box. But suppose you had to hang by that rope over a precipice. Wouldn’t you then first discover how much you really trusted it? The same with people…. Only a real risk tests the reality of a belief.”

When billions of frightened souls fell for the ruse, that rope that Lewis writes about—the ties that commonly bind us to one another—snapped. All I had in my hands then was the equivalent of the frayed end of a rope, the other end of which was held by billions of others as they plunged into an abyss of imaginary fear whipped up by those very same lies that I and a pitifully small number of others so easily saw through. And as this happened, I was reminded of another Buddhist teaching of the grief felt by an armless mother watching her only child get swept away by a raging river.

All I could do was roil against that raging river of propaganda for sweeping away my trust in human intelligence and discernment that I had expected would have instinctively led us all to higher ground and out of harm’s way; roil at the deluge of lies that so suddenly flooded the earth in a kind of recurrence of the biblical account of the great flood and Noah and his ark. Only in this version, it was not God who was destroying the world; it was the scorpions that we read about in Ephesians 6:12: “For our struggle is not against enemies of blood and flesh, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the cosmic powers of this present darkness, against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places.”

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“I’ve often wondered why conservative Christians remain the most faithful friends of American Jews but have their friendship repeatedly spurned in favor of a Jewish alliance with the cultural and political left.” So wrote Paul Gottfried, editor of Chronicles magazine, a conservative monthly. The recent war in Gaza began with the butchering of 1,200 innocent Israelis, but as of this moment the response has been more than 55,000 dead Palestinians and over 80,000 wounded—a number of civilian casualties that would mortify Genghis Khan. The slightest mention of these innocent deaths caused by indiscriminate Israeli bombing has the neocons and AIPAC, not to mention my favorite newspaper, the New York Post, claiming the Nazis are back and a new Holocaust is about to begin. Only last week, 463 dead and 600 injured Palestinians were dismissed as if an exterminator had gotten rid of unwanted insects in a housing area. Anyone protesting is more likely to be called a Nazi than to be heard. In Britain, The Daily Telegraph and the Daily Mail, two conservative papers, hardly mentioned the casualties of the bombing. Columnist after columnist extolled Israel’s restraint in the face of 1,200 dead, as if the number 1,200 vastly exceeded the number 55,000.

Are Jewish lives far more precious than Palestinian ones? In America and Britain it is a given that Black Lives Matter. Well, they do in America and Britain, but they do not matter at all in Africa. Nor do Palestinian lives matter, at least not enough to be mentioned in America and in Britain. History has been weaponized by Zionists, and the Holocaust is invoked to silence any criticism of Israel. As I write, another 85 flies—sorry, Palestinians—have been killed. Watching this on screen, I see a father holding a dead 2-year-old child and demanding to know: What has he done to Israel? He is guilty of what?

“At times I wonder if Bibi Netanyahu spent his youth pulling wings from insects.”

Netanyahu ordered food, fuel, and medicine to be stopped for 2.3 million Gazans just before the resumption of hostilities. If this wasn’t a major crime, my name is Adolf Hitler. Western media correctly describes the October 7 Hamas attack as sadistic barbarism. What angers me is the same media fails to decry the starvation, the atrocities, and the bombing of women, children, and old people by 2,000-pound bombs provided to Israel by Americans.

Any criticism of Israeli brutalities is immediately labeled anti-Semitic, this being among the oldest tricks of the neocons, those nice guys who gave us the Iraq War; people like the Podhoretzes, the Kristols, the Feiths, the Wolfowitzes, and the Kagans. They knew what they were doing. Dubious accusations of anti-Semitism were reserved for paleoconservatives like my friend Pat Buchanan, a great American patriot who was not fooled about what lay behind the war: Israel worried about Saddam and needed Uncle Sam to pull the rug out from under him.

And then there’s Mearsheimer and Walt, two brilliant intellectuals who criticized the Jewish lobby and wrote some terrific books about the lobby’s influence in America. The level of unhinged, ferocious hatred of their books, devoid of any proof that they are anti-Semitic, was hysterical and venomous. Had they been related to Hitler by blood, and had they partaken in putting Jews in concentration camps, the attacks on their persons would not have been worse. But what really bothers me is the media’s lack of interest where Palestinian deaths and injuries are concerned. We used to think that various human subjects, like Rome’s slaves, gladiators, and barbarians, were not worthy of moral consideration. Eventually we corrected that, or thought we did. Roman emperor Domitian spent his youth catching and killing flies. He became an elder tyrant and the cruelest of them all. At times I wonder if Bibi Netanyahu spent his youth pulling wings from insects.

