Lew Rockwell Institute

I was heartened when the whole Black Fatigue thing went viral on the internet recently. Have White people finally, at long last, reached a tipping point in regards to ghettoized behavior, I wondered? Are they going to give up senselessly apologizing for nothing? Will they take away Blacks’ “get out of criticism free” card?

Alas, recent events suggest that racial business has returned to normal in our increasingly dystopian America 2.0. When pro rassling legend Hulk Hogan died on July 24, the online response was very telling. No one had more to do with turning the WWF (which became the WWE) into a major sport for millions of enthusiastic fans than the Hulkster. But in 2015, audio of a private phone conversation was leaked to our “free press,” which attacked it like the state controlled vultures they are. In it, Hogan bemoaned the fact that his daughter was dating a Black man. There is no greater crime in our twisted society than a White father objecting to his daughter dating a Black man. And, to make things even worse, he used the dreaded “N” word. It was actually a very human, understandable comment in a half joking vein. But the WWE didn’t hesitate, and fired the biggest name in their history.

After banishing him, the WWE eventually allowed Hogan back into the Hall of Fame in 2018. But first he issued the prerequisite White apology. Well, actually series of apologies. Really obsequious and embarrassing apologies. Classic humiliation rituals. He famously appeared at the 2024 Republican convention in support of Trump. But in January, 2025, he was unceremoniously booed off the stage at the debut RAW event for Netflix, in front of 17,000 in Los Angeles. But still the reaction by many to his death was astonishing. Now, I really wasn’t a fan of the Hulkster. But I have a real problem with someone’s private conversations being monitored. Big Brother shouldn’t be listening to any of us. We all say things behind closed doors that we wouldn’t want the world to hear. I don’t care what he said. The fact that anyone cares is yet another abridgement of free speech. Like all of us, Hulk Hogan had a right to his opinion.

We all know that if The Rock- who has become the Whitest Black man since Michael Jackson- had expressed similar reservations about his daughter dating a “Cracker,” that the response would have been a giant, collective shrug. To cite just one example of a Black celebrity saying something far worse, jazz legend (and what older Black musician isn’t a “legend?”) Miles Davis was once asked what he would like to do as his final act on earth. The humble Davis, beloved by millions of Whites, answered, “I’d strangle a White man, and I’d do it nice and slow.” I don’t believe his supremely hateful comment has ever been repeated again in polite society. Better to let sleeping Black legends lie. “Sir” Charles Barkley, the rotund former NBA star who was once renowned for throwing much smaller White bar patrons through plate glass windows, once declared, “I’m a 90s n…er. We do what we want.” Barkley has been feted by the clueless Republicucks as a political candidate. They are the Stupid Party.

Bad Black behavior has been on display for my entire life. Muhammad Ali, the former Cassius Clay, always had notable non-Irishman Howard Cosell by his side, as he perfected his own WWE-style act. Cosell was very much his “handler,” like Rabbi Shmuley watches over RFK, Jr. In sports alone, Black athletes have been exhibiting nasty, violent antics for decades. And there were always a slew of sports “journalists” and talking heads, many of them Jewish, to excuse and justify it. When the NBA’s Latrell Sprewell literally strangled his coach, many attempted to rationalize it. Sprewell was eventually welcomed back into the league, and his attempted murder was mentioned about as often as Miles Davis’s similar fantasy. I am currently writing a book about the racial dynamics in sports. It’s sure to plunge my social credit score to new depths. Black on White assaults are very common in the world of sports. I have yet to find a single example of a White on Black assault from the sports world.

After Hogan’s death, very popular “gym influencer,” whatever that is, Joey Swoll spoke fondly of the man who had been a tremendous influence on him. And then the TikTok response forced him into issuing the standard White apology, much as Hogan had done himself. Watching the video of it, Swoll’s cringeworthy cuckery should have destroyed his shockingly large fan base. No White person should ever support him again. And, like every other apology issued by a White public figure over the decades, it did no good. The Social Justice Warriors didn’t pat him on the back and say, “Ah, that’s okay, don’t worry about it. Just don’t do it again, okay?” They still think he’s “racist.” Just like the Hulkster. Anyway, I imagine Swoll lost a substantial portion of his fans over his cowering, pointless capitulating. When will one of these Whites say, “I’m not apologizing. That’s what I think. We’re all protected by the Bill of Rights. If you disagree, that’s fine. I’m not catering my views based on what you think.”

And then, demonstrating that the Black Fatigue movement hasn’t made an iota of difference, there was the mass attack on a White couple in Cincinnati after a jazz festival. By, of course, the usual suspects. You will search news accounts for a very long time before you find a White mob attacking any Black person. Maybe in 1930 in the deep south. Maybe. This group assault was consistently referred to as a “fight” by our dear, beloved press. Sure, it was kind of an unfair fight- fifty or a hundred against two. And there were the normal trappings of ghetto culture involved. The woman was sucker punched from behind. You know, the way they do it in the Knockout Game. I mean, why can’t you actually punch a much smaller woman straight on? Why is it necessary to sucker punch her, to use classless, underhanded tactics? But then, why do these big, strong Black “gangstas” sucker punch elderly White and Asian women as well? To be clear, I’m not suggesting that women should be punched in any situation.

One of the White groups who have financed Black Lives Matter is run by Democracy Alliance, with the bottomless wallet of well known non-Christian George Soros behind it. Democracy Alliance was founded by Rob Stein. Not a Catholic. Both Norman Lear and Rob “Meathead” Reiner were also members of the organization. The NAACP was founded by Whites, one of them named Henry Moskowitz. Ironically, one of the things Joey Swoll got in Woke trouble for was referring to Blacks as “colored people.” Which makes perfect sense, given that the first organization formed to advocate for them is called the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. Swoll didn’t understand the distinction between “colored people” and “people of color.” To a former blue collar worker like me, they would seem to be interchangeable terms, with only a very slight semantic difference. And that’s what he should have said, and shamed them for their absolute stupidity.

Blacks all over social media have attempted to depict the “fight” in Cincinnati as being “started” by the White guy slapping a Black man. You don’t slap a Black man in 2025. You don’t call him a “colored person.” He’s a person of color! And if you do, every black has cause to physically assault you. Sucker punch your wife. Kick you when you’re down. Stomp on your head. The normal Marquess of Ghettosberry rules of engagement. Ghetto culture has elevated the sucker punch- formerly a sign of craven cowardice in our once civilized society- into a virtuous characteristic. Somehow, punching an eighty year old Asian lady- and even doing it in such a brazen, unsportsmanlike manner- is a sign of machismo to those who make the “Hood” what it is. Basically a swamp unfit for human habitation. The Deep State is in Washington, D.C. Think of the situation in urban areas across the country as the Dark State.

Cincinnati’s undefinably but undeniably nonwhite mayor, and the man-hating DEI chief of police spoke for the corrupt local authorities. The police chief, who clearly has never dealt with a violent criminal before, lashed out at social media, not the crowd of thugs who battered these poor immigrants. Yes, apparently the victims were Russian immigrants. I know, that doesn’t really count. An immigrant isn’t an immigrant if he/she/they/them aren’t nonwhite. That couple was like the South African migrants Trump gave asylum to a few months back, to great critical reaction from the state sponsored talking heads. The immigrants=good mantra was put to the test. Adding a nonwhite into the equation makes them nongood. Ungood. Look at the woman’s face. Where is the feminist outrage? If only her White husband had inflicted that kind of damage. Apparently, some fists are more equal than others.

So I’m more fatigued than ever at this nonsense. This celebration of impoliteness, ignorance, ugliness, loudness, unearned conceit, and irrational bravado. But to the people who run our culture, the film studio heads, the television network executives, the record company presidents, as well as every big business leader and politician, this mishmash of everything that used to be frowned upon is the apex of civilization. Even Ivy League graduates, with IQs twice the average of what you’ll find in a typical “Hood,” mimic it and promote it. So who is really smarter, the Ivy Leaguer or the gang banger? I don’t need to tell you what incredibly small religious/ethnic minority group a disproportionate number of those leaders come from. When you have seemingly a majority of one particular racial group willing to say- very loudly- that the mob was the good guy, and not the two injured victims- then you know how bad things are.

White silence and subservience in the face of the most uncontrolled and unlikeable segment of the population, has made this situation possible. That’s with all the figures in the shadows, with the easily recognized surnames, overtly pulling the strings. White people still made a conscious choice to be total cucks in the face of even the most outrageous injustice. Think Reginald Denny, the White truckdriver hauled from his vehicle and beaten to a pulp by Blacks he’d never met or done anything to. Denny and his mother would both hug the Blacks who tried to kill him in court. That’s what cucks do. Do we really think Denny would have resisted if the Blacks wanted to screw his wife? After all, there’s a whole, very popular subset of porn devoted to the fantasy of White men drooling with pleasure over Blacks pleasuring their wives. I haven’t found any examples of Black men wanting White men to screw their wives.

We will never have racial “harmony” in this country until that very visible percentage of Black people stop behaving like untamed animals. Stop acting like the same rules that apply to everyone else don’t apply to them. Now, to be fair, considering how often the rules haven’t applied to them over the years, this is understandable on their part. Why not call the young White girl who won’t go out with you a “racist?” Do you think any school system, any workplace, is going to take those Blacks to task for their obvious harassment of women? If you can get large numbers of people, not all of them Black, to defend Karmelo Anthony stabbing Austin Metcalf in the heart, then what Black misbehavior can’t you get people to defend? All you need are some of the plethora of DEI hires that litter the television screens now, or an obnoxious White guy not named O’Flaherty, to talk about “racism” and “historical oppression.”

Read the Whole Article

The post Black Fatigue and Jewish Supremacy appeared first on LewRockwell.

Comments open on YouTube

The post Whistleblower Tony Aguilar Responds To Attacks After Exposing Israel’s War Crimes in Gaza appeared first on LewRockwell.

One of my favorite homosexuals of all time was Justin Raimondo, founder of Antiwar.com and author of the 2008 book Reclaiming the American Right, who once said that the best thing about being homosexual was all the sneaking around. That was when there was a closet; ahh, the closet.

Most people in those days knew who was “that way,” who was “light in the loafers.” But they weren’t shoving it down our throats. Gays in Hollywood would ask of other gays, “Is he musical?” Almost everything was “on the down-low,” which, by the way, is a reference to married men sneaking out for gay action.

