Lew Rockwell Institute

‘Judaism is to do justice and to have mercy and to walk humbly with God; and all the rest is commentary and of secondary importance’.

So wrote Rabbi Elmer Berger, a leading Jewish thinker of the 50’s and 60’s, who opposed what he called Israeli-style ‘Jewish nationalism.’

Another renowned Jewish thinker, Arthur Koestler, warned that Israel was becoming ‘a nasty little Sparta.’

This past week, much of the rest of the world, sickened by the mass slaughter and destruction in Gaza wrought by Israel, joined in calls for creation of a Palestinian state. This obvious solution to the agonies of five million stateless Palestinian refugees would be a start to making whole one of the world’s largest refugee problems. Over 147 nations have recognized the Palestinian state. But until now, the United States, France, Britain and Germany have refused to heed the cries of the savagely abused Palestinian refugees.

This week, France, true to its libertarian traditions, finally announced it would recognize the Palestinian state this September.  Spain, Australia, Ireland and Saudi Arabia (which has been watching Gaza from the sidelines) and even usually timid Canada joined in. So too all of Latin America.  Germany, still handcuffed by accusations of wartime crimes, is still dithering.  Britain claimed it would recognize Palestine with certain conditions, giving it a way to wriggle out of the promise. A large part of the UK Labour Party has revolted, demanding an end to the massacres in Palestine as the Rothschilds strain to support Israel.

Interestingly, Egypt, the largest and most important Arab nation, remained quiet.  It has been secretly colluding with Israel in repressing the Palestinians.

The United States continues to openly back Israel’s draconian policies that have so far killed at least 60,000 Palestinians, mainly women and children.  President Trump has revealed himself as a Trojan Horse for Israel’s expansionist far right. He, so far, seems unconcerned that his military, financial and diplomatic support for Israel’s hard right has hurt America’s image around the globe.  It may take American voters to change his mind.  But they remain beguiled by the corporate-controlled media which promotes Israel’s arguments.

Still, it’s clear there has been a sea-change in the world’s view of Palestine. Behind all the fevered talk about removing Palestinians there are moderate-minded Jewish politicians and soldiers who realize that they must eventually find a way to live with Palestinians and share the land – as Rabbi Berger advised. The alternative is ethnic cleansing, genocide and more slaughter. 

What a stain on the honor of Judaism, what a horror after the WWII holocaust.  Israel’s repression in Gaza and strong-arming of Palestinian supporters and the media around the globe have created a tsunami of antisemitism.  Rabbi Berger warned that the Arab-Israeli conflict would eventually infect the United States and endanger our republic. He was very right.

The core of this conflict is attempts by Israel’s far right parties to seize more land for the Jewish state, notably the occupied West Bank, Gaza, southern Lebanon and bits of Syria. 

Greater Israel is the grand strategy. For some of the more fanatical groups now running Israel’s government (and giving marching orders to the spineless US Congress) Israel might expand into more of Syria, Iraq’s oil fields, even Saudi Arabia and Egypt. 

The post Israel, Listen to Rabbi Berger appeared first on LewRockwell.

In 1761 lawyer James Otis delivered a five-hour speech in a packed Boston courthouse in which he dismantled Parliament’s claim that general search warrants known as writs-of-assistance were constitutionally valid.  Though Otis lost the case his scholarly and fiery rhetoric won the support of onlookers such as 25-year-old John Adams, who near the end of his life wrote about his experience:

Every Man of an immense crowded Audience appeared to me to go away, as I did, ready to take Arms against Writs of Assistants. Then and there was the first scene of the first Act of opposition to the Arbitrary claims of Great Britain. Then and there the Child Independence was born.

What did Otis say that revolutionized so many people?  Author-researcher A. J. Langguth tells us the King’s advocate Jeremiah Gridley delivered a death blow to Otis’s case by claiming “the British constitution was now only and whatever Parliament said it was.”  Therefore, case closed.

But not for Otis.  He fought back taking Enlightenment philosophy to its logical conclusion.  As you read Otis’s words consider how utterly foreign they sound in today’s world, while at the same sparking exhilaration to know men once spoke like this:

Every man was his own sovereign . . . No other creature on earth could legitimately challenge a man’s right to his life, his liberty and his property. That principle, that unalterable law, took precedence—here Otis was answering Gridley directly—even over the survival of the state. [emphasis added]

Given that today states are sovereign entities wherever they exist, and by virtue of that status can legally overpower any domestic challenger, to assert that each individual is sovereign would seem at best wishful thinking.  Individuals can act like they’re sovereign but the state will carry them off somewhere, if necessary.  If “state” is defined in Rothbardian terms as a criminal gang writ large, then the adage “might is right” permeates state behavior.  Stripped of its august facade that’s what state sovereignty means.  Otis was saying we don’t need states.

In his inflammatory 1776 pamphlet Common Sense Thomas Paine wrote that “Some writers have so confounded society with government, as to leave little or no distinction between them; whereas they are not only different, but have different origins. . . . Society in every state is a blessing, but Government, even in its best state, is but a necessary evil; in its worst state an intolerable one. . .” Though he made a critical distinction between government and governed, Paine unfortunately went on to equate a lack of government with “miseries.”

In his autobiography Thomas Jefferson wrote that

the question was not whether, by a Declaration of Independence, we should make ourselves what we are not; but whether we should declare a fact which already exists. That, as to the people or parliament of England, we had always been independent of them, their restraints on our trade deriving efficacy from our acquiescence only, and not from any rights they possessed of imposing them.

Acquiescence has marked mankind’s long history.  Most people have preferred to surrender their sovereignty than assert it.  Today, in spite of Otis, Paine, and Jefferson, they don’t even realize they were born with it.

Following the Revolutionary War, Paine went to England to build an iron bridge and became friends with MP Edmund Burke.  As the revolution in France was transpiring they soon disagreed — strongly — as to its merit, with Paine praising it and Burke feeling threatened by it.  When Burke made his views public Paine wrote Rights of Man as a rejoinder to Burke’s position.

Paine invoked the “state of nature,” an Enlightenment phrase, to attack Burke’s defense of the corrupt English government:

It has been thought a considerable advance towards establishing the principles of Freedom to say that Government is a compact between those who govern and those who are governed; but this cannot be true, because it is putting the effect before the cause; for as man must have existed before governments existed, there necessarily was a time when governments did not exist . . .

The fact therefore must be that the individuals themselves, each in his own personal and sovereign right, entered into a compact with each other to produce a government: and this is the only mode in which governments have a right to arise, and the only principle on which they have a right to exist.  [emphasis added]

The government so formed would be the creation of people who were delegated to form a government.  But in doing so the delegates, intentionally or not, transfer sovereignty from the individuals to the government, and the result is the chaos and corruption that follows.

By contrast, on the free market under laissez-faire, which means without coercive interference, individuals conduct their economic lives without surrendering their sovereignty.

It’s not as if governments don’t realize the economic value of freedom.  The ones in charge seem to have heard about Aesop and his tale of the goose.  Paine spent the first 37 years of his life in England and had experienced this first-hand:

The portion of liberty enjoyed in England is just enough to enslave a country more productively than by despotism, and that as the real object of all despotism is revenue, a government so formed obtains more than it could do either by direct despotism, or in a full state of freedom, and is, therefore on the ground of interest, opposed to both.

Paine, however brilliant at times, is no stranger to inconsistent writing.  At the conclusion of the American Revolution he wrote the final installment of his American Crisis essays.  Elated by the American victory, he seemingly transferred sovereignty from its source to the collective:

Sovereignty must have power to protect all the parts that compose and constitute it: and as UNITED STATES we are equal to the importance of the title, but otherwise we are not. . . .

It is with confederated states as with individuals in society; something must be yielded up to make the whole secure. In this view of things we gain by what we give, and draw an annual interest greater than the capital.

No one would question that “something” must be yielded to gain a definite result.  But surrendering sovereignty should never be on the table.

The post The Life Source Missing From Today’s Narratives appeared first on LewRockwell.

In some ways it is refreshing to have a president who is so profoundly ignorant that one’s expectations regarding what good policies might actually come out of the federal government are really, really low. It took Donald Trump six months to accept the reality of the slaughter going on in Gaza where Israel is killing roughly one hundred Palestinians every day whose only crime is that they are looking for food, water and shelter. Admittedly Trump has actually been bold enough to challenge his Israeli masters by declaring that videos from Gaza show a lot of people who Trump admitted were “starving”, and promised to “take care” of it. Yet he has done nothing but support the Israeli blockade and repress or even deport any voices in America who protest against the war crimes. And right before Trump promised to “take care” of starving Palestinians, an Israeli official described his pleasure to report that when it came to pressuring Israel “to allow more humanitarian aid into Gaza, Trump [has] made no such requests.” So the killing continues, financed armed and supported by Donald J Trump just as was the case under Genocide Joe Biden.

Indeed, instead of pushing Israel to allow in aid, Trump partnered with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to destroy the existing United Nations system for delivering it. As Trump took office in January, Israel banned access to Gaza by the United Nations Agency for Palestinian refugees in Gaza, and Netanyahu was and still is backed up by Trump. Trump’s chief negotiator Steve Witkoff has boasted that there is “no space” between the president and Netanyahu on handling the Gaza issue, with Trump continuing to call on the Israelis to “finish the job,” which clearly means doing whatever necessary to get rid of the Palestinian “problem.” Trump has also made clear that Israel will “manage” and “preside over” the distribution of goods as part of its security measures to keep Hamas from stealing the food, which is a lie that has been heavily promoted by Israel. Armed Israeli settlers have also been given a green light to intercept and blockade food and medicine convoys as they approach the Gaza border.

Trump’s odd pledge to provide assistance to Gaza came as he sat alongside British Prime Minister Keir Starmer last week. He said “I know your nation’s joining us, and we have all of the European nations joining us, and others also called and they want to be helpful. So we’re going to set up food centers and where the people can walk in and no boundaries. We’re not going to have fences.” He elaborated “We’re going to be getting some good, strong food. We can save a lot of people. Some of those kids — that’s real starvation.” Trump earlier last Monday had been asked if he agreed with Benjamin Netanyahu’s comments that there was no starvation in Gaza. He responded somewhat incoherently “I mean, based on television, I would say not particularly, because those children look very hungry.”

