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“On becoming a doctor in 2005, I was under the impression that I had joined a profession that saved millions of lives and added years to life spans. 

We were led to believe that our predecessors had engaged in and emerged victorious in the war against germs. 

Furthermore, it is often claimed that we could do even better today if our communities had more “access” to allopathic interventions – that is, more pharmaceuticals and surgical procedures.

But is this true? 

What does the evidence actually say?

Please watch her newest video, HERE 

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The future of humanity is being decided as we speak. And it is not being decided on a battlefield in Eastern Europe, or the Middle East or the Taiwan Strait, but in the data centers and research facilities where technology experts create “the physical and virtual infrastructure to power the next generation of Artificial Intelligence.” This is a full-blown, scorched-earth free-for-all that has already racked up a number of casualties though you wouldn’t know it from reading the headlines which typically ignore recent ‘cataclysmic’ developments. But when President Trump announced the launching of a $500 billion AI infrastructure project (Stargate) on Tuesday just hours after China had released its DeepSeek R1—which “outperforms its rivals in advanced coding, math, and general knowledge capabilities”—it became painfully obvious that the battle for the future ‘is on’ in a big way. And this is not a battle that either side can afford to lose. Here’s how technology expert Adam Button summed it up:

Imagine we’re back in 2017 and the iPhone X was just released. It was selling $999 and Apple was crushing sales and building a wide moat around its ecosystem.

Now imagine, just days later, another company introduced a phone and platform that was equal in every way if not better and the price was just $30.

That’s what unfolded in the AI space today. China’s DeepSeek released an opensource model that works on par with OpenAI’s latest models but costs a tiny fraction to operate. Moreover, you can even download it and run it free (or the cost of your electricity) for yourself.

The product is a huge leap in terms of scaling and efficiency and may upend expectations of how much power and compute will be needed to manage the AI revolution. It also comes just hours before Trump is expected to unveil a $100 billion investment in US datacenters. The model shows there are different ways to train foundational AI models that offer up the same results with much less cost. It also opens up far more applications for AI that would have been too expensive to run previously, which should broaden the applications in the real economy. China’s DeepSeek may have just upended the economics of AI, forex live

Imagine the panic that is spreading across western tech capitals right now. AI was supposed to be the fast-track to absolute societal control and oligarchic rule into the next millennia, but now those pesky Chinese have overturned the applecart leaving western elites with a problem they might not be able to fix. (See—Unchecked AI will lead us to a police state, edri ) They expected that their microchip sanctions would sabotage China’s AI efforts for at least a decade-or-so but, instead, China has come roaring back with a system that has left the tech giants gasping for air.

Of course, China’s eye-popping strides in technological development are nothing new as editor Ron Unz pointed out in a recent article where he noted that “between 2003 and 2007, the US led in 60 of the 64 technologies.” Whereas, as of 2022, “China led in 52 of the 64 technologies.” That’s not a competition; that’s a beat-down in a parking lot. Here’s Unz:

China now leads the world in many of the most important future technologies. The success of its commercial companies in telecommunications (Huawei, Zongxin), EV (BYD, Geely, Great Wall, etc.), battery (CATL, BYD) and Photovoltaics (Tongwei Solar, JA, Aiko, etc.) are directly built on such R&D prowess.

Similarly, the Chinese military’s modernization is built on the massive technological development of the country’s scientific community and its industrial base…. With its lead in science and technology research, China is positioned to outcompete the US in both economic and military arenas in the coming years…. American Pravda: China vs. America, Ron Unz, Unz Review

None of this should come as a surprise, although the timing of DeepSeek’s release (preempting Trump’s Stargate announcement) shows that the Chinese don’t mind throwing a wrench in Washington’s global strategy if it serves their regional interests, which it undoubtedly does. Here’s a bit more background from an article by Benj Edwards at Ars Technica:

On Monday, Chinese AI lab DeepSeek released its new R1 model family under an open MIT license, with its largest version containing 671 billion parameters. The company claims the model performs at levels comparable to OpenAI’s o1 simulated reasoning (SR) model on several math and coding benchmarks….

The releases immediately caught the attention of the AI community because most existing open-weights models—have lagged behind proprietary models like OpenAI’s o1 in so-called reasoning benchmarks. …

The R1 model works differently from typical large language models ….They attempt to simulate a human-like chain of thought as the model works through a solution to the query. This class of what one might call “simulated reasoning” models, or SR models for short, emerged when OpenAI debuted its o1 model family in September 2024. …

DeepSeek reports that R1 outperformed OpenAI’s o1 on several benchmarks and tests, including AIME (a mathematical reasoning test), MATH-500 (a collection of word problems), and SWE-bench Verified (a programming assessment tool)….

TechCrunch reports that three Chinese labs—DeepSeek, Alibaba, and Moonshot AI’s Kimi—have now released models they say match OpenAI’s o1’s capabilities, with DeepSeek first previewing R1 in November. Cutting-edge Chinese “reasoning” model rivals OpenAI o1—and it’s free to download, ars technica

This is a very big deal. The United States intends to dominate the world in this critical technology and yet the upstart Chinese have not only produced a system that is every bit as good as America’s best, but have made it more affordable, more accessible and more transparent. What’s not to like?

WEF Vows Millions of ‘Useless’ Human Workers Will Be Replaced with AI by 2030 – Slay News https://t.co/JDEPE0EIQ8

— Wtfisup (@Wtfisup49061475) January 19, 2025

(Note—OpenAI is an American artificial intelligence (AI) research laboratory. It is made up of the non-profit OpenAI Incorporated and its for-profit subsidiary corporation OpenAI Limited Partnership. OpenAI has emerged to be one of the primary leaders of the generative AI era. OpenAI is a privately held company that has open sourced some of its technology, but it has not open sourced most of its technology…. In contrast, DeepSeek AI R1 is open source which means its code is publicly accessible—anyone can see, modify, and distribute the code as they see fit. Open source software is developed in a decentralized and collaborative way, relying on peer review and community production.)

Here’s more from political analyst Arnaud Bertrand in a post on X:

Most people probably don’t realize how bad the news (about) China’s Deepseek is for OpenAI. They’ve come up with a model that matches and even exceeds OpenAI’s latest model o1 on various benchmarks, and they’re charging just 3% of the price. It’s essentially as if someone had released a mobile on par with the iPhone but was selling it for $30 instead of $1000. It’s this dramatic.

What’s more, they’re releasing it open-source so you even have the option – which OpenAI doesn’t offer – of not using their API at all and running the model for “free” yourself.

If you’re an OpenAI customer today you’re obviously going to start asking yourself some questions, like “wait, why exactly should I be paying 30X more?”. This is pretty transformational stuff, it fundamentally challenges the economics of the market….

So basically, it looks like the game has changed. All thanks to a Chinese company that just demonstrated how U.S. tech restrictions can backfire spectacularly – by forcing them to build more efficient solutions that they’re now sharing with the world at 3% of OpenAI’s prices. As the saying goes, sometimes pressure creates diamonds. @RnaudBertrand

Get the picture? Everything the US has done to stymie China’s development—including economic sanctions, chips embargoes, military provocations, political meddling, even arresting a Huawei executive (truly pathetic)—has blown up in their faces. China’s well-educated, highly motivated, technologically adept workforce have produced a model of AI that equals or exceeds the best the West has to offer at a fraction of the cost and with open sourcing that allows users to
modify, and distribute the code as they see fit.

So, which version of AI sounds like a genuine benefit to humankind and which sounds like another scheme for transforming the world into a dystopian police-state controlled by aspiring tyrants and psychopathic control freaks? Here’s more from Bertrand on ‘why China is making AI available so cheap:

….it speaks to a different philosophy/vision on AI: ironically named “OpenAI” is basically about trying to establish a monopoly by establishing a moat with massive amounts of GPU and money. Deepseek is clearly betting on a future where AI becomes a commodity, widely available and affordable to everyone. By pricing so aggressively and releasing their code open-source, they’re not just competing with OpenAI but basically declaring that AI should be like electricity or internet connectivity – a basic utility that powers innovation rather than a premium service controlled by a few players. And in that world, it’s a heck of a lot better to be the first mover who helped make it happen than the legacy player who tried to stop it. @RnaudBertrand

(Creepy Larry Ellison predicts “citizens will be on their best behavior” with an AI police-state surveillance system.)