Then came a lot of things, including HIV/AIDS and gays invading St. Pat’s Cathedral, shouting “we’re here, we’re queer, get used to it.” Will & Grace came on TV. Then pederast Harvey Milk was murdered (not over gay) and drug-dealing Matthew Shepard was murdered (by a former gay sex partner)—all for “who they loved” was the narrative.

And then came the push for homosexual marriage. Voilà, cue the mythical white picket fences. “We are just like you!” All we want is to be treated just like you because, after all, that is what we are. They got “marriage” based on two lies: they wanted to be married, and they are just like us.

They didn’t really want to be married. After the imposition of gay marriage by the Courts, only roughly 10 percent of gay couples got “married.” Lots and lots of coupling, but only a rarest of couples sought permanency. Would you like to know what that percentage is now? Still just ten percent. A rarity. And without a doubt, none of these so-called marriages are monogamous. As a creepy-crawling gay sex writer named Dan Savage said many years ago, we are monogamish, not monogamous. This means you have someone at home and lots of action on the side. This is “normal gay.” Not just like us at all.

After gay “marriage” landed, queer theory emerged, seeking to “deconstruct the binary.” Everything was fluid. Cross-dressers wanted to flounce in front of school kids. They began cutting off the privates of boys and girls. This kind of thing was always present among homosexuals—see cross-dressing bars.

White picket fences began evaporating into the ether. Queer theory thrust the gay project out in the open, out from the back room, and society began rethinking the whole queer thing, most especially trans. Sirens began going off even among other gays, those who do not put on that gay voice, gays who could pass as one of us, that is, as “normal.” Was it time to cut ties? What happens if Mr. and Mrs. America turn against us, too?

The so-called “normal” gays saw their opportunity: we can finally cut them loose. No more LGBT, now only LGB! We don’t like Drag Queens for Diapered Babies, we’re just like you. Oh sure, we like drag queen bars. Sure, we cheer on the naked men parading past St. Pat’s every year. We chuckle at the leather boys. And we like promiscuous sex and lots of it, I mean, lots of it. Did I say lots of it? We are not like the perverts, we’re normal. We even voted for Trump! We even work for Trump.

Trans and queer became the perfect foils for Douglas Murray, Anderson Cooper, Andrew Sullivan, Brad Polumbo, Ric Grenell, and that long-haired lisping guy who says he won Pennsylvania for Trump. The Republican candidate for Lieutenant Governor of Virginia, John Reid, who presents himself as a “normal” gay, loves drag shows and gay hook-ups, just not for kids. How normal. How us.

Here’s the thing. There is no such thing as “normal gay.” Go to practically any “pride” parade. Pick up almost any “gay” book they want your children to read. Walk down the street on a summer’s evening in the Castro District of San Francisco. Go to the Pines on Fire Island. Look at the “gay” marriage rates. The only place you see this business about “normal gay” is in the political and policy hustings, not in real life. There is no such thing as “normal gay,” and J.D. Vance ought to take that back. They say he started this phrase on Joe Rogan.

Homosexuality is a sickness. It is a mental illness. It comes from early childhood sexual or emotional trauma. It was understood thusly by the psychiatrists before their professional associations were taken over by outside pressure and internal subversion. A man kissing another man is not normal. A man wanting to be treated like a woman is not normal. Putting certain body parts into the biological sewer is not normal. Having to wear adult diapers because of certain nasty sexual proclivities is not normal. Having hundreds of “sex” partners is not normal.

It is all queer. The “normal gays” want you to think queer theory is the enemy, the guys who want to deconstruct everything. But “gay” deconstructs everything—gay marriage queered marriage. Gay sex queered sex. Gay strikes right at the heart of what makes us human. They are sexual revolutionaries, all of them, even the most crew-cut, buttoned-down homosexual. They queered sexuality the moment they parted company with Justin Raimondo, who liked all the sneaking around. They queered it the moment they said it was normal and natural.

And, no, penguins have never been homosexual.

This article was originally published on Crisis Magazine.

The post All of It Is Queer appeared first on LewRockwell.

The Daughters of Union Veterans of the Civil War organization has joined with the Daughters of the Confederacy to advocate the restoration of the Confederate Memorial statue, also known as the Reconciliation Statue, to Arlington National Cemetery.  The beautiful monument, the work of Confederate Veteran sculpture Moses Ezeliel, was taken down during the burst of cultural Marxist communism during the Biden regime.  Now that the whole world knows that Biden was senile when he ran for office and declined year after year, it is clear that his administration was controlled by so-called cultural Marxist, modern-day American communistic revolutionaries.

The core believe of the “cultural” Marxists is that the old Marxism of class warfare between the capitalist class and the working class is not enough to persuade enough citizens to embrace communism.  It takes more than just factory workers who, by the way, only ever wanted better pay and working conditions and not to run the factories, as Marxist theorists argued.  As F.A. Hayek pointed out in “The Intellectuals and Socialism,” socialism has always been primarily promoted by “intellectuals” of various sorts and not by normal human beings.

The new “cultural” Marxism posits that there are two different classes in their class struggle theory:  the oppressor class and the oppressed class.  The major component of the oppressor class in America is essentially white heterosexual males of European heritage.  Everyone else is assumed to be oppressed by them.  Confederate soldiers in particular and the Confederacy in general are a key component of this New Communism.  Not only were they white males of European heritage, they supposedly fought to continue to oppress the slaves.  It does not matter to the cultural Marxists that Lincoln himself adamantly denied this, as did the 1861 War Aims Resolution of the U.S. Congress (the Crittendon-Johnson Resolution).  It was tariff collection that incited Lincoln to invoke the words “invasion” and “bloodshed” in his first inaugural address when addressing the topic of secession.  (There was no income tax at the time; tariff revenue composed more than 90 percent of federal tax revenue; and the average tariff rate had been more than doubled two days before Lincoln’s inauguration).

Hence the takedown of the Confederate Memorial at Arlington National Cemetery by Biden’s stable of cultural Marxist communist ideologues.  These are people who would never accept the idea of reconciliation of North and South, the whole idea of the Monument that was dedicated in 1914.  To them, accepting reconciliation with the South and southerners is to deny their own reason for being.  They are devoting their lives to politics and political activism in order to finally bring communism to America.

Ludwig von Mises would not be at all surprised by this.  In the latter chapters of his book Socialism Mises wrote extensively of “destructionism.”  Socialists of all varieties, he wrote, were first and foremost destructionists who sought to destroy the existing institutions of society that had evolved over time so that they could remake the world in their own communistic image.  The cultural Marxists, who first gained notoriety in the 1960s as celebrated Marxist university professors and “counter-culture” gurus, pinpointed in their writings and speeches the necessary destruction of the nuclear family, Christianity, the rule of law, constitutionalism, and of course economic freedom or real capitalism.  These are the main reasons why Europeans never voluntary accepted communism, they argued: They enjoyed freedom, prosperity, and human normality too much.

Although it appears to be a minor event, it is a most welcomed event that the Daughters of Union Veterans have become, whether they know it or not, the new anti-communists by calling for the restoration of the beautiful Reconciliation Monument at Arlington National Cemetery.

The post The New Anti-Communists: Daughters of Union Veterans of the Civil War appeared first on LewRockwell.

I remember like yesterday when Dr. Paul called me into his Member office in 203 Cannon with a draft of his famous “What If” speech.

He had written it in his own hand and he asked me to go over it and clean it up a bit. Not unusual for how he writes: from the heart.

And afterward I spent a good deal of time in his office with a stopwatch making sure he could deliver it under the five minute rule. Shuffling the papers. What do we have to cut. Which paragraph could be spoken a bit faster.

I knew and understood at the time that it was a very special speech. No one as far as I know had ever done such a thing before on the Floor of the House.

It was incredibly innovative and made all the powerful points without being unnecessarily confrontational. It was meant to gain allies, not to punish adversaries.

Because that is how Ron Paul always thought when he was in Congress. The worst of them were not fools to be brought low, but potential allies awaiting the proper argumentation with the application of time.

“They’ll come around,” he said patiently.

And believe it or not, it worked more often than you might think. Being a fly on the wall as the organizer of his legendary Thursday Congressional Member lunches, I was privy to so many Members who would not dare say so in public but who dropped in for a couple of Gulf Coast shrimp and to tell Rep. Paul how right he was on the Iraq war and Afghanistan and the Fed etc.

The campaigns later on were so important and galvanized the Liberty Movement and sent it worldwide, but the kernel was planted in his unique and generous, kindly approach to even his most odious adversaries.

“What did Ron Paul ever achieve in Congress???” – they demand. Well, he changed the world. How’s that?

Reprinted with permission from The Ron Paul Institute.

The post How Ron Paul Changed the World appeared first on LewRockwell.

The Donald seems to be continuing his bombing campaign, albeit this time by pivoting back to the home front and taking aim at “Too Late” Jay.

As usual, Trump has his facts all wrong about who has had how many rate cuts and that inflation has miraculously disappeared since January 20th. In fact, if anything, inflation has bottomed at an unsustainably high 3.0% level. Indeed, since March 2023, the annualized monthly change in our trusty 16% trimmed mean CPI has cycled between 2.5% and 4.0% with no indication that a return to the Fed-mandated 2.0% lane is imminent.

But at least this time the Donald is attacking the right target. The truth is, when it comes to verbal assault, you can’t drop enough bombs on the Fed or easily avoid the Donald’s bottom line conclusion: “We will be paying for his incompetence for many years to come”.

Unfortunately, the arrogant monetary mandarins who run the Fed are as unlikely to bend to the Donald’s verbal fusillades as the stiff-necked Netanyahu. Still, it is well worth pursuing the opening that the Donald’s latest missive provides.

To be sure, he is not remotely correct in suggesting that the Fed should be pegging rates “two to three points” lower. Nor would its failure to push rates back toward the negative yield line in real terms amount to monetary malpractice per his echo chamber in the VP’s office.

Then again, JD Vance’s sheer ignorance on the economic policy front might well be explained by his misfortune of having taken economics courses at Yale:

“The president has been saying this for a while, but it’s even more clear: the refusal by the Fed to cut rates is monetary malpractice.”