And it is certain that the children will stay hungry as Israel concentrates the Gazan population into restricted areas that will become death traps. Trump’s way of discussing the Gaza issue is, characteristically, very awkward and poorly expressed with “good, strong food” and “no boundaries…no fences.” His pledge to provide aid is also basically a lie or a “misspoke” as Trump has deferred to Israel in terms of how the flow of assistance will actually work. The reality is that both Trump and Starmer are reacting to popular sentiment in both the UK and the US, where voters have been rapidly losing any sympathy they might have had for the Israeli “security” policy vis-à-vis the Palestinians. Both leaders can reasonably be described as dedicated Zionists who are “controlled” by the Israel lobbies in their respective countries.

But more bloodshed was not the only Trump news during the past week. Apparently his outstanding performance in going to war with Ukraine, Iran, Syria and the Palestinians simultaneously has earned him recognition and rewards that will bring honor to his name for years to come. We are still waiting on possible receipt of the Nobel Peace Prize as recommended by no less an international notable than Bibi Netanyahu, but the Republican Party in the US has stepped in to fill the gap with legislation that will change the name of the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington DC, removing the Kennedy and replacing it with Trump. Inside the building itself the main opera house will be renamed for the First Lady Melina Trump.

I must admit to being turned off by the promiscuous honoring of people in public life who have no honor and who, in Trump’s case, probably cannot spell or pronounce the word. My local post office here in Virginia was threatened with being posthumously named after Madeleine Albright by a virtue of a bill submitted to Congress by our local Democratic Party representative. As one recalls, Albright was completely unapologetic, quite the contrary, over the killing of 500,000 Iraqi children which she described as “worth it.” That makes her similar to our current crop of brainwashed psychopaths, including Trump and his predecessor Joe Biden, who have been complicit in Israel’s war crimes. In the case of my local post office, the bill to honor Albright did not advance, suggesting that some smells are too extreme even for members of Congress.

One might recall that the Kennedy Center has been around for a long time and was meant to honor an assassinated president. JFK and his wife were, in fact, active supporters of the arts both when he was in the Senate and after he became president. Trump and First Lady Trump’s ties to theater and cultural events is somewhat more elusive unless one considers parties at Jeffrey Epstein’s various residences to be high culture.

The real tragedy is that the name change is doable, even though there are several hoops that have to be jumped through to accomplish it. The federal government first authorized the Center’s construction in 1958. The project, funded by both the government and private donations, stalled and was revived under President John F. Kennedy, whose family led an effort to get the center funded and built. It was named in his honor following his assassination. Two months later, President Lyndon B Johnson signed the legislation making it a living memorial to Kennedy. The law relating to the building states that “After December 2, 1983, no additional memorials or plaques in the nature of memorials shall be designated or installed in the public areas of the John F Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts.” Notably, there are four large new portraits of the first and second couples, the Trumps and Vances, in the center’s Hall of Nations, the main entryway to the facility. Until this year, the public spaces included only a bronze bust of President John F. Kennedy, so Trump or his facilitators have to a certain extent ignored that ruling. Nevertheless, as the Center’s names are protected by law it would require a new law to change that, which in turn would have to obtain 60 of the votes in the Senate to pass. As the Democrats are not likely to go along with that, the necessary majority would be lacking.

And that’s not all. The beatification of Donald Trump by Republicans in Congress continues to grow, and, let us not forget the Israeli government, which has called him the most pro-Israel president ever, meaning that the accolades with be fully backed by the immensely powerful Israel Lobby.

There are in fact a number of bills and other proposals floating around in Washington that would elevate Donald Trump the Man, turning him into something many magnitudes greater. Imagine getting the day off work in the near future to celebrate not only Flag Day on June 14th but also Donald Trump’s birthday as part of the federal holiday. Or going to a bank on the Washington Metro which will be called the Trump Train to withdraw money and receiving a $100 bill with Donald’s portrait on it. Or landing in an airplane at Donald J. Trump International Airport, formerly Dulles International, near the nation’s capital before going to a performance at the Donald J. Trump Center for Performing Arts. Any and all of the above would be possible if a series of bills and measures Republican lawmakers have sponsored this year were to be approved.

Trump is little more than six months into his second term, but some Republicans are ready to elevate him into the pantheon of American greats, proposing an ever-growing list of bills paying tribute well before his second term ends. One lawmaker even proposes carving his face into Mount Rushmore next to Washington, Lincoln, Jefferson and Teddy Roosevelt. Trump has told friends that would be his “dream” to be carved into Mount Rushmore. Fortunately perhaps, the National Park Service, which oversees Mount Rushmore National Memorial, has cited two reasons that Trump’s face cannot be added. First, it considers Mount Rushmore to be a “completed work of art.” Second, there is no room: “The carved portion of Mount Rushmore has been thoroughly evaluated, and there are no viable locations left for additional carvings.”

And the honors list grows longer and longer. Representative Joe Wilson of South Carolina carries a pamphlet he gives to colleagues asking them to sponsor a bill that would direct the Bureau of Printing and Engraving to design and print a $250 bill in June 2026 bearing Trump’s image. The honor would coincide with the 250th anniversary of the United States Declaration of Independence. It is, by the way, illegal to put the image of a living person on US paper currency or on a coin but Trump’s people seem to believe that rules exist to be broken.

If all of this sounds crazy to the reader, well it is, and it is intended to demonstrate the extent to which our country’s essentially ignorant leader has embraced a cult of personality about himself that goes beyond what Joseph Stalin, Mao Zedong, and Adolph Hitler had to offer. This immature but hubristic nut case will have us in more wars before too long just to demonstrate that he is so powerful and righteous that he can do it, not because there is any benefit to Americans or to the United States. Just witness the nonsense that has been going on over the past six months replete with phony negotiations leading to the recent warnings to Russia, the incessant pandering to Israel’s sadism, and the brain-dead attack on a non-threatening Iran. And in the latest development, Trump has declared that a “trade deal” with neighbor Canada will be “very difficult” because Ottawa intends to recognize Palestine! The US also stated on Thursday that it is going to impose sanctions on the Palestinians’ self-governance organization as well as on the body that represents it on the international stage. The sanctions will affect both the Palestinian Authority (PA) which was established by the Oslo peace accords, and the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO) which was recognized as the official representative of the Palestinian people in return for it recognizing Israel and renouncing violence. The State Department said it will starting now deny visas to PLO members and PA officials.

Who needs any more of this nonsense?

Reprinted with permission from Unz Review.

The post Hypocrisy Thy Name Is Trump appeared first on LewRockwell.

Even though it isn’t a nut, reality is especially hard to crack these days. But if you closely observe daily life all around you, no matter how superficial it may at first seem, you will catch many glimpses of why this may be so. The signs of falsehood are everywhere here in the land of make-believe, for those willing to decipher them. The big lies and deceptions of politicians, intelligence services, and their media minions have their counterparts in trivial encounters where, as Melville said, “A smile is the chosen vehicle for all ambiguities.” Such smiles plaster not just human faces, but appear in the signs and symbols of the wider culture everywhere you look. They are meant to tranquilize with trivia. They are offered as bait to induce people to stop worrying and be happy as their leaders smash the world to bits.

I recently chanced to look down the cereal aisle of a supermarket where my already florescent-irritated eyes were further dazzled by an entire row of technicolor boxes of the garbage that Americans eat to begin their days. First came the poison laid low down for the kids so they can reach the traps and pester their parents for what would better be served to rats. These I passed, only to stop at a big orange yellow box that was advertised on sale. I had seen it before, just as often as I had seen pictures of Van Gogh’s sunflowers adorning dentists’ offices and funeral homes, twin bright colors before which we are beseeched to smile and be happy like Vincent. The cereal was General Mills’ Honey Nut Cheerios.

At the center of the box in large letters outlined in bright orange screamed the words “made with REAL HONEY.” I quickly grabbed a box since I am always searching for reality, but then it struck me, as I fell off my motorized horse like Paul on the road to Damascus (not today’s bombed Damascus), that such an assertion was strange, for the cereal is called Honey Nut Cheerios, which would imply it was  made with honey. So why are they boldly asserting it is? Perhaps because the honey used is so minuscule it’s necessary to use a bullhorn to assert its reality. Or perhaps the clue lies in that word “real,” whose meaning is really confounding. It sounded like politicians in reverse who claim war is peace when it isn’t or introduce all their words by saying “to tell you the truth,” as they proceed to lie. So it always was, is, and will be? But then my existential search brought me to that ah-ha moment as I looked at the ingredients list and realized there were no nuts in the cereal. Where were the nuts, the people buying the cereal or me? By next year will the box announce REAL HONEY and REAL NUTS?

Or will they say it is made with REAL HOLES? Who knew that? Who knows that the holes are more real than that which surrounds them, or that nothing is more real than nothing? Why are some people always trying get something or other into holes, while others try to ignore their reality, even as the final holes patiently await us?

It then occurred to me that this semiotic search of mine (the analysis of cultural objects like advertisements, food, or activities such as golf, etc. for deeper meanings and social myths), like those of Roland Barthes in his acclaimed 1957 book, Mythologies, would not go over well with those who like being deceived, which seems to be most people. But my search continued, despite my wife calling out, “Come on, Honey,” to which I murmured to the cereal box, ”Really?”

My existential search then went into rapid overdrive, for when a wife says, “Come on, Honey,” who can hold back? I saw that the box cover read that the cereal was “naturally flavored,” which felt so reassuring until I wondered what they meant by “naturally” and why they were so insistent upon announcing that as well. Lower down on the box in large bold letters it said that eating the cereal “Can help LOWER CHOLESTEROL* as part of a heart healthy diet.” That asterix led down to much smaller and harder-to-read gibberish words that said that eating the cereal, within a larger low-fat diet, “may reduce the risk of heart attack.” Mr. Death is natural, too, I thought, but he wasn’t mentioned.

I was getting sick of my search and took another look at the cover whereupon the picture of a cartoon-looking bee with a honey wand – Buzz the Bee, I later learned they call him – reminded me of Tinker Bell from Peter Pan, the story of a boy who never wants to grow up because death comes in time as with the crocodile who has swallowed a clock and eats Captain Hook. No one dies in Neverland except the bad guy. Yet everyone seems to do that in our Neverland, where the bad guys kill the good people through a cornucopia of means.