Oracle’s Larry Ellison says “citizens will be on their best behavior” with an AI surveillance system pic.twitter.com/AzqWJWuswf

— Chief Nerd (@TheChiefNerd) January 22, 2025

So, it’s basically like everything else in this sick, twisted world where a handful of money-grubbing miscreants muscle their way into a new technology so they can fatten their own bank accounts while planting their bootheel firmly on the neck of humanity. It seems to me that China’s approach is vastly superior in that it’s clearly aimed at providing the benefits of AI to the greatest number of people at the lowest possible cost. Here are a few random comments on China’s DeepSeek AI that I picked off X that show how excited people are about this groundbreaking version:

The ramifications of this are huge. Every day China does something incredible, totally unlike the stagnation of the EU, talking all day while accomplishing nothing, or the latest evil plan oozing out of DC. This is just brilliant. & inspiring. & it WILL earn them more goodwill @CaptainCrusty66

It’s the china recipe book for success for every industry where western oligopolies have dominated. @bbooker450

AI will become a part of everyday infrastructure like electricity and tap water. DeepSeek is a signficant step towards that, thanks to its cost reduction and open source nature @MrBig2024

We are living in a timeline where a non-US company is keeping the original mission of OpenAI alive – truly open, frontier research that empowers all…. @DrJimFan

This is cool…this isn’t just another open source LLM release. this is o1-level reasoning capabilities that you can run locally, that you can modify and that you can study…
that’s a very different world than the one we were in yesterday. Al, comments line

Price comparison of OpenAI o1 and DeepSeek AI R1: R1 is significantly cheaper across all categories (96–98% savings). Now you know why big organizations don’t want open-source to continue, If humanity is ever going to benefit from AI, it will be from open-source . @ai_for_success

China is overturning mainstream development theory in astonishing ways. China’s GDP per capita is only $12,000. That’s 70% less than the average in high-income countries. And yet they have the largest high-speed rail network in the world. They’ve developed their own commercial aircraft. They are the world leaders in renewable energy technology and electric vehicles. They have advanced medical technology, smartphone technology, microchip production, aerospace engineering… China has a higher life expectancy than the USA, with 80% less income. We were told that this kind of development required very high levels of GDP/cap. But over the past 10 years China has demonstrated that it can be achieved with much more modest levels of output. How do they do it? By using public finance and industrial policy to steer investment and production toward social objectives and national development needs. This allows them to convert aggregate production into development outcomes much more efficiently than other countries, where productive capacity is often wasted on activities that may be highly profitable to capital, or beneficial to the rich, but may not actually advance development. Of course, China still has development gaps that need to be addressed. And we know from some other countries that higher social indicators can be achieved with China’s level of GDP/cap, by focusing more on social policy. But the achievements are undeniable, and development economists are taking stock. @jasonhickel

JULIAN ASSANGE says ‘Artificial intelligence is being used for mass assassinations in Gaza’ …“The majority of targets in Gaza are bombed as a result of artificial intelligence targeting.” ..It has been revealed that Google provided the Israeli military with AI tools in the early weeks of the genocide.

NEW: JULIAN ASSANGE says ‘Artificial intelligence is being used for mass assassinations in Gaza’

“The majority of targets in Gaza are bombed as a result of artificial intelligence targeting.”

It has been revealed that Google provided the Israeli military with AI tools in… pic.twitter.com/hJYFdKdT8C

— Megatron (@Megatron_ron) January 22, 2025

Unfortunately, the intensity of the competition between the US and China, ignores the inherent risks of Artificial Intelligence and its looming threat to human survival. In a recent analytical piece by the Rand Corporation titled AI and Geopolitics: How Might AI Affect the Rise and Fall of Nations?, the authors provide a disturbing window into a future in which “AI-enabled machines—of equivalent or greater intelligence and, potentially, highly disruptive capabilities” could pose a threat to our own existence. Keep in mind, the line between our historic reality and science fiction has already been crossed just as the probability that our own creation, AI, is likely “to become an actor, not just a factor” in the existential challenges faced by our species. Here’s a short blurb from this truly unsettling article:

Although technology has often influenced geopolitics, the prospect of AI means that the technology itself could become a geopolitical actor. AI could have motives and objectives that differ considerably from those of governments and private companies. Humans’ inability to comprehend how AI “thinks” and our limited understanding of the second- and third-order effects of our commands or requests of AI are also very troubling. Humans have enough trouble interacting with one another. It remains to be seen how we will manage our relationships with one or more AIs….

We are entering an era of both enlightenment and chaos…

The borderless nature of AI makes it hard to control or regulate. As computing power expands, models are optimized, and open-source frameworks mature, the ability to create highly impactful AI applications will become increasingly diffuse. In such a world, well-intentioned researchers and engineers will use this power to do wonderful things, ill-intentioned individuals will use it to do terrible things, and AIs could do both wonderful and terrible things. The net result is neither an unblemished era of enlightenment nor an unmitigated disaster, but a mix of both. Humanity will learn to muddle through and live with this game-changing technology, just as we have with so many other transformative technologies in the past….

The potential dangers posed by AI are many. At the extreme, they include the threat of human extinction, which could come about by an AI-enabled catastrophe, such as a well-designed virus that spreads easily, evades detection, and destroys our civilization. Less dire, but considerably worrisome, is the threat to democratic governance if AIs gain power over people….

AI cannot be contained through regulation, so the best policy will aim to minimize the harm that AI might do. This will probably be most critical in biosecurity,[3] but harm reduction also includes countering cybersecurity threats, strengthening democratic resilience, and developing emergency response options for a wide variety of threats from state and sub- and non-state actors…..

In light of the likely very widespread proliferation of advanced AI capabilities to private- and public-sector actors and well-resourced individuals, governments should work closely with leading private-sector entities to develop advanced forecasting tools, wargames, and strategic plans for dealing with what experts anticipate will be a wide variety of unexpected AI-enabled catastrophic events. AI and Geopolitics: How Might AI Affect the Rise and Fall of Nations?, RAND

In other words, humanity should encourage their business and political leaders to exercise sound judgement and prepare for unexpected disasters that could terminate the species.

That is simply not sufficient defense for the challenge we face.

Reprinted with permission from The Unz Review.

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Trump is making many things happen simultaneously. Two of them – transparency of the state and ridicule of the state – perfectly match America’s mood, and will determine her future.

The world is overwhelmed by the rate and depth of the changes the new administration is making. Around 185 million Americans have only really known the Bush 43, Obama and Biden presidencies – all examples of government secrecy and lies, avoidance of press conferences, and canned, often meaningless, statements.  Bush and Biden were especially known for misspeaking and getting their facts wrong, and Obama was far more soothsayer than head of state.

Bush 43 gave an average of 31 press conferences and media interviews per year, Obama 71, and Biden 41.  Trump 45 beat them all, averaging 117 press events per year, and he’s on track to exceed that in his current term.

The media’s stumbling incoherence during a Trump 47 press event (while he signed executive orders) on Inauguration Day reveals their lack of practice, and their incompetence. Did they fear, as happened the previous week, that asking the wrong question might be cause for being roughly physically ejected from the press event? Not at all!  Out of long habit, they feared asking questions to which they didn’t already know the answers, and being chastened by their editors or blacklisted from future media events. Like chained dogs, they accept their prior condition, and embrace it.

Turns out, in observing our elected leadership, we don’t need professionals to translate, or fact checkers to fact check.  The instantaneity and reach of information today provides whatever we need, in whatever volumes we prefer, to figure out if our prejudices and frameworks deliver for us, or need to be adapted.  We are our own headline writers. Trump is modeling, imperfectly and with occasional missteps, a kind of transparency that is wholly inconsistent with centralized big government.  Mainstream media and the remnants of the modern Democratic Party see Trump’s transparency and public conversations as signs of Trump the Totalitarian.  They have it exactly wrong.  Transparency and talking things through are the biggest weapons we all have against totalitarianism, oligarchic controls, state corruption and war.

The difference between old and new can be seen in the nature of Trump’s pardons, and those of his predecessor, occurring within weeks of each other.  Biden’s are critiqued from left and right as being engineered to hide information, crimes, and suspicions.  Trump’s, on the other hand, are aimed at unleashing information, exposing crimes, and openly labeling suspicions, inciting or inspiring an open review of the facts.  Will legacy media rediscover journalism, and conduct exploratory interviews with the Trump pardon recipients, to see what their experience has been, to revisit their “crimes” and their “punishments?”  While some complain that the BLM and Antifa rioters were treated too kindly in terms of legal penalties, if we wish to see what a big bad government can do to people – in several cases, people not even in Washington on January 6th, 2021 – we need to hear from the recently pardoned.

We also deserve media assessments and interviews with Ross Ulbricht, who spent nearly a decade in jail for writing software.  A lot has happened in that decade, and this pardon, like others that Trump has granted, opens to door to a greater understanding of truth – about technology, responsibility, and about the nature of the state.

