Lew Rockwell Institute

When I was a senior in college, one of my professors told me, “If you want to find a good translation of the Bible in English, you can find it in one that contains the word ‘verily.’”  Of course, that was back in 1982, when it would have taken a fair bit of legwork on my part to even identify the various biblical translations that contain the word “verily.” It would have taken even more effort to ascertain whether, individually or collectively, those translations were superior to others.

Jump ahead a few decades, and, thanks to the miracle of search engines, it would be a trifle to pull together a list of Bible translations containing the word “verily.” Nonetheless, I would still have to put in the effort to ascertain the merits of such translations, assuming that I was capable of making such judgments. Nowadays, however, thanks to the emergence of artificial intelligence, I can make a request for both the list and the evaluation of translations with and without “verily” and have all the work done for me in almost no time at all. What progress!

I mention these things to make a point—namely, that not even artificial intelligence can find what is not there. Let me offer an illustration. Our Lord concludes the parable of the wicked tenants with these words: “Therefore I tell you, the kingdom of God will be taken away from you and given to a people that produces the fruits of the kingdom” (Matthew 21:44 NRSVCE)

What happens to those who do not produce fruit in due season? Nothing good. Not even artificial intelligence, scouring all of Sacred Scripture in all translations in all languages, can find a psalm or canticle that praises the fruitless. Nowhere in Scripture, not even with the aid of artificial intelligence, will we find anything like this:

All ye barren branches, praise and exalt Him forever.
All ye orchards without fruit, praise and exalt Him forever.
All ye vines lacking grapes, praise and exalt Him forever.
All ye fig trees bearing no figs, praise and exalt Him forever.
All ye wheat fields producing no harvest, praise and exalt Him forever.
All ye nets with no fish, praise and exalt Him forever.
All ye bridesmaids with lamps but no oil, praise and exalt Him forever.
All ye salt without savor, praise and exalt Him forever.
All ye lights placed beneath a bushel basket, praise and exalt Him forever.
All ye talents buried in the earth, praise and exalt Him forever. 
All ye fruitless, feckless, and witless, to them be highest glory and praise forever.

Instead, such a scriptural search will show that the fruitless are gathered up to be burned (John 15:6). And there are related references to darkness, as well as wailing and gnashing of teeth (Matthew 8:12). What is not fruitful according to the divine mandate does not end well (Matthew 21:18-19).

Such images are on my mind because of recently released data illustrating the demographic collapse of the Catholic Church in the United States. From 1999-2022, the yearly number of adult Catholics coming into the Church in the United States has declined 58 percent. A recent Pew study indicates that for every 100 adults coming into the Church in the United States, 800 people leave.

Now, before we ask, “What can be done about this?” we may have to ask, “Can we even talk about this at all?” After all, denial is deeply rooted in bureaucracies. And let’s not forget McTeigue’s Axiom: “Most institutions would rather die than admit to having made a mistake.” After “the New Springtime” to “the Second Pentecost” to “Renew!” to “the New Evangelization” to “Eucharistic Revival,” and now, most recently, to “Synodality” and the newly mandated “Synodality Forever!” this is where we are. Somewhere out there, at least two Catholic members of the People Who Should Really Know Better Club are looking at these numbers and saying to each other, “I don’t know why this is happening. We had all those meetings!”

Read the Whole Article

The post Not Even AI Can Save Us Now appeared first on LewRockwell.

The failure to think clearly about government is one of the greatest sources of tyranny. The history of liberties lost is the history of patterns of abuses ignored and inductions not made.

People talk about the importance of ideas in politics. Often, it is merely the impact of a pretense of ideas. In Washington, fashionable ideas are the intellectual equivalent of lapel pins of the American flag. As long as politicians recite the latest phrase, they are credited with incarnating some grand idea or lofty principle.

Washingtonians become vested in Leviathan the same way that residents of other big cities become vested in their local NFL franchise. Washington logic begins and ends with deference. People genuflect to power and then rationalize their kowtowing by screening out evidence of abuses. The District of Columbia is the land of tautological reasoning by people smarter than the rest of America. Their rules of the intellectual game all favor big government.

Forbidden generalizations 

Why do people trust dishonest politicians to control their own lives? People often soundly judge the character of individual politicians, yet when it comes to judging politicians as a class, the fog banks roll in.