For a long time there was a store in the town where I live called Crystal Essence that recently closed.  I called it the rock shop. It sold a wide assortment of New Age products from crystals and rocks through incense and books on how to be happy forever. Somehow deathless. One day I passed this store, which was highly successful with tourists and locals alike, and saw a poster for Fairy Dusting. Perverse thinker that I am, I inquired within about this procedure. They sent me upstairs in the rear of the store where a woman greeted me with a big smile. “Did I want to be fairy dusted?” she asked. I said I was just inquiring as to what it was and how much it cost. She said $40, and you lie on a table as I circle you while dusting you with my wand filled with fairy dust, as Tinker Bell did. “What was the point?” I asked. She said it cleansed your aura and gave you a healthy journey through life and multiple reincarnations. “So it will help me not to die?” I asked. “Yes, she said with a huge smile. I said, “Thanks” and left, but not without thoughts of Peter Pan, Tinker Bell and a country that will never grow up. A look around in the most ordinary places will confirm that.

Still standing in the cereal aisle, I thought of my fairy duster and Buzz the Bee with his wand on the cover of the box that I held in my hand. Everywhere we look we see promotions for products that will dust us so we will live forever. The American culture of death threatens and kills while simultaneously offering anodynes. Deny, affirm, and cure. Honey Nut Cheerios, full of good cheer.

As I shoved the box back on the shelf, I noticed it said down low on its side that it was bioengineered. They want to bioengineer us all, I thought, mechanically petrify us, and so I revved up my engine and hurried to find my wife.

She had already checked out and was waiting for me at the door. She called out, with an enticing smile, “Come on, Honey!” And despite my deep existential semiotic search for truth in the cereal aisle, and with an inner nod to Barthes, I ran after her, for when a woman says such words to you, what man can hold back?

Cheerio!

As Jeffrey Epstein wouldn’t say: Beware the honey trap, My Lost Boys.

Cheerio!

Reprinted with the author’s permission.

The post Real Holes in Neverland appeared first on LewRockwell.

Some months ago, I pointed out that a benefit of Preacher Johnnie Moore’s taxpayer-funded defense firm, the Orwellian labeled Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, had one benefit and one benefit only.  It would allow its American employees, former soldiers in many cases, to be on the ground in Gaza seeing what the US is faithfully funding, and what Israel has done and is doing.

Israel, with the active support and blessing of over 80% of Israelis since late 2023, has been violently destroying Gazan structures, food and water systems, education, healthcare, along with many of the 2.3 million Palestinians who had created a culture and an economy – in spite of decades of periodic attacks, and the occupying state’s military domination and constantly evolving restrictions on trade, travel and movement.  In spite of this, and perhaps shocking to many Zionists, Gaza has survived and thus far, resisted its intended demise.

The tiny strip is now a moonscape, courtesy of the equivalent of 8 Hiroshima sized nuclear detonations, over half a million Gazans have been killed or lost in the rubble, and the intentional starvation, intensified in March by Israel, is reaching its tipping point.

Acute famine is part of the US and Israeli strategy for Gaza. IPC Phase Five has been purposely created in Gaza, and the upcoming and imminent stage is massive human losses as the weakest and sickest are already dead, and the stronger and healthier segments of society themselves begin to starve to death.  Resistance to disease for Gazans has already collapsed.

How do we know what starvation does to a population?  Because state-enforced starvation is a common historical tactic of empires and states against those they intend to punish and dominate.  The US government is happy to recognize and abhor the state starvations of populations, as we see in this recent US commemoration of the 91st anniversary of the Holomodor.  We study in universities the state conducted starvation and genocide against Jews and others by the World War II Axis powers. The government of Israel, and that of the United States, presides over a deep body of knowledge about engineering starvation and famine, and profiting from it.

The powerful conversation between Tucker Carlson and recently retired Army LTC Tony Agular this week is a point of light emerging from the fact that US soldiers are now on the ground supporting this imperial project of death and destruction.  Just as the US has experienced in other imperial wars, our own soldiers and Marines – like Lt General Smedley Butler – end up being the best witnesses, the angriest citizens, the boldest truth-tellers.

Agular is a military hero, which means his story is pertinent to Americans and politicians alike.  He is reporting on a genocide that is technically removed from a direct US policy – as far as I know, Trump and the US Congress, with the exception of porcine scum Randy Fine, have not endorsed genocide or starvation publicly.  Because of this, Agular’s story is particularly powerful.  He is an American soldier with a dozen deployments supporting American foreign policy of the last 25 years.  He is apolitical. He is focused on military best practices, law and justice. As a West Point grad, he does not lie, cheat or steal, nor tolerate anyone who does. He is ethical. Perhaps most importantly, unlike most Americans, he is unafraid.

The US taxpayer funds the Gazan genocide.  The US government authorizes and allows the starvation there, and yet, President Trump has the power to do two things right now.  He can freeze aid and weapons to Israel, and he can authorize military force against Israel in order to create a hundred road entry points to Gaza from the two largest US foreign subsidy recipients (Israel and Egypt), through which the US government can drive in thousands of trucks a day filled with food, water, and medicine, doctors, nurses, and health specialists.  The trucks and the donations are there.  Why doesn’t he?

Only a few weeks ago, Trump had no problem bombing a country for no discernable national security reason, without notifying Congress nor seeking its consent.  The aftermath of Trump’s “bold” decision to spend $200 million in order to have a cutely monikered “12 Day War” was confirmation that he presides as the current American emperor, as blatantly wasteful as Caligula and confirming growing suspicions that Trump may be our very own Commodus, or perhaps more appropriately, Caracalla.

Fascinated by war and conflict, Caracalla ended up militarizing and centralizing power in the Roman Empire, but “the extravagance and brutality of Caracalla’s reign ultimately undermined his authority.”  His reign was in the pre-Christian era Roman Empire, where state ethics were unhinged from societal ethics or religion as we understand them today.

Unhinged does indeed describe the US government today.  Whether you are angered that Trump reversed himself on Epstein, or happy that you are getting a consolation prize in the “reveal” of  Obama, Clinton, and Biden criminality – you are ruled by the unhinged.  Whether you love the military because it is “Number 1” or are happy that the US military is no longer “Number 1,” you are ruled by the unhinged.  Whether you oppose genocide in Gaza, or you cheer it – you are ruled by the unhinged.

Unhinged can be a psychological judgement, and there is evidence that Israeli society today satisfies that mental health criteria.  I’m using unhinged simply as a construction concept, the disconnect of a door with its frame.  The frame of the US government – the Constitution – is rotted and tattered.  These frames won’t hold any door, and thus we have unhinged function, where force or impetus for good may be applied to the state, but it doesn’t – and it cannot – result in the desired result. Case in point, Israel is self-destructing as a blatant murderous, ethnostate bent on geographical expansion and war above all.  What is worse, the average American Republican, Democrat and Independent – on record opposing US policies of fighting other peoples’ wars, subsidizing other people’s economies, militaries, education and health care – lives under a government that is orchestrating and tolerating genocide in Gaza, one they both know about and oppose! The American population is deprived of their money, their will, their voice, and their political function because the state framework is decrepit and corrupted beyond repair.

True freedom of speech is rarely observed, and barely tolerated, yet it is possible, as Tucker Carlson and Tony Agular, and millions of others who see and share this interview are demonstrating.  Colonel Agular also offers a number of specific steps that could be taken today, from a practical perspective – but the US state, unhinged, is not only unpredictable under pressure, it is inoperative, broken.  To my Marxist and Republican friends, who believe they could just fix the state, and or change its leaders, to make it work “as it should,” you are fantasists of a dead era, and complicit cowards.

This state-designed, funded, and implemented genocide in Gaza, and those to come, closer to home – are on you.

The post Our Unhinged Government appeared first on LewRockwell.

Thanks, John Frahm.

Politico

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Thanks, Bruce McLane.

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Steve Kirsch

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Writes Tim McGraw:

I watched this movie tonight. It’s free on Amazon Prime. Jake Gyllenhaal does a great job as the lead, but Conor MacGregor steals the show.

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Click here:

NY Post

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John Leake

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I’ve been a Democrat my whole life — until I walked away in 2021, because it was a Democratic administration that turned America evil, and that turned my own life unconstitutionally upside down.

I have never looked back, except to marvel at how, day by day, policy by policy, today’s DNC seems ever more determined to destroy its party’s storied legacy, as well as its own ability ever to win another race.

The DNC is pursuing a wholesale, wrecking-ball destruction of everything that made people want to vote Democratic in the first place, and to send money to Democratic candidates. It trashes its heritage of speaking up for marginalized groups; for the concerns of communities of color; for unionized workers; for cops and teachers and firefighters; for ordinary Americans who struggle to pay bills; people who, as Democratic candidate and later President Bill Clinton used to say, “work hard and play by the rules.”

How a party can burn up so visibly, and so readily, so much of what we used to call “political capital”?

There is a revolution brewing in New York City and its boroughs, and it just may show a shift that can transform the nation.

New leaders are arising, who simply cannot call themselves Democrats.

This is due to self-inflicted wounds by that party, in the form of lunatic and corrupt policies, and critical abandonments from 2021-present.

Lunatic polices? Here are some:

Support the rights of gay and lesbian people, and of other sexual minorities, not to face legal discrimination? Sure; that is a no-brainer. Take that consensus to a bizarre new level, and insist on interjecting biological males into women’s sports, endangering women physically and destroying Title 9 protections; then place biological males into female spaces such as bathrooms and changing rooms, prisons and mental institutions?

Who thought that that policy would have widespread support? What percent of the electorate has that deliverable at the top of its list?

Speak up for legal immigrants to be treated as fairly as anyone else? Absolutely. Those are traditional Democratic values. But champion the ingress to our nation of 15-30 million people who broke our laws in order to be here, and then shower ostentatious benefits upon them — ranging from cash cards to four star midtown NYC hotel stays — that our American elders and veterans and single parents can never afford for themselves?

How can the advisors sitting around the Democratic campaign tables, not game out what we used to call the “optics” of that situation? How does that help any Democrat run and win?

