Lew Rockwell Institute

“The most useful expert, of course, is the one who can lie.” Guy Debord

We’re living in the golden age of Spectacle: whatever substance remains in politics is lost in the endless parade of outlandish political theater, finance is dominated by staged spectacles of media-savvy CEOs announcing the next trillion-dollar product, and online, all the world’s a stage for everyone’s spectacle.

French philosopher Guy Debord outlined the value of spectacle in a society and economy that is increasingly dependent on artifice rather than authenticity in his 1967 book, The Society of the Spectacle.

Here is how Debord described his 1967 book in his 1988 follow-up work, Comments on the Society of the Spectacle: “In 1967, in a book entitled The Society of the Spectacle, I showed what the modern spectacle was already in essence: the autocratic reign of the market economy which had acceded to an irresponsible sovereignty, and the totality of new techniques of government which accompanied this reign.”

Debord is laying out a way to understand how society has become subsumed by economic forces, specifically markets ruled by the corporate-state.

This arrangement manages the populace by turning everything into a spectacle which in Debord’s view is not “real life,” it’s a representation that we passively accept without understanding how it transforms our identity and social fabric from “being” to “having,” i.e. buying and owning stuff that is a representation of who we are.

This representation is managed by technocratic expertise.

What we refer to as propaganda, marketing and narrative are for Debord all aspects of spectacle.

Spectacle as a simulation or facsimile of “real life” speaks to a profound alienation: we passively watch spectacle and take that passive consumption as “real life” without understanding it’s all managed to maintain the dominance of those benefitting from this arrangement.

This echoes many related ideas (for example, “The Matrix” films), simulacra being passed off as the authentic “real thing,” and Marx’s concept of alienation in which the worker has been disconnected (alienated) from the product/value of their labor.

The core idea here is that Spectacle is inauthentic, fake, a simulation, a substitution of representation for substance, that creates a peculiarly unreality. These are the themes I explore in my book Ultra-Processed Life.

The entire appeal of social media can be seen as personalizing Spectacle, as we each gain audience and influence by making ourselves and our lives into unreal representations, i.e. spectacles.

Here are some illuminating excerpts from Debord:

“Because spectacle replaces real life with a mere mediated representation of life that cannot be experienced directly, it provides a framework where mass deceptions and lies can consistently and convincingly appear as true.

It has recreated our society without community, and it has obstructed the ability to communicate in general. Such processes and their ramifications ultimately mean people cannot truly experience life for themselves: they have become spectators, bound to an impoverished state of unlife”

In The Society of the Spectacle, Debord explains that the economy subjugating society first presented itself as an “obvious degradation of being into having,” where human fulfilment was no longer attained through what one was, but instead only through what one bought and displayed. As society’s capitulation to the economy accelerated, the decline from being into having shifted “from having into appearing.”

With respect to knowledge, therefore, experts no longer have to be experts or have expertise, they only need to take on the appearance of expertise.

“All experts serve the state and the media and only in that way do they achieve their status. Every expert follows his master, for all former possibilities for independence have been gradually reduced to nil by present society’s mode of organisation. The most useful expert, of course, is the one who can lie.”

“The vague feeling that there has been a rapid invasion which has forced people to lead their lives in an entirely different way is now widespread; but this is experienced rather like some inexplicable change in the climate, or in some other natural equilibrium, a change faced with which ignorance knows only that it has nothing to say.” Debord

This reminds me of a comment French writer Michel Houellebecq made in an interview: “I have the impression of being caught up in a network of complicated, minute, stupid rules, and I have the impression of being herded towards a uniform kind of happiness, toward a kind of happiness that doesn’t really make me happy.”

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For all the media hand-wringing over the government shutdown the fact is only approximately 750,000 of the over two million non-military federal workers are being furloughed. Most federal programs will continue operating, including the major entitlement and welfare programs. The national parks will remain open, if understaffed and with closed visitor centers. Unfortunately, the shutdown will not affect the military-industrial complex.

President Trump’s supposed “master plan” to implement mass firings of federal employees will only fire 16,000 employees.

Democrats are refusing to vote for a short-term continuing resolution unless it extends the increase in Obamacare subsidies that was part of the Biden-era covid relief legislation. Republicans, who for years campaigned on repealing and replacing Obamacare, are not opposing extending the subsidies. Instead, they are focusing on concerns the Democrats want to allow illegal immigrants to receive taxpayer-funded health benefits. Republicans are also emphasizing that they want to negotiate over extending the Obamacare subsidies, not simply shove them into a “must pass” continuing resolution. Republicans also want to ensure that laws barring illegal immigrants from receiving the subsidies are in place.

Republicans’ de facto embrace of the increased Obamacare subsidies, which were supposed to be a temporary increase to help Americans who lost their jobs because of the covid lockdowns, is a little noticed but major milestone in the history of Obamacare. For many years Republicans campaigned on a promise to “repeal and replace” Obamacare. Opposition to Obamacare, along with opposition to the big bank bailouts and the cap and trade scheme, fueled the “Tea Party” movement, which led in the 2010 election to a Republican takeover of the House of Representatives. In 2013, as the federal government was implementing Obamacare, Tea Party Republicans orchestrated a government shutdown. The argument was this was the last chance to repeal Obamacare because once it was fully implemented the number of people who would become reliant on the program would make Obamacare politically impossible to repeal.

These Tea Party Republicans were mocked for their efforts, but history has proven them right. Even though Donald Trump and many Republican candidates for House and Senate promised to repeal Obamacare in their 2016 campaigns, they never even held a vote on full repeal of the healthcare law. Instead, they pushed legislation repealing the “unpopular” parts of Obamacare even though the way the program was structured it was impossible for the popular parts to work without the unpopular parts. The legislation repealing the “unpopular” parts of Obamacare was opposed by some Republicans who had previously voted to repeal all of Obamacare.

In the 2018 midterm election, the Democrats then turned the tables on Republicans by running as champions of healthcare who would protect Obamacare from the Republicans. This helped them retake the House.

Now, the majority of Republicans appear ready to ratify President Biden’s increase in Obamacare subsidies. So, Republicans have gone from promising to repeal Obamacare to promising to repeal the “unpopular” provisions to de facto supporting the program.

Republican failure to effectively oppose Obamacare is because of failure to acknowledge that the pre-Obamacare healthcare system was seriously flawed because of government interventions. Therefore, a way to “fix” healthcare is via measures giving patients and providers control over the healthcare system, such as tax credits and Health Savings Accounts (HSAs). Unapologetic advocacy of free markets is the only effective way to oppose big government schemes like Obamacare and advance liberty.

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>A website specializing in data visuals offered a helpful graphic on global inflation, 2020-2025, with no other comment about how or why this happened. The results are eye-popping and amazing, and a reminder that hardly anyone has fully come to terms with what transpired over five years.

Most currencies in the world took a 25-35 percent haircut, Far East excepted.

That’s a technical description that obscures what actually happened. The measures by which most people in the world hold the liquid part of their worldly possessions – the money they earned through hard work and saving – was robbed by a quarter and more.

Where did it go? After all, the wealth didn’t sink in the ocean. It was transferred from one group to another. It went from the poor and middle class to the elites in well-connected industries and government. It was simply sucked away from one sector to another, achieving in a matter of a few years what would have been impossible in normal times.

The forced transfer of wealth went from small business to large, from physical enterprise to digital, from store fronts to online, from citizens to government-connected contractors, from workers to leveraged capital, from families to corporations, from savers to a deeply indebted government, and so on.

You are perfectly free to believe that this was all a mistake. Just bad policy. The world panicked because of a pathogen, and central banks ran the printing presses. Out of compassion for our suffering, legislators rained fresh paper on the population which we used to buy hardware and digital gadgetry, while fostering addiction to online entertainment.

Regrettably and mistakenly, governments criminalized small businesses and subsidized large ones. Inadvertently our communities and extended families were divided and then shattered and replaced with the only technology around, Zooming and TikToking while awaiting artificial intelligence to replace the intelligence lost during school and college closures.

Sadly, the shots that everyone thought would save us made us sicker than ever – surely an earnest attempt gone wrong – while a depressed population got hooked on weed and liquor from shops that remained open, and availed themselves to psych drugs newly available through liberalized access via telehealth. The population in the developed world lost three years of lifespan expectation.

You can believe all of this befell people all over the world at the same time via a series of pathetic misjudgments.

Or you could be more realistic and see that this was not a mistake at all. It was entirely intentional, the unfolding of a dark scheme hatched by an indescribably sadistic ruling class. Indeed, if this had all been an accident, we surely would have heard someone apologize by now.

There is also the planning involved. There was Event 201, the lesser-known Crimson Contagion, and many others. They are usually described in the mainstream press as rehearsals for unplanned contingencies, like resiliency training. Absurd. This was plotted far in advance. We have all the receipts. To realize this and connect the dots does not make you a conspiracy theorist. It makes you a person with the capacity to think.

To deny nefarious motives and schemes makes you impossibly naive to the point of sedation. At best, it makes you ill-read in history.

After five years, what can we say was the plan and purpose of this calamity? We all have our views. Certainly within Brownstone ranks, there are many opinions. We argue among ourselves all the time. Coming up with a clean and clear explanation is not easy because there are so many moving parts and so many industrial opportunists who took advantage of the crisis to cash out.