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David J. Stewart

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Mondoweiss

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The Nation

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Gail Appel wrote:

Divine Design – God doesn’t make mistakes.

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America is faced with serious problems that require immediate action. Illegal immigrants are committing horrible crimes. “Woke” programs are entrenched in our schools, from elementary schools through universities. Judges are abusing their powers in order to block President Trump from cutting the budget and firing federal employees. Some people respond to this dire situation by demanding more power for the president. We must have government by executive order, they say. Is dictatorship such a terrible word? Not if it is for the right cause.

This talk is dangerous nonsense and goes against sound Rothbardian doctrine. The modern institution of the presidency is the primary political evil Americans face, and the cause of nearly all our woes. It squanders the national wealth and starts unjust wars against foreign peoples that have never done us any harm. It wrecks our families, tramples on our rights, invades our communities, and spies on our bank accounts. It skews the culture toward decadence and trash. It tells lie after lie. Teachers used to tell school kids that anyone can be president. This is like saying anyone can go to Hell. It’s not an inspiration; it’s a threat.

The presidency—by which I mean the executive State—is the sum total of American tyranny. The other branches of government, including the presidentially appointed Supreme Court, are mere adjuncts. The presidency insists on complete devotion and humble submission to its dictates, even while it steals the products of our labor and drives us into economic ruin. It centralizes all power unto itself, and crowds out all competing centers of power in society, including the church, the family, business, charity, and the community. I’ll go further. The US presidency is the world’s leading evil. It is the chief mischief-maker in every part of the globe, the leading wrecker of nations, the usurer behind Third World debt, the bailer-out of corrupt governments, the hand in many dictatorial gloves, the sponsor and sustainer of the New World Order, of wars, interstate and civil, of famine and disease. To see the evils caused by the presidency, look no further than Iraq or Serbia, where the lives of innocents were snuffed out in pointless wars, where bombing was designed to destroy civilian infrastructure and cause disease, and where women, children, and the aged were denied essential food and medicine because of a cruel embargo. Look at the human toll taken by the presidency, from Dresden and Hiroshima to Waco and Ruby Ridge, and you see a prime practitioner of murder by government.

As the presidency assumes ever more power unto itself, it becomes less and less accountable and more and more tyrannical. These days, when we say the federal government, what we really mean is the presidency. When we say national priorities, we really mean what the presidency wants. When we say national culture, we mean what the presidency funds and imposes.

The presidency is presumed to be the embodiment of Rousseau’s general will, with far more power than any monarch or head of state in pre-modern societies. The US presidency is the apex of the world’s biggest and most powerful government and of the most expansive empire in world history. As such, the presidency represents the opposite of freedom. It is what stands between us and our goal of restoring our ancient rights.

And let me be clear: I’m not talking about any particular inhabitant of the White House. I’m talking about the institution itself, and the millions of unelected, unaccountable bureaucrats who are its acolytes. Look through the US government manual, which breaks down the federal establishment into its three branches. What you actually see is the presidential trunk, its Supreme Court stick, and its congressional twig. Practically everything we think of as federal—save the Library of Congress—operates under the aegis of the executive.

The libraries are filled with shelf after shelf of treatises on the American presidency. Save yourself some time, and don’t bother with them. Virtually all tell the same hagiographic story. Whether written by liberals or conservatives, they serve up the identical Whiggish pap: the history of the presidency is the story of a great and glorious institution. It was opposed early on, and viciously so, by the anti-federalists, and later, even more viciously, by Southern Confederates. But it has been heroically championed by every respectable person since the beginning of the republic.

The office of the presidency, the conventional wisdom continues, has changed not at all in substance, but has grown in stature, responsibility, and importance, to fulfill its unique mission on earth. As the duties of the office have grown, so has the greatness of the men who inhabit it. Each stands on the shoulders of his forerunners, and, inspired by their vision and decisiveness, goes on to make his own contribution to the ever-expanding magisterium of presidential laws, executive orders, and national security findings.

When there is a low ebb in the accumulation of power, it is seen as the fault of the individual and not the office. Thus the so-called postage-stamp presidents between Lincoln and Wilson are to be faulted for not following the glorious example set by Abe. They had a vast reservoir of power, but were mysteriously reluctant to use it. Fortunately that situation was resolved, by Wilson especially, and we moved onward and upward into the light of the present day. And every one of these books ends with the same conclusion: the US presidency has served us well.

