Lew Rockwell Institute

The Cambridge academic Eamon Duffy first published The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England, 1400-1580 in 1992. The book’s premise is that the Medieval religion of England, including all of the bells, incense, candles, veneration of saints and pageantry of a highly liturgical religion, was still practiced day in and day out throughout England with vigor and belief when a top-down cultural revolution dissolved this essence of English life over a couple of generations. Duffy explores in detail the beliefs and practices at the parish level and how the grand history affected these pious people. It is rather well known that the Tudor king Henry VIII started the process in order to authorize his serial divorces. But Henry liked many of the old “superstitious” practices of the old religion. So it was only during the short reign (1547-53) of his son, the child king Edward VI, that the radical stripping of the altars occurred. Among the Protestant reformers, like Cranmer and Cromwell who probably were the real powers behind the throne, I am sure there was true belief in their iconoclastic form of Christianity. But to implement their reforms a bureaucracy was needed. Each bit of wealth directed toward Catholic religious practice, from books, to candles, to vestments, and more was winnowed and pillaged. Not directly stated by Duffy, but what I infer from his description of events is a classic money grab. So in the end, to understand the history of this period it is most instructive to follow the money. Even Wikipedia describes the dissolution of the monasteries by Henry as a money grab (See this version of ABBA’s “Money, Money’, Money”). Edward’s half-sister, Mary I, became queen upon his death in spite of his wish that the Catholic Mary not succeed him. She was dubbed “Bloody Mary” by her Protestant opponents for the number of religious dissenters burned at the stake during her reign. This was a short respite for Catholics, as art and color returned to English churches during her reign (1553-58). Mary’ Protestant half-sister Elizabeth I succeeded her (the three children of Henry who succeeded him to the throne, like a rock star, were each born from different mothers). During her long reign (1558-1603) Catholic practices were gradually but significantly snuffed out.

A preoccupation of Medievals was the fate of their souls after death.  From the reformers point of view it was the belief in Purgatory, a step of purification before going to heaven, that was a problem. Why was this important? People willed (Duffy gives a lot of evidence from wills) money to be remembered in prayers, masses, and dedications to physical objects in the church that supposedly reduced the soul’s time in Purgatory. Duffy describes the reform process and its effects.

For the reformers this act of distancing was in a sense deliberate, a necessary rite of exorcism. In his Displaying of the popishe Masse Thomas Becon has a passage in which he attacks the whole notion of commemorating the dead. In the course of it, he parodies the bede-roll [a list of people to pray for]:

And here in your mind and thoughts . . . ye pray for Philip and Cheny, more than a good meany, for the souls of your great grand Sir and your old Beldam Hurre, for the souls of Father Princhard and of Mother Puddingwright, for the souls of good man Rinsepincher and good wife Pinpot, for the souls of Sir John Huslegoose and Sir Simon Sweetlips, and for the souls of your benefactors . . . friends and well-willers.

This is undeniably effective, a rollicking but ultimately chilling reduction of the dead to the status of figures of fun, figures of contempt. From such puppets it was easy, and better, to be free. It is worlds away from More’s evocation of the dead, a generation before, as “your late acquaintance, kindred, spouses, companions, play felowes, and friendes.” The ripping out of the memorials of the dead, like the three hundredweight “in Brasses” sold to Thomas Sparpoyant at Long Melford for fifty-three shillings in 1548, was the practical enactment of that silencing and distancing. The dead became as shadowy as the blanks in the stripped matrices of their gravestones, where once their images and their inscriptions had named them, and asserted their trust in, and claims on, the living.

Thus, in the end the dead were disappeared from the everyday life of the living and the fabric of the community that bound the generations was torn apart, lessening the richness of future generations. Likewise, the woke iconoclasm of today, with its distortions of the past and destabilization of the present, is sure to damage the cultural fabric of tomorrow.

The post Disappearing the Dead appeared first on LewRockwell.

Rolling out of my crib before dawn today (I was in it long before the charlatans Harris and Trump began their theatrical “debate”), it being another September 11th, I wondered where Dick Cheney was.

And I was still wondering where Elmer Gantry was, having received the previous day a form message from RFK, Jr.’s faith-based engagement team leader, Rev. Wendy Silvers, that she was conducting a “pop-up” prayer service for the great Ciceronians’ debate, with Bobby Kennedy in the press room, rooting for his boy Donald.  Cheney and Harris vs. Kennedy and Trump.  A tag-team match perfect for the World Wrestling Federation (WWF).

I had just dreamed, or so I thought, that Cheney was out night-riding his white stallion across the Wyoming hills, long gun tight aside his saddle, cowboy hat slung back with a full moon shining on his melonic noggin, sea-shells in his ears as he grooved from side-to-side to the music of that other Kamala Harris endorser, Taylor Swift. It’s always wonderful, wonderful, oh so wonderful to get political advice from a fully-clothed warmonger and a scantily-clad diva.

In my dream I heard another voice as night rider Dick ripped off his earphones and pulled back on the reins.  “Dick, Dick,” an eerie voice rang out:

‘If you want to save your soul from hell a-riding on our range,
Then cowboy change your ways today or with us you will ride
-try’ng to catch the devil’s herd
Across these endless skies’
Yippee-yi-ay, yippee-yi-o,
The ghost herd in the sky.

That was it, I threw my old clothes on and headed up the hill to the lake to clear my mind of such a nasty flic.  Dick hadn’t changed his ways since 2001, except to embrace Democratic war making instead of Republican.  Actually, that’s wrong, for as Mr. Neocon, a signer of the bloodthirsty neo-conservative document the Project for the New American Century, he always welcomed and got bipartisan support to attack Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, and Iran. The neo-cons who run the Democrats and Republicans alike, and whose document “Rebuilding America’s Defenses” most interestingly stated long before COVID-19 that “advanced forms of biological warfare that can ‘target’ specific genotypes may transform biological warfare from the realm of terror to a politically useful tool.”

You don’t say.

There was no need for these neocons to mention the Palestinians, of course, for their slaughter was guaranteed, not only because so many neocons held dual Israeli-U.S. citizenship, but because of all the Israel Lobby money flowing into the pockets of Congress.  As for the Russians, attacking them was as American as cherry pie, for they were always coming to get us, just as those sneaky Chinese had their eyes on seizing California.

It was still semi-dark as I walked, with just the fingertips of a rosy-fingered dawn raising its hand over East Mountain.  At the lake’s edge, two men in woolen caps and parkas sat meditating facing the mist-rising lake.  I wondered why.  Were they seeking personal peace of mind or illumination about the ruthless ways of their government?  As I walked, I talked to myself and my own ghosts, watching as I went the disappearing vapor and the sky slowly turning blue.

I remembered that September 11, 2001 was also a very blue day until the black clouds flew in and that sparkling morning turned to smoke and dust as the three World Trade Center buildings were brought down by controlled demolition, not airplanes.

But where was Dick Cheney that morning?  Not out on the range, no siree.  He was riding herd on another roundup.  He had taken control of the U.S. government under a Continuity of Government (COG) declaration, as Peter Dale Scott has documented:

Within hours of the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on Sept. 11, 2001, Dick Cheney in effect took command of the national security operations of the federal government. Quickly and instinctively, he began to act in response to two longstanding beliefs: that the great dangers facing the United States justified almost any response, whether or not legal; and that the presidency needed vastly to enhance its authority, which had been unjustifiably and dangerously weakened in the post-Vietnam, post-Watergate years.

James Mann has argued that COG implementation was the “hidden backdrop” to Cheney’s actions on 9/11, when he “urged President Bush to stay out of Washington,” and later removed himself to more than one “’undisclosed location’”.

Scott and authors James Mann and James Bamford further show how Cheney and his buddy Donald Rumsfeld of “unknown unknowns” fame were for a long time part of the permanent hidden national security apparatus that runs the country as presidents like Bush, Obama, Trump, and Biden enter and exit the White House and are falsely held up as leading the nation.  “Cheney and Rumsfeld had previously been preparing for almost two decades, as central figures in the secret agency planning for so-called Continuity of Government (COG),” writes Scott.  “It was revealed in the 1980s that these plans aimed at granting a president emergency powers, uncurbed by congressional restraints, to intervene abroad, and also to detain large numbers of those who might protest such actions.”

Unlike this morning when I saw Cheney riding the range, on the morning of September 11, 2001, Cheney was in the Presidential Emergency Operations Center (PEOC) beneath the White House.  What exactly he was doing there I will leave to the reader’s research initiative. The great researcher David Ray Griffin’s many books about the attacks of that day would be a good place to start.  Let’s just say he wasn’t listening to pop music, not presidential recommender Taylor Swift anyway, for she was just eleven years old that day.  She was probably dreaming of writing her political music, Phil Ochs style.

Have you ever noticed how in all the presidential debates since 2001, the truth about what happened on September 11, 2001 is never discussed?  It is just assumed that the government’s version of events is true.  It is a third rail of American politics; mention it and your goose is cooked.

Just this morning at the 23rd anniversary memorial service of September 11th in NYC, Donald Trump and Kamala Harris shook hands. (Anthony Fauci would be outraged, having said that “I don’t think people should ever shake hands again.”) Was that handshake some sort of tacit agreement never to broach the subject of September 11th during the campaign?  To suggest that both the attacks of that day and the subsequent anthrax attacks were linked inside jobs sounds so conspiratorial. That’s a voter turnoff.  Even I find accusing the U.S. government of a false flag attack conspiratorial, since that’s exactly what it is, as I wrote years ago about the linguistic mind-control used to convince Americans that they are ruled by a secret cabal of ghost writers in the sky.  My words:

In summary form, I will list the language I believe “made up the minds” of those who have refused to examine the government’s claims about the September 11 attacks and the subsequent anthrax attacks.