So we all have our own judgments. Mine is as follows. There were three primary motivations and purposes for destroying the world as we knew it: Political, Industrial, and Pharmaceutical.

Political

In the years before the Covid response, the deep state in all nations was being put through a wrenching crisis of public plebiscites that were not going their way. This movement was dubbed and denounced as populist, meaning that actual people were using democratic means to voice their opinions. All this happened between 2010 and 2020 – you can date it decades earlier too – culminating in the lockdowns of 195 countries, which was the turning point as a hammer blow against all these populist movements.

In the UK, the voters had approved Brexit, which was a deep wound on the European Union scheme that dates back decades. The chosen leader in the UK was of course Boris Johnson who later found himself humiliated to have to lead the Covid lockdown campaign. The same was happening in Brazil with the rise and challenge to the establishment by Jair Bolsonaro.

In Italy, there was Matteo Salvini as Deputy Prime Minister and Interior Minister who led an Italy First movement, Marine Le Pen as leader of the National Rally in French politics, Viktor Orbán of Hungary who broke with euro-centralism, Geert Wilders of The Netherlands who headed the Party for Freedom, Rodrigo Duterte of the Philippines with populist appeal, Andrzej Duda of Poland who promoted nationalist policies, and Recep Tayyip Erdoğan of Turkey who was aligned with anti-globalist trends.

You don’t have to regard all these people as “good guys” to recognize how terrifying they are to the neo-liberal consensus, the phrase we use to mean permanent government by the administrative state backed by an entrenched industrial elite in finance, pharma, and elsewhere.

Above all else, there was Donald Trump in the US, who won in 2016 despite every conceivable effort and expectation that he would lose. This was the shock of a century of US history, a sure signal that the system set up since before the Great War to rig American electoral outcomes had broken. What was the fear? It was that he was an outsider who might respond to voter wishes and common sense. That much the establishment could not bear.

So the plot was on. It was the media, the financial establishment, the administrative state, all hands on deck. The election was declared invalid because of Russian interference and years of reporting and investigation commenced, which in the end produced absolutely nothing. It just so happened that the American people elected the man to disrupt a system that had been gamed for the better part of their lives.

With all other options failing, they finally played the pandemic card. The action unfolded from the fall of 2019 (the lab leak) through the spring of 2020, when Trump, surrounded on all sides, and after much resistance, finally greenlighted the lockdowns that wrecked the growing economy he had tried to foster.

The promise was that a shot would arrive in time for the election but the release kept being delayed through the summer and fall during which time he only inhibited the office of presidency, but was otherwise ignored and finally deleted from all social media. Nothing could stop the disaster they tried to prevent: he was reelected.

The rest of the history you know: the Russia scam, the impeachments, the wild media attacks, and the later assassination attempts.

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It’s cute how the Zionists think they’ll be able to manipulate and propagandize the world into liking Israel again.

Yeah, saturate all online platforms with weird-faced influencers telling us Israel is awesome. That’ll make us forget those years of genocidal atrocities.

Sure, buy up the social media platforms that young people are using so you can censor criticism of Israel. That’ll convince them that Zionism is cool.

Go on, take control of CBS and make Bari Weiss the boss. That’ll make us forget all those videos of mutilated Palestinian children.

Right, use Zionist oligarchs and influence operations to manipulate governments and institutions into crushing free speech which opposes a genocidal apartheid state. That’ll get everyone supporting the genocidal apartheid state.

Propaganda is an effective tool of mass-scale psychological manipulation, but it isn’t magic. It isn’t going to miraculously erase what people know in their bones to be true.

Your daily reminder, these people are paid to spread Nazi propaganda. The uptick in Nazi propaganda lately is remarkable https://t.co/9wPfHZzHxi

— Anita Zsurzsan (@iamjourjean) October 5, 2025

In order to successfully propagandize people you need to first get them to trust you, and then you need to feed them narratives which appeal to the cognitive biases they already hold. Nobody trusts Israel apologia anymore, and people’s biases are now stacked squarely against the Zionist entity. They’ve got nothing to work with and nowhere to start from.

If a coworker you hate came up to you and started stealing stuff off your desk while telling you he’s your friend and that he would never steal from you, you’re not going to believe him no matter how many words he says to you. No matter how skillful a manipulator he is, no matter how eloquent his words are, nothing he says will trump your first hand observations of your material reality.

That’s what it’s like at this point. They’re trying to throw a bunch of language at us in order to convince us that we haven’t seen what we’ve seen, haven’t experienced what we’ve experienced, and don’t know what we know. And they assume it will work because the language they’re throwing at us is being circulated in high volumes and costs a lot of money.

It won’t work, though. Even if propaganda could convince us that we haven’t seen what we’ve seen and don’t know what we know, propaganda only works if you don’t know it’s happening to you. These past two years have made even relatively apolitical members of the public acutely aware that there is an aggressive campaign to manipulate their perception of the state of Israel, and that anyone pushing them to support that state is untrustworthy. Nobody’s going to buy into the propaganda if they don’t trust the source.

Now that everyone’s aware that Israel is paying influencers $7,000 per post to churn out propaganda on its behalf, whenever you see a video online of some young social media-savvy personality promoting pro-Israel narratives you see their replies flooded with memes and jokes about their $7k jackpot. From now on whenever some sunglasses-wearing zillennial shows up going “Israel is surrounded on all sides by Islamofascists and you think JEWS are the problem? Uhh, no babe. Walk with me,” everyone’s going to go “Found one of those $7k posts.”

It just doesn’t work. Psychological manipulation only goes so far. There’s only so much that clever language can do to decouple someone’s mind from their direct experience of material reality.

This is where Israel went wrong in alienating the liberal Zionists. They needed people at the table who understood how normal human beings think, who could help the Israel project walk the delicate line between apartheid abuses papered over with propaganda and full-scale atrocities which would alienate the world. Instead they decided to go all in with the Smotriches and Ben-Gvirs, trusting that the propaganda machine which had served them so well all those decades would continue to carry them through any international upset they might cause.

It hasn’t turned out that way. The world’s eyes are open to what Israel is, and they are never going to close again. You can’t take off the Mickey Mouse mask, show the kids the snarling Freddy Krueger face underneath it, and then put the mask on and hope they start calling you Mickey again. Nobody’s going to forget what you showed them.

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Jack booted thugs are applying pressure to the throats of people living in the UK in the form of a new digital ID. Napolean found an invasion of Britain across the English channel too challenging, however, the UK government has deliberately allowed the invasion of boats of illegal aliens across the English channel, and maybe even worse, is using this as an excuse to force a digital ID on the innocent civilians that were betrayed by their own government.

As reported in Zero Hedge:

The growing protests in Britain complain about illegal and legal migration; the government has simply made most migrants legal with limited vetting. At no point has Starmer said he will end asylum policies or take real precautions to stop physical entry. In other words, the flow of migrants will continue and a digital ID would do nothing to stop the majority of them. The ID also would not solve the problem of the millions of third world migrants already allowed into the country.

According to British Führer Keir Starmer’s plan, those living in the UK without a digital ID will not be allowed to participate in society. They will not be allowed to work or rent a home. This is a basic human right violation to deny civilians the right to food clothing and shelter if they do not possess an Orwellian digital ID. The full implementation of the UK digital ID slave system will be by the end of Parliament in 2029.

In a close referendum vote, Switzerland voted in favor of digital IDs with a vote of 50.4% in favor of an electronic ID card, while 49.6% were opposed. Turnout was 49.55% of the electorate. The Swiss ID card is still optional, however.

It is clear that the international criminal class is working hard to implement their technocratic slave system. Digital ID systems will make it easier to implement forced bioweapon injections in the future, as well as a Centralized Digital Bank Currency and a Chinese style social credit system.

The Trump administration has been working to create a digital database on Americans. Newsmax.com reported in May of 2025:

Palantir, the AI-focused software and military contractor, has expanded its “work across the federal government in recent months” after it had been tapped by President Donald Trump to create “detailed portraits” or a digital ID on Americans “which could easily merge data on Americans — throughout agencies,” such as from the IRS, the Department of Homeland Security, the Health and Human Services Department, the Social Security Administration and the Department of Education.

Palantir has been using their version of a digital ID social credit score tracking system to help the Israeli military carry out its genocide in Gaza by using the system to pick civilian targets for drones.

The Trump administration also carried out Operation Warp Speed, which was treason and an act of war against the United States of America and the world at large. This campaign of mass murder was continued by the Biden administration and once again is being carried out by the Trump administration. The stupor that Americans are in regarding these issues is the direct result of mass media influence. The deliberate mixed messaging coming from the Trump administration is designed to confuse the victim, in this case the American people, while the technocratic slave state moves forward.

A digital ID, Centralized Digital Bank Currency, Smart Cities, and the overall restriction of travel, communication, and association are core components to the technocratic slave state being crafted. So to is the biodigital convergence, which is a merging of biology and technology. According to the Canadian government there are some wonderful opportunities opening up by altering what it means to be human. These include:

Biodigital convergence is opening up striking new ways to:

Change human beings – our bodies, minds, and behaviours

Change or create other organisms

Alter ecosystems

Sense, store, process, and transmit information

Manage biological innovation

Structure and manage production and supply chains

The twisted reality that I emerging with little resistance is incredible. The digital ID is a first step, but a necessary one to enslave and alter humanity.