The presidency is seemingly bound by law, but in practice it can do just about anything it pleases. It can order up troops anywhere in the world, just as  Obama, brain-dead Biden, and no Trump have done.It can plow up a religious community in Texas and bury its members because they got on somebody’s nerves at the Justice Department. It can tap our phones, read our mail, watch our bank accounts, and tell us what we can and cannot eat, drink, and smoke.

The presidency can break up businesses, shut down airlines, void drilling leases, bribe foreign heads of state or arrest them and try them in kangaroo courts, nationalize land, engage in germ warfare, firebomb crops in Colombia, overthrow any government anywhere, erect tariffs, round up and discredit any public or private assembly it chooses, grab our guns, tax our incomes and our inheritances, steal our land, centrally plan the national and world economy, and impose embargoes on anything anytime. No prince or pope ever had this ability.

Of course, none of the conventional bilge accords with reality. The US president is the worst outgrowth of a badly flawed constitution, imposed in a sort of coup against the Articles of Confederation. Even from the beginning, the presidency was accorded too much power. Indeed, an honest history would have to admit that the presidency has always been an instrument of oppression, from the Whiskey Rebellion to the War on Tobacco.

The presidency has systematically stolen the liberty won through the secession from Britain. From Jackson and Lincoln to McKinley and Roosevelt Junior, from Wilson and FDR to Truman and Kennedy, from Nixon and Reagan to Bush and Clinton, from Obama to Biden to Trump, it has been the means by which our rights to liberty, property, and self-government have been suppressed.

I can count on one hand the actions of presidents that actually favored the true American cause, meaning liberty. The overwhelming history of the presidency is a tale of overthrown rights and liberties, and the erection of despotism in their stead.

Conservatives used to understand this. In the last century, all the great political philosophers—men like John Randolph and John Taylor and John C. Calhoun—did. In this century, the Right was born in reaction to the imperial presidency. Men like Albert Jay Nock, Garet Garrett, John T. Flynn, and Felix Morley called the FDR presidency what it was: a US version of the dictatorships that arose in Russia and Germany, and a profound evil draining away the very life of the nation. They understood that FDR had brought both the Congress and the Supreme Court under his control, for purposes of power, national socialism, and war. He shredded what was left of the Constitution, and set the stage for all the consolidation that followed. Later presidents were free to nationalize the public schools, administer the economy according to the dictates of crackpot Keynesian economists, tell us who we must and who we must not associate with, nationalize the police function, and run an egalitarian regime that extols nondiscrimination as the sole moral tenet, when it is clearly not a moral tenet at all.

Let’s do everything we can to keep the presidency weak and to preserve the rule of law. Even if Trump does some things we like, he does many other thigs we dislike; and, if we have a powerful executive, the next “woke” president can drive us further down the road to ruin. And the next neocon president can unleash a nuclear war that will destroy the world.

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Consuming more of this Ultra-Processed World is not a path to “the good life,” it’s a path to the destruction and derangement of an Ultra-Processed Life.

The digital realm, finance, and junk food have something in common: they’re all ultra-processed, synthetic versions of Nature that have been designed to be compellingly addictive, to the detriment of our health and quality of life.

In focusing on the digital realm, money (i.e. finance, “growth,” consuming more as the measure of all that is good) and eating more of what tastes good, we now have an Ultra-Processed Life. All three– the digital realm, money in all its manifestations and junk food–are all consumed: they all taste good, i.e. generate endorphin hits, and so they draw us into their synthetic Ultra-Processed World.

We’re so busy consuming that we don’t realize they’re consuming us: in focusing on producing and consuming more goods and services as the sole measure of “the good life,” it’s never enough: if we pile up $1 million, we focus on piling up $2 million. If we pile up $2 million, we focus on accumulating $3 million. And so on, in every manifestation of money and consumption.

The digital realm consumes our lives one minute and one hour at a time, for every minute spent focusing on a screen is a minute taken from the real world, which is the only true measure of the quality of our life.

Ultra-processed food is edible, but it isn’t nutritious. It tastes good, but it harms us in complex ways we don’t fully understand.

This is the core dynamic of the synthetic “products and services” that dominate modern life: the harm they unleash is hidden beneath a constant flow of endorphin hits, distractions, addictive media and unfilled hunger for all that is lacking in our synthetic Ultra-Processed World: a sense of security, a sense of control, a sense of being grounded, and the absence of a hunger to find synthetic comforts in a world stripped of natural comforts.

In effect, we’re hungry ghosts in this Ultra-Processed World, unable to satisfy our authentic needs in a synthetic world of artifice and inauthenticity. The more we consume, the hungrier we become for what is unavailable in an Ultra-Processed Life.