To the contrary, the real “malpractice” is the fact that the Fed drove rates down into the sub-basement of history, generating negative inflation-adjusted yields for most of the 25-year span since the turn of the century. Yet negative real rates are the devil’s workshop of economic distortion and malinvestment. They encourage excessive gambling on Wall Street via the carry trades and unhinged borrowing in Washington owing to the temporary, artificial suppression of the interest cost of the public debt.

And yet, after just a few quarters of real money market interest rates above the flatline, currently posting at just 1.2% after inflation, the Donald and JD are huffing and puffing for a 2-3% cut in nominal rates. Of course, that would push real yields back into negative territory, which most definitely will Make America Broke Again—not usher in the Donald’s ballyhooed Golden Age of Prosperity.

Besides, riddle us this JD: How in the world did we get the storied Reagan Boom in the 1980s and 1990s when real money market rates posted in the +2.5% to +5.0% range? That is to say, capitalist prosperity is absolutely not a function of dishonest, cheap money flowing from the printing press of the central bank.

The fact is, the Fed should not be pegging rates at all – up, down, or sideways. This whole business of pegging overnight rates and, by extension, the level and shape of the entire yield curve amounts to monetary central planning, not sound money policy. So in attacking the Fed’s rate-pegging errors, the Donald is at least getting the issue on the table of public debate.

But the Fed will always be in error in pegging rates based on the dubious wisdom of the 12 monetary central planners who sit on the FOMC. Monetary central planning via the frail tool of rate pegging just plain doesn’t work in an immensely complicated and opaque $30 trillion open economy that is deeply and inextricably intertwined with the capital, money, goods, and services markets of the world’s $110 trillion GDP. By definition, the leakage of global supplies and financial flows into the US economy and domestic demand and flows outward confounds any possible formula linking short-run inflation and employment to interest rates.

Yet the Fed never stops counting the number of economic angels sitting on the heads of its interest rate pins. It pretends to be astutely monitoring and assessing the “incoming data,” but in the short run, the official data is way too full of noise and error messages—volatile data points which subsequently get revised, often unrecognizably.

For instance, the Powell Fed claims to watch wage rate movement like a hawk, claiming the resulting cost pressure or lack thereof is a leading indicator of price movements. Well, here are two indicators of wage rate movement over the last 10 years.

The blue line is the three-month moving average of year-over-year changes in unweighted linked wages (i.e., same workers), but is smoothed to exclude each month the 25% highest wage changes in the basket and the lowest 20%. Moreover, this “trimmed” wage index excludes a different set of high and low wages each month, meaning that it embodies a reliable smoothing mechanism without arbitrarily excluding any sector of the wage market on a recurring basis, as does, for instance, the CPI ex food and energy. The other key feature of the index is that the wage basket is unweighted and includes the same set of wage payments month after month.

By contrast, the green line represents the BLS’s comprehensive wage cost metric, including both wage payments and all fringes and non-cash compensation such as employer health insurance plans or vacation and maternity leave pay. Also, this index is weighted by current activity levels in each measurement period or quarter.

Thus, if the low-wage food service industry were to be shut down, for instance, the employment cost index would lurch higher. But that would happen owing to reweighting of the measurement basket to higher pay sectors of the labor market, not due to any acceleration of wage rate growth on an apples-to-apples basis.

The graph below makes clear that these indices do not measure the same thing or emit the same signals in the short or even medium term. For instance, from 2015 to 2017, the year-over-year rate of change measured by the two wage indices was roughly similar, but the gap widened significantly to a 100 to 150 basis points difference in favor of the employment cost index from 2018 to 2020.

But during the turbulence of the pandemic lockdowns and stimmies from mid-2020 through 2022, the gap not only widened, but the two indices went in the opposite direction. The employment cost index (green line) soared upwards to 5.0% on a year-over-year basis, while the trimmed mean wage index plunged to a -2% rate of year-over-year change.

All things considered, the dramatic widening shown in the graph amounts to a live fire experiment in the foibles of monetary central planning. By order of Dr Fauci, upwards of 10 to 15 million low-wage workers were laid off in the spring and the balance of 2020, which caused the employment index to soar, but not because wage growth suddenly accelerated. The doubling of the green line rate of change during that period (from 2.5% to 5.0%) was simply an error message about the wage change rates that are embedded in the activity-weighted construction of the index.

By contrast, the trimmed mean linked wage index went down because, with unemployment rates in double digits due to the lockdowns, wage pressures sharply abated. Accordingly, actual same employee wage rates turned flat to negative during Q1 2021 to Q4 2022.

Needless to say, it is not obvious which wage change signal, if any, the monetary central planners in the Eccles Building should have been eyeballing. The employment index was overstating the rate of true wage change owing to mix change in the wage basket, while the trimmed, same-worker index was measuring distressed but transient labor market conditions, which evaporated quickly after the economy was firmly reopened in 2023.

To be sure, this lesson could be written off by the Fed’s fanboys as illustrative of an aberrant economic shock that is not typical of year-in and year-out conditions and trends. But we don’t think so because the very nature of a dynamic capitalist economy is that it is always in a state of flux and change.

Accordingly, the primitive price and wage indices churned out by government statistical bureaus are always rife with noise and error messages. There is simply no set of 12 macroeconomic geniuses who comprise the FOMC that can possibly keep the signal separated from the noise.

And even if they could, the purified knowledge would be of limited use to central bankers. That’s because their tool kits consist of primitive interest rate pegging and bond buying and selling tools that are so loosely linked to the blooming, buzzing mass of activity in the interior of the GDP as to be thoroughly unreliable and dangerous instruments of economic navigation.

Fortunately, there is an answer to the information deficiency and toolkit inefficiency problem of today’s Keynesian central bankers. Namely, the free market in interest rates, money, capital, and every other kind of financial instrument and derivative.

Stated differently, we don’t need a 12-man committee of Too Late Jays setting interest rates, nor do we need to replace them with an Always Easy Donald or any other elected politicians. In fact, nearly 100 out of 100 times the free market will find the right price for money, debt, and equity capital far more reliably and efficiently than either the Powells or Trumps of the world ever could.

Of course, central bankers and their fanboys on both ends of the Acela Corridor will insist that interest rates, US Treasury debt costs and stock market indices don’t dare be left to chance on the free market. But that self-serving claim is exactly why a free market in money and finance is the only viable way to get honest prices in financial markets, and thereby force government spenders and Wall Street speculators alike to face the true economic risks and costs of their activities.

Accordingly, there is one simple reform that would pave the way to honest financial markets. To wit, a return to the “bankers’ bank” model of the Fed’s founding father, Congressman Carter Glass. Crucially, the Glassian model had no macro-economic targets or remit, operated exclusively through a passive discount window and included no provision for the Fed to effectively create “new” central bank credit by buying government debt.

To the contrary, interest rates were to be set by free market forces in the member banking system, while Fed credit would be priced at this free market rate plus a penalty spread and offered only in return for the collateral of commercial receivables against goods already produced and sold.

Accordingly, Fed credit growth could not be “inflationary” because it was predicated upon liens on new goods already produced, thereby keeping demand in line with supply and essentially functioning under the truth of Say’s Law.

At the same time, the Glassian Fed was no friend of the Washington spenders because it had no remit to purchase government debt on the bias of fiat credits snatched from thin air. Similarly, it was no solace to the Wall Street gamblers, either: There was no possible “put” under stock prices, not artificial suppression of bond yields and cap rates, and therefore no artificial goosing of PE multiples.

In short, the Glassian Fed was perhaps needed by a fractional reserve banking system that was still regulated on the basis of required reserves. The entire regime of required reserves and central bank provision of such reserves was ended in March 2020 when reserve requirements were abolished and the regulatory structure was shifted fully to bank balance sheet regulation via required capital and liquidity ratios.

At the end of the day, the virtual disappearance of hand-to-hand currency in daily commerce means that “money” has become entirely a matter of digital ledger entries and a derivative of private credit. Accordingly, the American economy no longer needs a central bank to print “money” in either paper or digital form, as the case may be.

At the same time, a marketplace that can find ways to securitize the likes of credit card receivables and recorded music royalties doesn’t need central bank credit at all. The free market can both make the credit and price it based on the facts and circumstances of its issuance.

Given those realities, we can hope that the Donald’s verbal bombing of the Fed can also lead to a lasting truce under which Wall Street and the Washington spenders both give up their piggy banks in the Eccles Building. So doing, they would give the people of Main Street America once again the opportunity to pursue their own economic ends and betterments on a free market of honest money and credit where neither Too Late Jay nor Too Easy Donald has anything to do with it.

Reprinted with permission from David Stockman’s Contra Corner.

The post Free Market Money: The Antidote appeared first on LewRockwell.

Autoimmune conditions have become one of the most common and stubborn health challenges of our time. While conventional medicine often treats them as mysterious immune system malfunctions—managed primarily with harmful steroids and other immunosuppressants —there’s increasing evidence that many of these diseases are not random. Rather, they’re signals of deeper dysfunctions in the body—many of which are tied to the modern lifestyle we’ve come to accept as normal.

Lifestyle Contributions to Autoimmunity

Many things in our lives that we have control over significantly affect our predisposition to autoimmunity:

Sleep—I have previously written about the profound importance of sleep and how many different illnesses are linked to poor sleep. In practice, we frequently find that patients with autoimmune conditions also have disrupted sleep cycles, and these improve once that is addressed (e.g., by improving sleep hygiene and avoiding blue light).
Note: the treatments for sleeping issues like insomnia are discussed further here.

Sunlight—Since the sun has no commercial lobby to advocate for it, the medical field demonizes sunlight as a cause of cancer despite a deficiency of the sun and sunlight being tied to a wide range of medical conditions (including cancers) and making individuals 60% more likely to die. A loss of sunlight exposure is also tied to many autoimmune conditions (e.g., multiple sclerosis). As such, we frequently find autoimmune patients improve from resuming healthy sunlight exposures (likewise, I suspect this partly explains why ultraviolet blood irradiation benefits so many different autoimmune conditions).
Note: appropriate sunlight exposure (e.g., going outside early in the morning and having the sunlight touch your face without being obstructed by glass) is also very helpful for reestablishing the circadian rhythm and restoring healthy sleep.