Trump’s dam-breaking declassification of whatever is left of the JFK, RFK and MLK assassination files, from the CIA and elsewhere, has happened in a way that is impossible to reverse.  Transparency empowers people.  Trump, by opening the doors and windows of the state to popular review and direct assessment, has lit a fuse and started a countdown that will be hard to reverse.

The second important thing – in the midst of so many things – is Trump’s consistent modeling of candid and confident contempt for the state.  Couched in MAGA – no doubt a statist sounding acronym, nationalistic and aggressive – Trump himself ridicules the state on a daily basis, and his second term actions are bringing that ridicule, sometimes gentle, sometimes direct, to the people in a way that has them agreeing with him more than disagreeing.  He openly speaks of a “revolution of common sense” as he trims the federal fat, and kindly reminds the country that working in and for the US government does not make you smarter, wiser, more competent, or more worthy than anyone else.  On Fauci’s security detail, and that of John Bolton, Trump points out, “You can’t have a security detail for the rest of your life because you worked for government.” He also mentioned how personally wealthy these recipients are, compounding another well-deserved point of ridicule for government elites.  Cancelling financially valuable security clearances on the taxpayer’s dime for retired Flag Officers and Senior Executive Service civilians is also an easy sell to the common sense crowd.

Tax-funded clearances and security details for government retirees are tiny wastes of funding compared to the incredibly insane, stupid and dangerous destruction of national wealth that is conducted every minute of every day by the state to benefit itself and its cronies, engineered to keep the “voter” economically tied down and intellectually impoverished.  But exposing these small “wastes” and “frauds” ratifies and energizes the innate contempt for government shared by most Americans.  Local government is not held in “as much” contempt as the US Congress, but the gap isn’t as big as you might think.

More than ever, Americans are wondering about the real Return on Investment for local, state and the federal government.  These Americans tended to be Trump voters, and he crafted a campaign that heard their complaints, and shared their curiosity.

Of all the things Trump 47 accomplished in his first week, stripping the veil from the state and leading a national mockery of our government are two of the most important.  Other changes he will make regarding operations, priorities, and constitutionality of government will be watered down, challenged, delayed and defeated.  But it’s impossible to unsee the despicable state he has shown us, and in seeing it, it is impossible not to hold that state in contempt and disdain.  Trump wants a revolution of common sense, and “good government” but he may be unleashing far more than citizen watchdogs.

Understanding the bloated and overweening state as it really is, and holding it in fearless contempt makes us all revolutionaries for liberty.  What a time to be alive!

The post Of All the Things Trump Has Done in a Week, Two Stand Out appeared first on LewRockwell.

For most people, the term “investment” means the purchase of something for its anticipated rise in value in the future. However, there is another category of investment, generally referred to as “retention of wealth,” that does not adhere to this definition. Although investments in this category may well rise in value over time, their principle purpose is not profit. Their purpose is to assure that if other investments fail, the investor will still have a portion of his wealth to fall back on.

Generally, during good economic times, investors are inclined to be somewhat uninterested in this category. However, when bad economic times are on the horizon, retention of wealth becomes (or should become) far more significant in importance.

The world has never seen a time like the present one. In most every facet of the economy, personal wealth is threatened. In many countries, there is the threat of greater taxation, devaluation of currencies, collapses in markets, and even outright confiscation of bank accounts.

Consequently, if the powers-that-be exert their power to (quite literally) rob their citizens, those citizens need to determine the safest havens for their wealth that they possibly can… and need to do so before the wolf arrives at the door.

Those of us who have been predicting the coming economic debacle for many years have, not surprisingly, spent much of that time researching and identifying such opportunities and divesting ourselves of investments whose days may well be numbered.

Basic Truth #1: Precious metals and real estate will become the last safe investments for the retention of wealth.

At some point in the Great Unravelling, we will reach the point when virtually the only “safe” investments will be precious metals and real estate. (It should be stressed that even these are not guaranteed, but they are, and will be, the last bastions. They are the Alamo.)

Although there were a small number of people professing this Basic Truth prior to 2008, very few people were listening. But today, more and more people are realising that, soon, the jig will be up, particularly if they live in the EU or US, where some, if not all, of the threats listed above are virtually certain to occur in the foreseeable future. As a result, there is growing interest in the ownership of precious metals and real estate.

Basic Truth #2: Precious metals and real estate ownership are only safe if they are located outside of an endangered jurisdiction.

For many people, it goes very much against the grain to own anything outside of the country in which they live. (The average American in San Diego would sooner own property in Miami, Florida, some 2500 miles away, than to own property in Tijuana, Mexico, just over the border.)

Yet, if the threat to your wealth is your own government, it is essential to remove your wealth from the country in which you live. The reason is that, as long as it remains in the country in which you are a citizen, the more likely it is that your government will regulate it, tax it, cause it to lose its value through inflation or hyperinflation, and/or simply confiscate it.

It is far more difficult for your government to destroy your wealth if you have expatriated it, as your government does not have free control over the laws and government of the country where you have invested. It would be harder for your government to force the repatriation of your precious metals, and downright impossible for it to demand that your overseas real estate be shipped to your home country.

Therefore, when choosing a jurisdiction in which to invest in precious metals and/or real estate, in order to maximise safety, the investor should choose a country that:

1. is not likely to be a candidate for major decline in the coming economic collapse,
2. is not likely to cave in to the demands of countries that are likely to soon collapse, and
3. has laws that impose as little as possible on foreign-owned investments.

This last item is critical. The safest countries are those that do not tend to fall prey to dictatorships or dramatic changes in laws. The ideal countries are the ones that impose the least interference in your ownership of your investment.

This leads to:

Basic Truth #3: The ideal jurisdiction in which to own property is one which does not tax your property.

This final principle is understood, at present, by only a handful of investors. A country that imposes income tax, capital gains tax, etc., may very well, in hard times, suddenly decide to tax precious metals ownership. Likewise, a country that imposes property tax may very well raise that tax suddenly in pressing times. Indeed, it may choose to claim that the investor has not paid his most recent tax bill (regardless of whether or not this is true) in order to justify the confiscation of his property.

Many governments of the world are now hopelessly in debt and on the verge of economic collapse. As their leaders become more desperate, they will resort to more desperate measures. In the next few years, we shall see the leaders of the most “respected” countries throw out the rule book and resort to a final grab of their citizens’ wealth.

It is important to recognise that the word “wealth” does not only refer to those whose net worth is in the seven-figure range and above. If your wealth is $5000, that amount might be better protected by the purchase of a few one-ounce gold coins. If it is $50,000, it might be better protected by the purchase of a house lot. Those who need to protect $500,000 or more might wish to create a portfolio of gold, silver, house lots, and built property.

Regardless of the amount of your wealth, the principles remain the same.

As to what countries the reader might consider, several nations in the world have no income tax, including the Bahamas, Bahrain, Bermuda, Brunei, the Cayman Islands, Kuwait, Qatar, Oman, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates (UAE).

There are sixteen nations that have no property tax—Bahrain, the Cayman Islands, Croatia, the Cook Islands, Dominica, Fiji, Israel, Kuwait, Liechtenstein, Malta, Monaco, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Turks & Caicos, and the UAE.

Once having decided to invest wealth in a safer jurisdiction, the investor might also consider which of the above countries might additionally provide him with an increased value. Still, the primary goal in Retention of Wealth is to save it from the negative effects that may soon be caused by governments.

Reprinted with permission from International Man.

The post The Retention of Wealth appeared first on LewRockwell.

“Delivering Emergency Price Relief for American Families and Defeating the Cost-of-Living Crisis” is the title of one of the many executive orders President Trump issued in his first week back in the Oval Office. This executive order directs federal agencies to “deliver emergency price relief” to the American people by reducing federal regulations that increase the cost or limit the supply of healthcare, housing, energy, and other goods and services.

Repealing regulations is an effective way to reduce costs and increase supply in the affected industries. However, the price increases caused by regulations are sector specific. Economy-wide price increases are caused by the Federal Reserve.

Widespread price increases are the result of inflation. Inflation occurs when the central bank lowers interest rates by increasing the money supply.

In his remarks by video on Thursday before the World Economic Forum’s yearly meeting in Davos, Switzerland, President Trump said he would soon meet with Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell to “demand” the Fed cut interest rates in order to help Americans cope with high prices. Pumping more money into the economy may give some consumers a temporary boost in purchasing power, but a long-term effect of the cut will be further erosion of most Americans’ standard of living as the influx of new money causes the dollar to lose value.

The short-term benefits of any increase of the money supply and reduction in interest rates are mostly felt by the well-off since they receive the new money before other Americans. So they enjoy increased purchasing power before the Fed’s inflationary policies cause prices to rise.