We’re told there’s no upper limit on “growth” of GDP, wealth, abundance, finance or consumption, but this is a form of insanity, for none of this “growth” addresses what’s lacking and what’s broken in our lives, the derangements generated by consuming (and being consumed by) highly profitable synthetic versions of the real world.

Insanity is often described as doing the same thing and expecting a different result. So our financial system inflates yet another credit-asset bubble and we expect that this bubble won’t pop, laying waste to everyone who believed that doing the same thing would magically generate a different result.

But there is another form of insanity that’s easily confused with denial: we are blind to the artificial nature of this Ultra-Processed World and blind to its causal mechanisms: there is only one possible output of this synthetic version of Nature, and that output is a complex tangle of derangements that we seek to resolve by dulling the pain of living a deranged life.

We’re not in denial; we literally don’t see our Ultra-Processed World for what it is: a manufactured mirror world of commoditized derangements and distortions that have consumed us so completely that we’ve lost the ability to see what’s been lost.

Ultra-processed snacks offer the perfect metaphor. We can’t stop consuming more, yet the more we consume the greater the damage to our health. The worse we feel, the more we eat to distract ourselves, to get that comforting endorphin hit. It’s a feedback loop that ends in the destruction of our health and life.

Once we’ve been consumed by money, the digital realm and ultra-processed foods, we’ve lost the taste for the real world. A fresh raw carrot is sweet, but once we’re consuming a diet of sugary cold cereals and other equivalents of candy, we no longer taste the natural sweetness of a carrot; it’s been lost in the rush of synthetic extremes of salt, sugar and fat that make ultra-processed foods so addictive. To recover the taste of real food, we first have to completely abandon ultra-processed foods– Go Cold Turkey.

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Loyola University of Chicago used to have a law school professor named George Anastaplo.

I learned about him in my late teens through a long piece in The Chicago Tribune Sunday magazine, which was written before most newspaper journalism turned into irredeemable garbage.

I think it if fair to say he is someone who the informed readers of these pages should want to know. I wanted to know him better, so I showed up at his office one day.

Anastaplo was the brilliant and stubborn son of Greek immigrants. He came of age during World War Two. After serving as a B-17 and B-29 navigator in Europe during the war, he came back and graduated with a law degree from the University of Chicago.

When asked during the Illinois State Bar Association application process if someone who was a member of the Communist Party should be admitted to practice law, he answered, “Yes.” When questioned further, he explained that the belief in revolution was a founding premise of America, citing the Declaration of Independence. He said free association was a premise of the First Amendment to the US Constitution and that no one should be asked about their political affiliation in order to be a lawyer. It is worth noting that since the state bar association had a state-provided monopoly with total control over who could practice law in Illinois, this policy was as good as government asking about political affiliation in order to be admitted to practice law.

Anastaplo’s law school classmates who agreed with him simply said whatever they needed to say in order to get their law licenses and move on with life. Anastaplo effectively threw away his law career by taking this stand. He actually ended up driving a taxi to make ends meet. And he wasn’t even a communist. He was, in fact, quite the patriotic American.

He just thought the questions were a lousy thing to ask in an allegedly free country. He took the matter over the next ten years through the court system and eventually lost his case In re Anastaplo at the US Supreme Court.

Justice Hugo Black wrote the dissenting opinion. After reading it, Justice William Brennan told Black that his opinion would “immortalize Anastaplo.” Part of this opinion was read at Black’s funeral in 1971. The last line of the opinion was, “We must not be afraid to be free.” The dissenting opinion used to be required reading in my classes when I taught material covering that period.

I believe the Mises Institute, one of my favorite non-profit organizations, exists partly to inspire young men and young women to be more like Anastaplo and to fight the principled fight regardless of the cost. I like people who stand on principle, even if I am not in total agreement with them. I like organizations that do the same. On top of it, Anastaplo had such a keen and hungry mind that allowed him to see all angles of an argument, rather than just being one who blindly followed. As far as the students of Leo Strauss go, the father of American neo-conservatism, there are few students who I have encountered who I truly appreciate. Anastaplo is my favorite. There are aspects of Anastaplo’s life and his intellectual influences that I do not agree with. There are other aspects that I find totally inspiring.

The Chicago Tribune piece that I read those years ago had some life advice from Anastaplo, “Avoid specialization too early in your careers. Allow principles to guide your decisions, even in the face of fear or ignorance. Act prudently; behave honorably. Buy a subscription to the symphony to enlarge your world. Know Shakespeare. Be a student all your life.” (emphasis added)

This advice stood out from the rest of the article. Shakespeare? Symphony? What could these possibly have to do with being a freedom fighter? What could these possibly have to do with living the principled life?