“Defund the Police”? Who thinks that that was a good idea? A winning policy?

Offer guidance in a public health crisis, sure. But force thousands of NYC teachers, cops and firefighters, and city workers of all kinds, to take into their bodies against their will, an experimental injection that everyone sentient now knows can be damaging or sterilizing or lethal? What are the odds that that will work out longterm?

Deny religious exemptions? Really?

There are 36,000 cops in NYC and 19,000 NYPD staff. There are 11,000 firefighters and 4500 EMTs in NYC. There are 77 thousand teachers in NYC. So a total of 147,400 New Yorkers in the front lines of New Yorkers’ lives, and of their kids’ wellbeing, were “mandated” with the experimental injection.

What if they get sick? What if they die? What if they know others who are getting sick and dying?

Who wants to “own” that catastrophe electorally?

The DNC does.

To this day, first responders in NYC who were “mandated”, do not have their jobs back. They do not have due process,. They did not get their day in court. The people on whose bodies the city runs, were betrayed.

Who isn’t sorry? The DNC. Who isn’t offering to “reinstate and compensate” these workers? The DNC’s new star, the “new AOC”, New York State Assembly Member Zohran Mamdani.

He is a poster child for the corruption of the DNC, and its betrayal of first responders and communities of color; traditionally stalwart groups in the Democratic base.

Mamdani is to the manor born. A Bowdoin college graduate, son of the glamorous Indian filmmaker Mira Nair, Mamdani’s family lives in Uganda, where Mandani was recently married. Indian media are reporting this event as a “lavish Uganda wedding bash”. “New York City mayoral frontrunner and current Queens Assemblyman Zohran Mamdani celebrated his recent marriage with a three-day private celebration at his family’s high-security estate in Uganda”, reports DNA_India.

In New York City media, in contrast, Mamdani poses in a hoodie on the subway.

Trust fund millennials in gentrified neighborhoods in New York, are salivating about Mamdani. In a gesture, voting for Mamdani wipes away the guilt of “white privilege”; no matter than he himself is more privileged than almost anyone in New York’s five boroughs.

Mamdani is a true socialist candidate: he offers to make New York life “affordable.” Free transit for all; government-run grocery stores — (which worked so well in the Soviet Union); frozen rents. It is a seductive appeal; New York is expensive; and Mamdani can hope that people under 60 do not remember what socialism actually did to those suffering under its yoke.

His candidacy definitely depends upon no one asking where all the money is going to come from, or noticing that when “the government” pays for it, it is taxpayers who actually pay.

Headlines from Politico to Newsweek are broadcasting the “fact” that Mamdani polled at 50 per cent, far above his competitors. But read the not-so-fine print (as Politico’s and Newsweek’s editors should have done, more carefully):

‘“Our independent poll — the first in this cycle to be offered in four languages and to drill down into national origin and religious denomination — makes one thing clear: Black union households, young Jews, South Asians, East Asians, Latinos, and New Yorkers in every income bracket are all on the same Zohran Mamdani bus, and it’s headed in the direction of the Democratic Party’s future,” said Amit Singh Bagga, the principal of Public Progress Solutions and a veteran of federal, city, and state government.

Bagga’s firm designed and analyzed the poll along with Adam Carlson’s Zenith Research. It was funded through private donations to Bagga, who advised Mamdani’s campaign during the primary on setting up an administration, and was fielded by Verasight.”

So: a poll handpicked the most likely Mamdani voters, left out the likely Mamdani non-supporters, his donors funded it, and legacy media is calling that a win. Both polling and news reporting could not be more corrupt than this.

In contrast to Mamdani and his theatrical structure of institutional alliances, a new generation of very different leaders in New York City, is also running for office. These young men and women had very different life experiences from Mamdani’s. They were not born to wealth or privilege; their families do not live on “lavish estates” in foreign countries.

The corrupt, institutional machine of New York City politics, is not helping them; the legacy media of New York City are not championing them.

Some of these new leaders have walked away from the Democratic party. They have re-registered as Republicans, which is in itself newsworthy. But these are not your grandma’s country club Republicans.

Athena Clarke, a New York City teacher who was “mandated” out of her job when she refused to take the experimental injection, the daughter of immigrants from Jamaica and the West Indies, and a mother of one, is running for city council in Brooklyn’s District 46. (Disclosure: DailyClout.io will run sponsored content from her supporters). She has an BA and an MA in education, specializing in children with disabilities.

For seven years Clarke worked as a tenured teacher in the New York City Department of Education. But in 2021, the city implemented a COVID-19 vaccine mandate. When Ms Clarke refused it, she was terminated from her job, without any court hearing, which is a violation of New York State Education Law.

This trauma led her to decide to run for City Council, and to seek reinstatement for first responders and teachers, among other planks on her platform.

Unlike Mamdani, she is not promising free everything. (One of her slogans is “Stop the Socialists!”)

I interviewed Clarke, and it was a different experience from interviewing a seasoned pol. She spoke from the perspective of a teacher and of a mom. She talked about the kids injured developmentally from being kept out of school for months; children alone in a room, socially isolated, staring at monitors. She talked about how kids with speech disabilities could not learn how to pronounce the sounds “l” or “th” without seeing their teacher’s mouths, which were hidden behind masks.

Her platform has other grassroots concerns. Parental rights is one of them; she is tackling the delicate issue of parents being unaware that children are exposed at public schools to “sensitive content,” often without their consent. She promises to take on the bureaucracy: Brooklyn often simply changes zoning, and imposes drug treatment clinics, homeless shelters, mental health facilities and other problematic institutions into local neighborhoods, especially in lower-income areas, without any local buy-in or approval process. Clarke promises to end that. She will also “reinstate and compensate” the terminated city workers who were “mandated” and who lost their jobs when they refused the vaccine.

Luis Quero is another Brooklyn-born and raised next-generation leader. He is running for Brooklyn City Council, District 38. He is sort of an anti-Mamdani.

His website is startlingly direct. “You just want to get to work without getting stabbed or burned alive”, it reads. “There is no Democratic or Republican way of cleaning the streets,” it notes, quoting legendary New York Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia.

Read the Whole Article

The post Democrats: Winning a Battle but Losing the War appeared first on LewRockwell.

The commute in Campbell, California, collapsed into chaos today (Tuesday) when a plastic trinket—placed by a weekend treasure hunter—was mistaken for the second coming of Guy Fawkes. Winchester Boulevard turned into a no-go zone while patrol cruisers, armored vans, and an inquisitive news chopper circled the scene.

Parents ran late, businesses lost customers, and every weary taxpayer footed the bill for a few lumbering hours that felt like a bad rehearsal of Homeland Security Theater.

I happened to be stuck in it. As the O’Learys claim to be an adventuring clan, I took my children on a quest while Mom was at the dentist. It turns out that the trip to the coin-op carwash a few klicks down the road was more than we bargained for.

I told Jack Callahan about our misadventure— “twenty minutes, seven side streets, and two cranky kids just to scrub road dust and a bunch of bird crap off the Yukon” —and he barked the laugh of a man who has shoveled more bureaucratic folly than snow.

“Son,” he said over a quick Zoom, clanking a coffee mug on his desk, “they closed a principal artery because some gadgeteer dropped a glorified Tupperware? That’s not safety. That’s institutional hypochondria!”

Jack has also watched government balloon in the post-Eisenhower years. There’s an industrial complex that never knows when to stand down. Whose folks haven’t regaled them about the drills of the 1950s and 60s—kids ducking under desks, generals measuring fallout with slide rules, mothers praying the Cubans would blink first in the nuclear standoff?

Back then, Jack argued, they served a palpable dread: Soviet warheads. Today, the danger is a nylon box with a smiley-face sticker.

Across the nation, bomb squads sprint to geocaches with the reflex of Pavlov’s dog, racking up overtime and wear on six-figure robots. Technicians detonated a pipe-shaped cache near a middle school in Frisco, Colorado. Officers in Murfreesboro, Tennessee, x-rayed a “Pipe Bomb Geocache” in a Home Depot lot. Ohio wardens evacuated hikers for a plastic LocknLock that did nothing but hide a logbook.

Each scare drains finite manpower. Colorado again: Summit County’s sheriff lamented “a significant amount of time and valuable resources” burned on harmless PVC.

Last week in Door County, Wisconsin, deputies cleared an entire park for a GPS game piece.

Consider. A single response truck runs nearly $200k—forget sirens and strobing lights. Regional squads log 40–60 callouts per year, and Santa Clara County’s unit stands ready 24/7 for three neighboring counties. Meanwhile, local police budgets groan under the bloat of overtime—New York alone projects $507 million in uniform OT this fiscal year.

Jack’s verdict: “They buy a bazooka to swat a housefly, then pass the invoice to the housefly.”

The Founders believed liberty survives only where citizens and the state maintain proportion. Yet modern officialdom multiplies protocols the way kudzu chokes a fenceline. One errant cache and the default is “cordon-and-search.”

Reflect. During World War II, explosives were shipped across the continent without paralyzing traffic. Today, a plastic box is enough to darken countless traffic lights.

Jack thundered: “We lock down, we clear out, we pay up—yet we never wise up.”

The pattern mirrors Prohibition raids and TSA shoe shuffling: bold headlines first, sheepish footnotes later. Fear becomes currency, and compliance turns into habit.

No one begrudges caution—real threats exist, as Oklahoma City proved in 1995. But prudence must share the stage with perspective. Ground rules already tell geocachers to avoid pipes, military ammo cans, and public transit pylons. Enforcing amateur guidelines would cost pennies compared with mobilizing the paramilitary.

Callahan frames it in boxing terms: “Government should fight in its weight class. Right now, it’s shadow-boxing ghosts, burning stamina while real crooks pick pockets in the bleachers.”

His prescription is surgical: Dispatchers must first cross-reference geocache databases; Hobbyists should plainly label containers; Open civilian hotlines to resolve benign sightings before alarms spread like prairie fire.

Today’s fiasco was a bureaucratic belly flop, not a public triumph. It showcased an apparatus that mistakes activity for achievement, then invoices Ordinary Joe for its blunders. Each lockdown chips away at civic patience, the same way price controls bred gas lines and sour distrust.