Interest rates are the price of money. As with all prices, interest rates inform market actors about market conditions. When the central bank manipulates the interest rates, it distorts the signals sent to market actors, causing misallocation of resources. The result is a “bubble” that produces a short-term boost in employment and incomes. However, the bubble will eventually burst, causing a recession. Just as middle- and lower-income Americans suffer most from the Federal Reserve-caused price increases, they are the primary victims of the Federal Reserve-caused recession.

The best thing Congress and the Federal Reserve can do when a bubble bursts is let the recession run its course. Recessions are necessary to remove the distortions caused by the Federal Reserve’s easy money policies. Of course, Congress and the Federal Reserve refuse to take the sensible, though politically difficult, path. Instead, they set the stage for the next bubble via “stimulus” spending and low interest rates.

President Trump claims he knows more about interest rates than does Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell. Whether or not President Trump’s experience in real estate development (a business that is very sensitive to changes in interest rates) makes him more of an expert on interest rates than Chairman Powell is beside the point. No politician, bureaucrat, or central banker can know the correct interest rate. The only way to know the correct rate is to allow individuals acting in a free market to set the interest rate.

Despite his misunderstanding of monetary policy, President Trump deserves credit for publicly criticizing the Federal Reserve. President Trump should follow through on his critiques of the Fed by working with Congress to pass the Audit the Fed bill and legislation allowing people to use alternatives like precious metals and cryptocurrencies.

Restoring a free market in money is key to fulfilling President Trump’s inaugural pledge to bring about a new golden age.

The post To Make America Great Again, Separate Money and State appeared first on LewRockwell.

Every modern president seems to promise transparency during their campaigns, but few ever seem to get around to it. Once in power, the value of being opaque becomes evident. We will have to wait to see if President Donald Trump will fulfill his pledges, but so far this is proving the cellophane administration. Putting aside his constant press gaggles and conferences, the Administration has ordered wholesale disclosures of long-withheld files from everything from the JFK investigation to, most recently, the CIA COVID origins report. That report is particularly stinging for both the Biden Administration and its media allies.

Newly-confirmed CIA Director John Ratcliffe released the report, which details how it views the lab theory as the most likely explanation for the virus. Expressing “low confidence,” the agency still favored that theory over the natural origins theory, which was treated as sacrosanct by the media and favored by figures like Anthony Fauci. (Other recent reports have contradicted the equally orthodox view on the closing of schools, showing no material benefit in terms of slowing the transmission of COVID).

Even a low-confidence finding shows the height of hypocrisy in Washington where politicians and pundits savaged any scientist who even suggested the possibility that the virus was man-made and likely originated in the Wuhan lab near the site of the outbreak.

This follows a recent disclosure in the Wall Street Journal of a report on how the Biden administration may have suppressed dissenting views supporting the lab theory on the origin of the COVID-19 virus. Not only were the FBI and its top experts excluded from a critical briefing of President Biden, but government scientists were reportedly warned that they were “off the reservation” in supporting the lab theory.

As previously discussed, many journalists used the rejection of the lab theory to paint Trump as a bigot. By the time Biden became president, not only were certain government officials heavily invested in the zoonotic or natural origin theory, but so were many in the media.

Reporters used opposition to the lab theory as another opportunity to pound their chests and signal their virtue.

MSNBC’s Nicolle Wallace mocked Trump and others for spreading one of his favorite “conspiracy theories.” MSNBC’s Kasie Hunt insisted that “we know it’s been debunked that this virus was manmade or modified,”

MSNBC’s Joy Reid also called the lab leak theory “debunked bunkum,” while CNN reporter Drew Griffin criticized spreading the “widely debunked” theory. CNN host Fareed Zakaria told viewers that “the far right has now found its own virus conspiracy theory” in the lab leak.

NBC News’s Janis Mackey Frayer described it as the “heart of conspiracy theories.”

The Washington Post was particularly dogmatic. When Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark) raised the theory, he was chastised for “repeat[ing] a fringe theory suggesting that the ongoing spread of a coronavirus is connected to research in the disease-ravaged epicenter of Wuhan, China.”

Likewise, after Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) mentioned the lab theory, Post Fact Checker Glenn Kessler mocked him: “I fear @tedcruz missed the scientific animation in the video that shows how it is virtually impossible for this virus jump from the lab. Or the many interviews with actual scientists. We deal in facts, and viewers can judge for themselves.”

As these efforts failed and more information emerged supporting the lab theory, many media figures just looked at their shoes and shrugged. Others became more ardent. In 2021, New York Times science and health reporter Apoorva Mandavilli was still calling on reporters not to mention the “racist” lab theory.

In Kessler’s case, he wrote that the lab theory was “suddenly credible” as if it had sprung from the head of Zeus rather than having been supported for years by scientists, many of whom had been canceled and banned.

As these figures were attacking reports, Biden officials were sitting on these reports. Figures like Fauci did nothing to support those academics being canceled or censored for raising the theory.

The very figures claiming to battle “disinformation” were suppressing opposing views that have now been vindicated as credible. It was not only the lab theory. In my recent book, I discuss how signatories of the Great Barrington Declaration were fired or disciplined by their schools or associations for questioning COVID-19 policies.

The suppression of the lab theory proves the ultimate fallacy of censorship. Throughout history, censorship has never succeeded. It has never stopped a single idea or a movement. It has a perfect failure rate. Ideas, like water, have a way of finding their way out in time.

Yet, as the last few years have shown, it does succeed in imposing costs on those with dissenting views. For years, figures like Bhattacharya (who was recently awarded the prestigious Intellectual Freedom Award by the American Academy of Sciences and Letters) were hounded and marginalized.

Others opposed Bhattacharya’s right to offer his scientific views, even under oath. For example, in one hearing, Rep. Raja Krishnamoorthi (D-Ill.) expressed disgust that Bhattacharya was even allowed to testify as “a purveyor of COVID-19 misinformation.”

Los Angeles Times columnist Michael Hiltzik decried an event associated with Bhattacharya, writing that “we’re living in an upside-down world” because Stanford University allowed dissenting scientists to speak at a scientific forum. Hiltzik also wrote a column titled “The COVID lab leak claim isn’t just an attack on science, but a threat to public health.”

One of the saddest aspects of this story is that many of these figures in government, academia and the media were not necessarily trying to shield China. Some were motivated by their investment in the narrative while others were drawn by the political and personal benefits that came from joining the mob against a minority of scientists.

The CIA report does not resolve this debate, but it shows that there is a legitimate debate despite the overwhelming message of the media and the attacks on scientists. Of course, the same media and political figures responsible for this culture of intimidation have simply moved on. The value of an alliance with the media is that such embarrassing contradictions are not reported. At most, these figures shrug and turn to the next subject for groupthink and mob action.

Reprinted with permission from JonathanTurley.org.

The post The CIA Report: Why a Low Confidence Finding Is the Height of Hypocrisy appeared first on LewRockwell.

After a long and purple-haired national winter, something good is finally afoot. Something like normalcy is in vogue again; it’s even okay to say it out loud.

Months ago, when our winds began to shift, we never dreamed the dark fog could lift. We could not underestimate the machine. For years, we were trained to be quiet and sit in our collective misery while the crazed Left beat us into submission. We were herded into the dark non-binary universe of third-world encampments and safe spaces.

Things were nasty and upended there, even violating human nature—but we were told to embrace it, threatened with various punishments. The new sheriffs had new rules for everything: Beauty itself was now offensive—the uglier or more repulsive, the better. Rewarding merit was racist; being athletic was ableist. Contradicting the weird new narrative was forbidden, so faith, logical reasoning and real science were replaced by indigenous “knowledge” and groupthink. We were left in ruins.

It was a long, bad dream, maybe best captured by literary reference—the White Witch, the Wicked Witch, and Big Brother all rolled into one. We indulged our old hopes through other characters—Rocky, Sir William Wallace, Maverick, or my favorite, Aslan. One could find normalcy in old books and old movies, at least.

Now, here we are—bruised, but now emancipated—and if you believe Trump’s boldest prophecy, we’re even entering a Golden Age.

We sure hope he’s right. At minimum, we can enjoy a little American knockoff of Narnia’s thaw. Nothing on earth truly rivals Narnia, but the Narnian resurgence of joy is somehow felt here, too. Could it be real? So many wrongs suddenly righted; so many fortunes restored. The unjustly jailed, the censored truth, our denuded national character—all returning after years under evil political ice.

On the morning after the election, we had to pinch ourselves. It was a sudden and glorious goodbye to freaks and fiends. We sent some of the country’s most ruthless and unattractive people packing, along with their dumbfounded cheerleaders in leftist newsrooms. In their places stand former exiles—freedom, patriotism, laughter, and—in a win for tired eyes everywhere—good taste.

