Lew Rockwell Institute

The release of the pardoned J6 political prisoners has, for the most part, gone well, but in a few instances vindictive Democrat officials still hold a few of the pardoned.  It is a fluid situation, and my figures might be out of date by the time you read them.

The worst offender is the black female mayor of D.C. who at last report has not released 12 of the pardoned.  Kentucky is still holding 6, and there are a few others being held here and there.  Democrats in Pennsylvania were looking for a way of duplicating the pardoned federal charges with state charges in order to continue the incarceration of the pardoned political prisoners. It is possible that some of the non released J6 political prisoners have outstanding state charges unrelated to the J6 fake charges.

It seems that at the time of Trump’s pardon there were 242 J6 political prisoners still in prison and a number I don’t have in halfway houses.

The issue has been raised whether some of the J6 prisoners had  chargeable offenses and should not have been pardoned. This is a red herring as rally attendees were arrested irrespective of whether they committed an offense. Before buying this argument, remember the facts.  The only reason there was a rally on January 6 was that the Democrats stole the 2020 presidential election, refused the evidence to be investigated, instead bringing court cases against those who made evidence-backed charges of electoral fraud.  

The rally was held to support the Republican senators who intended to present evidence of theft at the January 6 meeting when Congress assembled to certify Biden’s election.  To prevent the presentation of the evidence, the Democrats and RINO Republicans such as Mitch McConnell used the FBI and police to stage an “insurrection” in order to break up the meeting and prevent the presentation of the evidence. 

Remember that President Trump wanted to send 10,000 National Guardsmen to keep matters under control, but this interfered with the insurrection plot and Democrat House Speaker Nancy Pelosi prevented the deployment of the National Guard. 

Remember also that the FBI as revealed by FBI whistleblowers had agents embedded in the rally who incited violence at the Capitol.  

Remember also that the police began the violence by firing rubber bullets and teargas into the crowd of peaceful protesters.  These acts of violence committed by corrupt police incited the rally attendees to push back police barricades, which the whore US media played to the hilt as an “insurrection.”

Remember also that an appearance of violence was created by having a corrupt police officer fatally shoot US Airforce veteran Ashley Babbitt. The shooting was never investigated, and the officer was promoted for murdering an Airforce veteran without cause.

Remember that Democrats refused to release the videos of the alleged “storming of the Capitol.”  After Republicans regained control of the House, the videos were released.  The videos showed that there was no storming.  The police opened he doors and escorted the rally attendees around the Capitol.  There was no “invasion” of the Capitol.

Remember also that Derrick Garland lied through his teeth that the rally attendees killed a police officer.  The police officer’s family denied this.  The officer died the next day from a heart attack.

Remember also that the police attacked rally attendees with batons and bats, and attendees who raised their arms in defense were charged with “assaulting a police officer.” 

Remember also that a totally corrupt Justice (sic) Department violated privacy rights in order to hunt down and charge anyone who was present at the Capitol part of the rally.  Instead of calling “suspects” in for questioning, FBI SWAT teams, reincarnations of the Nazi Gestapo, broke into Americans’ homes in the middle of the night terrorizing children while dragging handcuffed parents out of the house.

Remember also the false and invented charges were enhanced with serious felony charges for those who refused to self-incriminate with a plea bargain.  The Democrats just wanted “convictions” for the whore media to hype to protect their rigged scheme from collapse.  

Remember also the instances of the wrongly incarcerated being held in solitary confinement, beaten, and imprisoned far from home in order to deny them support from visitations. Many were constantly shifted from prison to prison so that families did not know where they were.

The false indictments and convictions cost many their careers, their wives, their businesses, their homes. A young millionaire businessman lost his business and his wife. A medical student was disowned by his cowardly and stupid parents who fell for the bullshit fed to them. 

The abuses suffered by the J6 did not stop with their pardon. Had Gary Heavin and others not organized to meet the pardoned upon their release, some might have frozen to death. Some of the pardoned were released from prisons in the middle of nowhere in short pants into freezing temperatures without a cent and no ability to get to a safe place.

The stinking dirty Biden Regime and the gang of despicable criminals that comprised its Justice (sic) Department gave America FOUR YEARS of a Stalinist Gulag Archipelago.  Pardons for their innocent victims is just the first step of restoring justice to America. All of those responsible for the “insurrection” hoax and convictions of innocent Americans must be hunted down, arrested, indicted, and convicted.  

If the Democrats’ criminal act of stealing a presidential election and then, in order to cover up their theft,  refocusing attention on a concocted “insurrection” and falsely convicting 1,500 innocent Americans for something that never happened can escape accountability, Trump has no chance of making America great again.

The post The Democrats Who Stole an Election and Imprisoned the Protesters Must Be Held Accountable appeared first on LewRockwell.

Two months ago President Trump announced his ambitions to enlarge the United States.

Specifically;

In Latin America, Trump wants to retake the Panama canal, rename the Gulf of Mexico and bring Mexico to heal. This superficially evokes the Monroe Doctrine but more cogently involves controlling South America with its economic, political and migration problems.

Parenthetically a lack of rain in Central America may make the Panama Canal become unusable for modern navigation. In recent years hundreds of ships wait daily to cross between the Pacific and the Atlantic side even as they are unable to carry a full load. Maybe US technology and money might help.

The Chinese are buying up portions of South America and gaining economic sway in that area. Trump frets.

The coast of the United States roughly equals that of Mexico on the Gulf. I suppose Trump’s meaningless change in wordage is harmless.

To the north, the Greenland and Canada annexation schemes mention acquisition of natural resources like oil, minerals, lumber and fishing.  Greenland is on the shortest route between Europe and the USA.  The island can be used to spy on the Russian Northern Fleet as it enters the Atlantic.

All of these formulations are boilerplate and usually accompanied by maps which are crimped to support the author’s position. I found a number of contradictions among them and wanted to see the big picture. Accordingly, I invested seven bucks and bought two beach ball globes,  inflated one, studied it and found a vaster vision that might or might not color the president’s eruptions. (The second one goes to some grandkids.)

1) What’s obvious is that South America is by and large to the east of North America. I had not appreciated how wide the Pacific Ocean is. It requires a ship to travel almost halfway around the World to get to the Panama Canal from Japan or from China, in part because the two American continents slope away from Asia as they go further south.

2)The USA control over commerce to and among Central and South American countries at Panama allows China to invest money but always under the eye and control of the USA.

3) If central America continues its drought, the Panama canal will become unusable no matter what planned improvements are accomplished.  Other routes between the Pacific and Atlantic will become necessary.  And that’s an overlooked geopolitical twist to Trump’s northern yen.

4) There is a theory that the globe is warming and melting arctic ice will allow shipping in the Arctic. The  Northeast passage along Russia’s northern coast is already operational. Russia is building a nuclear powered icebreakers fleet to fully develop this passage.  It is already allowing Chinese and other ships to bypass the Suez and to shorten their journey to Europe.  It is operational for 8 months a year.