Jack tells me he’s going to raise one up tonight—Bud Heavy bottle, label out—and toast to the folks like me who were stuck in their noontime commute: “May your engines stay cool, may your kids forgive the delay, and may your public servants learn that discernment is cheaper than spectacle.”

After all, the republic Jack’s ancestors bled for was forged on measured courage, not reflexive dread. Until our institutions remember that distinction, every plastic lunchbox will parade as Armageddon.

At the same time, the real business of the nation waits at the barricade, honking its horn.

This article was originally published on The O’Leary Review.

The post How a $5 Plastic Box Cost Taxpayers Thousands: My 20-minute Nightmare on Winchester Boulevard appeared first on LewRockwell.

This article was written by my father before the implementation of the 2nd amendment.

The UN’s Arms Trade Treaty which covers everything from small arms to battle tanks, combat aircraft and warships – came into force on 24 December 2014. This treaty has not been ratified by our Congress but had the support of our Secretary of State, John Kerry who signed it and Our president at that time, who without expressly mentioning the treaty, said in a speech at the UN that all nations “must meet our responsibility to observe and enforce international norms.” The problem with that statement and this treaty is that we the people aren’t in control of what those ‘international norms’ are and as we have seen time and time again, those international norms might be detrimental to our country.

Many preppers and 2nd Amendment proponents believe that the Arms Trade Treaty will first lead to registration of all firearms and when that happens, historically the next step is confiscation through some means. Technically, no treaty can be put into action in the United States unless it has been ratified by a 2/3 majority of the senate. This fact is what most people cite when they are trying to refute any legitimate concerns about the UN Arms Trade Treaty or any other treaty’s potential effect on our country. This sounds well and good and serves to placate some, but for this fail-safe to have any weight you would first need to have a government that followed the letter of the constitution and additionally, that government would need to follow the wishes of the citizens they are representing.

Our government has proven time and time again that following the constitution is simply not something they feel they have to do when it stands in their way. For example, the senate has never voted on the Kyoto Protocol but that hasn’t stopped the EPA from enacting rules complying with the main goals of that treaty. Coal plants are being shut down left and right while the US and China agreed in 2014 to let China keep growing their output of carbon emissions (with coal power plants) until 2030. There are many examples of policies that are enacted that fall well outside the bounds of Constitutional limits on power but that doesn’t stop our representatives does it? On any issue there is more brainpower spent on finding ways around the Constitution than actually following it with the seeming goal of every single facet of law being finally decided by the Supreme Court. It’s as if in our society, the rules we decided long ago to set for ourselves are only as good as the interpretations of people today and if every single thing can be challenged (and in some cases changed), we don’t really have a Constitution at all. What we have is a framework for legal arguments that only establishes a baseline which can be over ruled completely by a simple majority of ideology on the bench.

As for a government that listens to their constituents, that long gone relic of thought is promised by every single person running for office. “I feel your pain” The truth of the matter is that in this day and age, every politician is a benefactor of the same special interests. There are no democrat and republican sides whenever both are receiving money from the same companies. The elected politicians, by overwhelming majority do not care what you say or want because they don’t answer to you. Their actions directly contradict election results, polls and public outcry. The 2014 mid-term elections  held should have sent a very strong signal to the leadership of both parties that the country wasn’t on-board with the policies of the current administration and the direction of affairs with the Congress, however; Obamacare and Amnesty both remain intact without so much as a whimper from our newly elected majority who promised for years to repeal it as soon as they were ‘in power’. To add insult to injury, the Republicans just released a 1 trillion budget proposal just over 24 hours before a procedural vote on it knowing that nobody would have time to read it. Same tricks but a different face is behind the podium. Why should we expect anything different from what we have been seeing?

Do you really feel that there is anything ‘your party’ is going to do to stop elements of this treaty from being implemented if it is in their best interests?

What’s so wrong with simply registering all guns?

What’s the harm in simply registering you say? It makes sense that government would want to know who has guns, so they can ensure that bad people don’t have them. You can’t argue with that logic can you? Well yes I can try. Registration will only be done by law-abiding people. The criminals they will try to get you to believe this registration would stop would never turn themselves or their guns in. If that were true, why wouldn’t criminals be lining up a police offices every day because we do have laws already, don’t we? How is this not obvious to everyone? I maintain that it is obvious to the people who are pushing for any restriction and by that I am referring to registration,  of our 2nd amendment rights.

Do guns kill people? Yes they do, but deaths by guns are a small fraction of the total deaths in the US each year. If you want to know who really kills people you have to look at governments historically.

Yes, you read that right. Governments are responsible for more deaths of their citizens in the 20th century than any other unnatural cause. It is called Democide and is been documented by R. J. Rummel, formerly of the University of Hawaii Political Science Department. He writes:

Most probably near 170,000,000 people have been murdered in cold-blood by governments, well over three-quarters by absolutist regimes. The most such killing was done by the Soviet Union (near 62,000,000 people), the communist government of China is second (near 35,000,000), followed by Nazi Germany (almost 21,000,000), and Nationalist China (some 10,000,000). Lesser megamurderers include WWII Japan, Khmer Rouge Cambodia, WWI Turkey, communist Vietnam, post-WWII Poland, Pakistan, and communist Yugoslavia. The most intense democide was carried out by the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia, where they killed over 30 percent of their subjects in less than four years.

The best predictor of this killing is regime power. The more arbitrary power a regime has, the less democratic it is, and the more likely it will kill its subjects or foreigners. The conclusion is that power kills, absolute power kills absolutely.

But we live in a democracy in the United States and we elect our representatives. We have a rule of law and nothing like the atrocities you mention above would ever happen here. Really? I certainly hope not and so it is with much interest that I have and will be keeping track of what goes on after December 24th and into the future on this topic.

But Mr. Rummel’s statement has weight in historical precedence and is alarming when looked at from the context of where we are as a country today. One could argue that our regime has an increasingly disturbing amount of ‘arbitrary power’. That is power that they have assumed that is outside of the Constitution and the really fun part is they keep giving themselves more of it every day. Some of this power was enacted by law of course, but it is power nonetheless and it never decreases, it only becomes more vast. From the Patriot Act, to NSA Spying, to treaties with foreign nations, harassment of political parties, to illegal searches, illegal detainment without cause, to killing people without a trial and just yesterday they passed a bill which grants the government and law enforcement “unlimited access to the communications of every American”. How much power is that?

Read the Whole Article

The post Next Step Is Confiscation Through Some Means: A Response to the 2nd Amendment Critique appeared first on LewRockwell.

The American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) distinguished itself as an obsessive shots pusher and freedom theatener during the coronavirus crackdown. It was admonishing that children — who were at very minimal risk from coronavirus — be subjected to the quack practices of masking and social distancing to protect them until they became “fully vaccinated” with experimental coronavirus “vaccine” shots. The AAP was also calling on pediatricians to evangelize for giving these dangerous and ineffective shots to nearly all children in the age groups for which the United States government had approved the shots.

Luckily for many American children, their parents resisted the AAP supported effort. But, many other parents, placing confidence in pediatricians that peddled the AAP line, went along.

While the coronavirus crackdown has receded into the past, the AAP, an organization claiming 67,000 members, is still pushing shots and threatening freedom on a grand scale. The latest example is the policy statement the AAP issued on Monday titled Medical vs Nonmedical Immunization Exemptions for Child Care and School Attendance.

In the policy statement, the AAP endorses the presence of laws and regulations requiring children to receive “immunizations” as a prerequisite for attending school or daycare. Further, the AAP supports eliminating philosophical and religious based exemptions from such mandates — the means by which the vast majority of parents who have opted out across America have been able to protect their children from receiving some or all of the plethora of shots listed in the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) childhood vaccination schedule.

The only exemption basis, declares the AAP in its policy statement, should be “medically indicated exemptions to specific immunizations as determined for each individual student.” As this phrasing from the policy statement indicates, this medical exemption route turns out to deny exemption for most children and can even limit the applicability of medical exemptions that may be granted to just one or some of the mandated shots. Showing a child has already been hurt by shots is part of one of the limited routes to maybe obtain a medical exemption. Such an exemption will, by definition, be too late. As I wrote in April of 2023, the medical exemption for vaccines “could more accurately be called the mirage exemption” given that it is unavailable to almost all children.

The AAP policy statement further says that, even once granted, medical exemptions should have hanging over them the possibility of being revoked at any time. The policy statement directs that “all pediatric health care providers” should “recertify the need for these exemptions on a regular basis.” Here today, gone tomorrow.

The AAP also appears to want to shut the door on any doctors who try to grant medical exemptions in any but the most stingy manner. The policy statement declares that “states and territories should develop policies to ensure that any medical exemptions are appropriate and evidence based.” It is not the doctor’s determination after all. Big Brother will be there to crack down on any doctor who swims against the current.

Shots mandates for children are already widespread in America. But, that is not good enough for AAP. It appears determined to eliminate the ability of almost all parents to opt their children out of the mandates.

This article was originally published on The Ron Paul Institute.

The post Pediatricians Organization Says Eliminate Almost All Vaccine Exemptions for Children appeared first on LewRockwell.

The “BRICS lab” has a non-stop, ever-adapting creative spirit. Beats Tariff dementia everytime.

The fourth plenary session of the Communist Party of China has been scheduled by the Politburo for October (no precise data announced; probably four days during the second half of October). That’s when Beijing will be deliberating the lineaments of its next five-year plan. The plenum should be attended by over 370 Central Committee members of the party elite.

Why this is so crucial? Because China is the undisputed top target, alongside top BRICS members, of the new universal “law” devised by the Empire of Chaos: I Tariff, Therefore I Exist. So the next five-year plan will have to take into consideration all vectors deriving from the new “law”.

The plenum will take place a few weeks after Beijing stages a grand parade to celebrate the end of WWII; Vladimir Putin is one of Xi’s guests of honor.

Moreover, the plenum will be right before the annual APEC (Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation) summit, starting October 31 in Seoul. This summit carries a window of opportunity for a direct, face to face Trump-Xi meeting – which the Circus Ringmaster, for all his posture and tergiversations, is actively pursuing.