Weeks later, Inauguration Day was a celebration of manly decorum and American glamour, a return to a kind of stateliness once taken for granted. The despondent Hollywood set was nowhere in sight; this was ceremony done right. Weak and woke corruption were out, and American courage was back. People of all races and incomes were once again given permission to be prosperous and free—and even attractive!

Although we can’t predict our future success, we certainly won’t witness the gloomy Delaware beach scene—an old man sleeping through presidential hours. Was the sleepy Biden shoreline that inspiring? Most of us knew only the barren scenes captured in Biden’s prolific getaways—sand, with an umbrella staking out a napping spot.

With our changing of the guard comes a renaissance of style, too. We won’t pretend to enjoy crumbling cities, nor will we defer to the motley malcontents of Bizarro World. Instead, we’ll let brilliance run free; we’ll build, restore and enhance. Instead of recreating favorite third-world haunts, we’ll project our principles through beauty, prosperity and peace.

Speaking of beauty, we’ll also admire the palm promenades and old elegance of Palm Beach. Yes, it brings its own excesses—grand ideas, glitzy style, and some surgical wonders; but it also excludes the pansexual and purple-haired ghouls who have informed our national policy for years. Given a choice, it’s Palm Beach or bust for me.

This originally appeared on Restoring Truth.

The post It’s Palm Beach or Bust for Me appeared first on LewRockwell.

Abigail Shrier writes in the City Journal that the members of Trump’s “Cabinet of the Cancelled” understand the danger of government coercion because they have experienced it firsthand.  And so has Trump and thousands of his supporters.

Shrier does a service by reminding us of the intense attempt of the Biden regime to revolutionize our society by attacking our principles and replacing a merit-based color-blind society with a status-based society of privileges based on race, gender, and sexual preference. The Biden regime weaponized law in order to cancel people who spoke truth to the regimes’ official narratives and to silence people by censoring and imprisoning them. 1,500 Trump supporters were sentenced for attending a rally, and right-to-life protesters were imprisoned for opposing a practice that during the first part of my life the law considered murder.

With Biden regime protection, Child Protective Services considered it child abuse for parents to oppose sex change operations or fail to use a child’s pronouns chosen for him by DEI propagandists at his public school, and children were seized from “abusive” parents.  Large numbers of traditional Americans found themselves  living in a dystopian novel.

An effort was made to destroy the US military with DEI and mandated vaccination. Traditional military families turned their sons away from military service.

Covid “vaccines” were forced on those who had too much sense to submit to vaccination with an untested experimental and known dangerous substance.  The great horror of abortion advocates spread into the male population. Both genders lost control over their own bodies to coerced vaccination.

The examples are endless. Tulsi Gabbard was placed on a government watch list and subjected to airport harassment simply for being critical of the Biden regime.  Stanford University Medical School professor Jay Bhattacharya was “cancelled” by social media companies at the insistence of the Biden regime’s Surgeon General.  Elon Musk’s companies were targeted with regulatory harassment because he returned free speech to Twitter, now known as X. Skepticism expressed about the safety and effectiveness of the Covid “vaccine” got doctors fired, their medical licenses confiscated by utterly corrupt “medical boards” acting on Big Pharma’s orders under the protection of Fauci and the Biden FDA.  Others who interfered with Big Pharma’s profits were branded “enemies of the people” and threatened with arrest. 

Americans were not even permitted to object to males participating in female sports or to men gaining access  to female locker rooms by self-declaring themselves to be women.

During the Biden attack on America, the most serious crime was not treason or mass murder.  The most serious crime was opposition to DEI.

As I explained yesterday, the enemies arrayed against Trump and his supporters are in control of all American institutions, public and private. The federal bureaucracy is against him. His appointees must be culture warriors, because they are greatly outnumbered by a force that has been conducting culture war against America for decades.

The agenda of the Woke Democrats is no less than the revolutionary overthrow of the United States and its replacement with a race and gender status-based hierarchy in which white heterosexual males are second class citizens in law.  White males who vote Democrat are endorsing their own demise and are the epitome of insouciant dumbshits.

During the next four years the fate of America’s constitutional order will be determined.  

The post A Cabinet of the Cancelled appeared first on LewRockwell.

The original source of this article is Lux Media and Global Research.

The post Israel’s Fake ‘Cease-Fire’ Against Palestine appeared first on LewRockwell.

The unusual combat organization of the Ukrainian army is taking its toll.

In a classic military hierarchy Corps, Divisions, Brigades and Battalions each have their own staff and responsibilities. The Ukrainian army is using a more flexible but also chaotic structure of Operational Units with less control. The results are unnecessary losses on the battle field.

After the Maidan coup the Ukrainian government designated the eastern Donetsk and Luhansk areas held by separatists as the Anti-Terrorist Operation Zone (ATO) and put it under the control of the Ukrainian secret service SBU.

In 2018 this changed:

On 20 February 2018, Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko changed the status of the ATO zone from an anti-terrorist operation to “taking measures to ensure national security and defense, and repulsing and deterring the armed aggression of the Russian Federation in Donetsk and Luhansk oblasts”.

This allowed the Ukrainian military to take charge of the zones instead of the Ukrainian secret service SBU. As such, the ATO was renamed to JFO zone (Joint Forces Operation (Ukrainian: Операція об’єднаних сил, ООС, romanized: Operatsiya ob’yednanykh syl).

The Commander of the Joint (or ‘Combined’) Forces Operation is also the commander of the Khortytsia Operational-Strategic Group which is directing the war against Russian forces in eastern Ukraine.

The Operational-Strategic Group (OSUV) commands several Operational Tactical Groups (OTUs), each with their local areas of responsibility. Several brigades and/or battalions get temporarily assigned to each Operation Tactical Group to fulfill its tasks.

This scheme is largely seen as ineffective:

Operational Tactical Groups (OTUs) and Operational Strategic Groups (OSUVs) are temporary military administrative bodies created specifically to command troops within combat zones and adjacent areas. These entities lack formal legal attributes such as correspondence addresses, contact details, or designated military unit numbers. Their structure is flexible, with authority limited to units operating within their respective zones of responsibility. In contrast, the established Operational Commands (OCs) focus on broader responsibilities, including the manning, training, and ensuring the combat readiness of their assigned units.

In simple terms, Operational Commands are responsible for preparing troops, while units deployed to a combat zone are transferred to an OTU or OSUV, which plan and coordinate their combat operations. This division often causes conflicts at both tactical and strategic levels. OTUs and OSUVs do not oversee the condition of the troops; they assign tasks based solely on operational needs, treating units as abstract entities on paper. When a unit loses its combat effectiveness, it is returned to its Operational Command for recovery and reorganization.

Operational-Strategic Groups as well as Operational Tactical Groups lack the staff and dedicated resources to fight their battles. They have little control over their assigned units which also continue to receive orders from their Operational Command. Units thus lack a clear line of reporting.

The commander of the Joint Forces and the Khortytsia Operational-Strategic Group is in a very hot seat. He is responsible for the successes and failures in eastern Ukraine while lacking control over his assigned resources and the means to influence those.

Sudden unceremoniously changes in that position have happened frequently with the latest announced just yesterday.

Zelensky replaces commander of Joint Forces Operation – Interfax, Mar 15 2022

KYIV. March 15 (Interfax-Ukraine) – Eduard Moskaliov has been appointed the new commander of the Joint Forces Operation, and its previous commander, Oleksandr Pavliuk, is the new head of the Kyiv regional military administration, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said.
…
Gen. Maj. Eduard Moskaliov, a professional, has been appointed the new commander of the Joint Forces Operation,” Zelensky said in his video address on Tuesday.

—Zelenskyy fired commander of joint forces – Ukrainska Pravda, Feb 26 2023

President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has fired Eduard Moskaliov from the post of commander of the joint forces.
Source: President’s decree on the President’s website
Quote: “To fire Eduard Mykhailovych Moskaliov from the position of commander of the joint forces.”

—Recently dismissed Joint Forces Commander says he found out about his dismissal from news headlines – Ukrainska Pravda, Feb 11 2024

Serhii Naiev, Commander of the Joint Forces of the Armed Forces of Ukraine, has indicated that he learned about the presidential decree on his dismissal from the mass media on 11 February.

—Zelensky appoints 4 new high-level military commanders – Kyiv Independent, Feb 11 2024

President Volodymyr Zelensky announced four high-level military appointments on his website on Feb. 11, including the commanders of the Ground Forces, Territorial Defense Forces, the Combined Forces, and the Airborne Assault Forces.
…
The Combined Forces will be headed by Lieutenant General Yurii Sodol, former head of Ukraine’s marine corps since 2018.