Exercise—Many of the benefits of exercise arise from the fluid circulation it creates in the body (as fluid stagnation underlies many illnesses—many of which we suffer from due to our sedentary lifestyle. This perspective in turn, is corroborated by the Chinese Medical viewpoint that blood stasis causes autoimmunity and that either treating blood stasis or zeta potential (which underlies both microclotting and lymphatic stagnation) frequently improves autoimmune conditions.
Note: exercise and eliminating fluid stagnation frequently improve insomnia. Likewise, sunlight exposure is a critical driver of fluid circulation throughout the body, all of which illustrates how intertwined many of the key lifestyle factors we routinely ignore are to our health.

Diet—Food allergens such as wheat, dairy, and nightshades frequently contribute to autoimmune conditions (particularly arthritis), and many have found food elimination diets that identify the reactive allergen to improve their condition significantly. Additionally, in many cases, allergies arise from deficient stomach acid, as without sufficient stomach acid, proteins are often not fully broken down (allowing intact allergens to enter circulation) and triggers acid reflux (due to top of the stomach only closing when sufficient stomach acid is present), which then irritates the lungs.
Note: many of the issues with gluten (e.g., autoimmunity or weight gain) are not experienced in countries like Italy that use more natural forms of wheat.

Stress—is well known to predispose one to autoimmune disorders and flares (e.g., 80% of autoimmune patients report an unusually stressful situation prior to their disease onset, while stress disorders increased the risk of autoimmune disorders by 46%-129%).
Note: some patients will not respond to a rheumatologic drug, until they eliminate the stress in their lives.

The Global Loss of Vitality

If you review the early history of medicine, it is striking:

• How profoundly damaging many of the early western medical remedies were (e.g., the smallpox vaccine or mercury).

• How much healthier people were and how much more effective many natural therapies were in the past than they are now.

This second point prompted me to ask older doctors (from various medical schools) if they had observed a general decline in human vitality in the patients they saw at the start of their careers compared to the end, and all of them shared that they had. Additionally:

• They noted that beyond patients becoming much sicker and having conditions they’d never seen before, it was also much harder to treat them as each therapy they used had shifted from making a dramatic improvement to a more minuscule one, which required numerous successive treatments to bring about an improvement.

• They typically attributed this shift to a loss in human vitality. They cited a variety of correlates (e.g., the average human body temperature dropping, people becoming less able to mount fevers, infants being less able to produce a brisk cry, or increasing degrees of fluid stagnation in their patients).

Note: typically this decline in vitality proceeds in a linear fashion and then spikes at certain times (e.g., after the introduction of the smallpox vaccine, the 1986 law which granted immunity to vaccine manufacturers and led to a rapid proliferation in the vaccine schedule, and after the COVID vaccines). In each case, this increase in disease gets normalized and forgotten by the next generation of doctors (who entered practice after the last wave of sickness had become the “new normal”).

Likewise, many datasets corroborate this steady decreasing vitality in humanity over the decades (e.g., we’ve witnessed a continual increase in autoimmune disorders). Having extensively explored this topic, we believe much of it is due to modern technology (e.g., vaccines, chronic chemical exposures or heavy metal toxicity, dentistry and surgical scars, EMFs, and widespread circadian rhythm disruption). Many of these, in turn, share a common thread—creating fluid stagnation throughout the body.

Note: After thousands of years, around 1830, blood stasis suddenly came to be viewed as a primary cause of disease in Chinese Medicine, which occurred shortly after the smallpox vaccine (which caused many severe injuries resembling blood stasis), which was introduced in China in 1805.

Systemic Suppression

One of the central criticisms of Allopathic (Western) medicine by natural schools of medicine has been that anytime an external agent is used to forcefully change a process which is unfolding within the body (rather than aiding the body’s ability to resolve it) you run the risk of a minor temporary issue being exchanged for a severe chronic one—especially when this is repeatedly done throughout the course of someone’s life. In some cases, this risk is very justified (e.g., in a life-threatening emergency or with a relatively safe drug that has limited long-term complications). At the same time however, a general unwillingness to acknowledge this issue pervades Allopathic medicine.

I’ve thus never forgotten a conference in the 1970s at which one of the world’s leading homeopaths convened a panel to discuss the likely consequences of modern medicine routinely suppressing symptoms (e.g., aggressively using fever suppressing medications or preventing childhood febrile illnesses with vaccination).
Note: studies have repeatedly linked preventing measles, mumps, and chickenpox to severe cancers later in life.

At that conference, building upon the recent mass introduction of suppressive steroids, they correctly predicted that if this suppression continued to increased, in the decades to follow:

• We would see a global shift from less severe illnesses to more severe ones.

• That this suppression would cause physical illnesses to be pushed deeper into the body and be replaced with psychiatric illnesses, and in time spiritual ones (particularly when the psychiatric illnesses were also suppressed with medications)—all of which would dovetail with people being willing to do crazier and crazier things.

Now, everyone has gradually become habituated to patients “just being” sicker and sicker, and that not much can be done about it.

Read the Whole Article

The post What They Don’t Tell You About Autoimmune Disorders appeared first on LewRockwell.

What is Speaker of the House Mike Johnson, a Christian and a Southern Baptist, doing going to Israel and praying at the Western Wall like a Jew? Theologically conservative Christians like me want to know.

The post What Is Mike Johnson Doing? appeared first on LewRockwell.

President Trump put a whopping 39% tariff on gold from Switzerland. Is it really about a trade imbalance? Or is there more to such a drastic tax? Also this week, the President took steps to allow 401(k)’s to include crypto and private equity. Is there are relation between these two policies? A huge tax on a global safe haven asset, and easier access to high-risk assets?

The post Tariffs on Gold, Gambling in 401(k)’s — Signs of A Crack-Up Boom? appeared first on LewRockwell.

Writes Tim McGraw:

In Britain, you can’t leave your house empty while you go on holiday. It will be full of invaders when you return. The police will do nothing to help you.

This will be the final blow to tourism in or from the UK.

The British are a Conquered People

The post The British are a Conquered People appeared first on LewRockwell.

Thanks, John Frahm.

Malone News

The post HHS Winds Down mRNA Vaccine Development Under BARDA appeared first on LewRockwell.

Correct nomenclature, as I have long argued, is essential for our understanding of things, people, events. Unless we name something properly we will not know how to judge it or what the right course of action may be in response to what it does. This is why our public discourse is so mixed up in the matter of what to call things: Naming something rightly is powerful; so is naming something wrongly, or refusing to name it all.

We are now urged — and required by law in many jurisdictions — to accept a definition of “antisemitism” that is beyond preposterous. With the assistance of various committees and Jewish groups, the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance has crafted a “working definition” of this term that, to sum up its many clauses, makes criticism of Israel or Zionism antisemitic. This is an absurd misnomer — purposeful and very consequential.

Roughly three dozen states now accept the IHRA definition; as Chris Hedges reported this week, New Jersey is currently debating a law to this effect. An increasing number of institutions, notably but not only universities, are also using the IHRA definition. As Hedges asserts in the above-linked piece, this is a straight-out attack on free speech. Taking the IHRA definition to its logical conclusion, we are headed in the direction of thought control.

There are other cases — many, indeed — wherein the accepted nomenclature is critical. If you do not call the United States an empire you won’t be able to see why and how it has become, for some decades now, the No. 1 most violent, destructive and disruptive force in global affairs. And since we are not supposed to see any such thing, you cannot call the United States an empire and expect to be taken seriously in what is quaintly known as — another misnomer — polite company.

We come now to the question of Israel’s terror campaign in Gaza (and its escalating terror campaign in the West Bank). What shall we call these daily depravities? Do we or do we not witness a genocide?

If there is a more contentious case of getting the name right, I cannot think of it. Call Israel’s assault on Gaza a genocide and you will understand the Zionist state one way and there will be legal ramifications; reject this term and you are wading around in “the right to defend itself” and other such notions — all of them as flimsy as that IHRA definition of antisemitism — and there will be no legal ramifications. It amounts to enabling justice or apologizing for limitless impunity.

I have never found the world to be very honest with itself. And it has been grossly dishonest since the autumn of 2023. For maybe 21 of these past 22 months, many people have insisted that Israel’s daily barbarities against the Palestinian people amount to a genocide. But the Gaza crisis has brought populations across the West face to face with their political impotence. In the seats of global power and among the media that serve them, Israel’s military aggressions and abuses of international law have gone unnamed. The consequences of this refusal can be measured any number of ways. The deaths of at least 60,000 Palestinians — and we can count this a conservative figure — are one of them.

Whether or not Israel is guilty of conducting a genocide should not be a question as the reality of its conduct enters its 22nd month. But it has been made a question, and at last this question-that-is-not-a-question begins to lose its power, its utility as a curtain drawn over Israel’s atrocities. This marks a significant advance, needless to say, in the right direction.

I have never found The New York Times to be very honest with itself, either. But when the once-but-no-longer newspaper of record takes to publishing opinion pieces (plural as of this week) that forthrightly accuse the Israelis not only of genocide but of genocidal intent, it is safe to conclude something of significance is in the hot summer winds.

We must be careful not to overstate what may come of a now-evident shift of opinion on Israel in high places — what and when. But in my read we are amid a sea change, a prelude to concerted action — legal, diplomatic, political, economic — against the Zionist regime.

Let us begin at the beginning. (And I do not mean to dismiss the long century of Israel’s aggressions against Palestinians prior to the afternoon of Oct. 7, 2023, when Israel began its assault on Gaza.)

In January 2024 the International Court of Justice found that it was “plausible” Israel was in violation of the 1948 Genocide Convention. I remember how disappointed I was to see the ICJ use so self-sabotaging a word. But even this ruling — cautious, provisional — prompted an uproar anyone paying attention will recall. Reflecting this — in my opinion reflecting this, I should say — the ICJ has since refrained from issuing a final, binding judgment and there is no telling when it will do so.

The first signs of an incipient change in the limits of acceptable discourse appeared last spring. There was a sudden spate of opinion pieces in the mainstream British press — The Economist, the Financial Times, The Independent, et al. — in which the atrocities of Israel’s war-that-is-not-war were at last acknowledged. “The longer it goes on,” The Financial Times wrote in a very pointed opinion piece signed by the editorial board, “the more those who remain silent or cowed from speaking out will be complicit.”