5) This northeastern passage will encourage development of Russia’s far north. It also goes through the White Sea where Russia’s north fleet is stationed.  The attached White Canal allows barge traffic to get to the Bay of Finland via St. Petersburg, and to the Caspian and Mediterranean Seas via the Volga and Don Rivers. Eastern Europe/Western Asia might bloom.

6) The Northwest passage has been a storied part of the American mythos, think Henry Hudson and the Lewis and Clark expeditions. It has now been developed on the American and Canadian side of the Arctic. The passage is being used in exploratory ventures by cruise ships and some commercial shipping during the summer.  It starts in the Labrador Channel between Greenland and the Maritime provinces, navigates an archipelago of sparsely inhabited Canadian islands, hugs Alaska’s northern shore and exits at the Bering Strait. Shervin House is a Canadian Youtuber who has illustrated the Northwest passage potential in an interesting way.

7) An unappreciated potential for this Northwest passage evident only on a globe shows that this passage passes by Hudson’s and James Bays, bodies of water that would let ocean shipping go far south into North America without going into the Atlantic. Ocean shipping might get to within 400 miles of Lake Superior.The area to the west of these two bodies of water seems to be flat and uninhabited. Building  a canal or railroad is feasible. Might shipping into the great lakes rejuvenate that entire region?

8) At the Pacific end, both the northeast and northwest passages begin at the Bering Strait which is 51 miles wide. There are two islands in its center: Big Diomede is owned by Russia while Little Diomede is owned by the US. The stretch of water between these two islands is only about 2.5 miles wide. Technically both countries could plausibly claim that any shipping into the Arctic from the Pacific invades their sovereign territorial waters and needs to obey their demands.

9). The Kremlin,  addressing Trump’s northern ambitions, worried about conflict but also talked about preserving peace and stability in the arctic. Putin sees the arctic as a commercial corridor as well as a place for resource recovery.

10) My evaluation of the two passages as seen on the globe seems to show that the Northwest passage on the American side is shorter than the Russian but that both extend to about the same degree of latitude north.

11) If the USA  develops the icebreakers and support facilities for a northwest passage, ships would have to choose between Russian and USA routes. Ultimate destinations and costs would of course be decisive but at some level the two routes and countries would compete. But competition is not war and duopolies almost invariably lapse into collusion.

12) If China (which is referring to itself as a “near Arctic power”) and others want to enter the Arctic from the Pacific to recover minerals, oil or other resources it must pass through the Bering Strait owned by two of its tough competitors.

13) Russia and China seem to be good buddies lately. But this has been the case on several previous occasions only to revert to mild hostility at other times.

14) Why would either Russia or the USA want to let China partake in the stripmining and environmental degradation? The Russians will justifiably worry about China’s taking over their Eastern Siberian wasteland. The US would want to retain control over the raw materials and political influence that allowing passage between the Atlantic and Pacific would give it.

15) The north edge of Greenland is really not necessary for the development of a northwest passage but owning it would deny China a roost. This makes Trumpian ambitions seem almost reasonable as a way to keep China tame.

16) Norway is the only other Nation that has ready access to the Arctic.  Norwegians, as judged by the politics of their cousins in Minnesota, tend toward addled. But Norway shares a border with Russia and its northern fleet is offshore. (Ditto for the negligible fronting of Finland and Sweden.) All are in NATO for what it’s worth. None would defy the USA or Russia and allow China to get a perch from which it could launch mining or drilling ventures.

17) Our elites seem to be bothered by China’s economic success which they want to abort by inciting a war over Taiwan. The US seizure of Canada and Greenland would cancel this claim.

18) The Chinese are smart, hardworking people who love to make the money which they use to buy other people. They seldom make war. They will certainly try to exploit the Arctic’s resources and use the new transportation routes. Their work will be subdued if entry and establishing a beachhead are restricted by the USA and Russia.

19) Another effect of the establishing of a northwest passage and of exploring for oil and minerals might cause another Sputnik effect among American youth.

20) Among American weapon systems that have been shown to be useless are the surface fleet of carriers, battleships and the like. Might these be converted to ice breakers instead of being sunk by Houthis?

I, as a libertarian, purposely spun my contemplation of a plastic globe to hint at world peace. Should it work out that way, Trump would be catapulted into being one of the immortals.

But he’ll hear only from the brainy guys in our national policy circle jerk who repeat endlessly the now trite “natural resources recovery” drill to condemn Trump’s enlargement of America.

My contribution may be flawed but the primal observations are solid.

I don’t approve of President Trump’s national aggrandizement or of using politics to thwart enterprises like those of the Chinese that increase human wealth and comfort that I’ve projected in this article, but maybe others seeing my look at the plastic world might develop other, more hopeful scenarios.

The post Trump’s American Expansion and my Beach Ball Globe appeared first on LewRockwell.

For as the body is one, and hath many members, and all the members of that one body, being many, are one body: so also is Christ. For by one Spirit are we all baptized into one body, whether we be Jews or Gentiles, whether we be bond or free; and have been all made to drink into one Spirit. (I Corinthians 12:12, 13)

And whether one member suffer, all the members suffer with it; or one member be honoured, all the members rejoice with it. Now ye are the body of Christ, and members in particular. (I Corinthians 12:26, 27)

The title of this column bears the same title as my homily last Sunday, which is taken from the above Scriptures.

The New Covenant has made all who come to faith in Christ one body: the Church, the Body of Christ.

Scofield Futurists (aka Christian Zionists) say that Christ is two bodies: the Body of saved Gentiles and the Body of Jews, saved or unsaved. Futurists are still living in the Old Covenant.

But the New Covenant Scriptures are clear:

There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither bond nor free, there is neither male nor female: for ye are all one in Christ Jesus.  And if ye be Christ’s, then are ye Abraham’s seed, and heirs according to the promise. (Galatians 3:28, 29)

I submit that as a whole America’s evangelicals are spiritually schizophrenic.

On the one hand, they spend countless time and money sending missionaries around the world. On the other hand, they are completely deaf and dumb to the plight of Palestinian Christians—all of whom are members of the Body of Christ.

But why are evangelicals deaf and dumb to the plight of our persecuted brothers and sisters in Palestine? Because the persecutors are Israelis, who evangelicals erroneously believe are God’s chosen people.

Again, they believe Christ is two bodies: The Gentile Christian Body and the Israeli body, Christian or not. They further believe that the Israeli body can commit any crime, mass murder or genocide against the Christian body—with the blessing of God. Of course, it wouldn’t work the other way around. If that’s not schizophrenia, tell me what is.

The truth is, the Israeli attack against the Body of Christ in Palestine is an attack against the Body of Christ everywhere.

I hear Christians saying, “Things are going to improve with Donald Trump in the White House. See, there is already a ceasefire.”

Bravo to Trump’s Executive Order (EO) freeing the January 6 protesters. Bravo to his EO releasing the documents from the assassinations of JFK, RFK and MLK. He also needs to unseal the documents from the assassination of Malcom X, 9/11 and the attack on the USS Liberty.