“Political reasoning” is often an oxymoron. Many people’s “political thinking” is little more than Pavlov buttons that rulers masterfully push. This is political thinking akin to a horse eternally balking at leaping over a very low hedge. The person sees the evidence, the trends, and then shudders at making even a little jump. It is as if people fear being lost forever in limbo if their feet leave the ground of safe surmises. Government schools and the mainstream media train citizens not to reach conclusions that condemn the existing political system.

If profound political errors were limited to people who have received little or no higher education, the problem would not be so perilous to democracy. But the errors of average citizens often pale in comparison to the follies of the educated elite. As legendary political scientist E. E. Schattschneider observed in 1960, “It is an outrage to attribute the failures of American democracy to the ignorance and stupidity of the masses. The most disastrous shortcomings of the system have been those of the intellectuals whose concepts of democracy have been amazingly rigid and uninventive.” It was the experts and intellectuals who systematically slanted political thinking and pronouncements in ways that unleashed government.

Faustian intellectuals

The longer intellectuals reside in Washington, the more credence they give to official buncombe. Instead of being revolted by b.s., they use it to fertilize their careers. Intellectuals are exploited to validate Leviathan and the political class, not for any wisdom they might confer.

Few things are rarer in Washington than thinking that goes beyond wrangling about how to best achieve goals decreed by politicians. Such “thinking” is usually little more than asking, “How can we best fulfill our master’s wishes?”

But in reality,  few intellectuals bother thinking. Instead, they strike the poses fashionable in their class that season. Nobel Laureate economist Friedrich Hayek defined intellectuals as “professional secondhand dealers in ideas.” A person is accepted as an intellectual not as a result of a Renaissance-like grasp of many subjects but because of recognized expertise in one subject.  Hayek stressed that intellectuals “judge all issues not by their specific merits but … solely in the light of certain fashionable general ideas.”

Politicians perennially defer to existing laws and policies as if they were the codification of all previous wisdom on a subject. Government agencies defer to their previous rulings, the laws, and to their political masters. Judges defer to the bureaucrats, the politicians, and to shelves of court decisions that previously deferred to bureaucrats and politicians. The fact that the U.S. government occasionally loses in its own courts does as little to curb its power as the occasional peasant uprising trammeled the Czar of Russia. The larger the government becomes, the greater the presumption in favor of perpetuating its own power.

Intellectual deference to Leviathan is also cumulative. The more power government amasses, the more homage it receives. There is no need to pay cash on the barrel-head for praise. A single genuflection by politicians is often sufficient to win undying devotion.

Throughout history, intellectuals have tended to understate the danger of political power. There have been brief periods in which they bluntly or accurately reckoned the likelihood that rulers would ravish or repress subjects. As long as court intellectuals were treated royally, they indemnified rulers for any and all abuses of the peasantry. As French philosopher Bertrand Jouvenal noted in 1945, “Authority can never be too despotic for the speculative man, so long as he deludes himself that its arbitrary force will further his plans.”

“Respectable political thought” by definition is incapable of admitting the danger of power. Respectable thought begins by respecting politics — and ends up ignoring government crimes and lies. President George W. Bush could not have so easily suspended habeas corpus if the intellectual elite had not previously convinced Americans that there is no danger of tyranny at home.

The high price of self-evident truths

Right-thinking Washingtonians quickly learn to avoid outlaw inferences. An “outlaw inference” is any induction which would contradict a self-evident truth.

And who determines the self-evident truths? The political establishment.

Outlaw inferences can result in instant banishment from respectable society — and from the jobs and contacts which assure a steady cash flow and plenty of invitations to social events. Washington’s self-evident truths function like an intellectual antivirus program — automatically deleting facts that contradict the verities upon which the political system rests.

At the time of the American Revolution, people recognized that the government’s authority to abuse one citizen put all citizens in peril. Blackstone, the British legal philosopher revered by many of the Founding Fathers, warned in the 1770s that for the government to kill a man or seize his property “without accusation or trial, would be so gross and notorious an act of despotism, as must at once convey the alarm of tyranny throughout the whole nation.”

The Founding Fathers fought the revolution based on early warning signals. They studied the words of British rulers and recognized the coming perils. But fewer people can hear the political alarm bells with each passing decade. Americans have been trained to view each government abuse in isolation. As long as liberties are snuffed piecemeal, no respectable person can say that there is a trend. Only alarmists worry about government abuses. Lessons drawn from political abuses are almost always isolated: that this particular politician should not have been trusted last time — or that particular policy was not optimal at that specific time.