1. Pearl Harbor. As pointed out by David Ray Griffin and others, this term was used in September 2000 in The Project for the New American Century’s report, “Rebuilding America’s Defenses” (p.51).  Its neo-con authors argued that the U.S. wouldn’t be able to attack Iraq, Afghanistan, etc. “absent some catastrophic event – like a new Pearl Harbor.”  Coincidentally or not, the film Pearl Harbor, made with Pentagon assistance and a massive budget, was released on May 25, 2001 and was a box office hit. It was in the theatres throughout the summer.  The thought of the attack on Pearl Harbor (not a surprise to the U.S. government, but presented as such) was in the air despite the fact that the 60th anniversary of that attack was not until December 7, 2001, a more likely release date. Once the September 11 attacks occurred, the Pearl Harbor comparison was “plucked out” of the social atmosphere and used innumerable times, beginning immediately. Even George W. Bush was widely reported to have had the time  that night to allegedly use it in his diary. The examples of this comparison are manifold, but I am summarizing, so I will skip giving them.  Any casual researcher can confirm this.
2. Homeland. This strange un-American term, another WW II word associated with another enemy – Nazi Germany – was also used many times by the neo-con authors of “Rebuilding America’s Defenses.”  I doubt any average American referred to this country by that term before.  Of course it became the moniker for The Department of Homeland Security, marrying home with security to form a comforting name that simultaneously and unconsciously suggests a defense against Hitler-like evil coming from the outside.  Not coincidentally, Hitler introduced it into the Nazi propaganda vernacular at the 1934 Nuremberg rally. Both usages conjured up images of a home besieged by alien forces intent on its destruction; thus preemptive action was in order.
3. Ground Zero. This is a third WWII (“the good war”) term first used at 11:55 A.M. on September 11 by Mark Walsh (aka “the Harley Guy” because he was wearing a Harley-Davidson tee shirt) in an interview on the street by a Fox News reporter, Rick Leventhal. Identified as a Fox free-lancer, Walsh also explained the Twin Towers collapse in a precise, well-rehearsed manner that would be the same illogical and anti-scientific explanation later given by the government: “mostly due to structural failure because the fire was too intense.” Ground zero – a nuclear bomb term first used by U.S. scientists to refer to the spot where they exploded the first nuclear bomb in New Mexico in 1945 – became another meme adopted by the media that suggested a nuclear attack had occurred or might in the future if the U.S. didn’t act. The nuclear scare was raised again and again by George W. Bush and U.S. officials in the days and months following the attacks, although nuclear weapons were beside the point. But the conjoining of “nuclear” with “ground zero” served to raise the fear factor dramatically.  Ironically, the project to develop the nuclear bomb was called the Manhattan Project and was headquartered at 270 Broadway, NYC, a few short blocks north of the World Trade Center.
4. The Unthinkable. This is another nuclear term whose usage as linguistic mind control and propaganda is analyzed by Graeme MacQueen in the penultimate chapter of the very important The 2001 Anthrax Deception.  He notes the patterned use of this term before and after September 11, while saying “the pattern may not signify a grand plan …. It deserves investigation and contemplation.”  He then presents a convincing case that the use of this term couldn’t be accidental.  He notes how George W. Bush, in a major foreign policy speech on May 1, 2001, “gave informal public notice that the United States intended to withdraw unilaterally from the ABM Treaty”; Bush said the U.S. must be willing to “rethink the unthinkable.”  This was necessary because of terrorism and rogue states with “weapons of mass destruction.”  PNAC also argued that the U.S. should withdraw from the treaty. A signatory to the treaty could only withdraw after giving six months notice and because of “extraordinary events” that “jeopardized its supreme interests.” Once the September 11 attacks occurred, Bush rethought the unthinkable and officially gave formal notice on December 13 to withdraw the U.S. from the ABM Treaty.  MacQueen specifies the many times different media used the term “unthinkable” in October 2001 in reference to the anthrax attacks.  He explicates its usage in one of the anthrax letters – “The Unthinkabel” [sic].  He explains how the media that used the term so often were at the time unaware of its usage in the anthrax letter since that letter’s content had not yet been revealed, and how the letter writer had mailed the letter before the media started using the word.  He makes a rock solid case showing the U.S. government’s complicity in the anthrax attacks and therefore in the Sept 11 attacks.  While calling the use of the term “unthinkable” in all its iterations “problematic,” he writes, “The truth is that the employment of ‘the unthinkable’ in this letter, when weight is given both to the meaning of this term in U.S. strategic circles and to the other relevant uses of the term in 2001, points us in the direction of the U.S. military and intelligence communities.”  I am reminded of Orwell’s point in 1984: “a heretical thought – that is, a thought diverging from the principles of Ingsoc – should be literally unthinkable, at least as far as thought is dependent on words.”  Thus the government and media’s use of “unthinkable” becomes a classic case of “doublethink.”  The unthinkable is unthinkable.
5. 9/11. This is the key usage that has reverberated down the years around which the others revolve. It is an anomalous numerical designation applied to an historical event, and obviously also the emergency telephone number.  Try to think of another numerical appellation for an important event in American history. The future editor of The New York Times and Iraq war promoter, Bill Keller, introduced this connection the following morning in a NY Times op-ed piece, “America’s Emergency Line: 911.”  The linkage of the attacks to a permanent national emergency was thus subliminally introduced, as Keller mentioned Israel nine times and seven times compared the U.S. situation to that of Israel as a target for terrorists. His first sentence reads: “An Israeli response to America’s aptly dated wake-up call might well be, ‘Now you know.’”  By referring to September 11 as 9/11, an endless national emergency became wedded to an endless war on terror aimed at preventing Hitler-like terrorists from obliterating us with nuclear weapons that could create another ground zero or holocaust. It is a term that pushes all the right buttons evoking unending social fear and anxiety.  It is language as sorcery; it is propaganda at its best. Even well-respected critics of the U.S. government’s explanation use the term that has become a fixture of public consciousness through endless repetition.   As George W. Bush would later put it as he connected Saddam Hussein to “9/11” and pushed for the Iraq war, “We don’t want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud.”  All the ingredients for a linguistic mind-control smoothie had been blended.

                                                  *

It’s getting dark now, the sun is setting and shimmering across the lake.  Shadows are falling, but to quote Dylan, “it’s not dark yet but it’s getting there.”  I hope to dream again tonight as I rock in my crib, not about Cheney and his ilk, not about Trump or Harris and the Spectacle, but maybe just about the lovely lapping lake I listened to today, thinking of Yeats’ poem, “The Lake of Innisfree,” set in the land of my ancestors, hearing its cadence that flows like a prayer.  It is always the poets who remind us that words can be used to traumatize or transport one into a beautiful dreamer.

I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree,
And a small cabin build there, of clay and wattles made;
Nine bean-rows will I have there, a hive for the honey-bee,
And live alone in the bee-loud glade.

And I shall have some peace there, for peace comes dropping slow,
Dropping from the veils of the morning to where the cricket sings;
There midnight’s all a glimmer, and noon a purple glow,
And evening full of the linnet’s wings.

I will arise and go now, for always night and day
I hear lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore;
While I stand on the roadway, or on the pavements grey,
I hear it in the deep heart’s core.

Reprinted with the author’s permission.

The post Another September 11th appeared first on LewRockwell.

I am absolutely convinced that until the U.S. Congress and America’s evangelical churches sever their ties with and devotion to the Zionist State of Israel, America will continue its societal, cultural, economic, spiritual and political collapse. I believe a strong case could be made for the proposition that Israel’s demise portends America’s demise—as the American government and Church have become surrogates of the Zionist state.

As many Middle East experts—in and out of Israel—have repeatedly said, Israel’s self-destruction is inevitable. And without divine intervention that forces the United States to separate itself from the apartheid Zionist state, America will continue to follow Israel—all the way to the grave.

No other country in the world could get by with the criminal atrocities that Israel repeats day in and day out, week in and week out and month in and month out.

Of course, Netanyahu could not continue his maniacal genocidal war against the Palestinian people without the assistance of several of the world’s leaders, most notable being America’s President Joe Biden, who is supplying Israel with the weapons of war that Netanyahu uses to murder hundreds of thousands. Yes, more than 300,000, NOT 40,000, Palestinians have been murdered to date. (See this report.) There is no contesting the fact that under both U.S. and International Law, Joe Biden is a war criminal.

The second leader facilitating Netanyahu’s slaughter of innocents is Turkey’s President Recep Erdoğan. The Turkish leader talks tough, but his talk is cheap. Turkey is Israel’s largest supplier of crude oil. All Erdoğan has to do is shut down delivery to Israel, and it’s game over. But he won’t do it.

And obviously, you could also add most of the leaders of the Western European nations to the ignoble list of Israel’s partners in crime.

When the war criminal and mass murderer Benjamin Netanyahu was invited to speak before the U.S. Congress and then received over 50 standing ovations from that body, our congressmen—from both parties—were showing the world that they are serving Israel, NOT the people of the United States.

It is well documented that the Israeli lobby owns both the White House and U.S. Congress—regardless of which party has control. I strongly urge readers to watch this brief video clip of the amount of power that the Israeli lobby wields in Washington, D.C.

And what is worse is the fact that America’s submission to a foreign government (Israel) could not have happened without the dominating influence of America’s evangelical churches over the last 70+ years, who have been preaching and proclaiming—from pulpits, schools, colleges, on radio and television, in rallies, newspapers, magazines, periodicals, etc.—that the murderous and idolatrous State of Israel comprises God’s chosen people and that the land of Palestine is the “Promised Land” for the Zionist state.

This erroneous prophetic doctrine was popularized at the beginning of the last century by the Scofield Reference Bible. Call it whatever you like, Scofield Futurism, Premillennial Dispensationalism, Christian Zionism, etc., it is the root from which all things Zionist have grown in these United States. And it is destroying this country!

I realize that I lost many evangelicals in the first paragraph of this column, but if you are still reading, the picture gets even worse. It’s really hard for us in America to truly comprehend the depth of the evil that emanates from Tel Aviv.

Writing for The Unz Review  (Ron Unz is an American Jew, by the way), Kevin Barrett wrote a column entitled Israeli Rapists and the Depravity of the Zionist Mind. It is more than sobering to read, but every American—especially every evangelical—needs to read it. I warn you that what follows is nauseatingly painful to read.

Anyone who doubts that “Israel” is an asylum for the criminally insane, and that the lunatics are in charge, must not be following news about the Sde Taiman torture facility. That is where a scandal erupted in early August following the arrest of nine Israeli reservist soldiers on charges of gang-raping a Palestinian hostage with a stick. (They were only charged because their crime was caught on camera, so the US pushed the Israeli authorities to go through the motions of a pro forma prosecution.)

In the world’s eyes, the scandal was that only nine of the torturers at Sde Taiman had been arrested. Israel’s most notorious torture camp, Sde Taiman had long been the site of regular and systematic infliction of the most depraved forms of torture imaginable.

Human rights lawyer Khaled Mahajneh, one of the few outside observers who has managed to get inside the torture prison, said: “The treatment is more horrifying than anything we have heard about Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo.” According to the Israeli newspaper Haaretz, more than 30 Palestinian hostages have been tortured to death at Sde Taiman since last fall.

But in “Israel,” the scandal was that the nine gang-rapists had been arrested! Immediately a “right to rape” movement broke out, supported by a chorus of voices throughout much of the Israeli media, and featuring pro-rape protesters gathering to show their rabid support for sexual violence at many locations around the country.