No doubt, Donald Trump will do some things that conservatives will like—including some things I will like. Conservatives and evangelicals are Trump’s base; he is required to mollify them in one way or another, as he made many promises to them.

The one Person Trump didn’t bother to take an oath to is GOD. Donald Trump did NOT put his hand on a Bible when he took the oath of office.

But regarding Palestine: First, there is no ceasefire. Israel has merely shifted the battlefield from Gaza to the West Bank. Plus, if Trump truly wants to bring peace to the Middle East, why is he sending 1,800 2,000-pound bombs (“Bunker Busters”) to Israel this week—during a “ceasefire,” no less? If any of those bombs are used against the Palestinians, Trump will be as guilty of genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity as Joe Biden.

Second, Trump has filled his cabinet and top executive leadership positions with uber Zionists—many of them Christian Zionists (Mike Huckabee, Elise Stefanik, Marco Rubio, Kristi Noem, Mike Waltz, Pete Hegseth, Pam Bondi, Sebastian Gorka, Steve Witkoff, etc.).

Now listen very carefully to what Trump told a reporter in the Oval Office shortly after he was inaugurated:

Reporter: How confident are you, Mr. President, that you can keep the ceasefire in Gaza and conclude the three phases of the deal?

Trump: I’m not confident. That’s not our war; it’s their war. But I’m not confident. But I think they’re very weakened on the other side.

Not our war? Either Trump is a blooming idiot, or he is a pathological liar (probably both). Every missile, every bomb, every jet, every tank, every piece of intelligence, communications and surveillance is marked Made in the U.S.A.

Plus, if it’s “not our war,” why does Trump say, “They’re very weakened on the other side”? Trump talks out of his rear end. In his two-sentence response to that question, he—probably without even realizing what he was doing—completely contradicted himself. If it’s “not our war,” then there is no “other side,” because we wouldn’t have a side.

This is quintessential Donald Trump.

Gaza, boy. I looked at a picture of Gaza. Gaza is like a massive demolition site. That place is…it’s really got to be rebuilt in a different way.

Wow! Trump “looked at a picture of Gaza.” He’s the President of the United States, and he “looked at a picture of Gaza.” Obviously, he didn’t take a close look at the hundreds of thousands—NOT tens of thousands—of dead bodies that WE, the government and people of the United States (through our tax dollars), have helped Israel slaughter.

I wonder why Gaza looks like a “massive demolition site.” Because that’s what it is. Israel committed mass ethnic cleansing, mass murder and genocide (meaning international war crimes and crimes against humanity) using U.S. bombs and jets to destroy virtually all of Gaza’s infrastructure, making it unlivable.

Reporter: Do you plan to help rebuilding Gaza?

Trump: I might. You know, Gaza is interesting. It’s a phenomenal location on the sea. The best weather. You know, everything’s good. It’s like some beautiful things could be done with it. But it’s very interesting. But some fantastic things could be done with Gaza.

Reporter: How do you see the future in governance for Gaza?

Trump: Well, it depends. I can’t imagine you could have…well, you certainly can’t have the people that were there. Most of them are dead. [Emphases added]

(Source)

Trump’s going to help rebuild Gaza “in a different way.”

“It’s a phenomenal location on the sea. The best weather. It’s like some beautiful things could be done with it. . . . Some fantastic things could be done with Gaza.”

BUT, “You certainly can’t have the people that were there [Palestinians]. Most of them are dead.”

This is NOT the language of a peace-loving president; this is the language of a greedy billionaire land developer who is willing to slaughter and/or displace millions of innocent men, women, children and babies in order to make a fortune off of beautiful beachfront property with perfect weather by building vast amounts of expensive properties.

And let’s not forget that the U.S. and Israel can also make trillions of dollars off the natural gas, oil and whatever minerals are lying under the ground in Gaza.

Think I’m making this up? Read this report in the The Times of Israel:

US President Donald Trump says that Jordan and Egypt should take more Palestinians from Gaza, where Israel’s war against Hamas has caused a humanitarian crisis.

“I said to him I’d love you to take on more because I’m looking at the whole Gaza strip right now and it’s a mess, it’s a real mess. I’d like him to take people,” Trump says about his call with Jordan’s King Abdullah.

“I’d like Egypt to take people,” Trump tells reporters, adding he would speak to Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi on Sunday.  “You’re talking about, probably a million and a half people, and we just clean out that whole thing and say, ‘You know it’s, over.’” [Emphases added]

Trump is saying it out loud: He intends to displace the remaining Palestinian people in Gaza to the U.S. puppet states of Egypt and Jordan and depopulate Gaza of the Palestinians.

“We just clean out that whole thing [Gaza].”

Trump has now revealed to the whole world—including the Palestinians he lied to in Michigan to obtain their vote—that he is a racist and supports Israel’s ethnic cleansing. This is also part of Trump’s deal with the Israeli government and Mossad asset, billionaire Miriam Adelson, for the hundred million dollars they put into Trump’s election campaign.

It’s interesting that Trump used the figure of “a million and a half” Palestinians to be displaced. I have no idea where he is getting that number, but let’s suppose for a moment that his number is correct. That would mean around a million Palestinians have been killed in the Israeli genocide against Gaza, not 40,000 or even 200,000. The population of Gaza before Israel’s genocidal war began was in the neighborhood of two and one half million. Or maybe he is intending to keep a few hundred thousand Palestinians in Gaza to act as servants for the new billionaire class that will be moving in.

Can we expect to see a new Trump Tower in Gaza? If Trump has his way, Yes.

The Zionists put Biden in office to do the dirty work of helping Israel commit genocide against the Gazan people and completely destroying the infrastructure, making Gaza unlivable.

Now the Zionists have put Trump in office to do the work of moving the remaining Palestinians to U.S. puppet countries (Jordan and Egypt) in order to allow the U.S. and Israel to develop the beachfront property of Gaza on the Mediterranean Sea and seize the oil, natural gas and minerals that exist there—and to also help Israel seize the land in the West Bank.

USMC General Smedley Butler was right: “War is a racket.”

Let me briefly pause right here to say, all I have written to this point is from the U.S. and Israeli perspective. But I must interrupt myself to recognize that much, if not most, of the Zionist-sponsored Western narrative is completely false and out of touch with reality.

The truth is, a small unsophisticated resistance movement (Hamas) in a tiny strip of land (Gaza) that is occupied by a sophisticated, nuclear equipped military (Israel), which was enthusiastically supported financially and militarily by the most powerful nation on earth (United States) has thoroughly and convincingly defeated both Israel and the U.S.

It is extremely likely that Benjamin Netanyahu and his government will not survive this defeat. And Trump’s plans for Gaza are delusional.