Zelensky dismissed former Airborne Assault Commander Maksym Myrhorodskyi and former Combined Forces Commander Serhii Naiev.

—Zelensky Replaces AFU Joint Forces Commander Amid Criticism and Military Failures – Kyiv Post, Jun 24 2024

Late night on Monday, June 24, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky replaced Lieutenant General Yurii Sodol as the Commander of the Armed Forces of Ukraine (AFU) Joint Forces with Brigadier General Andrii Hnatov.
…
Sodol had been the Joint Forces Commander since February 2024. His tenure faced criticism from military observers.

Activist Serhii Sternenko called his appointment a “personnel disaster,” and People’s Deputy Mariana Bezuhla blamed him for failing to defend Kharkiv Oblast from a Russian incursion in mid-May.

Earlier on Monday, June 24, Bohdan Krotevych, Chief of Staff of the Azov National Guard Brigade, has formally requested the State Bureau of Investigation (DBR) to investigate Lieutenant General Yuri Sodol, the commander of the Joint Forces of the Armed Forces of Ukraine.

—Ukraine’s ​​Andrii Hnatov to head Khortytsia Operational Strategic Group soon – Ukrainska Pravda, Jun 26 2024

Brigadier General Andrii Hnatov, the new commander of the Joint Forces of the Armed Forces of Ukraine, will replace Lieutenant General Yurii Sodol as the Head of Khortytsia Operational Strategic Group.

—Ukraine replaces commander of eastern front after Russia captures another town – Reuters, Jan 26 2025

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy replaced the commander of the eastern front, the most heated battlefield of the Ukraine war, after Russian forces captured another strategic town there.

Brigadier-General Andriy Hnatov was replaced as the battlefield commander in the east by Major General Mykhailo Drapatyi, overall commander of ground forces, who will keep his previous duties. Hnatov was given a role overseeing training and communications.

Eduard Moskaliov lasted 11 month. Serhii Naiev lasted 12 months. Yuri Sodol was fired after 4 months. Andrii Hnatov had 7 month.

How Mykhailo Drapatyi, now in a double role, is supposed to better handle the chaotic organization is beyond me.

Reprinted with permission from Moon of Alabama.

The post Ukraine – Organizational Chaos, Commanders Fired appeared first on LewRockwell.

Well that didn’t take long. President Trump has said he wants to “clean out” Gaza and relocate its population to US client states Egypt and Jordan, which would of course be a textbook case of ethnic cleansing. It would also align perfectly with longstanding Israeli agendas to remove Palestinians from their homeland so that their territory can be seized and settled by Jews.

Speaking with the press on board Air Force One on Saturday, Trump said he talked to Jordan’s King Abdullah II about taking in large numbers of Palestinians from Gaza, and said he plans to speak with Egypt’s president Abdel Fattah el-Sisi about doing the same.

“I’d like Egypt to take people and I’d like Jordan to take people,” Trump told reporters, saying the Gaza Strip is “a real mess” and “literally a demolition site”.

“You’re talking about probably a million and a half people, and we just clean out that whole thing,” Trump said.

The president said that this new arrangement could be either temporary or long-term, but one would have to be extremely naive to believe that either Israel or Washington plan on emptying out Gaza of its inconvenient population, rebuilding it, and then bringing them all back to shiny new homes. Israel has a very extensive history of grabbing land from Palestinians and then refusing to give it back, which is why there are so-called “refugee camps” for displaced Palestinians that are as old as the state of Israel itself.

“Just five days into his second term as president, Trump left no doubt about what his intentions are for Gaza,” Joe Lauria wrote for Consortium News on Trump’s comments, adding, “He tried to present what he was saying as humanitarian concern, but only the most ill-informed person about Gaza would not see that he is talking about committing the crime of forcibly relocating a population.”

Trump supporters will no doubt defend his stated plans as a compassionate effort to rescue Palestinians from unfortunate circumstances, because Trump supporters are chowder-brained bootlickers who would defend literally anything their president did. But make no mistake: this is the advancement of an agenda to end the existence of the Palestinian people in their historic homeland, and would fulfill the darkest desires of the most depraved political factions in Israel.

Mere days after the Hamas attack on October 7 2023, Israel’s Intelligence Ministry produced a document proposing the removal of Gaza’s population to Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula. At around the same time, an Israeli think tank called the Misgav Institute for National Security & Zionist Strategy published a paper arguing that “There is at the moment a unique and rare opportunity to evacuate the whole Gaza Strip in coordination with the Egyptian government.”

Since that time both the Israeli government and the Israeli media have gotten much less shy about saying that ethnic cleansing is the plan for Gaza. A few weeks ago multiple far-right Knesset members wrote a letter to Israeli defense minister Israel Katz demanding the “complete cleansing” of northern Gaza using siege warfare and attacks on civilians to drive the population out of the area. In November of last year, former Israeli defense minister Moshe Yaalon stated unequivocally that Israel was indeed in the process of ethnically cleansing Gaza. In October, the Israeli outlet Haaretz published an editorial titled “If It Looks Like Ethnic Cleansing, It Probably Is”.

Trump: ‘Clean Out That Whole Thing,’ Meaning the Gazan People https://t.co/Rilt6zVYkc

Says he is asking Jordan and Egypt to take as many as 1.5 million Gazans in what would be an historic act of the crime of ethnic cleansing, reports Joe Lauria.

— Consortium News (@Consortiumnews) January 26, 2025

One narrative Israel and its apologists like to push is that this forced mass displacement would be “voluntary migration”, which is ridiculous nonsense. Obviously if you make a place completely uninhabitable and refuse to rush massive amounts of aid to them so that they can live, you are forcing them to relocate as surely as if you’d forced them at gunpoint. Giving people the choice to relocate or starve is not giving them a choice at all.

Israel’s plan for Gaza once its ethnic cleansing agenda is complete is of course to begin building Jewish settlements there. Last year Israeli forces sparked a minor controversy by sneaking extremist settlement movement leader Daniella Weiss into northern Gaza so that she could scout the land for future use. Back in April a Knesset member named Limor Son Har-Melech stated on Israeli television that there are secret plans within the Israeli government to settle Gaza after military operations are complete. This past November numerous Israeli officials attended an event brazenly titled “Preparing to Resettle Gaza,” just in case you needed it spelled out even more clearly where all this appears to be headed.

Trump’s comments help illuminate what he meant when he gushed about all the wonderful things that could be done with Gaza when speaking to the press the other day.

“Gaza’s interesting, it’s a phenomenal location,” he said on Monday. “On the sea, the best weather. Everything’s good. Some beautiful things can be done with it. It’s very interesting. Some fantastic things can be done with it.”

It remains to be seen if Jordan and Egypt can be bribed or coerced into participating in the empire’s ethnic cleansing plans for Gaza, but either way the last word I would use to describe those plans is “fantastic”.

_____________

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Elections have consequences and the remarkable return of Donald Trump to the White House has already led to a flurry of major reversals across numerous policy areas. The weekend newspapers revealed that these now included the longstanding Covid origins debate, which had largely disappeared from the headlines over the last year or two.

John Radcliffe, the new incoming CIA director, had long favored the lab-leak hypothesis, claiming that the virus had accidentally escaped from China’s Wuhan lab, and under the influence of Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, Trump himself had sometimes taken that same position during 2020. According to articles in the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal, the CIA has now reversed its previous position and declared that it favors that theory. Although that shift was not based upon any new evidence and was only expressed “with low confidence,” leading China-hawks such as Sen. Tom Cotton eagerly seized upon this announcement to demand that “China pay for unleashing a plague upon the world.”

Given our bitter ongoing Cold War with China, the practical impact of the new CIA verdict remains unclear. But coming as it did around the fifth anniversary of that huge global catastrophe, I hope the resulting news stories may refocus public attention on that important issue, which had otherwise vanished from the headlines.

My own longstanding interest in this topic had already been rekindled a few weeks ago by a sudden dramatic event of an entirely different type.

On December 17, 2024, Lt. Gen. Igor Kirillov, head of Russia’s Chemical, Biological, and Nuclear Defense Troops, was assassinated outside his Moscow home by an explosive device, with Ukraine immediately taking full credit for the killing and the assassin himself caught soon afterwards.

No one could remember the last time such a top-ranking Russian general had died under those circumstances, and given Ukraine’s total dependence upon Western financial and military support, few believed that its government would have undertaken such an extremely provocative operation without at least the tacit approval of its American and NATO paymasters. Indeed, leading British newspapers, closely linked to that country’s intelligence services, quickly celebrated the powerful blow that had been dealt to their Russian adversary.