These pieces anticipated by a few weeks yet more powerful denunciations of the “Jewish state” among various government officials. “I condemn Israel for what it is doing to the Palestinian people in Gaza and indeed in the West Bank,” Mark Pritchard, a Conservative MP, said in the House of Commons May 6, “and I’d like to withdraw my support right now for the actions of Israel…. This is a moment in history when people look back, where we’ve got it wrong as a country.”

The headline atop the commentary I published in this space at the time was “Waves Upon the Sea of Silence.” So these were, but what prominent people were suddenly writing and saying in public places was more in the way of ripples. In all the pronouncements and denunciations one read and heard last spring, I know of no case that included the word “genocide.” The term was still all-but-officially off limits.

Now matters take yet another turn. It is as if the Western world is gradually inching its way toward a truthful judgment, with an implicit confession of past silence, of the Israelis’ sadistic attacks — and I consider them this — on the Palestinian people. Of Israel’s conduct of a genocide, this is to say.

Until now a few Israeli peace advocates and other voices of dissent have spoken honestly of the IDF’s purposefully genocidal atrocities. It is another thing when The New York Times publishes a long opinion piece under the headline, “I’m a Genocide Scholar. I Know It When I See It.” As many readers instantly understood, Omer Bartov’s essay, which appeared in The Times’s July 15 editions, was a very big deal, for what it said and where it said it. There it was, the “G” word, right in the headline. That yawning space between the sayable and the unsayable in matters to do with Israel suddenly seemed to get narrower.

A little Times-ology here. Bartov’s piece is typical of an old trick to which The Times resorts on occasions of ideological awkwardness. When something must be said that the paper does not want reported as fact in the news pages and with a Times reporter’s byline on it, it brings in an outside voice to hold forth in the opinion pages. So it is with Bartov, a professor of Holocaust and genocide studies at Brown. I imagine The Times’s editors knew they were detonating a bomb when they published his piece; whether or not they knew, it was an explosion of some magnitude.

After explaining his scholarly caution in the first months following the events of October 2023, Bartov surveys the on-the-ground record and the many statements of intent we have heard from Israeli officials and writes:

My inescapable conclusion has become that Israel is committing genocide against the Palestinian people. Having grown up in a Zionist home, lived the first half of my life in Israel, served in the I.D.F. as a soldier and officer and spent most of my career researching and writing on war crimes and the Holocaust, this was a painful conclusion to reach, and one that I resisted as long as I could. But I have been teaching classes on genocide for a quarter of a century. I can recognize one when I see one.

Bartov goes on to cite the company he keeps as he declares this judgment: Amnesty International, the South Africans, who brought the above-mentioned  genocide case to the ICJ in December 2023, Francesca Albanese, the U.N. special rapporteur for the West Bank and Gaza, Amnesty International. This week two big names in Israel’s human-rights scene, B’Tselem and Physicians for Human Rights–Israel issued reports, here and here, announcing they have come to the same conclusion. This time The Times reported this in its news pages; it was all over media elsewhere, too.

Read the Whole Article

The post Yes, It’s a Genocide appeared first on LewRockwell.

I found myself on a recent Judging Freedom episode saying that Trump as statesman tweets too much.  In retrospect, who am I to tell the President or anyone else to stop talking; it’s anti-liberty and rude.  Yet, it may be good advice; saying too much can help “enemies” to shape public opinion, and even to target Trump specifically.

Getting the dirt on a country’s leader – the intentions, the predilections, their secrets and their open confessions, tweets and threats – and using that dirt strategically is an intelligence function.  It’s what humans do on their own and in the employ of governments and businesses.  It’s part of the competition.  The hunter and the hunted, the prey outwitting the predator, or vice versa.

In nature, prey animals try to stay quiet, and the predator does the same.  Trump’s favorite sport is also a quiet game.  Even so, in both animal and human worlds, sound and action are used to warn the group, to compete for the best mates, and even to trick prey through subterfuge and deceit.  There are a variety of creatures that exhibit camouflage patterns to hide their real vulnerability, and mislead potential predators.  They pose as foul-tasting or dangerous, or hide in plain sight.

Trump may be the political version of the Texas wasp moth, which appears to be a dangerous stinging insect to avoid being eaten. Is Trump the Mothman?

Trump has created a lot of diversionary noise and confusion in his role of “Statesman Seeking Peace.”  His thinking on “king” dollar is a case in point, where he boldly and erroneously claims that BRICS was set up to “degenerate” or “break” the US dollar.

The average person, economist, and politician, in and out of BRICS, takes a far more evolutionary and fact-based approach.  The market in money, like anything else, moves towards security, trust, familiarity, and profitability.  There was a reason that the old Soviet ruble was never a natural draw for global investors – it was state-issued fiat on top of an impossible system of production, coupled with a largely made-up set of state data about that system of production. Beyond that flawed model, state corruption and propaganda is a global constant.  The bigger the state, the less accountable it has to be to either domestic or international forces. Trump’s solutions for saving the dollar do not appear to include actually improving dollar security, trust, familiarity and profitability. Like the Mothman itself, Trump’s strategies are not based in the natural order.

The more Trump speaks about his global intentions and solutions, ostensibly to Make American Great Again, the more he comes across as a statist, pursuing personality-, bureaucratic-, and party-driven mandates down to the smallest detail.   This kind of totalitarian obsessiveness in the Capitol is also an indicator that a nation, and its money, is in the process of dying.

Trump doesn’t like made-up data, at least when it makes him look bad.  But if Trump was really interested in facts, he would take on the entire system of inflation statistics (designed to reduce government outlays in COLA).  He would attack the idea that government spending should be counted as additional GDP (without consideration of the government’s compulsive serial rape and abuse of actual domestic productivity).  He would end, not harangue, the Federal Reserve (which exists, as Tucker and economist Richard Werner discuss, to fund government wars on the backs of the unborn). If Trump cared about facts, he would learn something factual about the major conflicts he is funding, in Biden’s footsteps.

Statesman Trump is as uninterested in the true US impact on the world as he is about the world itself. Instead, he wants to build out a vision filled with things he does know, like nice hotels, golf courses, casinos, and boats  – through diplomatic threats, trade favors and penalties, and military power.  Trump’s foreign policy is just thin.  Diplomatic threats, reversals, and evolving promises quickly earned him the hated descriptor “Trump Always Chickens Out.”  Illustrating the lightning speed at which the world communicates outside the state, global and domestic catcalls of TACO became a tool to manipulate Trump, one he reacted to rather than controlled.

Trump’s foreign policy is thin for two reasons.  First, he does not seek or demand depth of information – and summarily rejects information that contradicts his own presumptions and assumptions. For example, he heard some things he didn’t understand about Iran from his Director of National Intelligence, so he publicly threw Tulsi Gabbard under the bus.  Secondly, Trump appears not to hold any substantive philosophy that helps him understand the nature of money, in particular the infective debilitation of a national economy that comes from unreasonable lie-based state-borrowing, and state-directed and incentivized money-printing.  His personal experience in becoming a billionaire and surviving a number of personal debt crises in his businesses taught him that debt is a game, and if you are good at the game, you will be OK.

As to philosophy, Scott Ritter says it all when he says Trump cheats at golf.  But it is Adam Smith who explains why Trump’s “statesmanship” is a problem:

…[E]very individual, it is evident, can, in his local situation, judge much better than any statesman or lawgiver can do for him. The statesman who should attempt to direct private people in what manner they ought to employ their capitals would not only load himself with a most unnecessary attention, but assume an authority which could safely be trusted, not only to no single person but to no council or senate whatever, and which would nowhere be so dangerous as in the hands of a man who had folly and presumption enough to fancy himself fit to exercise it.

Successful “management” of a fading fiat currency burdened by unpayable trillions in US government debt requires that for every mistake, there are only two choices:  aggressively correct course, or compound the errors by continuing to misunderstand or misread the environment, the rules, and the data.  Trump seems to be misreading or misunderstanding the environment, the rules and the data, time after time.

Like the Texas wasp moth, he looks like he’ll do damage to the overweening state, but it’s a camouflage to ensure he can get what he really wants – applause, power, and an absolutely worthless Nobel Peace Prize.

So, does Trump talk too much, tweet too much, and threaten too much?  It’s not my place to say, but I think these tendencies reveal that his vision is not to create enduring American economic health and productivity.  Instead, he is happy to continue familiar, self-justified and ever-expanding DC imperialism with just a touch of fascismo in the pattern of his 20th and 21st century predecessors.

Six months in, second time around, Trump already seems frustrated.  How will he react when he discovers the whole world is moving on philosophically, economically, and innovatively without America’s permission?  How will he feel as he watches US vassals and beneficiaries collapsing under their own false premises, and promises, about money, state spending and war? I imagine he will tell us in a tweet, thanking us for our attention to the matter, and silently – or not – wonder if he can get a mulligan.

The post Does President Trump Talk Too Much? appeared first on LewRockwell.

International Man: Today, we’ll explore some of the most common criticisms of libertarianism and anarcho-capitalism.

Imagine two tribes. One is cohesive and tightly knit. The other promotes hyper-individualism. Which is likely to win in a conflict?

Doug Casey: There’s nothing wrong with forming cohesive groups. Humans have always been tribal because it’s conducive to survival. Many hands make light work. And specialization and division of labor—which is critical for progress—is only possible with a group. The problem is whether the group is voluntary or coercive in nature.

And you’re right. In a war, the tribe structured like a military unit has some advantages over a loose group of rugged individualists. But its only advantage is in war, which is something to be avoided at almost any cost. Why, then, do humans usually default to collectivism instead of libertarianism?

Unfortunately, the institution of the family, which is the foundation of society, inadvertently sets a bad example. That’s because the family—by its very nature—is authoritarian and socialistic. The parents call the shots and provide free food and shelter, while the kids get into the habit early of having things provided for them. They give according to their ability and receive according to their needs, a Marxist ideal. So perhaps the family, which is a good thing, paradoxically gets people off on the wrong foot.

Worse, in the real world, the arguments for liberty and individualism are all intellectual. They’re logical, they make sense—but most people don’t reason. The average person doesn’t live in an intellectual world; he lives in an emotional world. He acts according to what he feels, not what he thinks. He does what feels right without thinking about the consequences—even the immediate and direct ones, let alone the indirect and delayed ones. Reason is often used to justify emotions.