Have you seen the new videos out of Gaza? The devastation is unimaginable and horrific beyond description. But did you also see the Hamas fighters returning their prisoners of war? They emerged as a stronger and more popular fighting force than they were before Israel began its genocide. More importantly, did you see the Palestinian people? They endured more hell on earth during the last fifteen months than most countries on earth will experience in their entire existence, and yet they emerged with almost superhuman resilience, endurance, tenacity, willpower and strength.

These people are not going to let Donald Trump, Jared Kushner and Steve Witkoff take them anywhere. Through their pain, suffering and loss, these plucky Palestinians may have just succeeded in creating a new Palestinian state for their posterity and put that final nail in the coffin of Zionism. It can’t happen soon enough.

Now back to the point of this column:

None of the wars in the Middle East/Northern Africa could have happened, none of the mass murders of civilian populations—including tens or hundreds of thousands of New Covenant Christians—could have happened without mass support from evangelicals in the United States. I’m talking about Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Lebanon, Syria, Gaza, the West Bank, etc.

The truth is, contrary to the Apostle Paul’s admonition, “And whether one member suffer, all the members suffer with it,” there is little suffering or caring being exhibited in America’s evangelical churches regarding the suffering of the members of the Body of Christ in those countries. Why? Because Israel is the country that is causing the suffering.

I’m convinced that if Israel attacked the United States, America’s evangelicals would support Israel. I can say that because they already have. When Israel attacked the USS Liberty, it attacked the United States. And to this day, evangelicals defend, excuse and justify Israel’s murder of the Sailors and Marines on board the Liberty.

Again I say: This is the legacy of Cyrus Scofield; this is the legacy of Dispensational Futurism; this is the legacy of Christian Zionism.

Can you now begin to see the importance of a true understanding of Christ’s New Covenant, where “there is neither Jew nor Greek: for ye are all one in Christ Jesus”?

Reprinted with permission from Chuck Baldwin Live.

The post Palestinian Christians: Suffering Alone and Ignored by the Body of Christ appeared first on LewRockwell.

Sometimes wide moats and billions of dollars to blow lead not to glory but to hubris, which beckons Nemesis.

While everyone was busy reassuring themselves the stock market was still A-OK, the driver of the market–the AI fad–just burned to the waterline. Yes, the current euphoric expectations for AI are a fad, the latest in the endless stream of “gotta have” status signifiers and cultural frenzies.

The core dynamic in all fads is Human Wetware 1.0. Though we glorify our individuality–The primacy of the Individual is the key characteristic of Modernity–we remain a herd animal, alert to every twitch in the herd’s emotional state and anxious to join the herd when it starts running, lest we’re left behind or lose status.

CEOs are just as prone to fads as the rest of us, and this is how the AI fad gathered momentum. A decade ago the warm-and-fuzzy tech fad that enamored every corporate HQ was fuzzy logic, one of the long line of precursors to the current AI mania. So labels touting “fuzzy logic” were slapped on rice cookers as everyone scrambled to cash in on the latest tech fad.

And so now every package of Kroika Cookies is emblazoned with “powered by AI!” Indeed. The leaders of the herd are especially keen to study every shift in the zeitgeist and the pecking order, as the greatest sin for CEOs is to be revealed as incompetent / clueless by missing the latest boat in corporate fads.

Here is one example of the catastrophic consequences not of missing the boat but of blindly climbing on board. On a flight to Shanghai in May 2000, shortly after the NASDAQ dot-com bubble had peaked, my seatmate was a senior engineer working for a Silicon Valley semiconductor equipment maker. Over the course of the long flight, he recounted the domino-like chain of disastrous results of the CEO jumping on the “gotta offshore production” fad that was sweeping through Corporate America.

The net result of moving production to Southeast Asia and China was 1) the wholesale theft of intellectual property (IP) and 2) the collapse of quality, requiring technicians to be flown in to fix all the quality problems.

But to not move production overseas would have been perceived as “missing the boat,” so everyone rushed to join the thundering herd, whether it made any sense or not.

The second dynamic in play now is this: monopolies don’t care about efficiency or quality, as the user / consumer has no real alternative. The tech world is brimming with stories of corporate wealth being squandered on teams developing efficiencies that are shelved upon completion. The more money gushing into the corporate coffers, the less interest there is in efficiencies.

Keeping the Good Ship Status Quo on course is good enough–until the Status Quo burns to the waterline. Then the scramble is to cover the disastrous mis-allocation of corporate capital and identify the next fad to join.

The third dynamic is: this isn’t about one company. It’s about a toolbox that’s already infected the entire tech world. It doesn’t matter if DeepSeek disappears tomorrow: the toolbox of software structures they’ve released has already entered the bloodstream of global tech and has already transformed the DNA. There’s no going back to brute-force processing as any sort of competitive advantage. Rather, it’s a cost anchor that will drag any denialist laggards to the bottom.

The fourth dynamic is: there’s nothing investable in this disruption because everyone can now develop the same open-source tools and approaches. there is no monopolistic moat to guarantee profits, and no revenue stream to milk. Rather, like deploying billions of dollars on data farms to improve search, there is no revenue at all. Nobody’s paying a single dollar for AI enhanced search.

As I’ve noted before, when the tools and techniques are freely available to all, there’s no scarcity value to any of it. And with no scarcity value–no value proposition so mighty that people will pay a premium for it–then profits are thin to zero.

Read the Whole Article

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Founder of the Austrian School of economics, Carl Menger, some of his most famous intellectual descendants like Ludwig von Mises, 1974 Nobel Laureate in Economics F.A. Hayek, and author of the best-selling Economics in One Lesson Henry Hazlitt could be said to have literally saved civilization via their educational efforts on multiple occasions.

Until the late 1700s, most people lived in small, nearly self-sufficient farming towns. As technology improved (engines and factories) the rate at which mankind could transform raw materials into wealth was rapidly increasing in cities. A growing class of businessmen-entrepreneurs-capitalists were constantly innovating and due to people’s ‘freedom to trade’ their private property only for things they deemed superior alternatives, entrepreneurs also had to copy the innovations of competitors thus inadvertently creating and spreading superior information, turning cities and eventually the entire planet into supercomputers that were constantly reordering mankind in increasingly productive and technologically advanced states.

Competition between increasingly wealthy and productive factories and entrepreneurs motivated them to pay increasing amounts of wealth for labor relative to what people could earn in farms causing people to move to cities, quickly leading to massively complex metropolises and steadily increasing living standards for everyone.

These changes—what we could refer to as the emergence or evolution of modern capitalism—were not the deliberate design of people, they were, as Carl Menger writes: “the unintended result of individual human efforts (pursuing individual interests) without a common will directed toward their establishment,” or, in the words of Adam Ferguson: “indeed the result of human action, but not the execution of any human design.”

Since these changes were unintended, their benefits were not widely understood. Ignorance of how competing private sector companies were the creators and spreaders of superior information and subsequent social order led to some common errors. Erroneously and resentfully seeing the growing fortunes of some entrepreneurs and investors as exploitation of laborers—among numerous other fallacies led to the rapid spread of a new erroneous ideology-mythology—socialism.