Kirillov had no direct involvement in the bitter Ukraine fighting, so most assumed that he had been marked for death because of the controversial public positions taken by his organization early in the conflict.

Soon after Russian military forces poured across the border in late February 2022, Russia claimed to have found a network of dozens of biolabs mostly near their border, funded by the Pentagon and working with deadly anthrax and plague. Development of offensive biological weapons was blatantly illegal under international law, and Moscow declared that these posed an obvious threat to Russian society.

I had initially been uncertain whether to believe those accusations, which were so similar to the fraudulent claims of Saddam’s WMDs that we used to justify our own 2003 invasion of Iraq. But a few days later, Under Secretary of State Victoria Nuland, chief architect of our Ukraine policy, seemed to confirm those facts in her Congressional testimony, with both Tucker Carlson and Glenn Greenwald also noting the huge implications of her inadvertent public admissions.

Kirillov’s name had rarely been mentioned in that dispute, but then a few months later on August 4, 2022, he himself attracted even greater controversy when he held a public press conference to declare that there seemed strong evidence that Covid was an illegal American bioweapon, deliberately released against China.

According to many estimates, the Covid virus had already killed around 20 million people by that date, including more than a million Americans, so Kirillov’s accusations were momentous ones. Yet although his statements were heavily covered by the Russian media, they were almost totally ignored by every mainstream and alternative Western outlet, with my own article being nearly the sole exception. Twitter even launched a campaign of active suppression, taking the unprecedented step of suspending the official account of the Russian Foreign Ministry when it Tweeted out some of Kirillov’s information.

Gen. Kirillov was hardly the only prominent foreign leader to declare that the Covid pandemic was probably the result of an American biowarfare attack, and the same tactics of near-total Western media suppression had been regularly employed to prevent ordinary Americans from hearing those claims and wondering whether they might possibly be true.

For example, in my original April 2020 article I had noted the very early Covid outbreak in Iran, erupting in the Holy City of Qom and heavily infecting that country’s ruling elites.

As the coronavirus gradually began to spread beyond China’s own borders, another development occurred that greatly multiplied my suspicions. Most of these early cases had occurred exactly where one might expect, among the East Asian countries bordering China. But by late February Iran had become the second epicenter of the global outbreak. Even more surprisingly, its political elites had been especially hard-hit, with a full 10% of the entire Iranian parliament soon infected and at least a dozen of its officials and politicians dying of the disease, including some who were quite senior. Indeed, Neocon activists on Twitter began gleefully noting that their hated Iranian enemies were now dropping like flies.

Let us consider the implications of these facts. Across the entire world the only political elites that have yet suffered any significant human losses have been those of Iran, and they died at a very early stage, before significant outbreaks had even occurred almost anywhere else in the world outside China. Thus, we have America assassinating Iran’s top military commander on Jan. 2nd and then just a few weeks later large portions of the Iranian ruling elites became infected by a mysterious and deadly new virus, with many of them soon dying as a consequence. Could any rational individual possibly regard this as a mere coincidence?

This extremely suspicious combination of factors quickly led the top Iranian leadership and its media organs to accuse America of having launched an illegal biowarfare attack against their country, with Iran’s former president even filing a formal complaint with UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres.

But just as in the case of the later Russian charges, almost none of these explosive accusations were ever reported in the American media or that of other Western countries, so that few people in the West became aware of them at the time.

China had obviously been the main victim of the Covid outbreak and some of its government officials soon suggested that the virus had been brought to their country by the Americans participating in Wuhan’s World Military Games. But the Chinese subsequently went silent after ferocious counter-attacks by the Trump Administration, perhaps also recognizing that making such accusations without solid proof would be counter-productive and leave their country looking weak if they failed to forcefully retaliate. By then, China had already successfully controlled the spread of the virus, while Covid had begun sweeping across America, so they may have decided that since our own country was suffering the blowback from its botched biowarfare attack, no further response was necessary.

Those public statements by senior Russian and Iranian officials, heavily reported in their own media, were hardly based upon overwhelming evidence and failed to prove the accusations were true. But it seemed entirely unreasonable that they were almost totally ignored by our entire mainstream and alternative media, which successfully kept nearly the entire American public in a state of ignorance.

Even more unreasonable was the behavior of the numerous journalists and researchers who had been hotly debating the origins of the the Covid virus since the early days of the outbreak.

The official, establishment position promoted by the bulk of the mainstream media had always been that the virus was completely natural and had randomly infected its first human victim in Wuhan during late 2019. Meanwhile, a small but determined group of contrarian researchers and journalists—the so-called “lab-leakers”—strongly maintained that the virus was artificial and had been bioengineered, accidentally leaking out of a lab at China’s Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) and starting the epidemic in that city.

But although those latter individuals always claimed that they were exploring all possibilities and sources of evidence, none of them ever extended their discussion to include the biowarfare hypothesis, even after leaders in Russia and Iran had publicly proposed it. Instead, the Western media debate remained rigidly restricted to either the dominant narrative of a natural virus or the insurgent scenario of a Chinese lab-leak, with the third possibility always excluded from any discussion.

That bipolar consensus on the origins of Covid—natural virus or lab-leak—still remains in place today, a consensus now reinforced by the sudden assassination of the most prominent public figure who had challenged it.

Kirillov’s death prompted me to revisit these issues from years earlier, and I recapitulated and discussed these in a December article.

• Assassinating a Top Russian General
  Ron Unz • The Unz Review • December 23, 2024 • 5,600 Words

With my attention to the topic now reawakened, I began exploring additional developments. Earlier this month I devoted a long article to discussing and summarizing the Covid origins analysis of Jim Haslam, an independent researcher who had written a lengthy series of Substack posts over the last couple of years, then recently collected his material together and published it as a book.

Over the last few years, most of the Covid origins debate had taken place on ephemeral Twitter threads, and Haslam very helpfully gathered together and analyzed a great deal of this accumulated mass of evidence, coming to some striking and persuasive conclusions.

First, he mustered the absolutely overwhelming evidence that the virus was bioengineered rather than natural. As he demonstrated, most of the top virologists had quickly come to that same alarming conclusion soon after they began examining its full genome and discovered its very strange structure, while they apparently only reversed that verdict under heavy pressure rather than as a result of any new evidence or strong analytical arguments.

Haslam’s conclusions were based upon a combination of published accounts, leaked information, and declassified documents, and he summarized his reconstruction in a 2023 post:

• KGA was 60-70% lab origin.
• Bob said the RaTG13 alignment was “stunning,” but Tulane had previously been accused of a lab leak…
• Eddie was 60/40% via email and 80% in private…
• Andrew was “agnostic” but noted the unusual furin cleavage site.
• Mike Farzan, who discovered the SARS1 receptor, was 70/30% lab origin…
• Farrar was 50/50% lab origin but also funded self-spreading vaccine research…

What started as KGA’s lab leak ‘report’ slowly evolved into a natural origins paper. On Feb 4th, Eddie submitted the first draft, which speculated about possible reasons for a natural origin…

By Feb 12th, the draft had evolved from KGA’s lab leak report into Eddie’s natural origin paper. Nature Medicine’s editor replied, “Yes, please!” but they had to edit it down to 2,200 words and 30 references. Little space was left for nuance, and by Feb 25th, Eddie had convinced himself and the others that SARS2 had a natural origin…

The entire scientific enterprise (grants, funding, administrators, publication, patents, medals, Scripps 89.5% overhead) rested on the natural origins idea because otherwise, “it would shatter the scientific edifice top to bottom.”

As Haslam emphasized, part of the “smoking gun” evidence that had quickly captured the attention of those virologists was that a very long stretch of the Covid genome exactly matched that of a natural Chinese virus that had been catalogued by the Wuhan lab, the sole difference being the insertion of a short furin cleavage site, an addition that hugely enhanced the infectivity of the virus. Furthermore, this exact bioengineering proposal had previously been suggested in published research papers and grant requests.

Do the alignment of the spikes at the amino acid level – it’s stunning. Bob Garry email to Fauci

However, Haslam sharply departed from the previous lab-leak consensus on several important points. Nearly all of those past advocates had claimed that Covid had been bioengineered at the Wuhan lab, but Haslam argued that this was extremely implausible. None of the virologists at that facility or anywhere else in China possessed the technical expertise to do such work, nor had any of them previously published research papers indicating interest in that sort of project.

Instead, the primary author of the papers and grant proposals that amounted to a recipe for producing Covid had been Dr. Ralph Baric of the University of North Carolina (UNC), one of the world’ foremost viral bioengineers, who had long collaborated with the Wuhan lab and therefore received the genome of the natural Chinese precursor virus so closely matching Covid. So it seemed highly likely that Baric’s lab had produced the Covid virus, without anyone at the Wuhan lab involved in the project, and the behavior of the Chinese virologists strongly supported their claims of innocence.