The following statement will challenge the assumptions of some that have been conditioned to be obedient. The government does not have the right to know who you are, where you are going, or what you are doing. If it had these powers, there would not have been a Bill of Rights. Government is evil. Unfettered government is disastrously evil. If government is not minimized, then the human race will be destroyed.

Once you understand that the MRNA nanoparticle injections were biological and technological weapons of mass destruction then it becomes clear that the governments of the world are at war with their own citizens. The governments do not reflect the will of their voters partly because the computer voting is likely fake. They reflect the will of an international criminal class that has engaged in an international conspiracy to depopulate the planet, create a technocratic slave system, and pursue Godless transhumanism.

This recent manifestation of psychopathic authoritarianism is enhanced by technology in a way that could not have been imagined just a hundred and fifty years ago. The enhancement of technology begs for decentralized extremely limited government. Otherwise, we will be left with a global slave system and most of the planet will be murdered. As it is now, we don’t know how many will die over the next decade or two from the MRNA nanoparticle injections.

The assault on our species is multifaceted. Marginalizing civilians to the point of starvation is not out of the question. Concentration camps for the uninjected are not out of the question. Denying banking, employment, and even housing is not out of the question. Targeting civilians with drones is not out of the question.

Ignoring the reality of a coming freight train is not going to save you. Unfortunately, you can’t get out of the way. There is only one solution. Destroy or derail the train before it gets too much momentum.

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

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I recently went to the Netherlands to visit an old friend. He lives in Zeewolde, a small town (pop. 24,000) located in the Flevoland province. I found it remarkable that in this old country, the Netherlands, Zeewolde is only 42 years old, the province being included in 1986. In contrast, we spent an afternoon in Elburg, only about one kilometer on the other side of a little waterway from Flevoland, which was a Medieval fishing village with an impressive gate from 1392 that is still standing.

Flevoland. Zeewold is in the south, near the bottom of the image. Elburg is on the right-center, just outside of Flevoland, and Amsterdam is out of the image, just to the left on the AI.

The village gate of Elsburg.

This contrast exists because all 540 square miles of Flevoland are reclaimed territory, called polders, created by the Dutch for centuries. A short summary of the history of polder systems in The Netherlands is given below.

“The traditional polders in The Netherlands have been formed from the 12th century onwards, when people started creating arable land by draining delta swamps into nearby rivers. In the process, the drained peat started oxidizing, thus soil levels lowered, up to river water levels and lower. Throughout the centuries farmers have been adapting their agricultural system to lowering soil levels and occasional floods and invented new ways to organise themselves and keep sea and river water out – resulting in the building of hundreds of drainage windmills and later pumping stations to pump water from polders into the rivers and the sea. This development resulted in the creation of present-day polder landscapes that are characterised by grasslands on peaty soil with drainage channels, economically sustained by dairy farming, which harbour a rich flora and fauna. These systems function in a context of (among others) rising sea and river levels, continued lowering land levels, increasingly multifunctional use of land (urbanisation, recreation and tourism, nature conservation, culture conservation), interference of agricultural policies, and other interests. A plethora of government, non-government and private parties with intense negotiation practice make up the polder governance arena. The oldest of such organisations are the “water boards” with the mandate to provide safety from water threats for all citizens. The physical and institutional polder culture is indeed a crucial aspect of the Dutch national identity.”

Of course the Netherlands is famous for dams (or dikes). The Zuiderzee Works that eventually created Flevoland includes “the Afsluitdijk (enclosure dam), running from Den Oever on Wieringen to the village of Zurich in Friesland. It was to be 32 km long and 90 meters wide, rising to 7.25 meters above sea-level, with an incline of 25% on each side” that was completed in 1932. As an aside, the Wikipedia article on the Zuiderzee (South Sea) includes a short history of the “massive St. Lucia’s flood [that] occurred 14 December 1287, when the seawalls broke during a storm, killing approximately 50,000 to 80,000 people.” It destroyed “several dams and dunes and transform[ed] it into a bay which was then called the Zuiderzee, meaning Southern Sea.” What is stated without any notice of its political impact today is that a primary cause of the disaster was “rising sea levels due to global warming known as the Medieval Warm Period.”

The dams and polders around the Zuiderzee. The Afsluitdijk (enclosure dam) is at the top of the image.

In quaint Elsburg, we drank witte (also called wheat or white) beer in the warm Indian summer sunshine and talked about the current world situation. With images of Flevoland fresh in my mind, herein I describe my mixed perceptions. My host is an avid reader of LewRockwell.com. He is a pessimist. And as you readers can concur with him, there is a strong case for pessimism these days. With that in mind I thought of Flevoland itself, and the enormous size and duration of these projects, especially for such a small country. Today I can’t imagine any European country, or even the US, completing something similar today (for example, the California high speed train). Yet I remain optimistic. I could not disregard the tasty beer, the good looking people, and the charming village. In spite of my friend’s attitude, the Dutch seem to be a very prosperous and cheerful people. To understand the technical ability to create and maintain the polders impels one to have great admiration for this industrious country. How they came to endure the insipid Mark Rutte as prime minister for 14 years is a contradiction I leave for the Dutch to explain. A materialization of and symbol for me of the Dutch spirit of solidity and prosperity are the paving bricks and their patterns that make up virtually all of the sidewalks and many streets. To integrate these thoughts, I wonder why the “re” in reclamation is used to describe these projects. They created the land itself. While a real reclamation project would be to take back the culture of the West. I think it is possible, I think we must try.

Dutch paving bricks.

Just before this visit I had read Hope Against Hope: A Memoir by Nadezhda Mandelstam. She recounts her life with her husband, the poet Osip Mandelstam, in particular, during the Stalin induced Great Purge. In effect, Osip was arrested for poetry. After a period of internal exile with Nadezhda, he was sentenced to a forced labor camp. He subsequently died in a transit camp in 1938. She dedicated her life to preserving his poetry including memorizing much of it in the manner of Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451. She lived isolated and in terror for many years. Finally, after Stalin’s death in 1953 she was able to lead a more normal life and to eventually write this memoir. In a late chapter titled Rebirth she wrote.

“I must admit to being an incorrigible optimist. Like those who believed at the beginning of this century that life had [emphasis in the original text] to be better than in the nineteenth century, I am now convinced that we will soon witness a complete resurgence of humane values. I mean this not only in respect to social justice, but also in cultural life and in everything else. Far from being shaken in my optimism by the bitter experience of the first half of this incredible century, I am encouraged to believe that all we have been through will have served to turn people against the idea, so tempting at first sight, that the end justifies the means and “everything is permitted.” M. [Osip Mandelstam] taught me to believe that history is a practical testing-ground for the ways of good and evil. We have tested the ways of evil. Will any of us want to revert to them? Isn’t it true that the voices among us speaking of conscience and good are growing stronger? I feel that we are at the threshold of new days, and I think I detect signs of a new attitude.”

If she could be an optimist after her experiences I can be optimistic too.

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Say’s Law of Markets advances the self-evident truth that supply and demand are two sides of the same coin, meaning one can view economic output as supply as well as demand.  Demand is measured by what producers produce.  Supply is measured by what producers produce.

In a state of nature, one’s own economic demand is dependent on and measured by one’s production.  Survival requires people work to that end.  As civilization emerged producers began trading with one another, exchanging something they had for something they wanted.

Some people looked upon this activity and decided they could get what they wanted without working for it.  They saw a “free lunch” available for the taking.  Thomas Paine described them as “restless gangs” that “overawed the quiet and defenseless to purchase their safety by frequent contributions.” Though he was speculating about how the “race of kings” originated, his characterization applies to any society ruled by force.

Under coercive rule, which characterizes today’s states, every producer is subject to having a portion of his output confiscated for support of the ruling class.  Though rulers usually assure its denizens the confiscation is necessary for their benefit, the fact that it’s coercive means people have no choice in the matter.  Unlike markets in which people trade as equals, states established a system of obedience to a ruling elite to get what it wanted.  To hide the nature of the relationship, the restless gangs adopted civilized-sounding names such as “contributions” and “government.”

Calling the bounty government receives “free” is somewhat misleading, since the criminality requires sustained, often convoluted effort in the form of propaganda, bureaucracies, police, and close relationships with major economic actors, as President Trump is doing.  Regardless of what might flow from government to its citizens, the arrangement is such that government’s revenue stream will only stop if it kills the golden goose.

Over time economies adopted money to facilitate exchanges — and that’s where theft reached sophisticated lows.

Money is the most marketable commodity, and commodities can be made to deceive.  When money originated from the market, people gradually traded in coins of precious metals.  A one-ounce silver coin might look the same as others, but if the mint diluted it with base metals it would be reflected in its weight.  The emperor Nero began the gross debasement of the Roman denarius in this manner. Coins minted before the fraud were usually hoarded in accordance with Gresham’s Law (“bad money drives out good”).

Notice, however, in a free market, meaning without Caesar’s decree, good money drives out bad, and the Law as stated is wrong.  As Gary North points out,  “The free market rewards producers of customer-satisfying products and services. The definition of bad money is money that the free market refuses to use.”  But government’s coercive nature violates free markets.  Caesar was getting something for nothing through a subtle form of theft backed by the threat of death.  Again, the loot stolen took significant effort on the part of the thieves and diminishes the accusation that it was a “free lunch.”