Misguided ideologues and resentful masses increasingly thought that private companies led to unfair differences in wealth and exploitation, and that abolishing them or having them managed by a competition-immune coercive bureaucracy of experts, in other words, the state or government or the “public sector” would be better for society. Naive intellectuals would describe these increasingly popular fallacies-myths in a manner that was bound to go viral and that is what sort of happened with Karl Marx and his bite-sized ‘Communist Manifesto’ where he famously writes: “the theory of the Communists may be summed up in the single sentence: Abolition of private property.”

Without private property there are no competing—and thus, information-creating-and-spreading private sector—companies managed by entrepreneurs. Entrepreneurs are incentivized to be wealthy by producing more (revenue) than they consume (costs), and thus being profitable and increasing the overall economic pie. Competing companies would be replaced by a single, competition-immune state bureaucracy, led by appointed “experts” whose “central plans” can’t work if people are free not to fund or go along with them. Therefore, they inevitably require massive compulsion. Few would eventually understand the situation and do as much to save civilization as Ludwig von Mises, who explains:

By 1900 practically everyone in the German-speaking countries was either a statist [interventionist] or a state socialist. Capitalism was seen as a bad episode which fortunately had ended forever. The future belonged to the “State.” All enterprises suitable for expropriation were to be taken over by the state. All others were to be regulated in a way that would prevent businessmen from exploiting workers and consumers….

When I entered the university, I, too, was a thorough statist [interventionist]….

During the Christmas holidays of 1903, while a student at the University of Vienna, Mises read Carl Menger’s seminal Principles of Economics and, in his own words, “It was through this book that I became an economist.” Although few knew it at the time, by 1919, Mises was already one of the greatest economists of all time and was working at the Vienna Chamber of Commerce where he had become the principal economic adviser to the Austrian government. At this time Lenin’s Bolshevik-Socialist revolution was rapidly moving East and about to engulf Austria, yet Mises managed to stop the falling of this domino, saving civilization. He recalls:

There were few who recognized the state of affairs clearly. People were so convinced of the inevitability of Bolshevism that their main concern was securing a favorable place for themselves in the new order. The Catholic Church and its followers, the Christian Social Party, were prepared to befriend the Bolshevists with the same eagerness with which the bishops and archbishops would embrace National Socialism twenty years later….

I knew what was at stake. Bolshevism would lead Vienna to starvation and terror within a few days. Plundering hordes would take to the streets and a second blood bath would destroy what was left of Viennese culture. After discussing these problems with the Bauers [leading political figures] over the course of many evenings, I was finally able to persuade them of my view. Bauer’s resulting moderation was a determining factor in Vienna’s fate….

The most important task I undertook…was the forestalling of a Bolshevist takeover. The fact that events did not lead to such a regime in Vienna was my success and mine alone. Few supported me in my efforts… I alone convinced Bauer to abandon the idea of seeking union with Moscow.

Just three years later, in 1922, Mises published Socialism: An Economic and Sociological Analysis, a book whose wisdom and clarity is still lightyears ahead of what today’s “leading intellectuals” are babbling about. Hayek, who was working under Mises at the time, elaborates:

When Socialism first appeared in 1922, its impact was profound. It…altered the outlook of many of the young idealists returning to their studies after World War I. I know, for I was one of them.

Mises’s writings and professional help catapulted Hayek to prominence at the London School of Economics in the 1930s where he played a leading role fighting socialist myths in the English-speaking world. Hayek humbly acknowledges this intellectual debt to Mises in a letter:

I am aware, for the first time, that I owe to you virtually everything that gives me an advantage as compared to my colleagues here and to most economists… If I do not deceive too many expectations of the people here at LSE, it is not to my credit but to yours…. I must tell you this because I here feel more indebted to you than anytime before.

In September 1944, as WWII was still raging, Hayek published a book in England where he showed how the same fallacies that led to Socialism of the Nazi and Soviet style, also increasingly dominated the thinking of the freer democracies like England, and would inevitably lead to, as his book was entitled, “The Road To Serfdom.”

Properly identifying socialist ideology-mythology as an understandable error, he dedicated the book “to the socialists of all parties.” Fellow disciple of Mises, Henry Hazlitt—working at the New York Times—loved Hayek’s book, and wrote a glowing review: “In ‘The Road to Serfdom’ Friedrich A. Hayek has written one of the most important books of our generation.”

Hazlitt helped get the review placed in the front page of the Times’ book review section which created an explosion of interest. By the time Hayek came to the US in April 1945 to go on a speaking tour, instead of giving small talks at university departments, his first event “drew an overflow crowd of more than 3,000 listeners and was broadcast over the radio.” However, at over 250 pages, its wisdom remained less accessible to a mass audience. Enter Max Eastman.

Max had been one of America’s most prominent socialists. He had traveled to the Soviet Union, befriended leading Socialists-Bolsheviks like Leon Trotsky and even translated several of his works into English. But eventually the inevitable economic chaos and tyranny of socialism led him to stumble upon the writings of Mises and Hayek. He made an intellectual 180 and became a passionate defender of freedom and capitalism. Eastman’s great contribution came when he created a brilliantly written “condensed” version of Hayek’s book which was less than 40 pages, which with the help of The Reader’s Digest magazine where he worked was eventually sold to over one million American homes.

Hayek’s book and Eastman’s condensed version were a great antidote to Marx’s short and viral “Communist Manifesto” and may qualify as having saved civilization. Instead of inspiring socialist ideologues, it inspired freedom ones, like Margaret Thatcher, who read the book while an 18-year-old undergraduate at Oxford, and countless others like three-time presidential candidate Dr. Ron Paul, who writes:

My introduction to Austrian economics came when I was studying medicine at Duke University and came across a copy of Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom. After devouring this, I was determined to read whatever I could find on what I thought was this new school of economic thought—especially the works of Mises.

The post How Austrian Economists Repeatedly Saved Civilization appeared first on LewRockwell.

Dr Mark Bailey presents the evidence on this controversial subject.

Don’t miss this excellent interview.

Please watch, HERE

(56 min)

The post Do Viruses Exist? Texans for Vaccine Choice Interview Dr. Mark Bailey appeared first on LewRockwell.

Writes Rick Rozoff:

With all the money you and your like have voted for NATO to wage wars on three continents you could not only fund your campaigns but pull everyone in your district out of poverty and provide them health care and housing.

The post My comment on AOC Facebook fundraising post appeared first on LewRockwell.

The most hilarious thing about the ongoing confirmation hearings is how spitting mad every Democrat gets whenever a Trump appointee disagrees with the Demo-Bolshevik party/DC establishment party line.  NATO was not responsible for the war in Ukraine, they say.  The CIA and FBI are run by angels, they say.  Big Pharma has no influence, whatsoever, of any kind, on drug policy and especially on the decisions made by members of Congress. members of Congress are not bought off by Big Pharma.  The Hunter Biden laptop was Russian propaganda.  Trump is a Putin puppet.