One of Europe’s many gifts to the world is classical music. There is beauty in classical music. I will list a few thoughts around why beauty is good and worthy of pursuit.

1.) There is beauty in the world.

2.) Aesthetics matter. They remind us that life doesn’t suck.

3.) There is ugliness in the world. If you do not stop to curate what you choose to be exposed to during the day, your life will be filled with the ugly.

4.) Beauty is worth fighting for.

5.) Beauty is worth spending time on.

6.) Beauty is worth pausing your day for. One a day is set in motion, there are few who are flexible enough to pause when the moment truly calls for it.

7.) Beauty is worth paying for. Those who are cantankerous will fight at a moment’s notice, and will waste their time at a moment’s notice, but expect them to spend a dime on the thing that they will spend time and spill blood over, and they suddenly look much less principled, because they will then cantankerously fight will all their energy to hold on to their precious shekels.

8.) Beauty reminds that you are not just a worker drone.

9.) Beauty reminds that you are not just a slavish consumer. Virtually all channels of communication have turned into insistence that you be a slavish consumer. Don’t fall for it. Yes, buy things of value to you, but do so thoughtfully, prayerfully. They think they can get you to drink Pepsi with your next meal if they just say that word 8 times in front of you in the next 4 hours. Don’t be the marketing con man’s easy mark.

10.) Beauty inspires more creation of beauty. It inspires the creative mind to go create. It inspires the uncreative mind to contemplate that he too can create. It has potential to make the mind fecund, fertile, even prolifically so. This can be a reason that beauty can easily turn into an object of worship, but it should not be. It is but a gift. It is the Gift Giver (James 1:17) who is worthy of worship.

So, given the fact that a brilliant man in my youth spoke these words to me through a journalist, and then elaborated upon them in person, and convinced me that I needed a symphony subsection and more Shakespeare in my life, I tend to pursue those things every chance I get. I am not shy about welcoming others to join me either, since I know how edifying such activities can be.

I will be going to the symphony next weekend in Chicago. Those readers who are on my daily email list are invited. If you joined my daily email list, you could perhaps come too. But I don’t necessarily want to push you to do that. It might not be right for you for a variety of reasons. What I do however want to push you to do is this: Go to the symphony. Have a subscription.

Another of Europe’s gifts to the world is the work of William Shakespeare. Anastaplo is right that one should know Shakespeare. I had to read 7 or 8 Shakespeare plays aloud with a group of people on Tuesday nights, 3 or 4 hours at a time, before I finally started to be able to penetrate the language. Once the language is penetrated, the work is brimming with so much wisdom and beauty that it so often repays the one who takes the time, to read, re-read, and even memorize. From the St. Crispin’s Day Speech, to the sonnets, how glad I am to have a repository of that knowledge in my head.

The King James Bible specifically and the Bible in general requires similar repetitive reading before one can begin to penetrate the language and to begin to recognize the beauty contained within the language on paper. It is the only English language text that I have found more beneficial than Shakespeare to read, re-read, and memorize.

Similarly, in regards to repetition, I had to attend the symphony every week for some time before I finally got into a rhythm and began to understand the music. My favorite way to do so is to come with paper and pen and to write as the performance takes place. Some of my most passionate and beautiful writing has happened at the symphony. It took me time to understand that. There have been years when I have volunteered at the symphony to have exposure to more music, years when I had more than one symphony subscription and have dragged friends along, or years when I have multiple times each week attended. When you submerge yourself in brilliance and beauty, that brilliance and beauty refined through you, starts to come out of you.

I love listening to classical music in digital format but it is no replacement for feeling the tympani boom through your chest, to watch the aria mellow the entire room, to hear the collective sigh as the strings quiet down leaving a tension in the air broken by the triangle.

I did not always see that beauty, nor have that appreciation, but it has to start somewhere, and I think if you do not have that appreciation, today is the day to start with it.

There is beauty in the world. You must not forget that. Dear reader, you must not forget that. Dear woman of letters, you must not forget that. Dear man of ideas, you must not forget that. There is beauty in the world.

Get on the California Zephyr and sit in the observation car. Why? Because it’s beautiful. It’s not efficient. It’s not especially comfortable. It’s not fast, nor is it reliable. It’s beautiful to take the California Zephyr from San Francisco to Chicago.

Get three friends together and act out Troilus and Cressida. Why? Because it’s beautiful. It’s not efficient. It’s not especially comfortable. It’s not fast. It’s beautiful to spend your evening reading Shakespeare aloud in a small group.