Today’s thieves

Caesar’s idea has matured into the suit-wearing leaders of today.  Currency debasement is no longer regarded as fraud, but as smart money management.  Banks as money warehouses or savings institutions have long practiced fractional reserve banking as if it were ethical business conduct.  Embezzlement?  Hardly.  When banks couldn’t meet the demands of a bank run, government often allowed them to stay in business without redeeming their depositors gold or silver coins.  If people hadn’t been stampeded into doubting their bank’s solvency, one argument goes, there would be no crisis.

But for most people today the idea of paper money as receipts for market-valuable coins is alien in the extreme.  And to government, that’s the way they want it.  When FDR issued Executive Order 6102 on April 5, 1933, forbidding Americans from hoarding gold, the separation of money from its receipts began, and the receipts became money itself.  Not that gold suddenly became worthless.  Only the government could hoard it, which it did at Fort Knox, where coins were melted into bars.  Since paper can be inflated at will, experts decided monetary inflation was needed to end the Great Depression.

Since at least 1755 when Richard Cantillon published An Essay on Economic Theory it has been known that new money enters the economy at specific points, not everywhere at once.  The ones receiving the new money first, such as government personnel, are able to spend it before prices rise.  People who receive it later are stiffed with higher prices.

Thus the Age of Inflation began with elites benefiting from the new money while the rest of the population remained oblivious as to why prices always rise, often blaming it on greedy capitalists with an insatiable lust for profits. To those getting money as it came off the presses this became government’s Holy Grail, the “free lunch” it had at last found.

It was Keynes’s General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money, published in 1936, that provided the intellectual cover for government’s mandate for inflation.  Perhaps more than Keynes himself, it was his many influential disciples such as textbook king Paul A. Samuelson, Alvin H. Hansen of Harvard, and Keynes’ biographer R. F. Harrod that elevated his book to near-religious status.  Keynes’ straw statement of Say’s Law — supply automatically creates demand sufficient for full employment — was seen by policymakers as a flawed idea in an era of high unemployment.  It was time to discard Say so unemployment could be remedied by increasing demand, specifically government spending fueled by the printing press.  If people were out of work, have them dig holes and pay them with money they couldn’t redeem.

In Say’s formulation, as noted at the beginning, supply and demand denoted the same thing, production.  Production was the foundation of both supply and demand.  Government armed with fiat money could bypass production and essentially claim the output of others.  Some might call it a free lunch, others theft.

The post Government’s Eternal Longing for a Free Lunch appeared first on LewRockwell.

As the smoke clears in America, what kind of image greets a foreigner? Violence that makes international news nearly always has political worth. Anyone paying attention from abroad has got to see the similarity to sports team loyalties.

Fans who are on it, before grisliness online is taken down, can even resort to instant replay. The ubiquity of cameras has hyped up the game. What’s on a video gets exponentially more ink, blabber and outrage than any mere report can convey. One motion picture is worth millions of words. Much of the language is heartfelt, but, crass as it is to say, more of it is cashing in.

Mourning noises are expected etiquette, inaudibly though, you can almost hear the grief-casters thinking, ‘how does this work for us, how soon should waterworks cease and scorched Earth aggression begin?’

Restraint is generally the exception. Jumping the gun and pointing fingers before reliable facts are known has become the norm. That kind of haste stung in Jussie Smollett’s case. The newsmouths take no heed. They still squander what they see as opportunity, before any certainty arrives.

At the risk of taking sides myself, this needs saying: there are some differences between what are in fact ‘fan bases,’ however crude the term is right now, that should not go unnoted. Look at the coverage.

The newsy industry might tell us how misleading the visuals can be. Did anybody see the Kirkonians blocking traffic, torching town or making off with cases of the good stuff after the murder? If only Charlie had been resisting arrest at the time, riotousness could be fully condoned and justified.

Kirk’s murder has placed a recurring debate point upfront again. We keep rehearing the ongoing score. Partisan political violence is like golf – the lower for your side the better. Stats cited by Mehdi Hasan, The Washington Post, Dan Goldman and numerous others find the left wing consistently under par on the ideologically motivated homicide course.

Comparative figures blasted daily in podcasts have placed 333 out of 444 so-called “terrorist” killings between 2013 and 2022 at the feet of the “right wing.” The FBI’s Uniform Crime Report gives 179,301 as the number of murders over that period. 333 comes to 0.185721%, or about 1/500th, of the total. Dividing by 444 would not move things left of the decimal point. This leaves a susceptible observer with the, supposedly qualified, conclusion that nearly 179,000 murders can safely be ruled out as ideologically inspired.

Where then, would closer examination of individual cases take us? Presumably Dylan Roof and Peyton Gendron’s slaughters are counted among that 333. What about slayings like Iryna Zarutska’s? Does Decarlos Brown muttering about “white people” have any bearing? Does even asking this question in numerous instances of crime evoke “racist” hackles? The mere fact of ruling the demographics of crime, and criminal motivation, morally out of bounds gives rise to monsters like Roof, Gendron, Brown and many others in the first place. It gets worse. When the race of criminal and victim differ, why are editorial principles flexible? Media managers who stoop to switching standards must think they’ve speciated from lowly consumers. Marks that don’t fall for the con can be conveniently labeled “racist.”

A classic example of giving certain victims precedence over others occurred when Andrew Lester shot Ralph Yarl for ringing his door bell. A week later, Robert Singletary shot 6-year-old Kinsley White and her father William – one bullet grazing the mother – after a basket ball rolled into Singletary’s yard. The Washington Post had 3 front page stories – all mentioning race of the shooter in the headline – on Lester’s crime. Another opinion piece that Sunday did the same. A single page 2 story brought up Singletary’s act. The word “White” only came up because of the victims’ surnames. In the middle of that article both Yarl and Trayvon Martin got mention.

Is anyone naïve enough to believe these kinds of editorial priorities play no part in cranking up violent cranks? If whiteness is overwhelmingly prone to reach description in criminal narratives only when a Caucasoid does it, where does that leave the default? Have we reached a place where noticing that descriptive disparity can be characterized as “racist” in itself?

Around 75,000 murders between 2013 and 22, went unsolved. How reliable can the number 333 be in our understanding of a culprit’s “wing” in the clutter of unknowns about teeming criminal carnage? The subjectivity in judicial findings of “terror” came up again in a ruling on the Luigi Mangione case. New York Judge Gregory Carro found insufficient evidence of a motive to “intimidate or coerce a civilian population or government unit” as prescribed in statute. Should that have been left to a jury? Was similarly judicial fastidiousness applied in those 333 cases?

The reality is that journalistic, academic and political fads have been clouding precise and unbiased treatment of criminal behaviors for ages. Who takes it worse at trial and sentencing shifts with what’s in style at the moment. Laymen are expected to accept that present hot legal trends have finally got it right. People with any cool presence of mind know that human fates can swing wildly as emotions are stoked by polemicists with a mic. A potential upside of that is that anyone fearing punishment should be warier than ever about attacking others in a fickle human environment. The downside is that people inclined to act irrationally can be motivated witnessing literary, academic and legalistic absurdity.

I can no longer count how often claims that Tyler Robinson had “no known motive” have surfaced in both podcast and written media. What spurred the killer is as clear as what did it for James Earl Ray. The one’s making political hay out of Kirk’s tragic death search desperately for a “Raoul.” The axe-grinding industry’s greatest conflagrations are kindled with innuendo of a nefarious plot. Tragic events provide opportunity … to proclaim “they” were all in on it. Guilt, spewed out with a manure spreader, can gather a lot of political momentum.

Herschel Grynszpan killed Ernst vom Rath, but did no harm to Nazis plotting Kristallnacht. Victims of that pogrom might ask whose side Hersh thought he was on? There’s little telling where gratuitous violence may lead. Kirk’s demise has given Mehdi Hasan a new reason to bring up January 6, 2021 and half that magic number 666. Meanwhile, Marc Thiessen’s Washington Post column is titled “Yes, the left has a political violence problem.” In that article polling, which can be as lacking in precision as the “333,” has the “woke” coming off as the trigger happiest on the spectrum.

Anytime violence is prima facie political, reactions fall into place with eerie neatness. Ooh, how it hurt the grievance movement when Jussie Smollett got caught. And, golly gee, how others prayed that Jan 6 was an FBI false flag. Likewise, summer 2020 some still swear, was really the work of Proud Boys and allies. And, has Trump ever backed off his unsupportable claim that immigrants are rapey animals from Gehenna? Goebbels’ Sender Gleiwitz PR has become the inspiration for 21st century American factional exploitation. You might wonder if the diehards of either “side” find all bad news good.

Articles and books like “White Rural Rage: The Threat to American Democracy,” by Tom Schaller and Paul Waldman, have often been criticized as hitting wide of the mark. It’s a strange comfort to some Americans to find the slander true. They’ll stick by the facts they like to believe. Others prefer that crossing into city limits is risking life and limb across the country – and refuse to accept stats on crime rates dropping. It’s hard for anyone gazing intently, not to see a desire by political sectarians for their opponents to be lynchers or cutthtroats. The crimes they pretend to abhor are TD bombs in the perpetual Super Bowl of political capital.

What might improve things is unequivocally literal description and properly weighted editorial allotment of copy. Criminal violence has the same consequences for the victim whatever his attacker was thinking. It often looks like the purportedly aggrieved, when violence happens against one of their own, were thinking “now we’ve got ‘em, run out the clock.” Placing coverage in order to “get” some faction or demographic is propaganda whatever the ideological motivation. Words aren’t violence but putting them in where they don’t belong, or subtracting them where they do, certainly fuels unwelcome outcomes.