Almost as soon as word of the arrests leaked, a crowd of pro-rape protesters, led by parliamentarian Zvi Sukkot and Heritage Minister Amichai Eliyahu, gathered outside the gates of Sde Taiman. The two dignitaries incited the crowd to attack the guards, storm the torture camp, and free the rapists. A melee broke out as the right-to-rape rioters overcame the torture camp guards, helped by stand-down orders issued to police by supremacist minister Itamar Ben-Gvir, and ran wild inside the camp. But they discovered that the rapists, their heroes, had been transferred to Beit Lid in the Occupied West Bank.

That evening, throngs of rape-loving rioters descended on Beit Lid, invading a military court building and later a detention center. According to Le Monde:

Among them were masked, armed men in uniform, some wearing the insignia of Force 100, a unit accused of multiple acts of violence against detainees. Tally Gotliv, a member of parliament from Likud, the ruling far-right party, cheered on the rioters outside, along with two other far-right Mps.

The rioters were unable to immediately free the rapists. But shortly after the nationwide outbreak of pro-rape protests and riots, accompanied by a groundswell of pro-rape opinion in Israeli television and print media, five of the ten accused rapists were freed pending trial.

Since the initial protests and riots, the “right to rape” has been vociferously defended at the highest levels of Israeli politics and society. According to al-Jazeera:

On being asked by Ahmad Tibi, one of the Arab MPs within the Israeli Knesset last week if it was legitimate “to insert a stick into a person’s rectum”, Hanoch Milwidsky, a member of Prime Minister Benyamin Netanyahu’s ruling Likud party, responded: “If he is a Nukhba [Hamas militant], everything is legitimate to do! Everything!”

The United States government, in its dozens of unjust wars on almost every continent, has probably committed even more war crimes than “Israel” has. But Americans, for the most part, don’t vaunt their worst crimes. US officials were embarrassed by incidents like the My Lai massacre and the Abu Ghraib prison scandal, and some have worked hard to make such horrors the exception rather than the rule.

But in Israel, the worst forms of abuse are the rule, not the exception, and much if not most of the population, as well as its leaders, enthusiastically embrace systematic rape, torture, and the murder of defenseless women and children. As Robert Inkalesh writes: “The mere fact that Israeli elected officials supported the gang-rapists, who so badly sodomised their victim that he died of his wounds, tells you everything you need to know about Israel’s government.”

Is Israel’s right-to-rape frenzy an aberration? Unfortunately it is not. The Zionist occupation has spent 76 years systematically committing a long-term slow-motion genocide against the people of Palestine, and its morals have degraded to the point that comparing Israelis to the people of Sodom (ahl lut) might be an insult to Sodom.

The Israeli right-to-rape protests are not the settler colony’s first mass movement to exhibit almost unbelievable depravity. Huge mobs of Israeli protesters and rioters have been regularly blocking food trucks, and this at a time when UN officials declare that more than a million Palestinians are in imminent danger of starvation. And when the food trucks do get through, Israeli soldiers, steeped in the same genocidal mentality, wait till the starving Palestinians have crowded around the trucks, and then shoot them dead, sometimes over 100 at a time.

Many of the Zionists’ worst crimes explicitly target helpless women and children. Israel systematically murders children by various methods, including:

*Deliberately blowing up their houses, using an AI tracking system sadistically named “Where’s Daddy” designed to hold back on bombing until “suspected Hamas members” return home so their women and children can also be murdered.

*Routinely shooting children and babies with sniper rifles, often putting two bullets, one through the head and one through the heart, into the same small body. (This has been going on regularly for decades as a matter of de facto national policy, as reported by Chris Hedges in 2003.)

*Bragging about shooting pregnant women in the belly: One of the Israeli Defense Forces’ most popular T-shirts shows a visibly pregnant Palestinian woman with a target on her belly above the legend: “One shot two kills.”

*Regularly and systematically using bulldozers to bury large numbers of Palestinian civilians alive.

*Unleashing killer dogs to rip apart both living and dead bodies, and filming, posting, and celebrating such actions.

*Systematically murdering journalists; the total number killed since October, as of this writing, is 169.

Thanks to the peculiar form of criminal insanity afflicting Israel, Zionists of all stripes, at both the popular and leadership levels, brag about their horrifically depraved behavior rather than denying it, denouncing it, or at least feeling ashamed of it, as would normal people in a normal society (meaning virtually every other society on Earth.) Israelis are the only people who crowd hilltops and throw barbecue parties to celebrate watching Palestinian women and children being blown to bits, crushed under rubble, and burned to death with white phosphorus.

Thanks to the vociferous support for genocide expressed by a long list of top Israeli officials, the International Court of Justice has had no difficulty proving intent, which is normally the sticking point of genocide prosecutions. Netanyahu calls Palestinians “Amalek” meaning that they must all be exterminated, including women and children. Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant calls Palestinians “human animals” (who are therefore fit to slaughter). Parliamentarian Revital “Tally” Gotliv, a member of Netanyahu’s Party, advocates exterminating Palestinians with nuclear weapons, while another minister, Amichai Eliyahu, says “there are no non-combattants in Gaza” and insists that using nuclear weapons is “an option.”

As I read Barrett’s column, it came to me that Israel’s maniacal, murderous hearts are eerily reminiscent of the hearts of the Roman Caesars—especially beastly Nero, Vespasian and Titus—before and during the destruction of Jerusalem in 70 AD. What the Zionist Jews are doing to the Palestinians today is what the Roman Caesars did to the early Christians and to the Jewish inhabitants of Jerusalem and Judea and what the temple Jews did to the Christians before that.

In other words, Zionist Israel is a modern beastly system—as beastly as the beast himself, Nero Caesar.

Evangelicals that do not see the grotesque evil of Zionist Israel are blind. More than that, they are willingly blind. They don’t want to see the truth. As a result, “the salt [has] lost its saltness” and will be “trodden under the foot of men.” This refers to governmental tyranny. And the road to governmental tyranny in these United States is the road that evangelicals who embrace Christian Zionism are paving.

Reprinted with permission from Chuck Baldwin Live.

The post The Depravity of the Zionist Mind appeared first on LewRockwell.

To serve and protect, police are allowed to slander and destroy. Cops in many states and localities have acquired the right to lie about their shootings, searches, and practically anything else. Police have routinely planted drugs, guns, and other evidence to incriminate innocent people, while police labs have engaged in wholesale fraud blighting tens of thousands of lives.

From a trickle to a torrent

Supreme Court rulings turned a trickle of police perjury into a torrent. In 1967, the Supreme Court, in the case of McCray v. Illinois, gave policemen the right to keep secret the name of their “reliable informant” they used to get search warrants or target people for arrest. Law professor Irving Younger observed at the time: “The McCray case almost guarantees wholesale police perjury. When his conduct is challenged as constituting an unreasonable search and seizure … every policeman will have a genie-like informer to legalize his master’s arrests.” The Supreme Court created a judicial playing field on which police were the only witnesses who can safely lie.

In 1983, the Supreme Court ruled that government officials are immune from lawsuits even when their brazen lies in court testimony resulted in the conviction of innocent people. The court fretted that “the alternative of limiting the official’s immunity would disserve the broader public interest.” Honest government was not one of the “broader public interests” the court recognized that day.

In 1992, Myron Orfield, a Minnesota state representative and University of Minnesota law professor, conducted a confidential survey of Chicago judges, prosecutors, narcotics agents, and public defenders on Fourth Amendment issues. One Chicago prosecuting attorney observed that “in fifty percent of small drug cases [police] don’t accurately state what happens.” Twenty-two percent of Chicago judges surveyed reported that they believed that police are lying in court more than half of the time they testify in relation to Fourth Amendment issues; 92 percent of the judges said they believed that police lie at least “some of the time.” Thirty-eight percent of the Chicago judges said they believed that police superiors encourage policemen to lie in court. One judge did not even know how perjury was defined under the Illinois Criminal Code. After Orfield read him the technical definition, the judge replied: “Then there is sure a hell of a lot of perjury going on in this courtroom.”

In 1994, the Mollen Commission reported that “the practice of [NYPD] police falsification in connection with such arrests is so common in certain precincts that it has spawned its own word: ‘testilying.’” Federal appeals court chief judge Alex Kozinski observed in 1995: “It is an open secret long shared by prosecutors, defense lawyers and judges that perjury is widespread among law enforcement officers.” Former San Jose, California, police chief Joseph McNamara observed that “hundreds of thousands of law-enforcement officers commit felony perjury every year testifying about drug arrests.”

The consequences of pervasive lying

In Tulia, Texas, Tom Coleman, an undercover cop on the federally funded Panhandle Drug Task Force, carried out drug stings in 1999 that resulted in the arrests of 46 people — equal to 10 percent of the black population of the town. There were no independent witnesses to back up Coleman’s accusations of pervasive drug dealing in the low-rent farming community. As United Press International noted, Coleman “made no video or audio recordings during his 18-month investigation. No drugs were found during the drug sweep and later he said his only notes were scribbled on his leg.”

But his leg and his word sufficed for mass arrests, including 12 people sentenced to prison who had no prior criminal record. “Dozens of children became virtual orphans as their parents were hauled to jail. In the coming months, 19 people would be shipped to state prison, some with sentences of 20, 60, or even 99 years,” the Village Voice reported. The NAACP of Texas denounced the crackdown as “the ethnic cleansing of young male blacks of Tulia.” For his exploits, Coleman received the Texas Lawman of the Year award, presented by Texas Attorney General (and future U.S. senator) John Cornyn. Defense lawyers and civil-rights activists eventually exposed Coleman’s vast frauds. Gov. Rick Perry pardoned 35 convicts who had been wrongfully tarred by his accusations, but only after some of them had spent four years in prison. Coleman was later convicted of perjury but was sentenced only to probation.

Almost a thousand people have seen their convictions overturned in recent decades in cases that involved perjury or false reports by police or prosecutors. A 2018 New York Times investigation of police lying revealed “an entrenched perjury problem several decades in the making that shows little sign of fading.” More than 100 NYPD “employees accused of ‘lying on official reports, under oath, or during an internal affairs investigation’ were punished with as little as a few days of lost vacation,” the New York Civil Liberties Union reported in 2018.

The common practice of planting evidence

It’s a small step from fabricating guilt on the witness stand to creating guilt by planting evidence. Many police shootings have been exonerated by “throwdown” guns carried for emergency frame-ups. In 2001, a federal investigation resulted in the arrest of 13 Miami police connected to fabricating evidence or planting guns at the scene of three people who the police unjustifiably killed. In 2018, eight members of the Baltimore Gun Trace Task Force were convicted for planting guns on police shooting victims and other abuses. Police carried toy guns in their glove compartments or kept BB guns in their trunks to place at the scene of police shootings that might otherwise look like murder. More than 800 court cases were dismissed or overturned because of the Gun Trace Task Force’s crime spree.