Get online and find tickets for the next performance of classical music in your area. Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony would be a treasure. Or Vivaldi’s Four Seasons. And while classics known to you may be played, hopefully you will have a chance at something lesser known and equally beautiful, as well. Why? Because it’s beautiful. It’s not efficient. It’s not especially comfortable. It’s not fast. It’s beautiful to spend your evening listening to classical music in a symphony hall.

It will enrich the soul in ways you cannot even imagine. It will enrich your mind and impact your life. Cherish the beautiful. Stop hurrying. Stop doing what is popular. Stop bowing down to the god of efficiency. Seek that which is beautiful. Cherish it.

And not just once. But often. Break through the learning curve and make it part of your life. Make the pursuit of beauty a part of your life.

That is one of modernity’s great gifts. The technology is helpful. The efficiency is helpful. Technology for technology’s sake and efficiency for efficiency’s sake is a deep and worthless pit. Efficiency that makes more time for that which you love, technology that makes more time for that which you love, that is good. Embrace beauty. Either find beauty in all that you do or change what you do. So much of life depends on your ability to stop ceaselessly doing and to be able to pause and recognize beauty in your midst and to appreciate it for what it is.

Why? Not because it is efficient. Not because it is especially comfortable. Not because it is fast. But because it is beautiful.

The post Why You Should Either Come With Me Or Go on Your Own to the Symphony appeared first on LewRockwell.

It has long been a commonplace among commentators of the Confessions that the first nine books are about Augustine’s ardent search for truth, leaving reflections on its meaning for the remaining four books. In other words, now that he’s determined to cleave to Christ, to commune with Him in the most intimate way in the life of the Church, certain implications follow which Augustine is only too eager to flesh out over the course of the final number of books.

Putting it another way, one could say that while the first nine tell the story of his conversion, including the major bumps along the way, the last four focus on various applications thereof. For instance, the use of memory (Book X); the problem of time (Book XI); unpacking Genesis (Book XII); further exposition of Genesis (Book XIII).

Meanwhile, with Book IX what we have is a description of everything that has happened to Augustine since his conversion. These are the events of real and compelling importance which transpired in the immediate period following his dramatic turn to God, to Jesus Christ, and to the Church He founded, of which there are several worth taking a look at.

Two of them, by the way, happen almost at once, beginning with Augustine’s resignation as a teacher of Rhetoric, followed by his retirement to the country for a life of prayer and study. Concerning the first, his professorial post, he writes to the people of Milan, “notifying them that they must find another vender of words for their students.” And then, as always, he acknowledges before God: “The deed was done, and you rescued my tongue, as you had already rescued my heart.”

At the same time, he and a handful of others elect to leave the public life altogether, sequestering themselves outside Milan for a more single-minded pursuit of the contemplative life. “Once we were there,” he tells God, “I began at last to serve you with my pen.” Which he proceeds to do, drawing upon a number of the psalms for nourishment and inspiration. “How I cried out to you, my God, when I read the Psalms of David, those hymns of faith, those songs of a pious heart in which the spirit of pride can find no place!”

“How they set me on fire with love of you!” he continues, very much in the same rhapsodic vein. “I was burning to echo them to all the world, if only I could, so that they might vanquish man’s pride.” He reads on, quoting from Psalm 4: “Tremble and sin no more,” which, he tells God, moves him deeply, “because now I had learnt to tremble for my past, so that in future I might sin no more. And it was right that I should tremble,” he adds, recalling years spent inoculated against the truth of God and His creation because it was not some other nature belonging to the tribe of darkness that had sinned in me, as the Manichees pretend. They do not tremble, but “they store up retribution for themselves against the day of retribution, when God will reveal the justice of His judgments.”

Yes, the love of God ignites no end of fire in Augustine’s heart. And yet, at the same time, it leaves him little possibility of spreading that fire to others. All those “dead corpses,” he calls them, of whom I had myself been one. For I had been evil as the plague. Like a cur I had snarled blindly and bitterly against the Scriptures, which are sweet with the honey of heaven and radiant with your light. And now I was sick at heart over the rebellion of those who hate them. (citing Psalm 138)

He will soon need the grace of baptism to heal his heart, which is another of those salient events that follow his conversion. And when at last it comes, it fills him with a certitude of joy he had never felt before. “All anxiety over the past melted away,” he reports, for I was lost in wonder and joy, meditating upon your far-reaching providence for the salvation of the human race…The music surged in my ears, truth seeped into my heart, and my feelings of devotion overflowed, so that the tears streamed down. But they were tears of gladness.