If understanding what reality is is your goal you’ll always find yourself in the same place: wanting to know. If you already know you can find out nothing. Fans in the spectator sport of ideological carnage already know. “They” are out to get us and soon it’ll go so far we have to strike back. The chance that mediacrats will ever wise up to this reality doesn’t look good. They can find no hope in the proles.

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The drumbeats of war are no longer distant echoes, they are thundering across the Middle East, reverberating through global capitals, and shaking the foundations of the post–Cold War international system. What once seemed like speculative alarmism is now unfolding as a meticulously orchestrated geopolitical endgame, with Iran, Israel, and the United States locked in a high-stakes confrontation that promises to be anything but brief or contained.

Forget the so-called “12-Day War” of recent memory. Sources within defense and intelligence circles confirm that the next phase will not be a surgical strike or a limited retaliation, it will be a full-spectrum, decapitating campaign aimed at dismantling Iran’s nuclear infrastructure, military command, government officials, proxies and regional influence in stages of overwhelming blow. Yet this time, the calculus has shifted dramatically.

During the Trump administration, officials confidently claimed that Iran’s nuclear facilities had been “bombed into the ground,” rendering them inoperable for years. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, and his inner circle echoed this narrative, projecting an image of irreversible strategic victory. But that was then. What happened again? Is it because Iran refused to cooperate with IAEA? No, not at all. Today, Iran has signaled, unequivocally, that it will show no restraint this time around, Did Israel forgot it had to appeal to Trump to step in bring the last conflict to a close? No! They want Iran crushed. Should hostilities erupt, which will definitely do very soon, Tehran has made it clear it will not only retaliate against Israel but will also target U.S. military assets and interests across the region. Crucially, Iran has warned that any country hosting American bases used to launch attacks against it will be considered a legitimate target. This is not bluster; it is doctrine.

Netanyahu, besieged by domestic unrest, international condemnation over Gaza, and mounting protests from a global coalition critical of Zionist policies, is running out of time. Analysts suggest that opening a new front with Iran may serve a dual purpose: diverting global attention from the humanitarian catastrophe in Palestine while creating the fog of war necessary to escalate operations in Gaza with reduced scrutiny. In essence, a war with Iran could become the smokescreen for a final, devastating push in the occupied territories.

The scale of military mobilization confirms these intentions. Under directives linked to President Donald Trump and current Pentagon leadership, there has been an unprecedented surge in the deployment of heavy weaponry to the Middle East. Fighter jets, glide bombs, and—most tellingly—large consignments of gravity bombs have been moved into position across U.S. and allied bases. You do not transport such ordnance unless you intend to use it.

Even more revealing is the reactivation of Cold War–era protocols. The U.S. Department of Defense has quietly restructured command channels in a manner reminiscent of the War Department’s mobilization before World War II. The reason for the recent summons to generals and admirals worldwide, signaling a shift to war footing. Meanwhile, dozens of KC-135 and KC-46 aerial refueling tankers now sit in Qatar, assets that exist solely to enable deep-strike missions over Iranian territory. The USS Gerald R. Ford carrier strike group looms in the Mediterranean, a textbook prelude to escalation. Meanwhile, the geopolitical chessboard is fracturing along new fault lines. The U.S. recently signed a sweeping defense pact with Qatar, declaring that any attack on the emirate constitutes a direct threat to American national security. This isn’t about Qatar—it’s about securing Al Udeid Air Base from Iran missiles, the largest U.S. military installation in the region, as a launchpad for operations against Iran.

Yet the U.S. arsenal is not without vulnerabilities. With SM-6 missile inventories critically low, planners are reportedly relying on old Tomahawk cruise missiles, subsonic, slower, and more susceptible to Iran’s increasingly sophisticated air defenses. This reliance on legacy systems underscores both urgency and strategic risk. With Iran signalling the readiness to use advance weapons integrated with air defense.

Iran, for its part, is far from passive. Intelligence from regional sources indicates Tehran has fortified its asymmetric warfare capabilities. Its ultimate trump card? The Strait of Hormuz. Just 21 miles wide, this maritime chokepoint handles nearly 20% of the world’s oil exports. Even a partial closure would send oil prices soaring past $200 a barrel, trigger global supply chain collapse, and ignite economic chaos from Berlin to Beijing. Iran doesn’t need to win militarily, it only needs to make victory unbearably costly for its adversaries. We see Kurdish quick supply of oil to the global market, an alternative move the West played, in the case of Iran oil blockade, but sources have said even Kurdish will not be able to serve that purpose.

Iran Executive Six Mossad Operatives

Mossad, Israel’s intelligence agency, has allegedly been orchestrating covert destabilization campaigns in northern Iran via Azerbaijan. But this shadow war suffered a major setback when six operatives were captured and executed, a stark reminder that Iran is watching, and ready.

Regionally, no nation can remain neutral. Egypt’s President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi faces mounting pressure to act, as public outrage over perceived complicity with Israel grows. Pakistan, backed by China and possessing a nuclear arsenal it has declared “an Islamic deterrent,” stands ready to intervene if Israel crosses the nuclear threshold. Riyadh’s recent nuclear umbrella agreement with Islamabad is no coincidence, it’s a hedge against total regional collapse, to be on the safe haven of Western allies and Islamic State protection.

Pakistan, a nuclear-armed state that refuses to be sidelined. Backed by robust Chinese financial and military support, Islamabad has quietly repositioned itself as a key deterrent in the Islamic world. Pakistani officials have reiterated that their nuclear arsenal is not solely for national defense but is, in their words, “an Islamic shield” available to any Muslim nation facing existential threat. While never explicitly naming Israel, the implication is clear: should Tel Aviv resort to nuclear weapons in a desperate attempt to “decapitate” Iran, Pakistan may not remain neutral. The mere possibility of nuclear escalation however remote, adds a terrifying layer of unpredictability to an already volatile equation.

Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, long straddling the fence between East and West, may soon be forced to choose a side as domestic unrest swells and opposition forces demand decisive action. The Iran-Israel crisis could be the catalyst that finally pulls Ankara off the sidelines. In a move that signals a dramatic shift in regional power dynamics, Turkey recently denied passage to an Indian naval vessel reportedly en route to support Israeli operations in the Eastern Mediterranean. This isn’t mere bureaucratic friction, it’s a calculated geopolitical statement. By blocking the warship’s transit through the Turkish Straits under the Montreux Convention, Ankara has effectively lifted a finger, not in aggression, but in assertion. It’s a quiet yet unmistakable declaration that Turkey will no longer serve as a passive corridor for military actions it opposes, especially those aligned with Israel during a period of escalating tension with Iran.

Meanwhile, the United States has placed its entire global military command structure on high alert. From CENTCOM to EUCOM and INDOPACOM, readiness levels have been elevated to near-crisis status. Commanders across all theaters are being instructed to maintain constant operational preparedness, not just for potential direct conflict with Iran, but for cascading contingencies that could erupt from the Middle East to the South China Sea. This synchronized posture reflects a doctrine of “full-spectrum dominance,” but also reveals deep anxiety within the Pentagon: the fear that a regional war could spiral into a multipolar confrontation.

The Houthis of Yemen are far from passive observers in the escalating Iran-Israel-U.S. crisis, they are active, and have confirmed they will go all out against Israel. Their are now capable, and increasingly audacious players reshaping the regional balance of power. No longer reliant on rudimentary rockets, Houthi forces have developed and deployed a new generation of precision-guided, long-range missiles and drones capable of striking deep inside Israeli territory with alarming accuracy and minimal warning. Intelligence assessments confirm these systems, some reverse-engineered with Iranian assistance, others indigenously engineered, can now bypass layered air defenses and reach Tel Aviv, Haifa, and even Dimona without significant difficulty.

More than a military capability, this advancement is a strategic declaration: the Houthis have made it unequivocally clear that any large-scale U.S.-Israeli assault on Iran will trigger an immediate and sustained campaign against maritime traffic in the Red Sea and the Bab el-Mandeb Strait. They have vowed to bring global shipping to a standstill, targeting commercial vessels linked to Israel, the U.S., or their allies. Given that nearly 12% of global trade and 30% of container traffic between Asia and Europe passes through this chokepoint, such a blockade would inflict immediate economic shockwaves worldwide, spiking insurance premiums, rerouting supply chains, and potentially triggering a second energy and commodity crisis.

This is not theoretical posturing. Recall how, Trump administration, the USS Dwight D. Eisenhower aircraft carrier strike group was abruptly withdrawn from the Eastern Mediterranean after Houthi threats intensified, officially framed as the result of a “diplomatic understanding,” but widely known as a tacit acknowledgment of Houthi deterrence. The message was clear: even the world’s most powerful navy hesitates when asymmetric actors control critical maritime arteries.

Meanwhile, Iraq has taken a firm stance: Baghdad has formally declared it will not permit its airspace or territory to be used by any belligerent faction in a future conflict. This is a significant shift from past permissiveness and reflects growing Iraqi sovereignty concerns, public anti-American sentiment, and pressure from powerful Iran-aligned factions within its own security apparatus. Should the U.S. or Israel attempt to route strikes through Iraqi skies, they risk not only diplomatic rupture but potential retaliation from Iraqi paramilitary groups. Though Azerbaijan is on the side of the Israel, and it airspace open for Israel use, is also on the line of attack from Iran.