That scandal percolated for years because Maryland treats planting evidence as the equivalent of jaywalking. A Baltimore policeman was convicted in 2018 of “fabricating evidence in a case in which his own body camera footage showed him placing drugs in a vacant lot and then acting as if he had just discovered them.” A man was jailed for six months for those drugs before the charge was dropped. The policeman kept his job because, as the Baltimore Sun explained: “Under Maryland law, officers are only removed automatically if convicted of a felony. Fabricating evidence and misconduct in office are both misdemeanors.” An ACLU lawyer groused that he “cannot imagine a more screwed-up, idiotic way of trying to manage a police department or any other public office” than continuing to employ a cop convicted for fabricating evidence.

Bogus drugs produce more scandals than police throwdown guns. In 2019, Jackson County, Florida, sheriff’s deputy Zach Wester was charged with 50 counts of racketeering, false imprisonment, fabricating evidence, and drug possession for framing more than a hundred motorists he stopped. Wester would pull cars over for crossing the center line and then plant baggies of narcotics in their vehicles. As Reason reported: “Wester kept unmarked bags of marijuana and methamphetamines in the trunk of his patrol car, manipulated his body cam footage, planted drugs in people’s cars, and falsified arrest reports to railroad innocent people under the color of law. His victims, many of whom had prior records or were working to stay sober, had their lives upended. One man lost custody of his daughter.” Wester’s perfidy exceeded his mastery of his body cam, and his videos undid him. He was sentenced to 12 years in prison for planting drugs.

While planting drugs usually involves a smattering of victims, Massachusetts shattered all records. In 2012, Massachusetts State Police drug lab chemist Annie Dookhan was arrested for falsifying tens of thousands of drug tests, “always in favor of the prosecution,” as Rolling Stone reported. Dookhan would add narcotics to tests which came back negative or would boost the weight so that a person could be convicted of drug dealing instead of mere possession. Her zealotry knew no bounds, such as the day “she testified under oath that a chunk of cashew was crack cocaine.” Dookhan’s brazen lab frauds went unnoticed even though she routinely certified samples as illicit narcotics without ever testing them. Supervisors marveled at her productivity, and colleagues called her “Superwoman.”

Five months after the Dookhan scandal broke, another Massachusetts state lab chemist, Sonja Farak, was arrested at home and charged with tampering with evidence as well as heroin and cocaine possession. The state Attorney General’s office quickly announced that it “did not believe Farak’s alleged tampering would undermine any cases.” Governor Deval Patrick assured the media: “The most important take-home, I think, is that no individual’s due process rights were compromised” by Farak’s misconduct.

No such luck. Farak had personally abused narcotics from her first day on the job in 2004 — sometimes even cooking crack cocaine on a burner in the lab and snorting meth and cocaine in courthouse bathrooms when she was called to testify. She detailed her abuses in hundreds of pages of diaries. But the state attorney general’s office insisted that she had only started consuming narcotics on the job a few months before her arrest, and they blocked all efforts to expose the full extent of Farak’s abuses. Massachusetts government officials could not be bothered to rectify the unjust convictions. Slate reported in 2015 that “district attorneys take the position that … prosecutors have no special duty to notify defendants that their convictions might have been obtained with evidence that was falsified by government employees.” Most of the victims could not afford lawyers to challenge their convictions.

More than 50,000 convictions were overturned, and the ACLU hailed “the largest dismissal of criminal cases as a result of one case in the history of the United States of America.” Hundreds of convicts were released from prison. But as Anthony Benedetti of the Committee for Public Counsel Services observed, “the damage has been done. Jobs have been lost, people have been unable to get jobs, housing has been lost, some people have been deported.” More than 20 states have had crime lab scandals since the turn of the century.

The union to the rescue

Police unions have finagled legislation that routinely enables cops to trample the truth after  they shoot civilians. Maryland police were protected by a “Law Enforcement Officers Bill of Rights” that prohibited questioning a police officer for 10 days after any incident in which he used deadly force. In Prince George’s County, Maryland, “a lawyer or a police union official is always summoned to the scene of a shooting to make sure no one speaks to the officer who pulled the trigger,” the Washington Post reported. Union lawyers were kept busy because that police department had the highest rate of shooting civilians in the nation. A 2001 Washington Post investigation revealed: “Between 1990 and 2001 Prince George’s police shot 122 people…. Almost half of those shot were unarmed, and many had committed no crime.” All the shootings, including those that killed 47 people, were ruled “justified.” The Maryland legislature purportedly repealed the Law Enforcement Officers Bill of Rights law in 2021, but the replacement law was quickly exploited to cover up police abuses. Yanet Amanuel of the ACLU of Maryland groused: “Every time there is an opportunity to give the community control of the police, Maryland Democrats at every level who say they support police accountability squander it by backing amendments pushed by the Fraternal Order of Police (FOP).”

Thirteen other states have similar “law enforcement bills of rights” that give sweeping privileges to police accused of crimes, including automatic delays before they have to answer any questions about their shootings. The Florida Law Enforcement Officer Bill of Rights entitles police to receive “all witness statements … and all other existing evidence … before the beginning of any investigative interview of that officer.” In a 2019 George Washington Law Review article on delays in interviewing police who shoot citizens, one police chief commented that “showing evidence in advance allows [police] to tailor their lies to fit the evidence.” Another police chief observed that that process simply gives police suspects “time to fabricate a better lie.”

In July 2023, the NYPD Civilian Complaint Review Board agreed to permit police to “watch surveillance footage, bystander videos and other video recordings [including body cam] that investigators plan to ask them about before giving their versions of what happened,” Gothamist reported. Police received that special treatment even though they had made almost 150 false or misleading official statements to the review board since 2020.

Many of the procedures discussed in this article exemplify how truth doesn’t have a snowball’s chance in hell against police unions. Regardless of how many brazen coverups occur, politicians will continue providing favored treatment in return for the cash and votes that unions deliver. Regardless of how many thousands of innocent citizens are slandered or worse, any resulting testimony or accusations will continue to be “close enough for government work.”

This article was originally published in the August 2024 issue of Future of Freedom.

The post Police Have the Right to Lie and Slander appeared first on LewRockwell.

The half-baked UNIT

Alexey Subbotin, an investor and entrepreneur, and Ji Luo, an investment manager running investment operations for family offices and a computer engineer by training wrote a paper on a proposed BRICS trade settlement currency they called the UNIT

(https://wp.unitfoundation.org/).

It is generally assumed by some of the few western commentators who follow the BRICS story that it will be the basis of a proposal to be put forward at the BRICS summit. A Russian specialist working with a Chinese colleague has the outward appearance of a joint Russian and Chinese government-sponsored project. But given the proposers’ backgrounds, this is not so.

Furthermore, I can find little merit and some serious flaws in the UNIT proposal. We can all agree the sense in 40% gold backing, but with 60% fiat in various currencies without gold conversion facilities but just valued day-to-day in gold is unnecessarily cumbersome, and the redemption proposal is impractical. The inclusion of blockchain technology is unnecessary, exposing a poor understanding of the relationship between money and credit. Proof of this is the absence of any mention of interest rates on the proposed currency.

In any event, for a currency to be credible the arrangements must be as simple as possible and easily understood to maximise confidence in it for its users. The UNIT fails on these grounds alone.

The reason for reviving this topic (which I wrote about in March) is that there is already mounting speculation about this proposal for a trade settlement currency being on the summit agenda. But from various statements (Deputy Foreign Minister Sergey Ryabkov, and Sergey Glazyev with responsibility for the Eurasian Economic Union currency project particularly) we can forget the UNIT and if a trade settlement currency is proposed it will probably be as an aspiration requiring further discussion.

The speed with which problems for the dollar is mounting suggests that there is insufficient time for leisurely deliberations within the BRICS membership, doubtless in conjunction with the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation and the Eurasian Economic Union, in order to come to an agreement on this issue. Instead, either for defensive or offensive anti-dollar reasons, it makes more sense to implement a proper gold standard which BRICS members can have the option to use or not for trade settlements between them. It could be set up in a matter of a month or two rather than years, and in the face of a collapsing dollar may well have to be.

There are also clear benefits of a gold standard for Russia, whose finances are already suited to it perhaps with some minor adjustments. Either for Russia or a BRICS currency, a proper gold substitute can be implemented easily and simply. To understand how simple it is, I shall describe it in a national context for Russia, but it can equally be established for backing an entirely new cross-border trade settlement medium.

A currency is always credit, imparting its value to all lower forms of credit denominated in it. The objective is to tie the value of the currency firmly to gold which is the ultimate form of money, so that the currency becomes unquestionably a gold substitute.

The standard model

Russia can easily establish the rouble on a gold standard and maintain it, because it has a low debt to GDP and low flat-rate income taxes. Her principal problem is the lack of credibility in the currency, which in its fiat form requires excessively high interest rates to stabilise it. A gold standard would allow these interest rates to fall substantially, and properly implemented allow the rouble to retain its purchasing power by turning it into a credible gold substitute.

The following are the basic principles required to achieve this objective.

1.     The central bank is to be split into two separate entities: an Issue Department and a Banking Department. The objective is to ensure that rouble banknotes and bank balances held in the Issue Department are freely encashable into gold coin and bullion.

2.     The separation between the Banking and Issue Departments must be clearly defined and confirmed in law. As separate entities, each shall have its own balance sheets, so that the credit activities of one are separated from or influenced by the other.

3.     The central bank’s gold reserves must also be transferred to the Issue Department.

4.     The quantities in circulation and issue of rouble banknotes, together with commercial bank balances arising from the exchange of gold for rouble deposits must be reflected on the Issue Department’s balance sheet, which is tasked solely with managing the relationship between the gold reserves and the rouble.

5.     The Issue Department must have the sole power to set interest rates with the single objective of maintaining sufficient bullion balances at all times. Interest rates will no longer be used as a tool for economic policy.

6.     The Banking Department will continue with its other functions on behalf of the Russian state, except for the setting of interest rates. It will act as it sees fit in the management of commercial bank relations, extending credit or withdrawing it when necessary to maintain stability in the overall credit system.

7.     Along with the power to set interest rates, the Issue Department will be empowered to maintain reserve balances (the counterpart of bullion submitted to it) paying interest to the commercial banks at a small discount to the official rate, which it sets.

8.     Any restrictions and taxes on gold coin and bullion must be removed by law. All foreign currency restrictions and controls must be removed as well to permit the free flow of bullion.

Currently, Russia’s official gold reserves are declared to be 2,336 tonnes. It is thought that between two state funds, the Gokhran (State Fund for Precious Metals) and Russia’s National Wealth Fund, Russia has a further significant holdings of gold bullion. Their holdings need not be folded into the Issue Department (though it may be advantageous to the funds to do so), but public declaration of their quantity would be helpful to establish the gold standard’s initial credibility.