The plenum will have to carefully weigh how a de facto trade, tech and geopolitical war between the US and China will only get more incandescent. As much as Made in China 2025 revealed itself to be a staggering success – maximum pressure from Trump 1.0 notwithstanding – new Chinese wave tech decisions taken in 2025 will define the road map ahead on everything from AI to quantum computing, biotechnology and controlled nuclear fusion.

I am so thrilled to be your lackey

Everything that matters on trade and tech will be decided between the two economic superpowers. By now it’s clear that a potential third actor, the EU, has simply committed serial suicide.

Let’s start with the China-EU summit on July 24 – which featured, among other niceties, Beijing protocol deigning to send at best a lowly tourist bus to greet the European delegation, and Xi Jinping for all practical purposes ending the summit before schedule in a message widely interpreted across the Global South as “we have  no time to waste with you clowns”.

That’s exactly what the Circus Ringmaster wanted.

Then came the EU-US get together – which sealed, in spectacular fashion, the already accelerated phase of Europe’s Century of Humiliation.

It starts with Trump de facto erasing Russia from the EU’s energy future. Brussels has been forced – Mafioso “offer you can’t refuse”- style, to buy $250 billion of overpriced US energy a year, every year, for the next 3 years. And in the process be slapped with 15% tariffs – and like it.

So smashing Nord Stream 2 – an operation carried out by the previous D.C. autopen administration – had a clear imperial purpose from the start.

On top of it, the EU must pay for its – already lost – war in Ukraine by buying unlimited amounts of overpriced US weapons to the tune of 5% of GDP. That’s what Trump imposed NATO to impose on the EU. Follow the money.

Yet whatever the “deal” advertised with a profusion of superlatives by the Circus Ringmaster, the numbers don’t add up.

The EU spent a hefty 375 billion euros on energy in 2024; only 76 billion euros of these were paid to the US.

That means that the EU would have to buy three times more US energy over the next three years. And only LNG Made in USA: no Norway, for that matter, which sells cheaper pipeline gas.

Defying reality – and obviously not put in check by meek European mainstream media – the toxic Medusa in Brussels vociferated that US LNG is cheaper than Russian pipeline gas.

Moscow is not breaking a sweat – because its major clients are all across Eurasia. As for the Americans, they will not divert all their exports to the EU – as European refineries can only handle a limited supply of American shale oil. Moreover, there’s no way EUrocrats can force European energy companies to buy American.

So to round up their figures they will have to buy from somewhere else. That would be Norway – and even Russia, assuming the Russians will be interested.

Trump 2.0 was clever enough to “exempt” some sectors from the tariff dementia, such as aircraft and aircraft parts, semiconductors, critical chemicals and some agriculture. Of course: these are all part of strategic supply chains.

The only thing that really mattered overall was to lock up Europe as a massive buyer of American energy and force them to invest in US infrastructure and the industrial-military complex.

And that points to the only way to “escape” the tariff dementia: when faced with an “offer you can’t refuse”, you don’t refuse; you take it, like it, and offer all sorts of investment in the US. Ancient empires used to force their “partners” to pay tribute. Welcome to the 21st century version.

After all, what does Europe have to offer as leverage? Nothing. No European company on the global Tech Top Ten. Not even an  European search engine; or globally successful smartphone; or operating system; or streaming platform; or cloud infrastructure. Not to mention no top semiconductor producer. And only one car maker among the global best-selling Top Ten.

All aboard “directed improvisation”

If the US sharks gave the EU rodents literally nothing, foxy China was benign enough to give just a little bit of something: a blah blah blah on climate change.

The end result – for the whole world to see: the EU as a sorry player carrying less than zero strategic autonomy on the global chessboard. It is royally ignored on the Empire’s Forever Wars – from Ukraine to West Asia. And it lectures Beijing – in Beijing – (italics mine) when it is totally dependent on Chinese raw materials, industrial equipment and complex supply chains for green and digital tech.

Yuen Yuen Ang, from Singapore, is a professor of political economy at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore. She may need to tow the – strict – lines of US academia, which is exceptionalist by definition. But at least she’s capable of some valuable insights.  

For instance: “We’re all suffering from an attention deficit. We used to read books, then articles, then essays, then blogs, and now it’s further reduced to tweets of 280 characters. So you can imagine what sorts of messages fit in that tiny space. It has to be simplistic.”

That cuts to the heart of how the Circus Ringmaster is conducting his foreign policy; ruling via an accumulation of nonsensical posts.

Yuen Yuen reaches more serious territory when she comments on how China “wants to retire an old economic model that was highly dependent on low-cost exports, construction and real estate. It wants hi-tech, innovation-driven development.”

That’s exactly what will be discussed at the heart of the plenum in Beijing in October.

Yuen Yuen also notes how “back in the 1980s and 1990s”, China  could “imitate the late industrialisation model in East Asia. Today, there aren’t many role models. China itself has become a trailblazer, and other countries are seeing it as a role model.”

Hence her concept of “directed improvisation” – being conducted by the Beijing leadership. They know the preferred final destination, but still need to test all possible paths. The same, by the way,  also applies to BRICS – via what I defined as the “BRICS lab”, where all sorts of models are being tested. What matters, above all, is a non-stop, ever-adapting creative spirit.

Beats Tariff dementia everytime.

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

The post Chinese Foxes, American Sharks, European Rodents appeared first on LewRockwell.

Oops, they did it again.  Even though the housing market has been in a depressed state for an extended period of time and even though economic conditions are slowing down all over the country, the Federal Reserve has once again refused to lower interest rates.  What in the world are they thinking?  I certainly share President Trump’s frustration with the Fed.  Central banks all over the world have been cutting rates, but our central bank just won’t budge.  Have Fed officials gone completely insane, or are they purposely trying to destroy the U.S. economy?

Those that have been following my work for an extended period of time already know that I am not a fan of the Federal Reserve at all.  And now we have another very clear example of the Fed’s lack of competence…

The Federal Reserve said Wednesday it’s keeping its benchmark interest rate unchanged, citing elevated uncertainty over the nation’s economic outlook.

The decision to hold rates steady marks a continuation of the Fed’s “wait-and-see” strategy this year, as it monitors the impact of the Trump administration’s tariffs on consumer prices.

There were two Fed governors that did not agree with this decision.  This was the first time since 1993 that more than one Fed governor has dissented…

For the first time since 1993 more than one Fed governor voted against the Fed chair Jerome Powell and the committee’s majority decision.

The dissenters – governors Christopher Waller and Michelle Bowman – were both appointed by Trump and like the President support cutting rates.

For months Trump has pressured Powell to cut rates – currently between 4.25 and 4.5 percent – threatened to fire him, appoint a shadow chair and even harangued him over the cost of improvements to the Fed’s offices.

There are some experts that argue that we need to continue to keep interest rates at elevated levels in order to get inflation under control.

I definitely acknowledge that our seemingly endless cost of living crisis is a major concern.

But what about the housing market?

It has been in a depressed state for a long time.

Last year, sales of existing homes in the U.S. fell to the lowest level that we have seen since 1995…

Sales of existing homes in the US fell last year to the lowest level in almost three decades, as sky-high home prices and elevated mortgage rates squeezed home buyers.

Sales of previously owned homes, which make up the vast majority of the market, totaled 4.06 million in 2024, the National Association of Realtors said Friday. That’s the lowest level since 1995 and slightly below 2023’s similarly anemic levels.

And this year, sales of existing homes are expected to be even lower than they were last year…

Sales volume for existing homes, previously projected to grow slightly this year compared with 2024, is now expected to fall 1.5% annually, to just 4 million transactions.

That would mark the slowest year for existing-home sales since 1995, when they registered 3.8 million. Home sales were also at their lowest since 1995 in both 2023 and 2024, according to the National Association of Realtors®.

Things were not even this bad during the Great Recession in 2008 and 2009.

The primary reason why homes are not selling is because interest rates are way too high.

Is the Fed just going to sit there and watch the life get squeezed out of one of the most important pillars of our economy?

Of course there are many pundits that are pointing to today’s GDP number as evidence that the overall economy is doing well…

Gross domestic product, a sum of goods and services activity across the sprawling U.S. economy, jumped 3% for the April through June period, according to figures adjusted for seasonality and inflation.

That topped the Dow Jones estimate for 2.3% and helped reverse a decline of 0.5% for the first quarter that came largely due to a huge drop in imports, which subtract from the total, as well as weak consumer spending amid tariff concerns.

That number looks pretty good until you realize that it was artificially boosted by a massive decline in imports.

In fact, we are being told that a huge drop in imports somehow added 5.2 percentage points to our GDP during the second quarter…

With Trump’s double-digit tariffs looming, American retailers and manufacturers raced to order foreign goods early in the year before the levies took effect. That led to an unprecedented flood of imports, which must be subtracted from GDP – the goods that consumers, companies and the public sector bought – because they’re made overseas.

Since those purchases were pulled forward, companies didn’t need to order as many goods from other countries last quarter and imports plunged 30.3%, reversing the 37.9% rise that dampened output earlier and bolstering U.S. growth. As a result, those foreign shipments added 5.2 percentage points to growth after subtracting a whopping 4.7 points in the January-March period.

If you took away the 5.2 percentage points that were added to our GDP due to falling imports, economic growth would have been deeply negative last quarter.

And based on all of the other economic data that we have been getting, that would make all the sense in the world.

We see a similar thing going on with the official employment numbers that the government has been giving us.

Thanks to the “birth-death model”, the U.S. has supposedly added 614,000 jobs so far this year.

But if you take away the “birth-death model”, the U.S. has actually lost 62,000 jobs so far this year…

So far this year, the net birth-death model has converted what would have been a 62,000-job decline in not seasonally adjusted nonfarm employment into a 614,000-job gain. In the note cited above, Bloomberg Economics estimated that the model and other factors have been artificially boosting seasonally adjusted gains of 130,000 a month so far this year by about 80,000 a month. If even roughly correct (Bloomberg Economics’ payroll overcount estimates as of June 2024 were about twice as big as what the BLS eventually reported), this would mean another sharp downward revision next February, the fifth in the last seven years.

I don’t have any confidence in the numbers that the government gives us at this stage.

When President Trump called them “fake” prior to the election, he was right on target.

One recent survey found that 70 percent of Americans are feeling “anxiety and depression” due to the finances.