Soon thereafter, Augustine, along with Monica, his mother, and several others, leave Milan for the long journey home, stopping at Ostia, at the mouth of the Tiber, along the way. It is there that Monica will die, an event on which Augustine will dilate for the balance of Book IX, omitting not a word, he says, “that my mind can bring to birth concerning your servant, my mother. In the flesh she brought me to birth in this world: in her heart she brought me to birth in your eternal light.”

Clearly, after God, it is to Monica his mother that Augustine owes everything. And he heaps upon every memory he has of her, of the great goodness of her life and example, all possible praise. Including the fact that in the days before her death, having at last seen her prayers answered, and thus nothing more remains to be done before taking leave of this world, she tells him that she no longer wishes her body to be returned to Africa for burial in her native soil, despite an earlier and oft-repeated anxiety that she lie alongside her husband in the grave she had prepared for herself.

“You will bury your mother here,” she tells him. “It does not matter where you bury my body. Do not let that worry you! All I ask of you is that, wherever you may be, you should remember me at the altar of the Lord.”

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Readers of LRC have long been treated to dissertations from the Midwestern Doctor that run counter to the medical ‘Conventional Wisdom’. I myself suffered through many years of seeing poor quality medical research. I was hired by an elite private medical center in 1999 specifically to fix the Clinical Trials software purchased from another elite private medical center but were unable to deploy because it did not work. It was my introduction to research in the medical world. Disclaimer: I do not now and never had have a phd, but I am good at applied mathematics and do know how to make computer systems work. I have spent a fair portion of my professional life in research. This was the background I brought to medicine; math, computers and  total lack of healthcare knowledge beyond finding my doctor’s office. What I learned in the first fifteen years was eye opening and not in a good way.

Jakob Bernoulli was an 18th century Swiss mathematician that first recognized that statistical correlation is not causation. It was named after him Bernoulli’s Fallacy. There is a superb book on this topic on Amazon; well worth the $30 cost. Here is a great example of the correlation issue: all criminals breathe oxygen thus anyone that breathes oxygen is a criminal. Clearly bad logic. The correlation is criminals and breathing oxygen; the illogic is equating breathing oxygen with criminality. What Bernoulli was really saying is look at the data and draw conclusions from it. This is also known as Bayesian statistics. Not doing this is the province of speculation a fancy word for guessing.

I soon learned that modern medicine has ‘biostatistics’. After a little research I realized why: mathematical statistics is a rigorous discipline based upon proof. The diamond hard concept that all of math, physics and engineering are based upon. Biostatistics are not rigorous mathematics in fact just the opposite. It is solutions in search of problems. It is literally the reification of Bernoulli’s Fallacy that Naomi Wolf, a Rhodes Scholar at New College Oxford, is a superb author but may not have a mathematical bone in her body nonetheless her book The Pfizer Papers: Pfizer’s Crimes Against Humanity is literally all about how correlation isn’t sound science by any stretch of the imagination. In the case of COVID-19 bad science equates with bad outcomes. Outcomes are the only criteria any medical treatment or drug must be measured against using Bayesian Statistics not what the Congress, a Big Pharma CEO, their Board’s of Directors and marketing department dreamed was true.

Medical biostatistics is literally the worst offender when it comes to Bernoulli’s Fallacy. It’s riddled with p-hacking aka data dredging, publication bias, and overreliance on frequentist methods, which often treat statistical significance as proof of causation rather than just as an observation.

The Problem: Correlation ≠ Causation

• Most medical research relies on observational studies, which inherently suffer from confounding variables.
• Even randomized controlled trials (RCTs) are often misinterpreted because they don’t prove causation; they just reduce bias in correlation measurements.
• P-values are the worst culprits. If p < 0.05, researchers treat results as “significant,” ignoring Bayesian probability and effect sizes.

Example: The Hormone Replacement Therapy (HRT) Disaster

• In the 1980s and 1990s, studies showed that women on HRT had lower rates of heart disease.
• Doctors assumed HRT prevented heart disease and prescribed it widely.
• Later RCTs showed no protective effect—the correlation was due to wealthier, healthier women choosing HRT (confounding factor).

Modern Biostatistics Still Falls for This

• COVID-19 Studies: Many studies used relative risk reduction (RRR) instead of absolute risk reduction (ARR), misleading the public about vaccine efficacy.
• Nutrition Studies: Coffee is bad for you. Wait, no, coffee is good for you. Nutritional epidemiology is a dumpster fire of correlation-based claims.
• Genetic Research: GWAS (Genome-Wide Association Studies) link genes to diseases, but they rarely prove a causal mechanism.