The rouble must be defined as fully exchangeable by weight in gold grammes both as bullion and gold coin. New coin must be minted accordingly, perhaps with a face value of 50,000 roubles and exchangeable in those units (currently the equivalent of about $500, and similar to the value of a British sovereign). The time taken to design and mint the new coin may delay its introduction, but there is no reason why a bullion exchange facility cannot start immediately.

How it works in practice

The bullion exchange facility operates not through the Banking Department of a central bank, but through the Issue Department. In order for a commercial bank to have a credit balance with the Issue Department, bullion must be deposited in the first place. And it is here that the lessons learned from the 1844 Bank Charter Act come into play.

Banks eligible to open an account at the Issue Department can buy gold in domestic and foreign markets, where the lease rate for 12 months is currently less than 2%. We can take that as an indicated rate of interest that global markets pay to borrow gold or receive as depositors. Therefore, in one year a holder of 100 ounces of gold has 102 ounces. Meanwhile, the Bank of Russia’s key benchmark rate is 18%. The uplift in return for a buyer of gold in international markets depositing gold with the Issue Department is 16%, accumulating in a credible gold substitute. This is why the credibility of the standard is so important from the outset.

It now becomes obvious that Russian and other banks qualifying for accounts at the Issue Department will provide the gold deposits through international arbitrage to ensure that the Issue Department will rapidly accumulate all the bullion it needs to operate a secure gold standard. And it is equally clear that with the ability to regulate the interest rate, the issue Department can manage the quantity of its gold reserves. The remaining question is whether the Issue Department should have its liabilities covered entirely by gold, or by a lower level, such as the 40% mentioned in the UNIT paper.

There is no doubt that understanding it is the Issue Department’s interest rate which will control the gold position means that its liabilities need not be 100% backed. What is needed is simply a stable relationship between gold reserves and its substitute. Whether excess bank liabilities — that is additional to the gold held as an asset on the Issue Department’s balance sheet — are parked in the Issue Department or the Banking Department of the central bank should make little difference. It is the assets that match excess bank deposits on the issue department’s balance sheet which matter. And in the Bank of England’s Bank Charter Act of 1844 those assets were initially government debt.

In Russia’s case, it may be wise to minimise the Issue Department’s exposure to government debt to maximise the scheme’s credibility. Furthermore, Russia’s funding needs, apart from temporary war funding appear minimal anyway. For a new BRICS trade settlement currency, the creation of dependent credit may be best left to commercial banks entirely. Therefore, on balance, my opinion is that the Issue Departments of both cases should have gold as their dominant asset as close to 100% of its liabilities as possible, deriving its income from coin seigniorage and the difference between its official deposit rate and the rate paid to banks on their deposits.

It should be noted that the more credible a gold exchange standard is, the less the public will hoard gold coin, and the less bullion will be hoarded by private sector institutions and enterprises. Therefore, in its initial stages, maximum credibility is obviously the key. This can be rapidly achieved by the Russian banks supporting the plan, which they are bound to. Any bank on Russia’s SPFS payments messaging system can open an account with the Issue Department. This should be extended to any licenced bank in the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation and BRICS with secure messaging system access to the Issue Department. As well as acting as principals, these banks can operate on behalf of their customers. Russian oligarchs and draft-dodgers who have sold their roubles would almost certainly rush to buy them back, and even deposit gold with the Issue Department through the agency of their banks.

On current interest rate spreads, bullion inflows should be substantial: arbitrage with western bullion markets will ensure it. Given current sanctions against Russia, London and other markets under the control of the western alliance access will not be directly available to sanctioned banks, a factor which is likely to provide a significant boost to gold trade in Asian and Middle Eastern markets. Sanctions will not stop gold shipments. Furthermore, Russia’s success is bound to lead to imitators, almost certainly the Saudis, and if not immediately, the Chinese are bound to follow.

A rouble priced in gold will also make energy payments in declining fiat currencies even less desirable to Russia, which will have to be sold — for what? The divide between the fiat world and gold standard currencies would become a very wide gulf indeed. A new impetus for the delayed BRICS trade settlement currency is bound to ensue, particularly with Russia having the BRICS chair.

Alternatively, a gold-exchange standard for the rouble implemented on the lines above will be robust enough for BRICS and SCO members to use in place of a new trade settlement currency. Initially that may be difficult due to US sanctions against banks trading in roubles. But a collapse in the dollar, to a large extent accelerated by the introduction of gold backing for the rouble, would resolve that problem in not much time.

In contrast with the UNIT proposal, a gold-exchange standard on these lines would also work for a new BRICS trade settlement currency and is extremely simple to set up, perhaps with less than 100 tonnes of gold initially and an interest rate designed to attract further gold reserves through arbitrage. We can be sure that producers and merchants would prefer to be paid in credit tied firmly to gold’s value, instead of an array of fiat currencies with dubious value.

Reprinted with permission from MacleodFinance Substack.

The post BRICS and Its Trade Currency Problem appeared first on LewRockwell.

It’s hard to score goals in professional ice hockey. In a typical season, only thirty of 700 NHL players score more than thirty goals and only three players score over fifty.

About twenty years ago, I read of a defenseman who had just hung up his skates. Though he played effectively for a decade, this player never scored more than five goals in a season. On the day he announced his retirement, a reporter asked the now-ex-player how he’d like to be remembered. He smiled mischievously and said, “As a fifty-goal scorer.”

Often, how something is remembered differs sharply from how it actually was. And often, those who characterize their own conduct engage in revisionism.

—

In July 2016, I attended my 40th high school reunion. I enjoyed it immensely. I danced enthusiastically and at some length—no, I wasn’t drinking—with various women who, when I was 18, would have seemed much too old for me. At one point, I came off the floor on that hot night soaked with sweat. A former baseball and basketball teammate came up to me, put his hand on my shoulder, smiled and said, “Be careful. You’re not as young as you used to be!”

We both laughed hard. I knew he was right. And I probably shouldn’t have done those splits.

Four hours earlier, when I had arrived at the reunion’s check-in the table, one of my 430 classmates, Maura Dolan, looked up from her attendee list, smiled and exclaimed, “Mark Oshinskie, you were such a pisser in high school!”

Back in the day, a “pisser” was a wisecracker/jokester. My heart was lighter then. Life was simpler and less alienating. Phone-free people spent more time face-to-face.

Some have observed that people don’t remember what you did or said, but they do remember how you made them feel. Over time, people experience and see a lot and must select and compress what they remember. Thus, memories tend to be simple and binary. In four years, I might have been in one class with Maura. Maybe I said or did some funny stuff there; I don’t remember. But when I showed up at the reunion, Maura asked herself: did I like Mark, or not? She had mnemonically filed me as a pisser. Knowing this made me feel good and like her in return.

—

A few weeks ago, I flew back to New Jersey from Minnesota. When I wiggled into my window seat, I was wearing my anti-Coronamania t-shirt. The 26-year-old guy to my right told me that he had seen my shirt in the waiting area and liked it. I told him I had written a book about the Scamdemic and that I posted on the Net nearly each week about this topic since it began.

We talked the whole rest of the flight, asking each other many questions about a wide range of topics. Among these, he asked me what I sought to accomplish by continuing to write about the past four and a half years.

I told him that, as noted above, how an experience is remembered is important. During four-plus years of phony, alarmist Covid narrative, increasing numbers of people have gradually, belatedly figured out that the whole thing was a strategic, extreme, and extremely damaging overreaction based on a series of lies.

Some still haven’t perceived these lies. Others know they’ve been lied to but won’t admit that they were slow to figure this out. Many who bought or sold the overreaction lamely maintain that “We couldn’t have known” that this virus wasn’t so bad or that all of the disruption was “worth it, because it saved millions of lives.”

The media and government are doing their damnedest to preserve these foundational myths. Doing so assuages their audiences’ consciences and soothes their egos, which have deservedly taken big hits following their naive support of the absurd lockdowns, school closures, masking, testing-and-tracing and the epically failed shots. Perpetuating the disinformation that animated Coronamania also shields them from accountability for the destruction they’ve caused.

I write largely to dispel these lies. I want people to accurately remember what happened.

Some say that awakening people to the scam is important because it will prevent an overreaction to “the next Pandemic.” I’m not looking that far ahead. It’s important to tell the truth now, for its own sake. Of the few people who have engaged with me on this topic, most have relied on bogus “facts” that are easily debunked. If people predicate their views on these falsehoods, their memories will be faulty.

Napoleon said, “History is a series of lies, agreed upon.”

I’ll continue to bear witness to the Covid myths and illogic. The more people who do the same, the better. The Scamdemic’s implementers and those they conned want you to act as if the Scamdemic never happened.

—

I also write to link plainly visible, residual dysfunction to its Scamdemic origins. I want to remind people why social life has attenuated, why Americans are more divided than ever, why young people are academically, socially and psychologically damaged, why stuff costs so much, why there are fewer houses for sale and fewer jobs, why birth rates are declining and why people don’t trust the media, doctors, the government or mail-in election results, et al.

I stay on task by posting on Substack and by wearing my t-shirt in crowds. My book also tangibly, indelibly chronicles how disingenuous and destructive the mitigation has been. Censors can delete my internet posts; many of these were 404-ed in 2021. But there are hard copies of my book in my house and in many houses in many states.

In addition to writing and wearing a shirt, I still bring up the Scamdemic during direct encounters. This makes people uncomfortable and testy.

Good. Creating discomfort has value. How many times have you heard people say, in other contexts, that it’s virtuous to “afflict the comfortable?” By continuing to mention Coronamania, I’m afflicting those who were comfortable during that time, when billions lost age-limited life experiences, jobs and businesses, the ability to gather for weddings and funerals, killed themselves or died other deaths of despair.

The Covid overreaction deserves enduring focus. Many have proclaimed that people should “never forget” other dark chapters of human history. If the public isn’t continually reminded of what governments and the media have done since March 2020, these institutions will continue to shift public focus to the next, shiny object, media-designated crises here or abroad: foreign wars, monkeypox, J Lo, trans boxers, et al, ad infinitum.

I’m not so distractible.

Read the Whole Article

The post The Way They Were appeared first on LewRockwell.

When The New York Times tells you that the United States Constitution is a threat to democracy — As it did on the front page of its August 31 edition — you know that you are in thrall to exceedingly subtle minds. The Times only employs persons, both birthing and other, of the subtlest minds. You can tell because they are credentialed by our country’s finest institutions of educational credentialing.