Those are two major reasons—and there are lots of others—why socialism has more appeal than capitalism, not to mention libertarianism and anarcho-capitalism.

The socialistic habits we learn with the family are reinforced by emotions, feelings, and, oftentimes, irrational assumptions. Unlike libertarianism, socialism promises something for nothing, the prospect of automatic security, and a perpetual free lunch. Socialism sounds better to those who haven’t got critical thinking skills. That’s a real problem, and a cause for pessimism about the future of humanity.

The problem is compounded by the nature of politics, which brings out the worst in people. When you’re trying to influence “the masses,” emotion works 100 times better than reason. Worse yet, the people who are drawn to politics want power and want to manipulate others. Politics naturally attracts criminal personalities.

It’s almost genetically guaranteed that individualists, AnCaps, and libertarians have the odds stacked against them.

International Man: How, then, do you respond to critics who argue that libertarianism and anarcho-capitalism are impractical, utopian fantasies?

Doug Casey: Well, you can look at this from two points of view—the practical and the moral.

In primitive times, it was possible for a central power to dictate how much food would cost, how much laborers would be paid, and what the rules were in every area of life. It was counterproductive, but it was possible because things were very simple, unlike today’s world, with billions of people and trillions of transactions taking place every day. However, central authorities and socialism are at odds with a technological society. Collectivism is unworkable on any scale larger than a family, as the Soviets and the Maoists proved. It turned out that, in the real world, communism was the utopian fantasy.

More importantly, any system other than radical libertarianism is immoral. I won’t discuss property rights at length here, but suffice it to say that your primary possession is your own body. And why should anybody else have a right to tell you what you must or must not do with your own body? That includes how you use it, what you ingest, what you think, what you say, and how you use your other possessions. Every person is a sovereign being.

Unfortunately, humans’ innate character flaws and ingrained psychological tendencies cause them to do self-destructive things like trying to replicate the family on a giant scale, by creating the institution of the State.

International Man: How do you respond to those who argue that libertarianism and anarcho-capitalism are, at best, irrelevant? And at worst, tools used by powerful interests to atomize individuals, making them easier to control and dominate?

Doug Casey: Politicians are disinclined to treat people as individuals. They try to control and dominate by forcing individuals to become parts of a collective.

Some say libertarianism is irrelevant because so few people understand its principles. And even if they do understand them, they don’t put them into effect.

But libertarianism cyclically expands and contracts. For instance, the reason that America was unique in world history is that it was the first country ever founded on the principles of libertarianism. And those principles are responsible for its immense success. But over America’s history, sometimes those principles grow, and sometimes they fade.

Libertarianism is basically a belief in the non-aggression principle and the limiting of force. Anarcho-capitalism goes beyond libertarianism because it doesn’t believe in the existence of the State as an entity, as an institution. And 50 years ago, the term “anarcho-capitalism” didn’t even exist. Now it’s widely discussed. The president of Argentina is an anarcho-capitalist, and the country is being radically transformed.

Speaking as an Ancap myself, I’d like to see not just 200, but eight billion sovereign nations in the world. The key is to develop institutions and accepted ways of thinking that emphasize cooperation, not coercion, in everything.

International Man: Many libertarians and anarcho-capitalists argue that fully privatizing all property would effectively solve the migrant and border issue.

Critics, however, say this vision is unrealistic and not a serious solution, claiming it ultimately serves as cover for open-border advocacy and worsens the situation in practice.

How do you respond to that criticism?

Doug Casey: Moving the U.S. toward pure libertarianism—anarcho-capitalism—is by far the best solution to the border issue. Much better than walls and border guards checking to see if “your papers are in order.” If 100% of the U.S. were privately owned, with no exceptions, it would be up to the owner of that property to decide whether any given person or group could use it or trespass on it.

The real problem is the welfare systems of the U.S. In the 19th century, there was immense immigration to the U.S. But there was zero government support. Arrivals were immediately responsible for feeding, clothing, and housing themselves—or they would, frankly, starve. Immigrants knew that. As a result, the U.S. drew the best and most enterprising people.

Today, however, migrants are quite aware of the immense welfare systems available at the local, State, and national levels, in addition to what’s provided by NGOs, which are basically maintained with tax dollars, directly or indirectly. There are networks that actively facilitate the travel and upkeep of the migrants. If welfare were abolished, we wouldn’t draw these kinds of people. The argument can be made that George Soros might use his billions to purposely import them to property that he owns. But there they would have to stay; it’s a straw man argument.

Without a government to support them, migrants would be discouraged. Of course, they could steal for a living. But thieves could expect to be treated harshly, perhaps with extreme prejudice.

Ultimately, you can’t keep people from coming or going. And why should you? Groups have migrated throughout world history. But the best way to maintain stability is with 100% private property, not a reliance on political gimmicks. Politicians can be corrupted and bribed. In fact, that’s why many get into politics. Ancaps rely on the market, not politicos, bureaucrats, and storm troopers, to maintain stability.

International Man: Libertarianism and anarcho-capitalism emphasize individual liberty and voluntary exchange, but critics argue they offer little guidance on deeper ethical or moral responsibilities beyond the non-aggression principle.

How do you see these philosophies addressing complicated questions of ethics and morality in real-world situations?

Doug Casey: Ancaps don’t intend to address issues of ethics and morality. Those things are settled by religion and philosophy. Libertarianism and ancapism are mainly concerned with how society can best protect itself from the initiation of force and fraud. It doesn’t really matter what philosophy or religion individuals are partial to, as long as they don’t initiate violence against each other.

Remember, there are just two rules: Do all that you say you’re going to do, and don’t impinge upon other people or their property. With only two laws, you don’t need a legislature. And ignorance of the law is truly no excuse.

Beyond that, you can believe or do whatever you’d like. The fact of the matter is that birds of a feather naturally flock together. People form into groups based on whatever is important to them. For some, it’s their race. For some, it’s their religion. For some, it’s their way of thinking. None of that matters as long as they don’t aggress against other individuals or other groups.

There’s much more to be said about these things. I urge you to read “The Market for Liberty.” It’s a very short book. But one that can totally change how you see the world.

Reprinted with permission from International Man.

The post Responds to the Toughest Questions Facing Libertarians and Anarcho-Capitalists appeared first on LewRockwell.

Roger Waters has got a brand new song. It’s called Sumud. A ballad, but not just another ballad: actually a timeless Hymn to Resistance.

Roger Waters has got a brand new song. It’s called Sumud. A ballad, but not just another ballad: actually a timeless Hymn to Resistance. From now on, these sounds, and their rallying cry, should ideally straddle the global spectrum from Mali to Java, forging an already budding Global Resistance Alliance.

Gently, nearly whispering, setting up a Leonard Cohen-esque mood, Roger starts by introducing “Sumud” in Arabic: “steadfast perseverance”. As in non-violent everyday Resistance, at every level, against the occupation, exploitation and vicious, forced colonization of Palestine. But what’s at stake is even bigger, larger than life, as he evokes how “voices join in harmony” all the way to the positive, cathartic chorus. Resistance against injustice, conceptually, should imply the profound commitment of all of us.

Roger evokes martyrs from Rachel Corrie to Marielle Franco – “oh my sisters / help me to open their eyes” – bridging gaps “across the great divide” all the way to a state of awareness as “reason comes of age”.

The persistent, hypnotic theme of “Sumud” is the struggle to reach that stage of collective consciousness “when voices join in harmony”.

As we “follow our moral compass”, voices inevitably will come to a point of “standing shoulder to shoulder”. And “from the river to the sea”, “ordinary people just standing their ground” are and will be able to make their mark.

The long dark clouds comin’ down, over and over again, do not intimidate Roger’s intuition. He chooses to close “Sumud” in the most auspicious manner, evoking parallels with Buddhism: “Together these ordinary people /they will turn the ship around”.

How to turn the ship around

The notion of an ordinary people’s collective being able to turn the current ship of (dangerous) fools around could not be more at odds with the fully oligarch-orchestrated dementia of liberal totalitarianism cum techno-feudalism, totally out of control and bent on normalizing even genocide and forced starvation. This paradigm is set to intimidate, harass, demoralize and destroy exactly these “ordinary people”.

Roger, with a simple ballad, shows that turning the game around may be in the realm of the possible. This insight comes with age, experience, and mastery of one’s craft. Roger, after all, since the 1960s is one of the prime embodiments of Shelley’s intuition about poets being “the unknown legislators of mankind”.

Many of us spent our younger days mesmerized by the ceaseless exploration and experimental overjoy contained in “Relics”, Ummagumma” or “Meddle” – even before the outer space expedition to the Dark Side of the Moon.

On several layers, “Sumud” can be apprehended as a contemporary echo of – what else – the epic transcendental experience “Echoes” , whose lyrics are as crucial as the musical voyage: “Strangers passing in the street / By chance, two separate glances meet / And I am you and what I see is me / And do I take you by the hand / And lead you through the land / And help me understand the best I can?”

London in the late 1960s meets the Global Resistance in the mid-2020s: it’s all about human inter-connection. And once that happens, nothing is more noble than reaching towards a higher purpose.

It’s the same spirit already present in “Us and Them”: “With, without / and who’ll deny / it’s what the fighting’s all about.”

The defining fight of our time is how to turn the ship around from a death cult, with impunity, being able to unleash a homicidal potential equivalent to 12 atomic bombs in Hiroshima on a population ceaselessly subjected to serial assassination, famine and calculated extermination – live, on every smartphone across the world, and all that fully blessed by the collective West.

Is it possible to lead the fight just by brandishing – and singing – a ballad? Perhaps not. But that’s an almighty start. Resist. Persevere. Like the Houthis in Yemen – hailed as ethical heroes, with a clear moral purpose, by the Global Majority. Roger’s uplifting message is that one day, that rotten ship will sink.

The views of individual contributors do not necessarily represent those of the Strategic Culture Foundation.

The post Roger Waters Composes a Timeless Hymn To Resistance and Perseverance appeared first on LewRockwell.

According to media reports, Ghislaine Maxwell cleared Trump of having participated in sexual activities with underaged females.  The liberal-left will no doubt claim that Ghislaine lied in hopes of a pardon from Trump. 

This is typical nonsense from the American liberal-left.  Ghislaine Maxwell is the daughter of one Mossad asset and the lover of another.  Illusions are not her cup of tea. She knows that if Trump pardons her the pardon will be taken as proof that Trump was a participant in illicit sex and that Trump knows it.