Now, as tensions surge again, the Houthis are signaling they will act as Iran’s western flank, tying down U.S. naval assets, stretching Israeli air defenses, and forcing Washington to fight a multi-front shadow war it never planned for.

China and Russia have moved swiftly to bolster Iran’s defensive and offensive capabilities. Just weeks ago, Tehran, Beijing, and Moscow formalized a trilateral defense cooperation treaty, cementing what many analysts now describe as an “anti-hegemonic axis.” Intelligence reports confirm the delivery of advanced air defense systems, electronic warfare suites, precision-guided munitions, and even satellite intelligence-sharing protocols to Iran. These aren’t symbolic gestures; they are force multipliers designed to deter, delay, and if necessary, inflict unacceptable costs on any coalition attempting a strike on Iranian soil.

Disturbing intelligence assessments suggest the United States could exploit the chaos of an Iran-Israel conflagration to launch a simultaneous “law enforcement” operation in Venezuela, framed as a renewed “war on drugs” but functionally serving as a strategic diversion. By igniting a secondary crisis in Latin America, Washington could flood global news cycles with narratives of cartel violence and narco-terrorism, effectively drawing public attention and journalistic scrutiny away from military actions in the Middle East. Such a tactic would mirror historical precedents where secondary conflicts were used to mask primary geopolitical maneuvers.

The once-celebrated 21-point U.S.-Israel coordination framework for Gaza-Palestine now lies in tatters. Both nations are reportedly suspending other regional operations to concentrate entirely on what insiders refer to as “the Iran phase.” Military preparations are complete, with activation windows reportedly opening as early as late October. The urgency is palpable—and deeply political.

And behind it all looms a deeper, more insidious agenda. Critics warn that this manufactured crisis could serve as the final domino in the so-called “Great Reset”—a global power consolidation masked as emergency response. In the wake of economic shock, governments may fast-track Central Bank Digital Currencies, enforce universal digital IDs, and implement programmable money systems under the guise of “stability” and “security.”

Together, these developments reveal a world no longer governed by unipolar dictates but fractured into competing spheres of influence, shadow alliances, and covert red lines. Turkey’s blockade, Venezuela’s vulnerability, Pakistan’s nuclear posture, and Israel’s media machine are not isolated events, they are interconnected nodes in a global crisis architecture. What unfolds in the deserts of Iran may well echo in the boardrooms of Beijing, the corridors of Ankara, the slums of Caracas, and the digital feeds of billions.

This is more than a regional war in the making. It is the birth pang of a new world order, one defined not by treaties alone, but by who controls the narrative, the oil, the data, and ultimately, and the so called truth.

This is not merely a regional conflict. It is a battle for the soul of the 21st century, a clash between multipolarity and digital authoritarianism, between sovereignty and surveillance, between chaos and control.

The world stands at a precipice. The 12-Day War was a prelude. What comes next may redefine or dent civilization itself.

This article was originally published on Ultimate-Survival.

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Lew,

This should shock and alarm anyone who loves liberty and the Constitution and hates despots and tyranny. 

American Thinker

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Thanks, David Martin.

DC Dave

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Click here:

Eugyppius

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As the Left and the neocons advance against us to take away our liberties, many people appeal to the Constitution. Isn’t it unconstitutional for the President to involve us in foreign wars? The Constitution vests the warmaking power entirely in Congress. All sorts of things are denounced as unconstitutional, usually on good grounds. We should not avoid arguments of this type, which are often of some use in blocking radical left judges from reading their own agenda into the Constitution. As the great Murray Rothbard noted, for example, “In my opinion, the Jeffersonian strict construction theory of the ‘necessary and proper’ clause is obviously the meaning most appropriate to the text: ‘necessary’ always means, in logical discourse, those steps that are truly essential and not just what some congressmen think to be conducive to the final result.”

But ultimately, the Constitution is a weak reed. As Rothbard also noted in the posthumously published Volume 5 of Conceived in Liberty, the Constitution was a triumph for those who wanted a large central government. It was a blow to those who believed in states’ rights and civil liberties. Here is what Rothbard says: “The Constitution was unquestionably a high-nationalist document, creating what Madison once referred to as a ‘high mounted government.’ Not only were the essential lines of the nationalistic Virginia Plan Report carried out in the Constitution, but the later changes made were preponderantly in a nationalist direction. Of the fundamental changes, only the equality of states in the Senate and their election by state legislatures, the former bitterly protested by the determined large state nationalists, was a concession to the opposition. In contrast, on the nationalist side congressional selection of the president was changed to chosen by popular election, admission of new states was made purely arbitrary, and the amendment power was transferred from the states to the Congress. While it is true that the general congressional veto over state laws and the vague broad grant of powers in the original Virginia Plan were whittled down to a list of enumerated powers, enough loopholes existed in the enumerated list: the national supremacy clause; the dominance of the federal judiciary; the virtually unlimited power to tax, raise armies and navies, make war, and regulate commerce; the necessary and proper clause; and the powerful general welfare loophole; all allowed the virtually absolute supremacy of the central government. While libertarian restraints were placed on state powers, no bill of rights existed to check the federal government. And slavery, albeit not explicitly named in the document, was cemented into American society by the nationalists’ twenty-year guarantee of the slave trade, in the three-fifths clause ‘representing’ slaves in Congress, and in the compulsory fugitive slave clause. The northern nationalists were willing, if shamefacedly, to agree in exchange for the right to regulate commerce and thus grant themselves commercial privileges, while the southern nationalists were willing to concede regulation of commerce in confident expectation of an early slave-state preponderance in Congress for the South and Southwest. Both wings of nationalists looked forward to a central government that could pursue an aggressive foreign policy, either on behalf of commercial interests to pry open the West Indies trade, or on behalf of interests in the western lands to push Britain out of the Northwest or Spain out of the southwestern Mississippi.”

But what about the Bill of Rights? Doesn’t it protect individual rights and limit the power of the federal government? Rothbard was not impressed. He says about the Bill of Rights: “The Ninth and Tenth Amendments were signed to give the stark rebuttal to the cynical Wilson-Madison-Hamilton argument that a bill of rights impairs people’s rights by permitting encroachment in unenumerated rights that would supposedly belong to the people. The Tenth Amendment specifies that ‘the powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.’ This amendment specifies that the national government is one of strictly delegated powers, and that powers not so delegated belong to the states or to the people. In other words, the power not specifically delegated or prohibited to the federal government cannot be assumed by that government and are reserved to the states. For many years the Tenth Amendment was the great weapon of the states-rightists and other anti-nationalists in their argument that the states (or the people of the states) are really sovereign, rather than the national government. This amendment did in truth transform the Constitution from one of supreme national power to a partially mixed polity where the liberal anti-nationalists had a constitutional argument with at least a fighting chance of acceptance. However, Madison had cunningly left out the word ‘expressly’ before the word ‘delegated,’ so the nationalist judges were able to claim that because the word ‘expressly’ was not there, the ‘delegated’ can vaguely accrue through judges’ elastic interpretation of the Constitution. This loophole for vague ‘delegated’ power allowed the national courts to use such open-ended claims as general welfare, commerce, national supremacy, and necessary and proper to argue for almost any delegation of power that is not specifically prohibited to the federal government—in short, to return the Constitution basically to what it was before the Tenth Amendment was passed. The Tenth Amendment has been intensely reduced, by conventional judiciary construction, to a meaningless tautology.”

Rothbard sums up his opinion of the Constitution in this way: “Overall, it should be evident that the Constitution was a counterrevolutionary reaction to the libertarianism and decentralization embodied in the American Revolution. The Antifederalists, supporting states’ rights and critical of a strong national government, were decisively beaten by the Federalists, who wanted such a polity under the guise of democracy in order to enhance their own interests and institute a British-style mercantilism over the country. Most historians have taken the side of the Federalists because they support a strong national government that has the power to tax and regulate, call forth armies and invade other countries, and cripple the power of the states. The enactment of the Constitution in 1788 drastically changed the course of American history from its natural decentralized and libertarian direction to an omnipresent leviathan that fulfilled all of the Antifederalists’ fears. With the ratification of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, the new government was now a fact and the Antifederalists would never again agitate for another constitutional convention to weaken American national power and return to a more decentralized and restrained polity. From now on American liberals, relying on the Bill of Rights and the Tenth Amendment, would go forth and do battle for Liberty and against Power within the framework of the American Constitution as states’-righters and Constitutionalists. Their battle would be a long and gallant one, but ultimately doomed to fail, for by accepting the Constitution, the liberals would only play with dice loaded implacably against them. The Constitution, with its inherently broad powers and elastic clauses, would increasingly support an ever larger and more powerful central government. In the long run, the liberals, though they could and did run a gallant race, were doomed to lose—and lose indeed they did.”