They come to The Times fully equipped with the armamentarium of advanced, progressive, innovative, nuanced, cutting-edge modes of understanding our world — which, you’ll agree, is a pretty goshdurned complex place, and rather niggardly in yielding its secret workings. Hence, The Times has concluded that the Constitution is flawed, perhaps fatally, because it allowed for the election of Donald Trump once, and now, possibly, a second time:

“It’s no surprise, then, that liberals charge Trump with being a menace to the Constitution. But his presidency and the prospect of his re-election have also generated another, very different, argument: that Trump owes his political ascent to the Constitution, making him a beneficiary of a document that is essentially antidemocratic and, in this day and age, increasingly dysfunctional.”

The Constitution does not stipulate a particular election day, but subsequent US law established the first Tuesday after the first Monday in November as the day for federal elections (the states can establish their own election dates for state and local offices). This changed beginning in the year 2000, when Oregon legislated to conduct all elections by mail-in ballot and other states followed with alterations to voting methods beyond a single election day. The Covid-19 pandemic prompted states to permanently relax rules on absentee ballots and expand mail-in voting, under guidance from the federal agencies such as the CDC, while the CARES Act of 2020 provided emergency funding to implement procedures for mail-in voting in order to reduce in-person voting that might enable the spread of Covid-19.

All of that followed orderly legislative procedure. The result was widespread ballot fraud, especially in crucial swing voting districts, much of it arrant. Contrary to official narratives out of the “Joe Biden” administration and the salient organs of corporate news, the allegations of widespread fraud were not “baseless” nor were they “conspiracy theories.” Subtle minds schooled in nuanced, cutting-age modes of analysis agreed to ignore documentary evidence of ballot fraud because it disfavored their preferred candidate, “Joe Biden.” Subtler judicial minds subsequently dismissed challenges to official tallies.

Other shenanigans such as the $400-million that Mark Zuckerberg  (Meta and Facebook) injected into swing districts for “election administration and voter turn-out,” via his Center for Tech and Civic Life (CTCL), was not adjudicated in any court. The upshot of the “Zuckerbucks” prank was that polling offiicials in many precincts were replaced by Democratic Party activists who ended up counting the votes. The Federal Election Commission (after “Joe Biden” became president) decided that under federal campaign finance law, the contributions were not seen as illegal — though the “Zuckerbucks” scandal did lead to legislative reform in several states.

You might suppose in the years since the 2020 election that opportunity would be seized to materially correct the weaknesses of mail-in ballots, early voting, ballot “harvesting” practices, giant “balloting centers,” and the use of vote-tallying machines (Dominion, etc.) with modems allowing for Internet hackery. The best and simplest reform would be a return to paper ballots cast only on one election day, with voter ID and proof of citizenship (accomplished prior in voter registration), conducted in smaller, distributed precinct polling places that make hand-counting of ballots practical. Alas, this was too difficult for Congress, while the subtle, nuanced, cutting-edge minds working in news media were not interested in such straightforward reform and did not advocate for it.

Rather, the news media advocated for further laxity in voting rules. And so, now they are actually arguing about whether it is desirable for non-citizens to vote.  The “Joe Biden” administration allowed at least 10-million people to enter the country illegally since 2021 and have gotten a million or more of them registered to vote via motor-voter laws — automatic registration when an illegal alien gets a driver’s license, and ditto when they apply for various social services. Alejandro Mayorkas’s Department of Homeland Security has shrewdly distributed large numbers of these illegal aliens into swing districts of states crucial to the Democratic Party’s election chances.

The inquiring mind is prompted to wonder whether it is the US Constitution that is a “menace to democracy” or the Democratic Party. Mr. Trump is issuing communiqués on “X” (Twitter) that his party is paying special attention to voting fraud in the current election, with imputations of very severe punishment to cheaters and fraudsters. You might think that the Kamala Harris campaign would declare likewise. I expect Mr. Trump will put the proposition to her in their Tuesday debate.

Reprinted with permission from JamesHowardKunstler.com.

The post The Votes and Who Counts Them appeared first on LewRockwell.

Up to a million Ukrainians are now killed or wounded in the futile war. The 20 year long attack on Ukraine by the West, overturning elected governments, using the country as a battering ram to bring about “regime change in Moscow” and “break up Russia” has been a catastrophe for the people of Ukraine.

The country’s infrastructure and energy installations are largely destroyed, the valuable minerals and industrial base in the East have been lost, millions have fled the country, the youth is being destroyed on the battlefields, the birth rate is catastrophic and corruption is rife. In the history books this period should be known as “the Ukraine Sacrifice”. A sacrifice on the altar of US neocon imperial ideas, German Europe’s “Push to the East” and a decadent British political class (without public support) surrendering to Russophobia and leading the rhetorical charge.

On September 1st, the 500,000th Ukrainian soldier’s obituary was published in Ukraine. At least that number have in addition been wounded or are missing. The battlefields are notoriously covered with un-retrieved corpses, images of which never of course appear in western media, although recently the American Washington Post reporting on a video from a cemetery in Kharkov, quoted a Polish journalist:

 “It seems that there are twice as many graves of killed soldiers as there were… exactly a year ago.”

In recent days there have been reports of two catastrophic bombings of Ukraine training and deployment centres, one in Poltava where there were 200 dead and 340 wounded and a troop and military equipment concentration near Sumy where 80 died.

(These deaths contrast with 26th August Russian missile and drone attack on the whole of Ukraine – the biggest of the war so far – with BBC reporting only 4 killed! The targets were electricity substations, gas storage facilities and airfields.)

At the Poltava training centre two missiles hit the Poltava Institute of Military Communications—which housed not only a vital drone-technical program, and (according to the commander of the Ukrainian intelligence unit, Denis Yaroslavsky, young pilots) but valuable Swedish instructors for the forthcoming transfer of Swedish AWACS planes. 

The Swedish connection will not be lost on Russians who celebrate the famous battle of Poltava where Peter the Great defeated the Swedish army in 1709, ending Sweden’s imperial power in the region. A comment from Encyclopedia Britannicaseems ironically to echo the position of Ukraine today: “The Swedish invasion of Russia had already failed the previous winter, with the loss of their major supply column to the Russians and their failure to receive expected reinforcements. Despite the severe shortages of troops, artillery, and powder, Charles continued the war and besieged Poltava in May 1709”. The desperate Swedish strategy failed and they were defeated. For Charles then read Zelensky now!

War Going Badly for Ukraine

The Ukraine invasion of Russia in the Kursk region (it has been compared to Nazi Germany’s last desperate  campaign, the Battle of the Bulge in 1944) was a high risk tactic to force the Russians to withdraw forces from the battlegrounds of Donetsk and Luhansk and thus resist the very large advances into Ukraine held territory. It has not worked, not least because ammunition, troops and equipment were withdrawn to reinforce the Kursk invasion forces in which new recruits and foreign troops (including Americans, Polish and British) are taking part.

The Financial Times reports that the Ukrainian Armed Forces’ defence in Donbas was left without shells and soldiers after the offensive on the Kursk region, thus accelerating Russia’s breakthrough.

The initial attempt to reach Kursk and perhaps capture the Kursk nuclear power plant (as a future bargaining chip) failed and now Russian forces are pushing back.

The American Institute for the Study of War reports that Ukrainian friendly fire incidents have increased 400% due to poor training and severe fatigue and depletion of the forces. The Ukraine Armed forces chief Syrsky confirmed that new conscripts receive only 2 months training before being sent to the front line and others confirm that they are no match for the hardened professional Russian military.

Western Analysts Worry Ukraine Throwing Scarce Resources at Kursk

Desertion and the Cost of Avoiding Conscription

According to a CNN report desertion and insubordination are becoming the main problem for the Ukrainian Armed Forces

“They go to their positions once, and if they survive, they never come back. They either abandon their positions, or refuse to go into battle, or try to find a way to leave the army.”

In the first four months of 2024 alone, Ukrainian prosecutors opened criminal cases against nearly 19,000 soldiers who either abandoned their posts or deserted.

The desperate Ukrianian search for more conscripts as losses reach catastrophic levels is indicated by the rising price of the “White ticket” which has risen from $5,000 to $37,000, according to the MP Yurchenko. This is the cost now of the conscription exemption certificate charged by the corrupt Ukrainian TCC (Conscription Office) which daily captures men off the streets to send to the front. For some mobilization is a profitable business!

In general the war is going very badly for Ukraine as the Kursk advance is halted, Russia begins recapturing territory and large losses continue in the east. As the pro Ukrainian German journalist Julian Roepke of Bild Zeitung reports “The Ukrainian military is already mentally preparing to defend the Dnieper,” – in other words abandoning the Eastern provinces of Donetsk, Luhansk, Kherson and Zaporozhia.

While the Ukrainian army was able to take control of only one small Russian town of Sudzha with an official population of 6,000 people, the Russian army captured five Ukrainian settlements with a total population of more than 53,000 residents in August alone – including Novogrodovka, Krasnogorovka, Druzhba, Severnoye and New York. Krasnogorovka has fallen and Ukrainsk and Toretsk are about to fall and the strategic town of Pokrovsk (a critical rail and road communications node) is under grave threat. The populations of Pokrovsk and Kramatorsk are being evacuated. Roepke writes

“The Ukrainian soldiers I speak to can barely comprehend the catastrophe that is unfolding. Territory is sometimes being lost so quickly it is as if a retreat order had been given. They also consider the rotations that have already been carried out and planned to be dangerous for holding the front.”

Boris Johnson’s Catastrophic Legacy

In a recent interview the politician who sabotaged the Russian Ukrainian peace agreement at Istanbul in March 2022, Boris Johnson, (confirmed by the parliamentary leader of Zelensky’s own party David Arakhamia at the time) has just called for Ukraine conscription down to the age of 18 and long range weapon attacks on Russia. His deranged language included his assertion that “If I were a general I could lead the foreign troops against Russia”

The Johnson argument for more Ukrainian cannon fodder has been taken up by Zelensky who has urged Western leaders to help bring refugee men of fighting age back to Ukraine according to Bloomberg. There are some 650,000 Ukrainian men of conscription age in other countries. But there is a strange twist to this problem:

“Politicians from Poland to Hungary have said they will not send refugees back as long as the war continues,” and “much of Central and Eastern Europe is experiencing a labour shortage, and countries like Poland and the Czech Republic do not want to lose people.”

Russian Troop Build Up

The number of the Russian Armed Forces in Ukraine will reach 800,000 people by the end of the year, Ukrainian Deputy Defence Minister Gavrylyuk has said.

At the beginning of the year, this figure amounted to 440,000 military personnel, while now the Ukrainian Defense Ministry estimates the Russian Armed Forces grouping at 600,000 people.