Leviathan logic 101

The first principle of D.C. logic is that there is never enough evidence to condemn  Leviathan. Conversely, almost any dubious assertion is sufficient to sanctify or expand government power.

The prevailing D.C. rules of evidence rest upon trust in the current regime. According to Rep. Tom Tancredo (R-Col.), the key question regarding the 2002 congressional resolution to permit the president to attack Iraq was: “Do you believe in the veracity of the President of the United States?”

The Bush team sneered down any arguments against a rush to war. When Defense Secretary Rumsfeld was asked in February 2002 about evidence that Iraq supplied weapons of mass destruction to terrorists, he replied that “the absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.” This was Leviathan logic at its best, but Rumsfeld was applauded for his retort. Childlike wordplay sufficed for a justification to commence bombing foreigners. The fact that Rumsfeld’s standard would permit the United States to attack almost anywhere was irrelevant.

Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz commented on the eve of the Iraqi government’s release of a twelve-thousand-page report on its weapons: “If [Saddam] flatly denies that he has weapons of mass destruction, that’s good evidence [of his guilt]. If he comes forth with new programs that we didn’t know about, that’s good evidence.” Wolfowitz asserted that Saddam was guilty “until proven otherwise.” In another forum, Wolfowitz explained the “standard” which Saddam must satisfy: “It’s like the judge said about pornography. I can’t define it, but I will know it when I see it.” When the news media continued requesting evidence, Rumsfeld groused to the press corps on February 4, 2003: “The fixation on a smoking gun is fascinating to me. You all … have been watching ‘L.A. Law’ or something too much.” Rumsfeld earlier declared that there was almost nothing worse than a smoking gun: “The last thing we want to see is a smoking gun. A gun smokes after it has been fired. The goal must be to stop such an action before it happens.”

No dearth of evidence could negate the U.S. right to attack Iraq. Charles Hanley, a 30-year veteran Pulitzer Prize–winning reporter for the Associated  Press, traveled from suspected weapons site to suspected weapons site with U.N. and U.S. inspectors in Iraq in early 2003. He reported, “No smoking guns  in … almost 400 inspections.”  Hanley said such lines “would be stricken from my copy because it would strike some editors as tendentious, as … some sort of allegation rather than a fact.” The “fact” that Bush administration assertions were groundless was inconceivable — or at least unprintable — to editors.

In July 2003, Americans learned that the Bush team relied on blatantly forged documents on Niger uranium to justify the war. White House press spokesman Ari Fleischer responded to the controversy: “I think the burden is on those people who think [Saddam] didn’t have weapons of mass destruction to tell the world where they are.” This was the most creative absolution for the Iraq war.

In November 2005, at a time when more critics were asserting that the Bush administration deceived the United States into war, Vice President Cheney declared it was “not legitimate — and what I will again say is dishonest and reprehensible” to suggest “that the President of the United States or any member of his administration purposely misled the American people on pre-war intelligence.  The burden of proof was entirely on the dictator of Iraq — not on the U.N. or the United States or anyone else.”

In other words,  the burden of proof rests on anyone the U.S. government wants to attack. And U.S. government officials have the prerogative to dismiss any evidence foreign governments offer in their defense.

Exoneration via groupthink

There is a dearth of honest thinking about government in Washington in part because the conclusions are largely preordained. Anyone who reaches the wrong conclusions is likely to be ignored.

In the summer of 2004, the Senate Intelligence Committee issued its first report on the Iraq war. Committee chairman Sen. Pat Roberts (R-KS) announced that “the intelligence community was suffering from what we call a collective  groupthink” and that the groupthink “also extended to our allies and to the United Nations.” The “groupthink” verdict allowed the political herd to absolve its own stampede and helped defuse Bush’s biggest liability in his reelection campaign. The Senate committee postponed the release of a separate report on the administration’s deceitful use of the classified intelligence until after Bush was reelected.

“Groupthink” is not a problem: it is a career path for aspiring Washingtonians. An erroneous opinion is exonerated if it is shared by more than 80 percent of the experts. “Herd-certified” is the ultimate intellectual safety net.

The flip side of “groupthink” is the reflexive derision toward people foolish enough not to follow their betters. “Guilt by association” has a starring role in D.C. debates. The only grounds needed to make evidence inadmissible is that wackos believe such things.