But doesn’t the Supreme Court act as a check on the federal government, by sometimes ruling that Congress or the President has violated the Constitution? The problem with this is one that John C. Calhoun long ago pointed out: the Court can legitimize the federal government by affirming that what it has done is constitutional. What else would you expect—it is a branch of the federal government. As Rothbard pointed out in a review of a book by the leftist Yale Law School professor Charles L. Black, Jr., “Black is perhaps the first since Calhoun to realize that judicial review is not simply a welcome check on government power. More important is the function of judicial review in validating, in legitimatizing, government power, and in inducing the public to accept it. . . Now, judicial review, beloved by conservatives, can of course fulfill the excellent function of declaring government interventions and tyrannies unconstitutional. But it can also validate and legitimize the government in the eyes of the people by declaring these actions valid and constitutional. Thus, the courts and the Supreme Court become an instrument of spearheading and confirming federal tyranny instead of the reverse. And this is what has happened in America—so that the Constitution itself has been changed from a limiting to an aggrandizing and legitimizing instrument.”

Let’s do everything we can to promote a correct understanding of the Constitution, using it to defend liberty but also recognizing its limits, as the great Murray Rothbard has taught us.

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American taxpayer money played a crucial role in keeping Moldovan President Maia Sandu in power, former USAID chief Samantha Power has claimed in a prank call with Russian comedians Vovan and Lexus.

Power, who led the US Agency for International Development under President Joe Biden, was recorded speaking to the pranksters as they posed as former Ukrainian President Pyotr Poroshenko. In the video, released Wednesday, she reflected on her time overseeing an agency with 15,000 staff and a multibillion-dollar budget, and cited expanded aid to Moldova as one of her successes.

“This was not a country that USAID had really had much of a presence in, very small,” Power said. “We expanded it massively, both for the sake of Ukraine, but of course also for Moldova. And it was a democratic brightspot with President Sandu, a Kennedy School graduate and a real reformer.”

According to Power, Sandu “narrowly squeaked by the last time,” though she did not specify whether she was referring to last year’s presidential election or the recent parliamentary vote in Moldova. Sandu and her party secured both contests with strong support from Moldovan expatriates in Western nations, while failing to secure a majority in the popular vote at home. Opposition figures argue the process was skewed to limit turnout in anti-government areas.

Sandu, a Romanian citizen, has faced criticism for what opponents describe as authoritarian tactics, including shutting down opposition media and branding rivals as Moscow-backed criminals. She has maintained that Moldova’s path to the European Union depends on her leadership.

Power said the Biden administration folded tens of millions of dollars for Moldova into broader Ukraine aid appropriation requests. “That money went much, much further in Moldova than it did in Ukraine because it’s such a small country,” she noted.

She also suggested people tend to associate Washington’s support with “arms, and maybe with Tori Nuland and interference,” but they overlook “forms of more subtle support.” Former US Under Secretary of State Victoria Nuland is widely described as a key architect of the 2014 coup in Kiev and the subsequent escalation of tensions with Russia.

Moscow reiterated criticisms of Sandu after her latest victory, which Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov branded a blatant example of “electoral fraud.”

This article was originally published on RT News.

The post Ex-USAID Chief Brags About Funding ‘Democratic Brightspot’ in Moldova appeared first on LewRockwell.

Ursula von der Leyen, President of the European Commission (the collective body that constitutes the Presidency of the EU), wants to add both Ukraine and Moldova to the EU, though at least one EU member-nation, Hungary, is opposed, and though the EU’s existing Constitution prohibits any new member-nation to be added unless all existing member-nations approve its application to join.

The EU’s Constitution is called the “Treaty on European Union”, and its Article 49 says that no nation can be added to the EU unless its existing member-nations are unanimous in approving its being added to the membership:

Any European State which respects the values referred to in Article 2 and is committed to promoting them may apply to become a member of the Union. The European Parliament and national Parliaments shall be notified of this application. The applicant State shall address its application to the Council, which shall act unanimously after consulting the Commission and after receiving the consent of the European Parliament, which shall act by a majority of its component members. The conditions of eligibility agreed upon by the European Council shall be taken into account.

The conditions of admission and the adjustments to the Treaties on which the Union is founded, which such admission entails, shall be the subject of an agreement between the Member States and the applicant State. This agreement shall be submitted for ratification by all the contracting States in accordance with their respective constitutional requirements.

Every EU Member-nation has a member in the EU Council, and all of those must be united in approving the applicant-nation’s application, in order for a new member-nation to be added.

Consequently, the EU will violate its tradition of never even accepting an application to join, unless all existing members are willing to consider that nation’s application. Implicitly, the EU is telling Hungarians to replace their existing Government, and are expecting that the newly elected Hungarian Government will support the applications of Ukraine and Moldova to join. It’s an implicit warning to Viktor Orban, Hungary’s current Prime Minister, that the EU will do whatever it can to get him removed and replaced by someone whom the EU will accept to represent Hungary.

On September 29th, Politico headlined “Costa seeks to bypass Orbán’s veto on Ukraine’s EU membership bid: Brussels’ rules requiring all 27 member countries to agree on new entrants will face scrutiny at a summit this week in Copenhagen.”

On September 30th, the Financial Times headlined “EU moves to advance Ukraine’s accession by sidestepping Hungary: Brussels advises Kyiv to advance technical work despite Budapest holding up talks”.

The FT article reported that, “Once Hungary was willing to lift its veto, the formalities could be sped up. ‘In theory you could then open and close a cluster on the same day,’ one of the officials said.” In other words: by breaking tradition on this, as von der Leyen wants, both Ukraine and Moldova might possibly be added to the membership almost immediately after the new, pro-war, Government becomes installed in Hungary and/or in any other possible anti-war existing EU member-nation.

In the eventuality that there would be no success at regime-change in Hungary, or if some other existing member-nation decides to oppose adding Ukraine and Moldova, the EU might get impatient with adhering to the existing Treaty on European Union, and try to Amend it by replacing the existing unanimity-requirement by making that instead something less, such as a mere majority-approval requirement. However, Amending that Treaty (the EU’s Constitution) has been made prohibitively difficult by the Treaty’s Article 48, which requires unanimity in order to Amend the document.

As-of now, there have been no Amendments to the Treaty on European Union. This would be the first.

The Treaty fails to include any Article or clause describing a process by which to expel a member-nation (such as Hungary) — even if they now might wish to do that in order to expedite their transition from having been almost exclusively an economic union, to becoming now a military union.

The EU’s apparent urgency to get at least Ukraine into its membership is actually part of the EU’s intention to become a replacement for NATO, an anti-Russian military alliance (the EU having been the anti-Russian economic alliance) which WOULDN’T be dependent upon the U.S. EU countries have been just colonies of the U.S. empire. Consequently, for example, the “New Union Post” a “Magazine on EU enlargement,” headlined on August 21st, “Is EU accession a security guarantee for Ukraine? Thanks to the mutual defence clause enshrined in the Treaties, EU enlargement could represent ‘a very strong guarantee on paper,’ says EUISS senior analyst Ondrej Ditrych. However, it needs to be backed up by capacities and plans to ‘fill the widening deterrence gap caused by uncertainty about the US’s credible commitment’ in Europe.”

This way, the EU could take over from NATO the war to conquer Russia.

Perhaps Europe’s billionaires see the potential to enable the armaments manufacturers that they control become the profiteers — no longer America’s billionaires to be that — from the war in Ukraine. They might make more money by competing against the U.S. empire than by being parts of the U.S. empire. For example: by replacing NATO as the drafter of technical standards for their weaponry, an all-European EU could then advantage European ‘defense’ firms (no longer U.S.-based ones), for purchases of weapons, by all European Governments. Whereas now, U.S. billionaires are the main profiteers from armaments (which are sold not only to the U.S. Government but to all Governments throughout the U.S. empire), European billionaires might come to replace them in that capacity. By far the most profitable segment of the S&P is the ‘defense’ (aggression) sector. So, replacing U.S. billionaires in that capacity might enormously boost their personal fortunes. The war in Ukraine is, after all, extremely profitable (though it enormously increases the indebtedness — and thus taxes — of EU Governments, and of the U.S. Government). Anyway, this is a sensible way to interpret Ursula von der Leyen’s initiative here.

This article was originally published on Eric’s Substack.

The post Ursula Von Der Leyen Tries To Change the EU’s Constitution appeared first on LewRockwell.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has openly acknowledged that his government is paying U.S. social media influencers up to $7,372 per post in an aggressive digital campaign to sway American public opinion in favor of Israel’s military operations in Gaza. The revelation, based on recent Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA) filings and reporting by Responsible Statecraft, has sparked fresh scrutiny over foreign influence in U.S. media and political discourse.

Speaking at a closed-door meeting with American influencers at the Israeli Consulate General in New York, Netanyahu defended the strategy in stark terms. “We have to fight back. How do we fight back? Our influencers,” he said in recorded footage. “We cannot fight with swords anymore, that doesn’t work very well. We have to fight with weapons that apply to the battlefields in which we’re engaged in, and the most important ones are on social media.”

Netanyahu’s remarks underscore what many critics have long suspected: Israel sees social media as a critical front in its ongoing public relations war over its Gaza campaign and broader Palestinian policy.

The payments are part of a larger digital influence operation code-named the “Esther Project,” which runs from June to November 2025. The campaign is managed by Bridge Partners LLC, a Washington D.C.-based firm contracted by Israel’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs. The company bills Israel through Havas Media Group Germany, creating an added layer of operational opacity.

According to Responsible Statecraft, of the $900,000 allocated to the effort, approximately $552,946 has been used for direct payments to influencers between June and September 2025. With 75 to 90 posts made during this period, influencers are being paid between $6,143 and $7,372 per post on platforms such as TikTok and Instagram.