Ukraine War Crimes in Kursk Attack

Ukrainian Armed Forces shot dead  a Monk at the Gornalsky Monastery during their invasion of the Kursk region. Archpriest Oleg Chebanov witnessed the shooting:

“The first thing they bombed and what was in their sights was the temple of the Gornalsky Monastery. It was not some administrative building and at that time, a service was going on there, and when the monks were hiding, and when they left, one of the novices was simply shot in the back.”

The Kiev government has for several years been running a campaign of harassment against the Russian Orthodox Church and its affiliated Ukrainian Orthodox Church whose members it has attacked and accused of treason. Two weeks ago the UOC was banned.

The Patrick Lancaster Channel has reported how Ukrainian soldiers in the Kursk region murdered a pregnant woman.

I investigate reports of civilians being targeted and killed by Ukrainian forces in the Kursk region of Russia. I found a man who says his pregnant wife was killed by a Ukrainian soldier while she was trying to protect her 1 year old son. The son was also injured. He asks the USA to make Ukraine give a Humanitarian corridor so he can retrieve his wife and unborn Child’s bodies and so other civilians can get to safety. He says Ukraine is making a genocide of Russians in the Kursk region. I show you what eyewitnesses say.

Kursk Residents Abducted: 83 of the hundreds of abducted residents of the Kursk region, who were taken by Ukrainian soldiers to the territory of Ukraine, received $25,000 for renouncing Russian citizenship.

Will we see the International Criminal Court issuing arrest warrants for Kiev politicians for these abductions?

Britain Main Driver of Kursk Invasion

Although, according to some reports, the USA was surprised by the Kursk invasion, The New York Times reported that the USA and Britain provided Ukraine with satellite images and other information about the Kursk region after the Ukrainian Armed Forces’ invasion in order to track the transfer of Russian reinforcements and

to enable the command staff to better monitor the movement of Russian reinforcements that could attack Ukrainian troops or cut off their possible escape route to Ukraine.

The UK has just restricted arms sales to Israel in case the government could be accused by the International Criminal Court of aiding war crimes. Might there not be scruples about supplying Kiev for its invasion of Russia?

This article was originally published on Freenations.

The post The Ukraine Sacrifice – Kursk Invasion Hastens Ukraine Defeat, Boris Johnson’s Disastrous Legacy, War Crimes in Kursk appeared first on LewRockwell.

In the 1970s when I served in the congressional staff and in the 1980s when I served in the executive branch, there was still some intelligence in the US government, with the exception of the Federal Reserve, where there has never been any intelligence.

Today there is no sign of intelligence anywhere in the US government. That fact is documented every day on my website.

As I recently reported, about 900,000 new jobs that had been claimed over the preceding year have just disappeared in a revision. A further downward revision could follow.

These non-existent jobs were the Federal Reserve’s evidence for a hot inflation-prone economy justifying high interest rates. All the time the Fed was preaching inflation, the Fed was contracting the money supply, a contraction that has been underway for 2.5 years. This in itself is proof that the “inflation” was really higher prices caused by the shortages the senseless Covid lockdowns caused. In other words, the higher prices were due to mandated shortages, not to inflation. A central bank too stupid to recognize this is too stupid to justify its existence.

Whenever the Fed contracts the money supply recession follows. If the contraction is too large and lasts too long, as it was following the 1929 stock market crash, the result is a decade of depression and high unemployment.

A contraction in the money supply means that the same level of economic activity and employment cannot be maintained at the same level of prices. Either economic activity and employment fall or prices fall. Historically, it has been economic activity and employment that fall first, and prices follow. Generally, that means profits fall.

Now that it has dawned on the dummies at the Fed that they have set a recession in place, the talk is interest rate reductions. Wall Street is salivating over a possible half of one percent beginning. For Wall Street, a reduction in interest rates means an increase in money, and it is liquidity increases that drive stock prices higher. What usually happens is that stock prices rise in expectation of the Fed loosening, but by the time the Fed loosens the economy is in a recession. So stock prices rise while profits fall, with the market banking on recovery to bring profits up to the level implied by the stock prices that have jumped the gun.

Things, however, can go wrong. Expectations of lower interest rates is a signal to start up home building. But if a recession is in place, who is going to be purchasing homes? If the builders’ loans are due before the houses sell, the builder goes bust.

In today’s immigrant-invader overrun America, there is a new consideration. According to even presstitute media reports, in blue cities immigrant invader gangs are seizing homes and apartment buildings, and soon, if not already, newly constructed homes. If you are sufficiently stupid to live in a blue city, you can go to the grocery store and return to find your home occupied by immigrant-invaders. The police will not remove them.

If you are stupid enough to live in a blue city, what this means is that you cannot risk going shopping, or to a medical appointment, or to pick up your kids from the school that indoctrinates them unless you hire a security service to occupy your home in your absence. You cannot possibly risk your home by going on a vacation. Builders will have to provide armed security for nearly finished homes, apartments, or any type of structure.

No, I am not delusional. This is what is already happening.

Keep in mind also my reports on The Great Dispossession. Federal regulators have taken away your ownership of your investments and bank account and given them, in the event that your depository institution enters financial difficulties, to the creditors of your depository institution. This is what is meant by a “bail-in.” If you thought you didn’t need to read my articles, you made a mistake. Use the search feature and find them.

To be clear, we already own nothing if there is another financial difficulty. Given the Federal Reserve’s record, such a difficulty is certain.

Will it be this time, or the next time, or the one after?

The post The Big Collapse Awaits appeared first on LewRockwell.

After the Second Vatican Council, having received no help to inspire a new spiritual revival and reluctant to reintroduce the old moral spirituality that had failed before, there was a new “pseudo-spiritual movement,” seen most clearly in religious life. This new “movement” was to do what the old moral spirituality had failed to do.

While Marxism was developed into Liberation Theology in South America and was seen as the way to change the world, it was Depth Psychology that was developed in Europe, which was seen as the way to change oneself. In both cases, returning to authentic, traditional, Catholic, God-given wisdom was rejected in favor of the latest wisdom of the world.

St. Augustine would turn in his grave, for the Pelagianism that he had spent his lifetime trying to destroy was alive and well and taking over the helm on the Barque of Peter. The slow and gradual spiritual deterioration that had set in since Quietism was now to gather a pace after the Second Vatican Council. For, if nothing else, the strong atmosphere of authoritarianism that had held the Church together before was suddenly lifted. The same sort of libertarianism that prevailed in the “swinging sixties” began to seep into the members of the Church, who soon began to vote with their feet.

The gap that was left when no document—nor any teaching—on the spiritual life was given at the Second Vatican Council was filled by the teaching of Depth Psychology, mainly implemented by ungifted amateurs. With the demise of the traditional, God-centered spirituality that once thrived in the Church, new secular missionaries rushed in to introduce their man-centered sociopsychological therapies of one form or another. All methods, all ways, and all courses, no matter how bizarre, that promised greater personal psychological well-being and maturity were in, while all courses that offered traditional spiritual growth in Christ were out.

My knowledge of these divisive times comes not from sifting through contemporary documents but from experiencing these horrors for myself, although it has to be said that they mainly affected those living in religious life. The laity continued with the same sort of moral spirituality as before, although the quality of a person’s religious identity tended to be assessed by their liturgical preferences, by which other Catholics judged them.

From 1969-1981, I was the director of a diocesan retreat and conference center in London, so I was well positioned to see what other such centers were doing in the United Kingdom and in Ireland. The center that I was running belonged to the Dominican Sisters of Oakford in South Africa. The Dominican General, finding no clear spiritual guidance from the Vatican Council, sent her sisters to seek it elsewhere. On the advice of the Dominican Fathers in Rome, Sr. Margaret Mary Sexton sent sisters to a yearlong course on Dominican spirituality in Rome. Acting on the advice of a Dominican sister who had studied Depth Psychology in Rome under Professor Rulla, S.J., another group was sent to study psychological renewal in Denver, Colorado, under the Jesuits in the United States.

Each year, different groups were sent to both Rome and Denver. The inevitable clash took place under a new General, Sr. Dolores, who sympathized with the sisters who were sent to Denver, Colorado, where professor Rulla’s teaching was disseminated and put into the hands of ungifted and ill-prepared amateurs. As Professor Rulla was a Jesuit, he had himself experienced the failure of that old moral spirituality in his own formation and in the formation of so many of his peers. He became convinced that a person’s “actual self” could only be transformed into their “ideal self” not by traditional methods of formation, which had been tried and found wanting, but by Depth Psychology.

Since I lectured in Mystical Theology at the Dominican renewal course in Rome, and as I was the director of the Dominican conference and retreat center in London, I was seen as the opposition. So, I was immediately sacked. Half of the community in the convent next to the retreat center, including the prioress and the novice mistress, moved from the convent into stables that I had renovated at the rear of the conference center. Here they awaited the approval of Rome for the new congregation that now thrives in New Forest.

Read the Whole Article

The post The Post-Vatican II Pseudo-Spiritual Movement appeared first on LewRockwell.

Self-serving special interests are delighted to fill the void when local journalism disappears.

The vast majority of social media is opinion, spin or all about me. Whatever passes for analysis is often cherry-picked data packaged to support the spin.

There are a number of dynamics driving this post-truth competition for attention and engagement, but they boil down to money and selfhood in the online era.

Money is an obvious dynamic: the tech monopolies in search and social media and the media conglomerates all reap billions of dollars in revenues from users’ attention and engagement, as the data collected from users is sold at a premium. The more time users spend online, the greater the revenues and profits.

Why do people spend such large chunks of their lives posting “free” content on platforms? Many, including myself, of course, are hoping to make money by attracting subscribers, viewers, sponsors, advertisers, etc. to their feed / site, while others seek to establish a selfhood online that is larger and more fulfilling than the one they have in the real world.

Changing our selfhood in the real world is difficult; it’s much easier to curate a carefully edited mise en scene version of ourselves and our life online.

What’s been lost in this frenzied competition for eyeballs and “likes” is the distinction between opinion and journalism. The post-truth cliche is that there is no distinction, that everything is mere opinion and spin, but this is not true: journalism is different from opinion and spin.

In the post-truth competition for attention and engagement, the more sensational the content, the better. In contrast, much of journalism is DBI: dull but important. It’s never going to attract the same attention as sensationalist extremes, and few are willing to pay for it.

The core claim of the post-truth era is that there are no facts, there are only ambiguities and interpretations that can be spun 360 degrees at will. Actually, there are facts, for example, the city council voted 5 to 2 to approve the transit station project, and the county received funding for the rehab of the bridge.

From 1988 to 2005, I was a free-lance journalist for metropolitan newspapers, paid to cover housing and urban design issues as well as other topics. Under the guidance of editors, I learned what I call the journalistic style of research, interviews, fact-checking and composition.