In 2007, Fox News talk show host Bill O’Reilly declared that at the beginning of the war in Iraq,  “everybody in the country [was] behind it, except the kooks.” Thus, O’Reilly was justified in disregarding all opposition of the invasion. The fact that war opponents were kooks made irrelevant the bothersome fact that they were right. The “kooks” included U.N. weapons inspectors, the head of the International Atomic Energy Agency, many foreign governments, and journalists whose articles were too controversial for print.

Though the evidence for attacking Iraq was empirically flawed, the logic remained politically impeccable. The New Yorker reported in late 2006 that some White House officials had concluded, regarding Iran’s alleged nuclear weapons program, that “the lack of evidence means they must have it.” President Bush declared in August 2007 that “it’s up to Iran to prove to the world that they’re a stabilizing force as opposed to a destabilizing force.” Regardless of his own paltry record as a “stabilizing force,” Bush’s assertion failed to generate ridicule.

The fact that ideas often appear to drive public policy is no evidence that sound reasoning propels  the ideas. Politicians use ideas to consecrate their pursuit of power. Logic often has no more sway in political disputes than it does in fraternity drinking contests. As long as the ruling class has vast benefits to distribute, intellectual servility will continue to be lavishly rewarded.

This article was originally published in the March 2025 issue of Future of Freedom.

The post Leviathan Logic Versus Individual Liberty appeared first on LewRockwell.

California’s decline has grown so stark that even steadfast Democratic allies can no longer deny the truth: the state’s extreme left-wing policies have plunged it into chaos.

Aaron Levie, founder and CEO of Box, has joined the chorus of voices condemning the Democratic Party’s mismanagement of California, asserting that the party’s entire political apparatus demands a complete overhaul. Levie, who endorsed Vice President Kamala Harris in the 2024 presidential election, made the pointed remarks during an interview with co-founder and former Lattice CEO, Jack Altman.

“We live in California. It should be like the greatest place on Earth on every dimension. How do you beat this weather? You’ve completely created the atmosphere of every major tech company,” Levie explained. You have Stanford, Berkeley, Caltech. You have institutions and all the venture capital. You’re sitting on this incredible asset and then literally you can’t make it affordable to live here. That’s just insane.”

.@levie to @jaltma: Democrats Are To Blame For California’s ‘Insane’ Affordability Crisis

“We live in California. It should be like the greatest place on Earth on every dimension. How do you beat this weather? You’ve completely created the atmosphere of every major tech… pic.twitter.com/WYPgRAjCVt

— Josh Caplan (@joshdcaplan) March 25, 2025

“That’s totally insane and that is 100% due to the bureaucracy of our state. That’s basically a Democrat problem,” the Box CEO added. “Democrats can’t out message that with their policy views because their policy views are in many cases just the wrong policy views. You actually just have to build and you have to create an environment where you can build things.”

Levie concluded his critique by urging a “reset” for the Democrats.

California’s affordability crisis has reached a critical juncture, with soaring housing costs, stagnant wages, and rising living expenses pushing many residents to the brink.

In major cities like Los Angeles and San Francisco, median home prices have skyrocketed beyond $1 million—Redfin reports $1.35 million in San Francisco and $1.05 million in Los Angeles as of February 2025—far outpacing the national average of $371,200 according to Zillow, while rents consume a disproportionate share of income for working families, with the California Budget and Policy Center noting over 50% of renters spend more than 30% of their income on housing.

Coupled with high taxes (the Tax Foundation pegs California’s tax burden at 11.5% of income in 2025), steep utility rates (CPUC data shows electricity at 30 cents per kWh), and grocery prices outstripping inflation (a USDA report cites a 19% rise since 2020), the state has become a challenging place for all but the wealthiest to thrive.

This economic squeeze has fueled an exodus of middle- and low-income households—the U.S. Census Bureau recorded a net loss of 500,000 residents from 2020–2024—exacerbating labor shortages and straining local economies, as the Public Policy Institute of California highlights in its 2025 labor market analysis.

Levie’s sober talk about the Democrats aligns with growing voter dissatisfaction, as many within the party are unhappy with it’s direction since President Donald Trump’s reelection to the White House.

A plurality of voters (40%) believe the Democratic Party has no clear strategy for countering Trump, according to a survey by the liberal firm Blueprint, first reported by POLITICO. Another 24% said the party does have an ineffective plan.

If only Californians could convince their governor-turned-podcaster Gavin Newsom to do something about it.

Reprinted with permission from Zero Hedge.