The Fix? Bayesian Thinking

• Instead of p-values, use Bayesian credible intervals—but frequentist stats dominate because they are easier to publish and explain.
• Mendelian randomization tries to fix correlation issues, but it’s not foolproof.
• More RCTs, fewer observational studies—but funding biases favor quick, cheap correlations.

This is my opinion, buyt based on my experience modern medical research is not based upon Bayesian probability and statistics thus any results from biostatistic’s might be taken with a grain of salt, possibly even the whole shaker’s worth. When you understand Bernoulli’s Fallacy and the difference between statistical significance and the errors inherent in using correlation as causation we come upon the gross problem with so much of medical research.

Researchers have a disquieting tendency to find what they were looking for. The window they see through when looking is the correlation/causation dichotomy. President Trump is a lot of things but I would bet all my bitcoin that he is not a mathematician. President Biden might not have even been conscious during 2021 and it is for this reason that bad science and ruthless marketing led to billions of taxpayer dollars going straight into Big Pharma’s pockets while potentially creating millions of cripples around the world for a non-solution to a non-problem. That is where the data leads.

The post On Medical Fallacy appeared first on LewRockwell.

A significant amount of US military power has been on the move over this past week, including several B-2 strategic bombers which have landed at the US military base in Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean just over 2,000 miles southeast of Iran. According to press reports this is the most significant B-2 presence on the Island in nearly half a decade. In addition flight trackers are showing increased activity by at least nine KC-135R refueling aircraft in the region. Several C-17 cargo planes have also been spotted by satellites on the Island.

The US President has ordered US Carrier Strike Group Carl Vinson to the Mideast.

While the Administration continues to escalate its illegal bombing campaign against Yemen – some are reporting more than 60 strikes today alone and President Trump promises that they will continue “for a long time” – speculation is increasing that the Diego Garcia build-up is the beginning of the long process of positioning US military muscle for an attack on Iran.

President Trump today warned although his “big preference is we work it out with Iran…if we don’t work it out, bad bad things are gonna happen with Iran.”

So is the US president elected with the promise to end wars rather than start them ready to launch a war against the modern, technologically-advanced nation of 90 million with an extremely complicated terrain, advanced military capabilities, and a newly-signed strategic partnership treaty with Russia?

No one knows.

Congress seems uninterested in its Constitutional obligation to serve as the red light or green light for war – there has been nary a peep over Trump’s bombing of Yemen to, as his top aides were caught saying, “send a message.” Does anyone believe they will come out of their slumber as Hegseth, Waltz, Rubio, and the rest of the gang that couldn’t shoot straight (or at least plan a war on Signal straight) position the US for an attack on Iran?

Trump has continued – and perhaps even accelerated – in his second term a pattern of extreme rhetorical escalation followed by retrenchment possibly as a means of gaining the attention of the party he is addressing. For example he warned Russia earlier this month that he would increase sanctions and destroy its economy before backing down to a series of lengthy phone calls and lately capitulating to all of Russia’s demands.

So is this a big bluff to get Tehran back to negotiate the deal that Trump himself abrogated when he took office the first time? (And if so, why would Iran trust Washington this time)? Or will Trump (again) heed the call of Israel’s Netanyahu and expend US blood and treasure to take out Israel’s enemies?

Already Trump’s top picks, including his ambassador to Tel Aviv Mike Huckabee who is doing his best Colin Powell impression – claiming that as soon as Iran takes out Tel Aviv it will turn its sights to Tennessee – are urging action against “the head of the snake” as Bibi is wont to describe Iran. The pieces are falling into place and Trump’s entire cabinet is chock full of individuals for whom a war with Iran is the single most important item on the foreign policy agenda.

As analyst William Schryver points out, Iran is certainly not Yemen, Afghanistan, Saddam’s Iraq, Gaddafi’s Libya, or Noriega’s Panama. The United States under four years of mismanagement by whoever was acting as Biden’s brain has already thrown everything it had available in attempt to secure a strategic defeat for Russia and lost. The DC neocons move from failure to failure without skipping a beat, even as the US economy is bled dry by the war machine.

This war would be the end of Trump’s presidency and could well be the end of the US economy itself. All for an outrageous domino theory presented by (to a large degree) US religious extremists not unlike the religious extremists they claim to oppose abroad – that Tehran is seeking to “take over” the United States. It’s bonkers…yet for those of us who spend decades watching US foreign policy bonkers usually wins the day. Strap in…

Reprinted with permission from The Ron Paul Institute.

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