The “Esther Project” bears a curious resemblance in name to the Heritage Foundation’s “Project Esther,” launched in late 2024, which focuses on dismantling pro-Palestinian activism in the U.S. by labeling Israel critics as “terrorist sympathizers.” While no formal connection has been confirmed, the overlap raises concerns about coordination between political, ideological, and state actors.

Bridge Partners, whose co-founders Yair Levi and Uri Steinberg each hold a 50% stake, describes its mission as promoting “cultural interchange” between the U.S. and Israel. The firm has enlisted former Israeli Defense Forces spokesperson Nadav Shtrauchler and the law firm Pillsbury Winthrop Shaw Pittman, which previously represented the controversial Israeli spyware firm NSO Group.

The influencer campaign is just one element of Israel’s vastly expanded digital propaganda program—often referred to as hasbara. According to Jewish Insider, Israel’s public diplomacy budget has ballooned to $150 million in 2025, over 20 times what it was before the Gaza war escalated in October 2023.

This follows a series of exposed influence operations by the Israeli government, including a $2 million Ministry of Diaspora Affairs effort in 2024 that created hundreds of fake social media accounts targeting U.S. lawmakers—especially Black Democrats—to encourage continued American military aid to Israel, according to The New York Times.

Notably, the Esther Project coincides with the U.S. government’s controversial move to transfer ownership of TikTok’s U.S. operations to a consortium led by Oracle co-founder Larry Ellison, a Netanyahu ally and major donor to Israel’s military apparatus. The timing raises additional questions about whether access to U.S. digital platforms is being used to further Israeli strategic interests.

While Israel continues to rely heavily on American military and diplomatic support, the revelation that it is actively funding covert influence operations on U.S. soil—particularly through social media influencers—raises serious questions about transparency, ethics, and foreign interference in the digital age.

This article was originally published on Restoring Liberty.

The post Netanyahu Admits Israel Pays U.S. Influencers Over $7,000 Per Post to Shape Opinion on Gaza appeared first on LewRockwell.

At Naked Capitalism Yves Smith published a paper by Servaas Storm:

The AI Bubble and the U.S. Economy: How Long Do “Hallucinations” Last?

Yves writes:

This is a devastating, must-read paper by Servaas Storm on how AI is failing to meet core, repeatedly hyped performance promises, and never can, irrespective of how much money and computing power is thrown at it. Yet AI, which Storm calls “Artificial Information” is still garnering worse-than-dot-com-frenzy valuations even as errors are if anything increasing.

Storm’s introduction:

This paper argues that (i) we have reached “peak GenAI” in terms of current Large Language Models (LLMs); scaling (building more data centers and using more chips) will not take us further to the goal of “Artificial General Intelligence” (AGI); returns are diminishing rapidly; (ii) the AI-LLM industry and the larger U.S. economy are experiencing a speculative bubble, which is about to burst.

I happen to a agree with the arguments and conclusion.

The current Large Language Models are part of the Generative Artificial Intelligence field. GenAI is one twig on the research tree of  Artificial Intelligence. LLMs are based on ‘neural networks’. They store billions of tiny pieces of information and probability values of how those pieces relate to each other. The method is thought to simulate a part of human thinking.

But human thinking does much more than storing bits of information and statistical values of how they relate. It constantly builds mental models of the world we are living in. That leads to understanding of higher level concepts and of laws of nature. The brain can simulate events in those mental model worlds. We can thus recognize what is happening around us and can anticipate what might happen next.

Generative AI and LLMs can not do that. They do not have, or create, mental models. They are simple probabilistic systems. They are machine learning algorithms that can recognize patterns with a certain probabilistic degree of getting it right. It is inherent to such models that they make mistakes. To hope, as LLM promoters say, that they will scale up to some Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) know-all machines is futile. Making bigger LLMs will only increase the amount of defective output they will create.

(Yesterday I watched a video of Jon, a baker in Mesa, in which he mentions how he had asked an LLM to half a recipe he was going to make. It did that correctly for all but one ingredient. The model had divided the amount of water needed by ten. Jon’s test bake had failed.)

But the hype around LLms is real and huge amount of money is flowing into the companies that are building such models. This while none of them has found ways to create sufficient revenue to support such investments. Training and running these models at scale is very expensive. There are simply too few real use cases that would justify paying the cost for them. It may be fun to create and play around (archived) with AI-slop videos on social media. But who is willing to pay for that? Especially when the use of social media is finally sinking (archived).

(For a more detailed discussion of LLMs, their costs, lack of use cases, and on the incestuous structures of the investments that are flowing into them see Edward Zitrons 18,500 words epos here: The Case Against Generative AI.)

There are still hundreds of billion dollars flowing into the already overvalued LLM hype:

AI startups’ aggregate post-money valuation (the valuation after the latest round of funding) soared to $2.30 trillion, up from $1.69 trillion in 2024, and up from $469 billion in 2020, which back then had already set a huge record, according to PitchBook.
…
OpenAI reached a $500 billion valuation in early September, when it offered eligible former and current employees to sell $10 billion of their shares in a secondary share sale to other investors, led by SoftBank, according to CNBC. In April, OpenAI had reached a breathtaking post-money valuation of $300 billion at a funding round when it raised $40 billion, primarily from SoftBank. The sky is not the limit.

Elon Musk’s xAI is supposedly shooting for a $200 billion valuation in a $10 billion funding round, according to sources cited by CNBC, which Musk denied on X as “fake news. xAI is not raising any capital right now.” Well, not right now. Or whatever.

Anthropic reached a $183 billion post-money valuation, after raising $13 billion in a Series F funding round in early September, according to Anthropic.

And so on. These valuations of AI startups are mind-boggling. How are these late-stage investors going to exit their investments with their skin intact?

They wont.

Dozens of specialized LLM data-centers are getting build to house a huge amount of expensive chips that lose their values faster than a newly bought hyper-car. All without a real use case for LLMs and without any hope for sufficient revenue to ever sustain the business.

This is bad for the U.S. economy.

The money that is flowing into the LLM hype is gone. It can not be invested somewhere else even when that would make way more sense for the larger society – for example in the revival of manufacturing or in apprenticeship programs. Like during the dot.com boom (archived) in the late 1990s the real economy gets crowded out by a virtual one. Trump’s tariffs will not lead to the revival of U.S. industries if there is no money left to invest in them.

The data-centers being build will need huge amounts of additional electricity which can not be generated within the foreseeable future:

The implications are brutal and stark. Curtailed and costly electricity supply for AI and manufacturing will impair American economic competitiveness, with knock-on effects for household affordability. These impacts are already becoming evident, with wholesale pool prices in the U.S. rising by 267% over the past 5 years, on the back of skyrocketing electricity demand from the AI sector (Bloomberg).

All recent U.S. stock market gains were powered by the LLM hype. When the bubble will burst, the stock market will sink and most people who are, directly or indirectly, invested in the LLM hype will lose a lot of their money.

Unfortunately there is no way to foresee when that will happen or how far the damage will spread.

But we can already see damage to the real economy. Investment in factories for real products gets crowded out and electricity prices are doubling and tripling, hitting manufacturers as well as private consumers.

Why don’t we have ways to prevent bubbles? Or why can’t we deflate them before they become threats to our societies?

This article was originally published on Moon of Alabama.

The post Is the AI Bubble Ready To Pop? appeared first on LewRockwell.

You just landed after a quick business trip. You have been on the red eye into Atlanta, tired but eager for a hot shower and your own bed. The Uber hums along I-285, headlights slicing through the night, when suddenly everything changes.

The dashboard lights flicker and die. The engine coughs and goes silent. The Uber rolls to a stop, and you realize every other vehicle around you has gone dark too. Traffic lights are out. The city that never sleeps is hushed in an unsettling way. You notice the rustle of leaves, the soft whistle of the wind between the buildings, and the distant, confused chatter of thousands of people.

This is the calm before the storm. EMP survival just became your reality.

You know what happened, an electromagnetic pulse just hit. Within the hour, confusion will turn to chaos. No phones. No power. No cars. Just millions of people trapped in a city that has suddenly gone silent. The question is: what do you do next?

Why EMP Attacks Are the Ultimate Urban Nightmare

The silence of a dead city feels heavier with each step. You catch the glow of headlights abandoned mid-lane, doors left hanging open, horns locked in a final frozen cry. It’s in this kind of darkness that fear multiplies. But your bag is more than fabric on your shoulders, it’s a contract you wrote with yourself long before tonight. Every zipper you pull is a promise that you’ll make it home.[/caption]

Your Insurance Policy in the Dark

When panic closes in, your Get Home Bag is more than sharp steel. It’s an insurance policy against the unknown.

Your get home bag is your lifeline. Here is what belongs in it:

Navigation and Communication

• Compass and backup compass

• Paper maps of your area

• Radio for emergency broadcasts (protected in a emp proof bag)

• Whistle and signal mirror

Water and Food

• Portable water filter and tablets

• Metal single wall container for boiling

• High calorie lightweight food for 72 hours

• Collapsible water containers

Shelter and Fire

• Lightweight tarp or emergency bivvy

• Fifty feet of paracord

• Fire kit with multiple ignition methods

• Rain gear or poncho

• Emergency blanket

Security and Tools

• Fixed blade knife, folder and or multitool

• Discreet defensive tools like a tactical pen

• First aid kit

• Cash in small bills

• firearm if possible

Read the Whole Article

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