Haslam also seemed to have cleared up one of the strangest puzzles regarding the pattern of Covid infectivity. A natural virus is almost invariably found in one or more local animal species, whose populations constitute its wildlife reservoirs from which it eventually jumped to infect humans. Yet despite enormous efforts, no such Chinese host species has ever been found.

Meanwhile, without much effort at all, five different North American animal species were found to have been heavily infected, including deer, and particular species of field mice and bats. Yet based upon other factors, we certainly know that Covid was not a natural virus that had previously been circulating in North America, so this anomaly had long puzzled many observers.

Haslam’s skilled scientific detective work uncovered that exactly these species were used as lab animals in Dr. Vincent Munster’s Rocky Mountain Lab (RML) in Montana. This strongly suggested that after its initial bioengineering, the Covid virus had been tested and had its infectivity tuned at that facility, using those particular animals for that purpose.

Prof. Jeffrey Sachs of Columbia University had served as the chairman of the Lancet‘s Covid Commission, and in 2021 he had co-authored the earliest scientific paper arguing that Covid was bioengineered rather than natural, then expanded on that highly-controversial claim in numerous public interviews. Haslam’s arguments seemed to have convinced Sachs, who mentioned the Rocky Mountain Lab in his long March and December interviews with Tucker Carlson, which drew many millions of views on Twitter and YouTube.

I felt that Haslam had made a very strong case that Covid had been bioengineered from a natural Chinese precursor virus, probably at Baric’s UNC lab, then tested and tuned at Munster’s RML facility, and I summarized and quoted much of his analysis in my long article.

Read the Whole Article

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In the course of 2024, the Wall Street Journal Editorial Board expressed signs that it is not entirely composed of venal nitwits who are owned by military-industrial, financial, and pharmaceutical interests. Especially encouraging were Opinion pieces enumerating the evidence that SARS-CoV-2 was, in fact, produced in a lab.

However, just a few days ago, the WSJ published a report headlined Trump Order Seeks to Stop Virus Research That Critics Have Linked to Covid in which the two reporters made mind-bogglingly stupid assertions such as:

Some Republicans have blamed gain-of-function work for the Covid-19 pandemic, asserting the virus leaked from a laboratory in Wuhan, China.

Many scientists and public-health officials have said there isn’t any public evidence that an experiment at the Wuhan lab could have created the virus that caused the pandemic.

Where does the WSJ find its reporters? Standing at a random bus stop in downtown Manhattan?

This morning the Editorial Board swept itself into the dustbin of history by publishing an Opinion piece (Why RFK Jr. Is Dangerous to Public Health) that is pure Big Pharma propaganda—repeating the same tired mantras, distortions, and ideological articles of faith we’ve been hearing since 1986, when the National Vaccine Injury Act granted liability protection to vaccine manufacturers.

Instead of addressing RFK, Jr.’s concerns about data transparency and safety when it comes to injecting children with products for which manufacturers bear no liability, the WSJ Editorial Board dismissed them out of hand. Of the Opinion’s many inanities, the most notable is the following:

He says he merely wants to ensure that vaccines are safe and thoroughly studied—who doesn’t?—and that Americans have access to more information. In Mr. Kennedy’s case, this means opening the industry to lawsuits by the trial bar.

Can the editors name a single other industry in the United States that is shielded from lawsuits in the event that its service or product results in injury or death? Would aircraft and car manufacturers maintain stringent quality control standards if they never had to worry about a lawsuit in the event of a crash?

On a Southwest Airlines flight in 2018, a fatigued fan blade broke free from a CFM International jet engine and penetrated a cabin window, causing a catastrophic depressurization and the killing a passenger. Following the disaster, multiple passengers sued Southwest. The company conducted rigorous diagnostic tests on these engines in its fleet to correct the problem. CFM International also launched an investigation, disclosed its findings, and issued service bulletin to CFM56-7B operators.

Contrast this with vaccine manufactures, who simply deny that there is a problem and dismiss anyone who claims there is to be a crazy conspiracy theorist. What is most astonishing about this state of affairs is that it was the vaccine manufacturers themselves who sought liability protection because, by their own admission, it is inevitable that some children will be injured or killed by vaccines.

With their smear of RFK, Jr. this morning, the WSJ Editorial Boards signals that it has—despite all the dreadful revelations of the last five years—remained willfully or unintentionally ignorant of the fact that American public health and public health policy are in a terrible state.

We the People want Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. to serve as our HHS Secretary because we want a man who cares about our interests, and not merely those of Pfizer, Dow Jones, the Murdoch family, and their Big Pharma advertisers.

This originally appeared on Courageous Discourse.

The post WSJ Editorial Board Sweeps Itself Into Dustbin of History appeared first on LewRockwell.

They call him “Bitcoin Jesus,” though he despises the nickname. His real name is Roger Ver. At any moment, Roger could be arrested for alleged tax evasion and mail fraud. But anyone familiar with his case knows the truth: Roger’s only “crime” was being the very first investor and passionate advocate for Bitcoin. For that, he faces 109 years in federal prison.

As devastating as this is for Roger, this case is less about him and more about you.

Roger is being persecuted as a warning from corrupt lawmakers who aim to set a precedent that could threaten your ability to own, trade, and profit from cryptocurrencies. This isn’t just about Roger’s freedom; it’s about the future of financial sovereignty for us all.

What you’re about to watch is a 20-minute documentary directed by acclaimed filmmaker Mikki Willis. He had this to say about Roger and the case against him:

“When Roger’s story was brought to my attention by my friend Angela McArdle (chair of the Libertarian National Committee), I was already overextended with production commitments. After one Zoom call with Roger, I knew I had to put everything on hold to do whatever I could to help him. I was deeply moved by the quality of his character and his willingness to sacrifice his own freedom to protect the freedoms of all people. Roger’s story is almost too wild to believe! Yet it’s real, and it’s unfolding right now as you read this. The clock is ticking on a man’s fate, his freedom, and your right to control your financial future.”

Please take the time to watch, respond, and share.

The post Bitcoin Jesus: The Prosecution of Roger Ver appeared first on LewRockwell.

A “committee” widely cited in the media as opposing the nomination of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as Secretary of Health and Human Services turns out to be a Bill Gates-backed “Astroturf” organization that accepts fake signatories.

The “Committee to Protect Health Care,” cited by NBC News and others, published an open letter declaring that doctors are “appalled by Donald Trump’s reckless decision” to appoint Kennedy. Thousands are said to have signed.

However, there is no verification process for signatories. (Breitbart News was able to sign up as Dr. Donald Duck, OG, of Disney World, FL, specializing in podiatry.) The anti-Kennedy petition simply accepts any signature from anyone.

Others have tried the same experiment, including fitness influencer Jillian Michaels and provocateur Alex Jones.

The Committee to Protect Health Care is a 501(c)4 organization, meaning that it does not have to reveal its donors.

However, a related 501(c)3 charity, The Committee to Protect Health Care Fund, does have to reveal its donors. It is funded in part by the “left-of-center Sixteen Thirty Fund (1630 Fund) and Hopewell Fund.” The Hopewell Fund, in turn, has “hired Arabella Advisors, a leading national philanthropy services firm, to manage its project hosting and fiscal sponsorship services.” The Sixteen Thirty Fund is likewise managed by the Arabella Advisors organization.

Arabella’s donors include “Bill Gates, George Soros, and Mark Zuckerberg,” according to the Capital Research Center: “Each of them has given a tremendous amount of money to (or through) the main network of Arabella Advisors-managed nonprofits and used it to create policy advocacy projects for their favorite pet sociopolitical issues.”

The term “Astroturf” refers to fake grass — as in, a fake grass roots organization, created to mimic public support. No doubt there are doctors who oppose Kennedy — and some who support him — but this widely-cited list is not reliable.

Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). He is the author of The Agenda: What Trump Should Do in His First 100 Days, available for pre-order on Amazon. He is also the author of The Trumpian Virtues: The Lessons and Legacy of Donald Trump’s Presidency, now available on Audible. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak

The post BREITBART: Doctors’ ‘Committee’ Opposing RFK Is Bill Gates-Backed Astroturf with Fake Names appeared first on LewRockwell.

Thanks, John Smith. 

Why are there so many Palestinian children in Israeli prisons? | Israel-Palestine conflict News | Al Jazeera

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Thanks, John Smith. 

US may put ‘very big bounty’ on Taliban leaders, Secretary of State Rubio says | Reuters

The post “The more things change the more they stay the same” US may put ‘very big bounty’ on Taliban leaders, Secretary of State Rubio says appeared first on LewRockwell.