That wouldn’t be happening if our economy really was in good shape.

Unfortunately, as long as the Federal Reserve keeps interest rates at elevated levels it is going to be a real struggle to turn things around.

Reprinted with permission from The Economic Collapse.

The post Is the Federal Reserve Purposely Trying To Destroy the U.S. Economy? appeared first on LewRockwell.

Today as I write we are experiencing the effort by Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabba and CIA Director John Ratcliffe to retrieve American law from its weaponization against President Trump by the Obama Five–John Brennan, James Coney, James Clapper, Hillary Clinton, and President Obama himself, all of whom have been referred to the Attorney General on criminal charges. These people created the false “Russiagate” charges against President Trump in order to cancel his election and presidency and his intent to “normalize relations with Russia,” which was a threat to the profits of the US military/security complex. 

A large percentage of Americans are outraged by the corrupt Democrats’ use of law against Trump as a weapon in order to trample on the democratic process that elected Trump. But the weaponization of law occurred 80 years ago at the Nuremberg Trials.

The person responsible was the least likely of all.  It was former US Supreme Court Justice and former US Attorney General Robert Jackson. 

Until I read some years ago David Irving’s book, Nuremberg, I was a great admirer of Robert Jackson.  I still am for his previous positions, but he blew it at Nuremberg.

World War II was a disaster for many reasons still unrecognized. The victims were not only the millions of lives, the destruction of economies, the loss of European countries’ national confidence and sovereignty, but also truth and justice as values that must be defended.  

At Nuremberg the British, Americans, and Soviets, who had committed worst war crimes than the Germans, sat, immune from accountability, in judgment. “The winners write the histories” and hold he trials.

As David Irving documents in his histories, Churchill’s War and Hitler’s War, Hitler regarded the bombing of civilian cities as a war crime. When Churchill kept secret from his cabinet Hitler’s generous offer of peace, which included Germany’s promise to use its military power in defense of the British Empire, which Hitler regarded as essential to the continuation of vastly outnumbered white ethnicities, Churchill kept the document secret from the British Parliament and ordered the British air force  to commence bombing civilian German residential neighborhoods. 

Churchill ordered that the air force focus on workers’ housing, because it was closer together and the fires would spread quicker.  He ordered that first the British bombers use incendiary  bombs, then when the fire trucks showed up to again hit with high explosives.  He ordered that the British air force add poison gas to the bombs.  At this point, the Air Force high command, already concerned about war crimes, flatly refused.

In Germany, the generals told Hitler that the British would not stop bombing German civilians unless Hitler replied in kind.  Once Hitler was pressured into this response, Churchill, who had kept secret from the British that he was firebombing German cities, said: look, the barbarian Hitler is bombing civilians.  We must fight on and continue the war.

You can find the documentation in Irvings’ World War II histories and in John Wear’s books reproduced on my web sites.  Ron Unz of the Unz Review has also written extensively about the true story of World War II, one most people have never heard.

As far as I can tell, there are only three historians of World War II who are not court historians regurgitating the official war propaganda.  One is A.P.J. Taylor, who saw the hypocrisy of the court historians, but did not have the documentary resources that David Irving spent 50 years hunting down and forcing out of official files, hunting down and reading diaries and interviewing survivors.  John Wear is the third.

If you want to know the truth about World War II, you can only find it in these few writers, especially David Irvings’ Churchill’s War and Hitler’s War.  On orders from Israel, these books, that once sold in the millions of copies, have been burnt by the threatened and intimidated publisher, and copies are hard to find.

My generation and those following were taught that Churchill, Franklin Roosevelt, and Dwight Eisenhower were moral crusaders who fought against the evil demon Hitler.  Once you read Irving’s histories of World War II–histories based entirely on the OFFICIAL DOCUMENTARY EVIDENCE, NOT IRVING’S OPINION–you will wonder who the true evil demons were.  John Wear’s account of Eisenhower’s treatment of German prisoners of war shows the hate-driven barbarity with which German POWs were treated.  No honor of the rules of war here.

Here you have the great moral Western heroes showing their true colors:

“President Franklin D. Roosevelt, General Eisenhower, and Winston Churchill thought that surviving Nazis should be shot without trial. Roosevelt laughed about liquidating 50,000 German military officers. Eisenhower told Lord Halifax that Nazi leaders should be shot while trying to escape, the common euphemism for murder. Russians spoke of castrating German men and breeding German women to annihilate the German race. US Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau wanted to reduce Germany to an agrarian society and send able-bodied Germans to Africa as slaves to work on ‘some big TVA project.’”

The Great Moral Western World thought this was appropriate punishment for a country that dared to retrieve its national borders from the Treaty of Versailles that had dismembered Germany despite guarantees by US President Wilson.  The fact that WW II was started by Britain and France declaring war on Germany is left out of the story.

Below written by me eight yeas ago is the sad story of Robert Jackson’s destruction of law, which has left us all unprotected. Those of you who still care about your country need to understand what you are up against.

You are up against the worst and most powerful form of evil–the lost of your mind to lies and your conviction of a crime for believing the truth.

The Pale Horse is among us in Washington and Tel Aviv, with wars in process or brewing in Europe and Ukraine with Russia, in Iran with Trump and Netanyahu, in China with Trump.  The other Horses of the Apocalypse are not far behind.

The nuclear weapons likely to be used in war today are terminal of life on earth.  The Americans have idiots for foreign security advisers who think that  Russia is incapable of defending Russia from US nuclear attack.  Therefore the US can win a nuclear war with a country whose nuclear war capability greatly exceeds that of the US.

Putin’s hesitancy has given rise to this mistaken opinion.  In the world of today those who seek peace are regarded as trying to avoid war because they are weak and cannot win.  The apocalypse that is unfolding is due to the refusal of Washington to conclude a mutual security agreement with Russia.

Tyranny at Nuremberg

Update Aug. 12, 2017: Here is David Irving’s account of his arrest, trial, and imprisonment in Austria. His conviction was overturned by a higher court, and he was released. http://www.fpp.co.uk/books/Banged/up.pdf 

The showtrial of a somewhat arbitrarily selected group of 21 surviving Nazis at Nuremberg during 1945-46 was US Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson’s show. Jackson was the chief prosecutor. As a long-time admirer of Jackson, I always assumed that he did a good job.

My admiration for Jackson stems from his defense of law as a shield of the people rather than a weapon in the hands of government, and from his defense of the legal principle known as mens rea, that is, that crime requires intent. I often cite Jackson for his defense of these legal principles that are the very foundation of liberty. Indeed, I cited Jackson in my recent July 31 column. His defense of law as a check on government power plays a central role in the book that I wrote with Lawrence Stratton, The Tyranny of Good Intentions.

In 1940 Jackson was US Attorney General. He addressed federal prosecutors and warned them against “picking the man and then putting investigators to work, to pin some offense on him. It is in this realm—in which the prosecutor picks some person whom he dislikes or desires to embarrass, or selects some group of unpopular persons and then looks for an offense—that the greatest danger of abuse of prosecuting power lies. It is here that law enforcement becomes personal, and the real crime becomes that of being unpopular with the predominant or governing group, being attached to the wrong political views or being personally obnoxious to, or in the way of, the prosecutor himself.”

Later as a Supreme Court justice Jackson overturned a lower court conviction of a person who had no idea, or any reason to believe, that he had committed a crime.

Having just finished reading David Irving’s book Nuremberg (1996), I am devastated to learn that in his pursuit of another principle, at Nuremberg Jackson violated all of the legal principles for which I have so long admired him. To be clear, at Nuremberg Jackson was in pursuit of Nazis, but their conviction was the means to his end—the establishment of the international legal principle that the initiation of war, the commitment of military aggression, was a crime.

The problem, of course, was that at Nuremberg people were tried on the basis of ex post facto law—law that did not exist at the time of their actions for which they were convicted.

Moreover, the sentence—death by hanging—was decided prior to the trial and prior to the selection of defendants.

Moreover, the defendants were chosen and then a case was made against them.

Exculpatory evidence was withheld. Charges on which defendants were convicted turned out to be untrue.

The trials were so loaded in favor of the prosecution that defense was pro forma.

The defendants were abused and some were tortured.

The defendants were encouraged to give false witness against one another, which for the most part the defendants refused to do, with Albert Speer being the willing one. His reward was a prison sentence rather than death.

The defendants’ wives and children were arrested and imprisoned. To Jackson’s credit, this infuriated him.

President Franklin D. Roosevelt, General Eisenhower, and Winston Churchill thought that surviving Nazis should be shot without trial. Roosevelt laughed about liquidating 50,000 German military officers. Eisenhower told Lord Halifax that Nazi leaders should be shot while trying to escape, the common euphemism for murder. Russians spoke of castrating German men and breeding German women to annihilate the German race. US Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau wanted to reduce Germany to an agrarian society and send able-bodied Germans to Africa as slaves to work on “some big TVA project.”

Robert Jackson saw in these intentions not only rank criminality among the allied leadership but also a missed opportunity to create the legal principle that would criminalize war, thus removing the disaster of war from future history. Jackson’s end was admirable, but the means required bypassing Anglo-American legal principles.

Jackson got his chance, perhaps because Joseph Stalin vetoed execution without trial. First a show trial, Stalin said, to demonstrate their guilt so that we do not make martyrs out of Nazis.

Whom to select for the list of 21-22 persons to be charged? Well, whom did the allies have in custody? Not all those they desired. They had Reichsmarschall Herman Göring who headed the air force. Whatever the valid charges against Göring, they were not considered to be mitigated by the fact that under Göring the German air force was mainly used against enemy formations on the battleground and not, like the US and British air forces in saturation terror bombing of civilian cities, such as Dresden, Tokyo, Hiroshima, and Nagasaki, or by the fact that in Hitler’s final days Hitler removed Göring from all his positions, expelled him from the party, and ordered his arrest.

The Nuremberg trials are paradoxical in that the law Jackson intended to establish applied to every country, not to Germany alone. The ex post facto law under which Germans were sentenced to death and to prison also criminalized the terror bombing of German and Japanese cities by the British and US air forces. Yet, the law was only applied to the Germans in the dock. In his book, Apocalypse 1945: The Destruction of Dresden (1995), Irving quotes US General George C. McDonald’s dissent from the directive to bomb civilian cities such as Dresden. Gen. McDonald characterized the directive as the “extermination of populations and the razing of cities,” war crimes under the Nuremberg standard.