It is absolutely hilarious to see RFK, Jr., Tulsi Gabbard, and others call out these and dozens of other lies that are the whole basis of the power of he Demo-Bolshevik party, such as it is in the age of Trump.  RFK, Jr. even pointed out at his hearing that Bernie Sanders collected more money (millions) from Big Pharma than any other member of Congress from both houses.  Bernie blew his top over that public revelation.

Some of these people have spent decades weaseling their way into Congress because, first and foremost, they want to be dictators and order all of us around like slaves or serfs.  Just when they thought they had finally achieved totalitarian power, along come these people who announce to the entire world watching the confirmation hearings on TV that their questioners are in reality hysterical, comical, ignorant, corrupt, criminal, lying sacks of sh _t.  Take Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders, for example.  Please.

The post Our Emperors Have No Clothes appeared first on LewRockwell.

Thanks, Rick Rozoff.

Tulsi Gabbard says Biden FBI ‘abused its power’ by targeting ‘Traditional Latin Mass’ Catholics

Gabbard, President Donald Trump’s nominee for director of national intelligence, said the FBI “abused its power” by labeling Catholics who prefer the Latin Mass as “radical traditionalist Catholics.”

The post Tulsi Gabbard says Biden FBI ‘abused its power by targeting ‘Traditional Latin Mass’ Catholics appeared first on LewRockwell.

Thanks, Johnny Kramer.

Trump just rolled out some wild new Executive Orders pic.twitter.com/TBEbidysLa

— Tyler Fischer (@TyTheFisch) January 27, 2025

The post Trump just rolled out some wild new Executive Orders appeared first on LewRockwell.

Writes David Martin:

Why am I not surprised?

Global Times

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Writes Brian Dunaway:

The “Confirmation Hearing” of Tulsi Gabbard is proceeding predictably, and reflects the hopeless and terminal sickness of the American State. Almost to a senator, whether Democrat or Republican, are attacking Ms. Gabbard on one or more of the following talking points (in approximate order of emphasis):

Edward Snowden is a dangerous traitor!

FISA 702 is critical for national security!

The Russian Empire invaded Ukraine for no reason to all!

Assad gassed his own people, and you talked to him!

How dare you not believe any of these things!

They are terrified of her, and betray truth and human decency with nearly every word.

As Tulsi Gabbard wants to be DNI, she feels compelled to lie about every one of these subjects, each of which she has formerly spoken bravely in truth to power.

It is a perfect demonstration that the American State has entered its final phase of decay, and reform is impossible.

The post Tulsi Gabbard Confirmation appeared first on LewRockwell.

Thanks, John Frahm.

Lifesite  News

The post All 6 people trying to replace Trudeau agree with him on almost everything appeared first on LewRockwell.

The post In The Senate, Tulsi Brings The House Down! appeared first on LewRockwell.

Click Here:

Eugyppius

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The concept of the Establishment was first used in England referring to the established (or official) state church, the Anglican Church or Church of England, created by the usurper and schismatic Henry Tudor during the Protestant Reformation.

As two later disparate sources document (Leornard and Mark Silk, The American Establishment, and Samuel Blumenfeld, Is Public Education Necessary?) the origins of the American Establishment began during the presidency of Thomas Jefferson in 1803 during the Massachusetts conflict for control of the Congregationalist State religious establishment and Harvard College, between the liberal Unitarians versus the conservative Trinitarian Calvinists. The Unitarians won and Harvard became the seat of liberalism and the Establishment.

Nineteenth-century writer William Cobbett later expanded the concept to include those networks of financial institutions related to the Bank of England, elite public schools and clubs, and publishing entities (such as “the bloody old Times”) the ruling aristocracy used to train and sustain its oligarchic bureaucracy who manned the British empire. Cobbett labeled this power elite as “the Thing.”

As Leonard and Mark Silk also observed in their masterful book, The American Establishment, twentieth century British historian A. J. P. Taylor later adapted Cobbett’s “the Thing” into “the Establishment” in a 1953 article in The New Statesman, followed by journalist Henry Fairlie’s usage of the term in The Spectator in 1955.

The broad concept was soon adopted by wide-ranging American analysts of the powers-that-be, such as Richard H. Rovere, C. Wright Mills, Dan Smoot, Phyllis Schlafly, Carroll Quigley, John Kenneth Galbraith, and G. William Domhoff.

“The American Establishment,” by Richard H. Rovere

http://archive.wilsonquarterly.com/sites/default/files/articles/WQ_VOL2_SU_1978_Article_05.pdf

The Power Elite, by C. Wright Mills

https://ia601701.us.archive.org/29/items/dli.ernet.507694/507694-The%20Power%20Elite%20%281959%29.pdf

The Invisible Government, by Dan Smoot

https://ia801809.us.archive.org/35/items/B-001-014-093/B-001-014-093.pdf

Tragedy and Hope: A History of the World in Our Time, by Carroll Quigley

http://www.carrollquigley.net/pdf/Tragedy_and_Hope.pdf

These various authors recognized that while the First Amendment to the United States Constitution prohibits an establishment of religion, our nation does indeed have, like its British cousins across the pond, an Establishment, complete with its own theological canon and doxology of statecraft and spy craft. Its “Vatican” is the Council on Foreign Relations. Its primary source of treasure and alms has been the Morgan and Rockefeller financial empires, which created the Fed, the great enabler of the Welfare-Warfare State. Many of its elite seminarians have studied at Ivy League institutions such as Harvard, Princeton, or Columbia; some in particular, at Yale where they were initiated into Skull and Bones.

The immediate post-World War II period of history, tracing the Establishment’s bipartisan “foreign policy consensus” on the Cold War, is the crucial gestation period, a time implementing “the American Century” of Henry Luce, of the Truman administration’s creation of the National Security State and its doctrine of Containment as a public rationale for global intervention and the military-industrial complex (and George F. Kennan’s, Robert A. Lovett’s, and the Dulles Brothers’ clandestine policy of Rollback or Liberation through covert operations of the OPC and CIA).

But the Establishment’s rules and credo were sketched on papyrus long before 1947. They were put forth by visionary prophets of pelf, plunder and empire fifty years earlier, during the Spanish-American War and the Philippine Insurrection.

A central figure was the sinister Elihu Root, later founding chairman of the Council on Foreign Relations, who like his fellow interventionists and war criminals Theodore Roosevelt and Barack Obama, was recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize. He was the archetype of the Establishment’s much-abused “Wise Man” category, the mainstream media’s designation of select servitors of power stretching from Root to persons such as John J. McCloy to Richard Holbrooke – Special Representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan, Bilderberg group, Trilateral Commission, Council on Foreign Relations, former managing director of Lehman Brothers, and board director of AIG to July 2008 (just before the bailouts).