There is one thing she could do in exchange for a pardon.  She could acknowledge that the Epstein operation was an Israeli blackmail operation to ensure that US Middle East policy conformed with Israel’s.  The policy declared by US policymakers–seven countries in five years–was the policy of Greater Israel. 

This revelation would free Trump from Israel’s control, and he could free American foreign policy from Israel.  It would also free the insouciant American public from its delusions about America’s great friend Israel who God commands us to protect.  It would be made clear that Israel for several decades has used American lives and American money for Israel’s benefit.  

Of course, if Ghislaine acknowledged this truth, the Zionist American media and the Christian Zionists would shout her down.  But her main and immediate danger would be Mossad assassination. 

Could her life be protected from Israel’s assassins who have proven their ability to assassinate Iran’s top scientists, military and political leaders, and those of every country that presents difficulties to Israel?  Ron Unz recently published an article noting that Israel and the Zionist movement that created Israel “have probably employed assassination as a tool of statecraft more heavily than any other political entity in recorded history. Indeed, their deadly activities had easily eclipsed those of the notorious Muslim sect that had terrorized the Middle East a thousand years ago and gave rise to that term.” See here. 

Certainly Ghislaine could not resume her social life in England or New York.  She wouldn’t even be safe in a maximum security prison.  If she blows the whistle on Israel’s spy/blackmail operation against Americans positioned to influence US Middle East policy, her freedom means her death.

If the US Secret Service was able to create a new identity for her in some out of the way place and keep her safe without people wondering why she has so many bodyguards, it would not be the kind of social life she knows.

Perhaps Washington could seize several prominent Israelis and hold them as hostages against Ghislaine’s life.  But this would give Muslims an incentive to kill Ghislaine in order to have the US kill the Israeli hostages.

Ghislaine has the information, but how to get it from her?

Trump’s bluster and threats won’t do it.  A guarantee of her life has to be strong enough for her to take the risk. Does anyone have any ideas how it might be done?

The post Ghislaine Could Give Trump a Chance To Break Israel’s Power Over America appeared first on LewRockwell.

Consider the following headlines that appeared in various newspapers, and especially notice the dates of the articles:

“Disgrace and Crime Sold Openly in Opium Market”: New York American, February 22, 1927

“Two Daughters Accuse Guitar Instructor of Giving Marijuana to Their Mother”: San Francisco Chronicle, March 26, 1940

“Black Men Versus the Drug Problem”: Metropole, November 9, 1969

“Nixon’s War on Drug Addicts”: Guardian, June 17, 1971

“Drug Lab Defendants Sentenced to Prison”: Waco Herald-Tribune, October 15, 1988

“Cocaine Haul: $100 Million”: Greenwood Index-Journal, July 27, 1989

In other words, the much-vaunted war on drugs has been going on for a very long time. It is still going on. It will go on forever. Children today will be living under the drug war when they become adults and probably until the day they die.

Today, DEA agents, federal prosecutors, and federal judges continue to do the same things that federal officials have been doing our entire lives. They arrest people who possess or distribute drugs. They prosecute them. They jail them.

And the process just keeps repeating itself, year after year, decade after decade forever.

Do all these federal officials really believe that their efforts will somehow bring victory in the war on drugs? I can’t believe they do. Nobody can be that obtuse. Every single DEA agent, U.S. Attorney and Assistant U.S. Attorney, and federal judge in the land has to know that what they are doing is just mindlessly repeating what their counterparts were doing 40 years in their effort to win the war on drugs.

It’s just a continuous stream of arrests, prosecutions, and prison sentences, with no end in sight. Forty years from now, when today’s crop of DEA agents, prosecutors, and federal judges are retired or dead, there will be the new crop of DEA agents, prosecutors, and federal judges doing the exact same thing.

And for what? What do they accomplish? Nothing. They bust one drug dealer and ten more pop up to take his place. That’s the way black markets work.

Moreover, if this were a cost-free exercise, that would be one thing. But it’s not. Along with all the taxpayer money that goes into this mindless federal program are violence, drug gangs, drug cartels, official corruption, turf wars, murders, and, of course, the destruction of the civil liberties and privacy of the American people.

As we have been saying for some 35 years here at FFF, there is only one solution to all this mindless drug-war mayhem: drug legalization. With drug legalization, the violence, the drug gangs, the drug cartels, the destruction of civil liberties and privacy, and other negative consequences of the drug war would disappear overnight.

I recently watched a 1991 movie on Amazon Prime called “The Return of Eliot Ness,” staring Robert Stack as Ness. The beginning of the movie depicted the massive violence that came with alcohol Prohibition. It was similar to the massive violence we see in the war on drugs. Emblematic of Prohibition was the war between Ness and alcohol gangster Al Capone. But the movie was built around a period of time after Prohibition had ended. Thus, there were no more alcohol gangsters or alcohol-Prohibition-related crime for Ness to combat.

Why can’t federal drug agents, prosecutors, and federal judges see this? Why can’t they see that they are just wasting their lives and their talents in devoting themselves to this drug-war inanity?

My hunch is that they can see it. They are smart people. My hunch is that they simply do it for the money. They have nice government jobs that pay well. Like lots of other people, they have mortgages to pay and children in school. They don’t want to give up their jobs, even if they know that their jobs are valueless in terms of meaning in life.

Moreover, it’s not like they have the power to end the war on drugs. Only Congress can do that. Thus, the question naturally arises: Why don’t the members of Congress end the war on drugs? Here is where I think the obtuseness really comes into play. My hunch is that the average member of Congress has no idea of how long the war on drugs has been going on and is convinced that victory is just around the corner.

Finally, there is the role that the deep state might be playing in all this. For decades, evidence has periodically surfaced that the CIA is involved in the drug trade. If that’s in fact the case, then there is no reasonable possibility at all that Congress or, for that matter, any other federal official, is going to interfere with how the deep state is making its money. The deep state’s involvement in the drug trade would guarantee that the drug war will continue into perpetuity.

Reprinted with permission from The Future of Freedom Foundation.

The post The Never-Ending War on Drugs appeared first on LewRockwell.

As we commemorate the 80th anniversary of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki atomic bombings, the world is drifting as close to another nuclear confrontation as it has been in decades.

With Israeli and American attacks on Iranian nuclear energy sites, India and Pakistan going to war in May, and escalating violence between Russia and NATO-backed forces in Ukraine, the shadow of another nuclear war looms large over daily life.

Eighty Years Of Lies

The United States remains the only nation to have dropped an atomic bomb in anger. While the dates of August 6 and August 9, 1945, are seared into the popular conscience of all Japanese people, those days hold far less salience in American society.

When discussed at all in the U.S., this dark chapter in human history is usually presented as a necessary evil, or even a day of liberation—an event that saved hundreds of thousands of lives, prevented the need for an invasion of Japan, and ended the Second World War early. This, however, could not be further from the truth.

American generals and war planners agreed that Japan was on the point of collapse, and had, for weeks, been attempting to negotiate a surrender. The decision, then, to incinerate hundreds of thousands of Japanese civilians was one taken to project American power across the world, and to stymie the rise of the Soviet Union.

“It always appeared to us that, atomic bomb or no atomic bomb, the Japanese were already on the verge of collapse,” General Henry Arnold, Commanding General of the U.S. Army Air Forces in 1945, wrote in his 1949 memoirs.

Arnold was far from alone in this assessment. Indeed, Fleet Admiral William Leahy, the Navy’s highest-ranking officer during World War II, bitterly condemned the United States for its decision and compared his own country to the most savage regimes in world history.

As he wrote in 1950:

It is my opinion that the use of this barbarous weapon at Hiroshima and Nagasaki was of no material assistance in our war against Japan. The Japanese were already defeated and ready to surrender. My own feeling was that in being the first to use it, we had adopted an ethical standard common to the barbarians of the Dark Ages.”

By 1945, Japan had been militarily and economically exhausted. Losing key allies Italy in 1943 and Germany by May 1945, and facing the immediate prospect of an all-out Soviet invasion of Japan, the country’s leaders were frantically pursuing peace negotiations. Their only real condition appeared to be that they wished to keep as a figurehead the emperor—a position that, by some accounts, dates back more than 2,600 years.

“I am convinced,” former President Herbert Hoover wrote to his successor, Harry S. Truman, “if you, as President, will make a shortwave broadcast to the people of Japan—tell them they can have their emperor if they surrender, that it will not mean unconditional surrender except for the militarists—you’ll get a peace in Japan—you’ll have both wars over.”

Many of Truman’s closest advisors told him the same thing. “I am absolutely convinced that had we said they could keep the emperor, together with the threat of an atomic bomb, they would have accepted, and we would never have had to drop the bomb,” said John McCloy, Truman’s Assistant Secretary of War.

Nevertheless, Truman initially took an absolutist position, refusing to hear any Japanese negotiating caveats. This stance, according to General Douglas MacArthur, Commander of Allied Forces in the Pacific, actually lengthened the war. “The war might have ended weeks earlier,” he said, “If the United States had agreed, as it later did anyway, to the retention of the institution of the emperor.” Truman, however, dropped two bombs, then reversed his position on the emperor, in order to stop Japanese society from falling apart.

At that point in the war, however, the United States was emerging as the sole global superpower and enjoyed an unprecedented position of influence. The dropping of the atomic bomb on Japan underscored this; it was a power play, intended to strike fear into the hearts of world leaders, especially in the Soviet Union and China.

First Japan, Then The World

Hiroshima and Nagasaki drastically curbed the U.S.S.R.’s ambitions in Japan. Joseph Stalin’s forces had invaded and permanently annexed Sakhalin Island in 1945 and planned to occupy Hokkaido, Japan’s second-largest island. The move likely prevented the island nation from coming under the Soviet sphere of influence.

To this day, Japan remains deeply tied to the U.S., economically, politically, and militarily. There are around 60,000 U.S. troops in Japan, spread across 120 military bases.

Many in Truman’s administration wished to use the atom bomb against the Soviet Union as well. President Truman, however, worried that the destruction of Moscow would lead the Red Army to invade and destroy Western Europe as a response. As such, he decided to wait until the U.S. had enough warheads to completely destroy the U.S.S.R. and its military in one fell swoop.