They had foreign minister Ribbentrop. They had field marshals Keitel and Jodl and the grand-admirals Raeder and Dönitz. They had a German banker, who was saved from sentencing by the intervention of the Bank of England. They had a journalist. They had Rudolf Hess who had been in a British prison since 1941 when he went to Britain on a peace mission to end the war. They wanted an industrialist, but Krupp was too old and ill. He was devoid of the persona of a foreboding evil. You can read the list in Irving’s book.

Göring knew from the beginning that the trial was a hoax and that his death sentence had already been decided. He had the means (a poison capsule) throughout his imprisonment to commit suicide, thus depriving his captors of their planned humiliation of him. Instead, he held the Germans together, and they stood their ground. Possessed of a high IQ, time and again he made fools of his captors. He made such a fool of Robert Jackson during his trial that the entire court burst out in laughter. Jackson never lived down being bested in the courtroom by Göring.

And Göring wasn’t through with making his captors look foolish and incompetent. He, the field marshalls and grand admiral requested that they be given a military execution by firing squad, but the pettiness of the Tribunal wanted them hung like dogs. Göring told his captors that he would allow them to shoot him, but not hang him, and a few minutes before he was to be marched to the gallows before the assembled press and cameras he took the poison capsule, throwing the execution propaganda show into chaos. To this injury he added insult leaving the prison commandant, US Col. Andrus a note telling him that he had had 3 capsules. One he had left for the Americans to find, thus causing them to think his means of escaping them had been removed. One he had taken minutes prior to his show execution, and he described where to find the third. He had easily defeated the continuous and thorough inspections inflicted upon him from fear that he would commit suicide and escape their intended propaganda use of his execution.

There was a time in Anglo-American law when the improprieties of the Nuremberg trials would have resulted in the cases being thrown out of court and the defendants freed. Even under the ex post facto law and extra-judicial, extra-legal terms under which the defendants were tried, at least two of the condemned deserved to be cleared.

It is not clear why Admiral Donitz was sentenced to 10 years in prison. The chief American judge of the Tribunal, Francis Biddle, said: “It is, in my opinion, offensive to our concept of justice to punish a man for doing exactly what one has done himself.” “The Germans,” Biddle said, “fought a much cleaner war at sea than we did.“

Jodl, who countermanded many Nazi orders, was sentenced to death. The injustice of the sentence was made clear by a German court in 1953 which cleared Jodl of all Nuremberg charges and rehabilitated him posthumously. The French justice at the Nuremberg Tribunal said at the time that Jodl’s conviction was without merit and was a miscarriage of justice.

The entire Nuremberg proceeding stinks to high heaven. Defendants were charged with aggression for the German invasion of Norway. The fact was kept out of the trial that the British were about to invade Norway themselves and that the Germans, being more efficient, learned of it and managed to invade first.

Defendants were accused of using slave labor, paradoxical in view of the Soviets own practice. Moreover, while the trials were in process the Soviets were apparently gathering up able-bodied Germans to serve as slave labor to rebuild their war-torn economy.

Defendants were accused of mass executions despite the fact that the Russians, who were part of the prosecution and judgment of the defendants, had executed 15,000 or 20,000 Polish officers and buried them in a mass grave. Indeed, the Russians insisted on blaming the Germans on trial for the Katyn Forest Massacre.

Defendants were accused of aggression against Poland, and Ribbentrop was not permitted to mention in his defense the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact that divided Poland between Germany and the Soviet Union, without which Germany could not have attacked Poland. The fact that the Soviets, who were sitting at Nuremberg in judgment on the Germans, had themselves invaded Poland was kept out of the proceedings.

Moreover, without the gratuitous British “guarantee” to Poland, the Polish military dictatorship would likely have agreed to return territories stripped from Germany by the Versailles Treaty and the invasion would have been avoided.

The greatest hypocrisy was the charge of aggression against Germany when the fact of the matter is that World War 2 began when the British and French declared war on Germany. Germany conquered France and drove the British from the European Continent after the British and French started the war with a declaration of war against Germany.

Irving’s book is, of course, politically incorrect. However, he lists in the introduction the voluminous files on which the book is based: Robert Jackson’s official papers and Oral History, Francis Biddle’s private papers and diaries, Col. Andrus’ papers, Adm. Raeder’s prison diary, Rudolf Hess’ prison diary, interrogations of the prisoners, interviews with defense counsel, prosecutors, interrogators, and letters from the prisoners to their wives. All of this and more Irving has made available on microfilms for researchers. He compared magnetic tape copies of the original wire-recordings of the trial with the mimeographed and published transcripts to insure that spoken and published words were the same.

What Irving does in his book is to report the story that the documents tell. This story differs from the patriotic propaganda written by court historians with which we are all imbued. The question arises: Is Irving pro-truth or pro-Nazi. The National Socialist government of Germany is the most demonized government in history. Any lessening of the demonization is unacceptable, so Irving is vulnerable to demonization by those determined to protect their cherished beliefs.

Zionists have branded Irving a “holocaust denier,” and he was convicted of something like that by an Austrian court and spent 14 months in prison before the conviction was thrown out by a higher court.

In Nuremberg, Irving removes various propaganda legends from the holocaust story and reports authoritative findings that many of the concentration camp deaths were from typhus and starvation, especially in the final days of the war when food and medicine were disappearing from Germany, but nowhere in the book does he deny, indeed he reports, that vast numbers of Jews perished. As I understand the term, a simple truthful modification of some element of the official holocaust story is sufficient to brand a person a holocaust denier.

My interest in the book is Robert Jackson. He had a noble cause—to outlaw war—but in pursuit of this purpose he established precedents for American prosecutors to make law a weapon in their pursuit of their noble causes just as it was used against Nazis—organized crime convictions, child abuse convictions, drug convictions, terror convictions. Jackson’s pursuit of Nazis at Nuremberg undermined the strictures he put on US attorneys such that today Americans have no more protection of law than the defendants had at Nuremberg.

The post The Demise of Western Law Dates From the Nuremberg Trials appeared first on LewRockwell.

On Monday the 21st of July the Ukrainian Secret Service (SBU) searched offices of the independent anti-corruption police (NABU) and anti-corruption prosecutor office (SAPO) and detained several of its investigators. A day later the Zelenski regime pushed a law through parliament which ended the independence of both entities by putting them under control of the prosecutor general.

The move had been planned for months (in Russian) but was executed in haste after NABU and SAPO had served a notices-of-investigation to people near to the president.

But Zelenski had miscalculated the step. There were highly visible local protests and the EU stepped in by threatening to withhold subsidies on which the Ukrainian state depends.

Two days after his strike against the independent anti-corruption entities Zelenski had to pull back. Today the parliament reestablished the independence of NABU and SAPO.

The Verkhovna Rada (Ukrainian parliament) has passed a law restoring powers to Ukraine’s key anti-corruption agencies – the National Anti-Corruption Bureau (NABU) and the Specialised Anti-Corruption Prosecutor’s Office (SAPO).

A total of 331 MPs voted in favour of the presidential bill [..]. No MPs voted against the bill, and no one abstained. Nine MPs did not vote.

Under the new law, SAPO will now independently oversee the procedural supervision of NABU investigations – and is no longer under the control of the Prosecutor General.

The new law was signed by the president and is now in force.

By his misstep and its retraction from it Zelenski demonstrated a fatal weakness which his political enemies will soon use to end his control of the country.

Several additional corruption investigations against Zelenski’s entourage are pending. The most severe one is against Timur Mindich, a longtime business partner of the president nicknamed “Zelenski’s wallet”. NABU had wiretapped Mindich’s apartment which was used by Zelenski and others to discuss ‘businesses’. (Mindich’s bugged luxury apartment in Kiev is said to include a room with a golden toilet.)

With the independence of NABU and SAPO restored, new investigations against Mindich and other people near to Zelenski, and potentially against himself,  are likely to soon be published.

They will demonstrate that the president has lost the ability to protect those who work with him.

In consequence the majority of his party in parliament is shrinking (machine translation):

People’s Deputy Dmytro Kostyuk announced from the rostrum of the Verkhovna Rada that he was leaving the Servants of the People faction due to the situation with the National Anti-Corruption Bureau of Ukraine.

According to him, deputies were forced to vote for the draft law on depriving the NABU and SAPO of their powers, threatening them with criminal cases. He himself also supported this bill a week ago.
…
Now the faction formally consists of 231 deputies, which gives “Servant of the People” the rights of a mono-majority coalition. [..] However, if six people leave the faction, its number will be reduced, it will be less than the required 226 votes, and thus the ruling mono-majority will disappear.

The opposition, with former president Petro Poroshenko in the lead, will soon be able to clip the president’s wings.

The political chaos in Kiev is reinforced by the catastrophic situation on the battle field. There are four significant population centers which are likely to fall under Russian control within the next month.

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1. Kupiansk (pre-war population 26,000) – The Russian forces are pressing from the north towards the west of the city to cut its main supply line.

2. Siversk (pre-war population 10,000) – Russian forces have captured large parts of the woods north of Siversk and are now moving in from all sides.

3. Konstantinivka (pre-war population 8,500) – Russian forces are pushing west from the finally taken Chasiv-Yar agglomeration to cut the northern supply line to Konstantinivka. Russian forces southwest of the city are moving northward for the same purpose.

4. Prokovsk (pre-war population 85,000) – Ukrainian defense lines around and within the city have broken down. Russian forces are already in the city. Supply and exit routes to the north and west are barely passable.

The Ukrainian forces lack infantry. Some Ukrainian brigades have less than 100 people to man several miles long defense lines. There is a severe lack of mortar and artillery ammunition. The Russian side has more and better drones available in higher numbers. The recent re-organization of the Ukrainian army into corps sized structures has only increase the organizational chaos.

The Ukrainian army, like the Ukrainian state, is in the process of falling apart.

Reprinted with permission from Moon of Alabama.

The post Ukraine – Anti-Corruption Independence Restored, Zelenski Weakened, Four Cities Are Falling appeared first on LewRockwell.