Before the acclaimed “Wise Men” of the Truman regime came the “Four Evangelists” of an earlier era. Led by Elihu Root, his protégé “Colonel” Henry L. Stimpson, along with “Colonel” Edward M. House and Raymond B. Fosdick, these little-known four were the real architects of the American Establishment and its interventionist gospel of the Welfare-Warfare State. It is they who wrote its rules and drafted its credo which has transformed the American republic into a squalid and overstretched empire.

We must continue our role as non-interventionist heretics to the CFR’s church, working for its disestablishment and demise. And while the usurper Biden was upheld by the craven courts and subterfuge in the Electoral College, his illegitimate reign was subject to daily ongoing intense scrutiny and derision by tens of millions.

What we have been seeing in 2020-2024 played out on the streets of America, particularly in large Blue State metropolitan areas and dense urban cities is classic planned chaos and the “Strategy of Tension.” Unable to dislodge Donald Trump by the Russiagate hoax or the malicious soft coup impeachment process, his sworn enemies, using COVID-19 as their pretext, have turned to the destruction of the economy by repressive lockdowns, creating mass unemployment and annihilation of small businesses, thus fracturing civil society. The Democrats, elements of the deep state, Big Tech, and their complacent, compliant regime media pawns, have turned to an age-old psy/war strategy to be wielded as an ax against the president, insidiously using the weaponized corpse of the slain George Floyd as the new rationale for these riots and insurrections. These dark seditious forces then engaged in the largest, most treasonous act in American history, by attempting to subvert the integrity of the 2020 presidential election by subterfuge, fraud, and duplicity, by manufacturing widespread disruptive anomalies and naked corruption.

Historically there has been a symbiotic correlation relationship between agent provocateur groups, infiltration by police informers, and the counter-terrorism forces of the deep state. The repressive security state has molded and used such witting (or unwitting) terrorist pawns or drones in covert activities to create a “strategy of tension” to instill fear and consolidate repressive power and control which would enhance strident calls for more intense police repression and clandestine surveillance of its subject general population. With countless decades of real-world experience and clinical research, masters of psychological warfare and mind control, expert manipulators and programmers of cult-like behavior, recruit those alienated arrested development post-adolescents and anti-social disillusioned vicarious thrill seekers who fit a susceptible psychological profile matrix and who relish vandalism, violence and destruction as a means of striking out at a world beyond the control of their misshapened lives. An ideological construct of direct action “anarchism” or “propaganda by the deed” is put forth as a purported justification for their aberrant thug-like terrorist behavior.

The willfully ignorant nihilistic mobs and savage looters are simply acting as pawns, the unwitting tools of the deep state “strategy of tension” 2020 in creating the pretext for the elite’s technocratic New World Order of digital, Social Credit Scoring economy and centralized political total control in a totalitarian corporatist entity, with all pervasive mass surveillance by facial recognition databases and coercive regimentation. These actions are running parallel with the transition to a cashless society with all financial transactions via a CBDC or “electronic purse” monitored through biometric identification using such technologies as fingerprints, hand geometry and retina scanning. This is the Great Reset.

In this time of unprecedented, planned chaos, each of us must steel ourselves to understand, discuss and analyze the crucial global dimensions of what the Elites have scheduled to take place and how it plays into the technocrats’ plan to control the world’s resources and implement genocidal eugenics-based austerity.

The father of the US Constitution, James Madison, in Federalist Paper #47, observed, ”the accumulation of all powers, legislative, executive, and judiciary, in the same hands, whether of one, a few, or many, and whether hereditary, self-appointed, or elective, may justly be pronounced the very definition of tyranny.”

The deep state is beyond the Constitution. It is separate from the legislative, executive, and judicial branches of government that we all learned about in grade school.

The deep state has no restrictions on its extra-constitutional actions, no separation of powers, no checks and balances, no transparency or open accounting for its egregious and invasive behavior.

We are no longer governed by Congress or the President or the Courts, but by a corporate, financial, and military Elite that write the laws to suit themselves. It is the cloistered class of professional managerial credentialed elites of the administrative regulatory captured bureaucracy and covert intelligence agencies who rule us all.

Donald Trump, J. D. Vance, RFK Jr., Elon Musk, and Tulsi Gabbard will jointly forcefully challenge the despotic tyranny and regimentation of the governing elites composing the regulatory captured bureaucratic administrative state and its corrupt crony enablers, particularly in Big Pharma, the warmongers of the military industrial complex, and the invasive surveillance/intelligence deep state at the core of this infamy.

The post The American Establishment appeared first on LewRockwell.

Click Here:

Reclaim the Net

The post Klaus Schwab Labels “Misinformation” a “Critical Challenge,” Urges Elites to Develop Solutions appeared first on LewRockwell.

Republican Senators are being lame. So, are both shilling for the Poison Injection Industrial Complex?

No Letters of Endorsement for RFKJr during the hearings?

https://tomkudla.substack.com/p/where-are-the-letters-of-endorsement-for-rfkjr-during-the-hearings

Senators take aim at RFK, Jr.

https://mailchi.mp/tomwoods/rfkhearing

PR coup that needs happen at Kennedy Confirmation Hearing

https://tomkudla.substack.com/p/pr-coup-that-needs-to-happen-at-kennedy-confirmation-hearing

The post RFKJr Hearings: The Democratic Senators are being vicious appeared first on LewRockwell.

Bernie Sanders—Senate HELP Committee ranking minority member—just convened a roundtable of Vaccine High Priests, including Pontifex Maximus Paul Offit. The obvious objective of this roundtable discussion is to spread fear among the American people that Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. will take away their vaccines and send their children back to 19th and early 20th century conditions of childhood mortality.

It’s ironic that Senator Sanders has drunk the Kool-Aid of vaccine ideology, given his general posture of being suspicious of industrial and financial interests with well-funded lobbies on Capitol Hill. It seems likely he is aware that that Big Pharma has by far the biggest lobby on the Hill, but he apparently has a blind spot where vaccines are concerned.

Reviewing the literature on pediatric diseases in the 19th century, I see the major causes of death in children were:

1). tuberculosis,

2). diarrhea of infancy

3). bacillary dysentery

4). typhoid fever

5). scarlet fever.

6). diphtheria

7). lobar pneumonia.

Note that all of the above are caused by bacterial infections that have been almost entirely eradicated by advances in public sanitation and antibiotics.

As Stanford T. Shulman—Division of Infectious Diseases, Northwestern University, The Feinberg School of Medicine, The Children’s Memorial Hospital, Chicago—notes in his paper The History of Pediatric Infectious Diseases:

Inadequate sanitation, impure water and unsafe milk supplies all contributed very significantly to the spread of infectious diseases among infants and children, and particularly to those living in the very crowded circumstances that promote transmission.

I suspect it is impossible for the typical American mother today to begin to fathom the sheer horror of poor sanitation during this time in crowded tenement buildings in major American cities such as New York and Chicago, where several large families living on the same floor would share just one hallway water closet. Today, the mere sight of such a water closet would cause a young mother to vomit on her lululemon yoga tights and have nightmares for the rest of her life.