The basic idea is to interview subjects who are involved in the issue or knowledgeable observers, gather facts (who, what, when, where, budget, policies, master plans, etc.), confirm the quotes from the sources and if there was a controversial decision looming, make sure the competing views were represented, while making clear who had a financial stake in the issue.

I’ve endeavored to maintain the core tenets of the journalistic style in my posts from 2005 to the present.

Though few seem to notice, old-school journalism is still being done the hard way, and no, it’s not all opinion and spin. Yes, a point of view can be established–for example, the muckraking investigative journalist makes it clear that The Little Guys are uncovering the dirt the Big Guys have been successfully hiding from the public–but this is different from opinion and spin. It’s in plain sight, and part of the story being presented.

Yes, bias can slip in, for journalists are human, too, but the goal is objectivity–a standard that has been buried by an avalanche of spin, both institutional and online.

While most of what passes for “news” focuses on national and international events, what has more direct impact on our lives is what’s happening in our city and county. These local decisions are the beat of local newspapers, who pay journalists to do the dull but important work of showing up to county council meetings, public hearings, judicial hearings, interview elected and appointed officials and their critics–all the scutwork of journalism that actually matters in our real-world lives, as opposed to the make-believe “life” we present online.

While the precise percentage of mass media ownership concentrated in the hands of a few corporations is open to debate, that most of the mass media is owned by a few corporations is not open to debate. This concentration is especially apparent in the tech monopolies in search and social media, where a cryptic Orwellian message that you’ve “violated community standards” sends you to Digital Siberia without any recourse.

The 6 Companies That Own (Almost) All Media

These global corporations have little interest in local journalism because it’s expensive and rarely profitable. Local newspapers were once supported by advertisers, classified ads and subscribers. Craigslist and similar sites dismantled classified ads, and few younger readers bother subscribing to the local newspaper because “all the news is online for free.”

Yes, all the corporate-packaged and sensationalized news is online, but local journalism dies when local newspapers go under. Investigative journalism and shoe-leather journalism are time-consuming, unglamorous and do not lend themselves to sensationalization. Few people are willing to pay for this work via direct subscriptions to journalists. Yes, there are a few superstars with thousands of paying subscribers, but local coverage attracts few subscribers. The investigative journalists I know only survive financially because their spouse has a steady job.

Read the Whole Article

The post When Local Newspapers Close, We Lose What Matters: Journalism appeared first on LewRockwell.

War has broken out. There is no need for further pretence about it.

In the Washington Post on Monday, the headlines read: Musk and Durov are facing the revenge of the regulators. Former U.S. Labor Secretary, Robert Reich, in the British Guardian newspaper, published a piece on how to ‘rein-in’ Elon Musk, suggesting that “regulators around the world should threaten Musk with arrest” on lines of that which befell Pavel Durov recently in Paris.

As should be clear to all now, ‘war’ has broken out. There is no need for further pretence about it. Rather, there is evident glee at the prospect of a crackdown on the ‘Far-Right’ and its internet users: i.e. those who spread ‘disinformation’ or mal-information that ‘threatens’ the broad ‘cognitive infrastructure’ (which is to say, what the people think!).

Make no mistake, the Ruling Strata are angry; they are angry that their technical expertise and consensus about ‘just about everything’ is being spurned by the ‘deplorables’. There will be prosecutions, convictions and fines for cyber ‘actors’ who disrupt the digital ‘literacy’, the ‘leaders’ warn.

Professor Frank Furedi observes:

“There is an unholy alliance of western leaders – Prime Minister Keir Starmer, French President Emanuel Macron, German Chancellor Olaf Scholtz – whose hatred of what they call populism is undisguised. In his recent visits to Berlin and Paris, Starmer constantly referred to the threat posed by populism. During his meeting with Scholz in Berlin on 28 August, Starmer spoke about the importance of defeating “the snake oil of populism and nationalism”.

Furedi explained that as far as Starmer was concerned, populism was a threat to the power of the technocratic élites throughout Europe:

“Speaking in Paris, a day later, Starmer pointed to the far Right as a ‘very real threat’ and again used the term ‘snake oil’ of populism. Starmer has never stopped talking about the ‘snake oil of populism’. These days virtually every political problem is blamed on populism … The coupling of the term snake-oil with populism is constantly used in the propaganda of the technocratic political elite. Indeed, tackling and discrediting snake oil populists is its number one priority”.

So, what is the source of the élite’s anti-populist hysteria? The answer is that the latter know that they have become severed from the values and respect of their own people and that it is only a matter of time before they are seriously challenged, in one form or another.

This reality was very much on view in Germany this last weekend, where the ‘non-Establishment (i.e. non Staatsparteien) parties – when added together – secured 60% of the vote in Thüringen and 46% in Saxony. The Staatsparteien (the nominated establishment parties) choose to describe themselves as ‘democratic’, and to label the ‘others’ as ‘populist’ or ‘extremist’. State media even hinted that what counted more were ‘democratic’ votes; and not non-Staatsparteien votes, so the party with the most Staatsparteien votes should form the government in Thüringen.

These have co-operated to exclude AfD (Alternative für Deutschland) and other non-Establishment parties from parliamentary business as far as legally possible – for instance by keeping them out of key parliamentary committees and the imposition of various forms of social ostracism.

It reminds of the story of the great poet Victor Hugo’s membership rejection – no less than 22 times – by the Académie Française. The first time he applied, he received 2 votes (out of 39) from Lamartine and Chateaubriand, the two greatest men of letters of their time. A witty woman of the time commented: “If we weighed the votes, Monsieur Hugo would be elected; but we’re counting them.”

Why war?

Because, after the 2016 U.S. election, the U.S. political backroom élites blamed democracy and populism for producing bad election outcomes. Anti-establishment Trump had actually won in the U.S.; Bolsonaro won too, Farage surged, Modi won again, and Brexit etc., etc.

Elections were soon proclaimed to be out of control, throwing out bizarre ‘winners’. Such unwelcome outcomes threatened the deep-seated structures that both projected and safeguarded long-seated U.S. oligarchic interests around the globe, by subjecting them (oh the horror!) to voter scrutiny.

By 2023, the New York Times was running essays headlined: “Elections Are Bad for Democracy”.

Rod Blagojevich explained in the WSJ, earlier this year, the gist of what it was that had broken with the system:

“We [he and Obama] both grew up in Chicago politics. We understand how it works—with the bosses over the people. Mr. Obama learned the lessons well. And what he just did to Mr. Biden is what political bosses have been doing in Chicago since the 1871 fire: Selections masquerading as elections”.

“While today’s Democratic bosses may look different from the old-time cigar-chomping guy with a pinky ring, they operate the same way: in the shadows of the backroom. Mr. Obama, Nancy Pelosi and the rich donors—the Hollywood and Silicon Valley élites—are the new bosses of today’s Democratic Party. They call the shots. The voters, most of them working people, are there to be lied to, manipulated and controlled”.

“The Democratic National Convention in Chicago next month will provide the perfect backdrop and place [for appointing a] candidate, not the voters’ candidate. Democracy, no. Chicago ward-boss politics, yes”.

The problem was that the revealing of Biden’s dementia had pulled the mask from the system.

The Chicago model is not so very different from how EU democracy works. Millions voted in the recent European parliamentary elections; ‘Non-Staatsparteien’ parties chalked-up major successes. The message sent was clear – yet nothing changed.

Cultural War

2016 represented the onset of cultural war, as Mike Benz has described in great detail. A complete outsider, Trump had crashed through the System’s guardrails to win the Presidency. Populism and ‘disinformation’ were the cause, it was held. By 2017, NATO was describing ‘disinformation’ as the greatest threat facing western nations.

Movements designated as populist were perceived as not simply hostile to the policies of their opponents, but to élite values too.

To combat this threat, Benz, who until recently was directly involved in the project as a senior State Department official focused on technology issues, explains how the backroom bosses pulled an extraordinary ‘sleight of hand’: ‘Democracy’ they said, was no longer to be defined as a consensus gentium – i.e. a concerted resolve amongst the governed; but rather, was to be defined as the agreed ‘stance’ formed, not by individuals, but by democracy-supporting institutions.

Once re-defined as ‘an alignment of supporting institutions’, the second ‘twist’ to the democracy re-formulation was added. The Establishment had foreseen a risk that were a direct info-war on populism pursued, they themselves would be portrayed as autocratic and imposing top-down censorship.

The solution to the dilemma of how to pursue the campaign against populism, according to Benz, lay in the genesis of the ‘whole of society’ concept whereby media, influencers, public institutions, NGOs and allied media would be corralled and pressured into joining an apparently organic, bottom-up censorship coalition focussed on the scourge of populism and disinformation.

This approach – with the government standing at ‘one removed’ from the censorship process – seemed to offer plausible deniability of direct government involvement; of the authorities acting autocratically.

Billions of dollars were spent in raising up this anti-disinformation eco-system in such a way that it appeared to be a spontaneous emanation out of civil society, and not the Potemkin façade that it was.

Seminars were conducted to train journalists on Homeland Security disinformation best practices and safeguards – to detect, mitigate, dismiss and distract. Research funds were channelled to some 60 universities to found ‘disinformation laboratories’, Benz reveals.

The key point here is that the ‘whole of society’ framework could facilitate a blending back into the policy mainstream of the long timeframe and largely unspoken (and sometimes secret) bedrock structures of foreign policy – on which foundation many key élite financial and political interests are leveraged.

An outwardly bland ideological alignment focussed on ‘our democracy’ and ‘our values’ would nonetheless allow for the re-integration of these enduring structures to foreign policy (hostility to Russia; support for Israel; and antipathy towards Iran) to be re-formulated as the appropriate rhetorical slap in the face to the Populists.

The war may escalate; It may not end with a disinformation eco-system. The New York Times in July posted an article arguing how The First Amendment is Out of Control and in August another piece entitled, The Constitution is Sacred. Is it Also Dangerous?

The war, for the moment, is targetted at the ‘unaccountable’ billionaires: Pavel Durov, Elon Musk and his ‘X’ platform. The survival or not of Elon Musk will be crucial to the course of this aspect of the war: The EU’s Digital Service Act was always conceived to serve as ‘Brutus’ to Musk’s ‘Caesar’.

Throughout history, self-regarding and self-enriching élites have become dangerously contemptuous of their peoples. Crackdowns have been the usual first response. The cold reality here is that recent elections in France, Germany, Britain and for the Euro-parliament reveal the deep distrust and dislike of the Establishment:

“The alienation is worldwide, against the postmodern West. Europe will either distance itself from it, or become embroiled in the detestation of the “privileged ci-devant”. The end of the dollar is indeed the analogue of the abolition of feudal rights. It is inevitable, but it will also cost Europeans dearly”.

An eco-system of propaganda does not restore trust. It erodes it.

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

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