War planners estimated this figure to be around 400. To that end, Truman ordered the immediate ramping up of production. Such a strike, we now know, would have caused a nuclear winter that would have permanently ended all organized life on Earth.

The decision to destroy Russia was met with stiff opposition among the American scientific community. It is now widely believed that Manhattan Project scientists, including Robert J. Oppenheimer himself, passed nuclear secrets to Moscow in an effort to speed up their nuclear project and develop a deterrent to halt this doomsday scenario. This part of history, however, was left out of the 2023 biopic movie.

By 1949, the U.S.S.R. was able to produce a credible nuclear deterrent before the U.S. had produced sufficient quantities for an all-out attack, thus ending the threat and bringing the world into the era of mutually assured destruction.

“Certainly prior to 31 December 1945, and in all probability prior to 1 November 1945, Japan would have surrendered even if the atomic bombs had not been dropped, even if Russia had not entered the war, and even if no invasion had been planned or contemplated,” concluded a 1946 report from the U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey.

Dwight D. Eisenhower, Supreme Allied Commander in Europe and future president, was of the same opinion, stating that:

Japan was already defeated and dropping the bomb was completely unnecessary…[it was] no longer mandatory as a measure to save American lives. It was my belief that Japan was, at this very moment, seeking a way to surrender with a minimum loss of face.”

Nevertheless, both Truman and Eisenhower publicly toyed with the idea of using nuclear weapons against China to stop the rise of Communism and to defend their client regime in Taiwan. It was only the development of a Chinese warhead in 1964 that led to the end of the danger, and, ultimately, the détente era of good relations between the two powers that lasted until President Obama’s Pivot to Asia.

Ultimately, then, the people of Japan were the collateral damage in a giant U.S. attempt to project its power worldwide. As Brigadier General Carer Clarke, head of U.S. intelligence on Japan wrote, “When we didn’t need to do it, and we knew we didn’t need to do it, and they knew that we knew we didn’t need to do it, we used them [Japanese citizens] as an experiment for two atomic bombs.”

Tiptoeing Closer To Armageddon

The danger of nuclear weapons is far from over. Today, Israel and the United States – two nations with atomic weaponry – attack Iranian nuclear facilities. Yet their continued, hyper-aggressive actions against their foes only suggest to other countries that, unless they too possess weapons of mass destruction, they will not be safe from attack. North Korea, a country with a conventional and nuclear deterrent, faces no such air strikes from the U.S. or its allies. These actions, therefore, will likely result in more nations pursuing nuclear ambitions.

Earlier this year, India and Pakistan (two more nuclear-armed states) came into open conflict thanks to disputes over terrorism and Jammu and Kashmir. Many influential individuals on both sides of the border were demanding their respective sides launch their nukes – a decision that could also spell the end of organized human life. Thankfully, cooler heads prevailed.

Meanwhile, the war in Ukraine continues, with NATO forces urging President Zelensky to up the ante. Earlier this month, President Trump himself reportedly encouraged the Ukrainian leader to use his Western-made weapons to strike Moscow.

It is precisely actions such as these that led the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists to move their famous Doomsday Clock to 89 seconds to midnight, the closest the world has ever been to catastrophe.

“The war in Ukraine, now in its third year, looms over the world; the conflict could become nuclear at any moment because of a rash decision or through accident or miscalculation,” they wrote in their explanation, adding that conflicts in Asia could spiral out of control into a wider war at any point, and that nuclear powers are updating and expanding their arsenals.

The Pentagon, too, is recruiting Elon Musk to help it build what it calls an American Iron Dome. While this move is couched in defensive language, such a system – if successful – would grant the U.S. the ability to launch nuclear attacks anywhere in the world without having to worry about the consequences of a similar response.

Thus, as we look back at the horrors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki 80 years ago, we must understand that not only were they entirely avoidable, but that we are now closer to a catastrophic nuclear confrontation than many people realize.

This article was originally published on MintPress News.

The post 80 Years of Lies: The US Finally Admits It Knew It Didn’t Need To Bomb Hiroshima and Nagasaki appeared first on LewRockwell.

August is the month when I always write about Greece, where I find myself at present enjoying the Attic climate. This time Sparta is on my mind, perhaps because I’ve been thinking about the man in the white suit of late, and the Spartans were the ones who made him redundant. Death to a Spartan was like the proverbial cold, to be endured but not to be feared nor taken too seriously.

All my mother’s antecedents were Spartans. Her mother’s brother, whose name is honored by streets and squares in central Sparta, was president of the Greek Academy, president of the Archaeological Society, Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, and even Prime Minister of Greece, Panagiotis Poulitsas. He taught me how to read ancient Greek when I was very, very young and was bitterly disappointed when I returned from America speaking Greek with an accent. Modern Sparta, needless to say, always votes for the right. Another uncle of mine used to win elections to the Greek Senate with 99 percent of the vote, and due to his 6-foot-2 height and Spartan toughness was never, ever challenged over the Stalin-like electoral result. When war broke out in 1940, my mother had four brothers and a husband up in the front the next day.

“The Spartans remain famous throughout history for their doomed stand at Thermopylae and are immortalized as the epitome of martial prowess.”

Sparta’s demise came from lack of men. Spartans were warriors, and warriors die in battle. The city-state simply ran out of fighters. Machiavelli and Montesquieu were big admirers of Sparta, as was the American Samuel Adams. Sparta conquered all surrounding states like Messenia and Laconia, and by 750 B.C. was the mistress of all Doric-speaking people. Helots, or slaves, of conquered territories did the heavy lifting. Unlike modern Caribbean and African dictators, no one has ever demanded reparations from modern Spartans for past helot services.

A true Spartan was one whose father and mother were Spartans, and they were called peers. A male peer devoted himself exclusively to military training. His dedication to the state was reciprocated by a grant of state-owned land in Laconia or Messenia, which was worked on by helots. The first six years of a Spartan boy’s life were spent at home, where he would be looked after by his mother and a nurse. He was taught not to be afraid of the dark, or of being left alone, and not to cry or throw temper tantrums. Then at the age of 7 he went to the barracks with other boys his age. Their hair was cropped and they trained naked. Food was in short supply in order to harden them for eventual warlike conditions. From age 18 Spartan young men were called up for military service. At age 20 they were permitted to marry.

At age 24 the Spartan male became a frontline combatant and at 30 a full citizen with the right to participate in the Assembly. Girls did not have it much easier. They trained intensively and ran, wrestled, and threw the discus. They were taught to sing and dance and were allowed to make fun of men and criticize their failings but also sing their praises. Doesn’t their education remind you of American high schools today?

The two most famous Spartan sayings are “Molon Lave” and “I Tan I Epi Tas.” “Molon Lave” was the answer by King Leonidas and his 300 Spartans when King Xerxes of Persia and his 200,000 troops offered the Spartans freedom if they laid down their arms. “Come and get them,” was the answer. They died to a man but killed thousands and won time for the rest of the Greeks to unite and defeat the invading Persians.

“I Tan I Epi Tas” was what every Spartan mother told her son as he departed for war: With it or on it, come back victorious or dead. Ancient Sparta was a mixture of monarchy, oligarchy, and democracy, something that made it difficult for ancient writers to classify. Plato himself could not decide whether Sparta was a democracy or a tyranny. Sparta’s council of 28 elders, who had to be over 60 years of age, sat along with the two kings. Leave it to the Spartans to have two of the latter.

Sparta’s eventual demise came at the hands of the Thebans, whose military strategy outfoxed the set Spartan plans (a weak center but two strong flanks). But the Spartans remain famous throughout history for their doomed stand at Thermopylae and are immortalized as the epitome of martial prowess. All my maternal relatives were proud Spartans, and they never forgot to remind me that I was half Spartan, hence to act like a man. Just like the #MeToo movement in America.

This article was originally published on Taki’s Magazine.

The post Laconophilia appeared first on LewRockwell.

This article was first published on March 9, 2022, revised and expanded on October 5, 2022, minor revisions on May 25, 2023.

Introduction

At no point since the first atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima on August 6th, 1945, has humanity been closer to the unthinkable. All the safeguards of the Cold War era, which categorized the nuclear bomb as “a weapon of last resort”, have been scrapped.

Let us also recall the unspoken history of America’s doctrine pertaining to the conduct of nuclear war. 

Barely six weeks after the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the U.S. War Department released a Secret Plan on September 15, 1945 to  bomb 66 cities of the Soviet Union with 204 atomic bombs.

The September 1945 Plan was to “Wipe the Soviet Union off the Map” at a time when the US and the USSR were allies. Confirmed by declassified documents, Hiroshima and Nagasaki served as a “Dress Rehearsal” (see historical details and analysis below).  

Video: The Dangers of Nuclear War: Michel Chossudovsky with Caroline Mailloux

April 2023. Comments: Link to Odysee

The Dangers of Nuclear War are Real. Profit Driven. Two Trillion Dollars

Under Joe Biden, public funds allocated to nuclear weapons are slated to increase to 2 trillion by 2030 allegedly as a means to safeguarding peace and national security at taxpayers expense. (How many schools and hospitals could you finance with 2 trillion dollars?):

The United States maintains an arsenal of about 1,700 strategic nuclear warheads deployed on intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) and submarine-launched ballistic missiles (SLBMs) and at strategic bomber bases. There are an additional estimated 100 non-strategic, or tactical, nuclear weapons at bomber bases in five European countries and about 2,000 nuclear warheads in storage. [see our analysis of B61-11 and B61-12 below]

The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) estimated in May 2021 that the United States will spend a total of $634 billion over the next 10 years to sustain and modernize its nuclear arsenal. (Arms Control)

In this article, I will focus on

• The Post Cold War shift in US Nuclear Doctrine,
• A brief review of the History of US-Russia Relations since World War I, 
• An Assessment of  the history of nuclear weapons going back to the Manhattan Project initiated in 1939 with the participation of both Canada and the United Kingdom.

Most people in America do not know that the Manhattan Project in the immediate wake of bombing of Hiroshima, Nagasaki in August 1945, was intended to formulate a nuclear attack against the USSR, at a time when the Soviet Union and the U.S. were allies.

Read the Whole Article

The post ‘Preemptive Nuclear War’: The Historic Battle for Peace and Democracy appeared first on LewRockwell.