Likewise, at the turn of the century, the American milk supply for crowded cities was appalling. As Dr. Schulman noted:

An exceptionally important advance during the late 19th Century and early 20th Century was the result of efforts by concerned pediatricians and others to secure a safe and sanitary milk supply for infants). Nonbreast-fed infants experienced particularly high mortality rates, because much of the cow milk supply was “swill milk,” which came from cows fed only distiller’s mash, housed in incredibly filthy conditions, without fresh air, exercise or hay, many of which were also infected by bovine tuberculosis.

Job Lewis Smith, who was one of the first to differentiate rubella from rubeola and wrote several papers on neonatal tetanus, served as the second APS President in 1890, 18 years after he had written in his textbook that more than half of New York’s infants who were spoon-fed (i.e. not nursed or wet-nursed) in the summer, died before fall. He strongly urged milk sterilization and wrote and spoke about the dangers of artificial infant feeding.

In a 1675 letter, Isaac Newton famously wrote: “If I have seen further [than others], it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.”

Nowadays our society gives all the credit for public health to vaccines developers, but all of them stood on the shoulders of hygiene pioneers such as Ignaz Semmelweis, John Snow, Job Lewis Smith, and above all, the civil engineers and builders who brought proper sewage channelization and clean water to our cities.

This originally appeared on Courageous Discourse.

The post Bernie Sanders Convenes Vaccine High Priest Roundtable appeared first on LewRockwell.

With the global economy hanging on by one rusty and wobbling wheel to the triple loop roller-coaster rails we are on; paper money is no longer a wise investment. For those who see the writing on the wall and even the less pessimistic, holding precious metals in the form of Gold and Silver are a time-tested hedge against inflation, currency manipulation and bank defaults. You can’t help but hear the advice of financial professionals who are saying you should buy gold at the very least as part of a diversification strategy. There are numerous opinions about this and I for one am convinced that at some point in our future, the dollars in my bank will either be worthless or unobtainable for a variety of reasons. If the economy finally does go off the rails, precious metals are what we in the prepping community are looking to as our monetary bumper guard.

When this happens, people who have prepared by purchasing Gold and Silver for their financial security will be all set, right? That is what we all think about but it got me to thinking. Let’s take the hypothetical scenario that you have purchased 10,000 silver American Eagles and they are hidden safely away somewhere that only you and your spouse know about. You wake up tomorrow morning and we are hit with a Weimar Republic type of scenario. Banks are closed for weeks and thousands of dollars won’t buy a loaf of bread. The way of life we once knew is completely gone and now you have one of the only forms of money that will buy anything. You figure you can go down to the local market and buy or barter for anything you want with some of your shiny American Eagles. There may be a few problems though.

How do you know if the metals you are trading for are real?

One of the first issues I can foresee with a new economy based upon precious metals is the risk of forgery. I assume this has been the case throughout time since money was invented and began to be circulated as a suitable method for payment. Do you know how to test a gold coin to make sure it isn’t fake? What if a total stranger offers you a gold coin for two of your best shotguns you were keeping for barter. Will you know if the yellowish coins he is giving you are real? What if a woman offers you two old-looking silver coins with some woman on the face and tells you that they have been in her family for years. Will you know if they are real or forgeries from China? These could be more risks with bartering that you need to consider.

Testing precious metals is fairly easy if you have the knowledge and supplies. There are several methods for each and I will go into a couple for Gold and Silver. If you think you may encounter a situation where you might be faced with trading large or even small amounts of precious metals, it may be wise to invest in a digital scale to verify the weight. A silver (troy) ounce coin should weigh 31.10 grams and simply being able to verify that the coin someone is trying to trade you for weighs close to what it should weigh could give you a quick indication as to the authenticity.

To quickly test gold you can purchase a Gold testing kit which comes with a variety of acids. These acids are in marked bottles and each reacts differently to different types of metals. With one of these relatively cheap kits you can test Gold, Silver and Platinum and even know the quality of the metal from 10K to 22K.

To test the gold you simply drop a small drop of the acid onto the coin or bar and the acid reacts when the gold is real and the correct acid will react to the correct Karat or purity of gold.

You can test Silver with the same kit mentioned above or there are some other less sophisticated methods that are supposed to work also. I found a nice article that describes 3 quick ways to help tell real  Silver from Fake Silver.

The Ring Test

Silver has a nice ringing sound when it is tapped. If it is a coin, you can flick it into the air. Alternatively, you can gently tap it with another coin. In both instances, you should hear a high-pitched bell-type ring that lasts about 1-2 seconds. A fun way to try this is with a U.S. quarter from the years 1932-1964, which is 90% silver, and with a modern U.S. quarter (post 1965), which is 91.67% copper and 8.33% nickel. The silver quarter ring will be much higher-pitched compared to the dull ring of the copper quarter. Be careful when doing this with whatever coin you are testing so as not to ding or damage it.

The Ice Test

In addition to having the highest electrical conductivity of any element, silver also has the highest thermal conductivity of any metal. If you place an ice cube on a silver coin or bar, the ice will begin to melt immediately. Obviously, ice will melt if placed on anything at room temperature, for example, but if placed on silver it will melt much more quickly and impressively. Try it!

The Magnet Test

Silver is not magnetic. If you place a strong, rare-earth magnet called a Neodymium magnet on a silver coin or bar, it should not easily stick to it. If you are testing bars, you can angle one at 45 degrees and let the magnet slide down. It should slide down very slowly. If it sticks or it slides very quickly, it is not silver. However, keep in mind that just because the magnet does not stick does not necessarily mean that it is silver.

How will you carry your Gold and Silver?

OK, now you know how to verify if gold or silver is fake but in a post collapse world there will still be risks that you might want to consider. You will be your own ATM because there won’t be a strong building to store your precious metals in until you need them. You will be responsible for storing, hiding most likely and keeping your wealth safe from people who want to take it. There will no longer be the illusion of safety that the FDIC provides to your deposits. If someone steals your gold and silver, it’s gone. There isn’t any getting it back unless you find the person who stole your money and take it back.

There are a lot of strategies for hiding your money but probably the most important concept would be to make sure you do not hide everything in one place. If you are going to hide your silver, make sure there are several locations. I would recommend a minimum of 3 locations with varying sizes in there.

For example if you were bugging out on foot and had to take all of your money with you the risk that you might be confronted on the road is higher after the SHTF. Do you want to have all of your silver in one pack? Probably not. If you aren’t alone, you could have different caches of your money so that if the bad guys ask for your money you could give up one bag but the other two would be OK. I might recommend having three so when you give them the first bag and they inevitably ask for the second you still have your third in reserves. Who knows if this will work but it does give you options. You could do the same with weapons, food or any other survival cache you have planned.

Hopefully this gives you something to think about as you prepare for whatever is in our future. If you are considering stocking up on precious metals, the points above may help you out one day.

This originally appeared on Preppgroup.

The post How to Carry Gold in a Post-Collapse World appeared first on LewRockwell.