The post Pro-Kamala Harris Tech Titan Admits Democrats Destroyed California appeared first on LewRockwell.

America’s military budget is more than just numbers on a page—it’s a reflection of the priorities that shape our society. Right now, that nearly trillion dollar budget is bloated, inefficient, and far removed from the needs of everyday Americans. We’ve identified six simple yet effective ways to cut at least $100 billion from the Pentagon’s budget—without sacrificing even the most hawkish of war hawk’s sense of national security. Ready to take the scissors to that excess spending? Here’s how we can do it.

1. Halt the F-35 Program (Save $12B+ per year)

The F-35 is the poster child for military mismanagement. It’s a fighter jet that was supposed to revolutionize our military—except it’s plagued by cost overruns, delays, and underperformance. Despite a projected lifetime cost of over $2 trillion, this aircraft only meets mission requirements about 30% of the time. If we ended or paused the F-35 program now, we’d free up $12 billion annually. The military-industrial complex can afford a few less fancy jets that destroy land and lives, especially when they don’t even do their job right.

2. Reassess Long-Range Missile Defense (Save $9.3B+ per year)

For over half a century, we’ve sunk an eye-watering $400 billion into long-range missile defense systems that have never delivered. The cold, hard truth is these systems are ineffective against real-world threats. In fact, no missile defense technology has ever proven capable of neutralizing an intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) attack. Cutting back on these programs would save us $9.3 billion per year—money that could be better spent on diplomacy initiatives that actually work.

3. Cut the Sentinel ICBM Program (Save $3.7B+ per year)

ICBMs were once the crown jewels of our nuclear deterrence strategy, but they’re outdated in today’s geopolitical climate. With more reliable and flexible platforms like submarines, bombers, and emerging hypersonic technologies, maintaining an expensive, high-risk ICBM arsenal makes little sense. Ending the Sentinel ICBM program would save taxpayers $3.7 billion annually, and even more in the long run, with total savings over its lifespan estimated at $310 billion. It’s time to face facts: we don’t need to keep pouring money into a strategy that no longer aligns with modern defense needs. Especially when the best nuclear deterrence system is ending nuclear weapons programs to begin with.

4. Cease Procurement of Aircraft Carriers (Save $2.3B+ per year)

Aircraft carriers are relics of a bygone era, costing billions to build and maintain, while becoming increasingly vulnerable to modern missile technology. These floating cities are no longer the symbols of naval power they once were. By halting new aircraft carrier procurements, we can save $2.3 billion a year—money that could be better allocated to ways that actually keep us safe in the 21st century like housing, healthcare or climate justice.

5. Cut Redundant Contracts by 15% (Save $26B per year)

The Pentagon’s bureaucracy is a cash cow for contractors—more than 500,000 private sector workers are paid to do redundant and often wasteful work. Many contracts overlap or go toward projects that are, frankly, unnecessary. Cutting back just 15% on these contracts would save $26 billion annually. That’s a massive chunk of change that could be reallocated to more efficient and effective defense projects. Want a starting point? Look no further than SpaceX’s lucrative contracts—it’s time we hold these companies accountable.Maybe DOGE knows a guy there?

6. Prioritize Diplomacy (Save $50B+ per year)

The best way to avoid unnecessary military spending is to prevent conflicts from happening in the first place. By focusing on diplomatic solutions instead of military interventions, we can scale back expensive overseas bases, reduce troop deployments, and use reserves and National Guard units more effectively. This shift could save up to $50 billion a year—and possibly as much as $100 billion in the long term. It’s about time we put our resources into creating peaceful solutions rather than preparing for endless wars.

What Could We Do with the $100 Billion in Savings?

The possibilities are endless when we take a more practical approach to national security spending. What could we do with the $100 billion we save? Here’s a snapshot of just some of the incredible investments we could make in American society:

• 787,255 Registered Nurses: Filling critical healthcare gaps nationwide.

• 10.39 million Public Housing Units: Making affordable housing a reality for families across the country.

• 2.29 million Jobs at $15/hour: Providing good jobs with benefits, boosting the economy.

• 1.03 million Elementary School Teachers: Giving our children the education they deserve.

• 579,999 Clean Energy Jobs: Building a sustainable, green future for the next generation.

• 7.81 million Head Start Slots: Giving young children a foundation for lifelong success.

• 5.88 million Military Veterans receiving VA medical care: Ensuring those who served our country receive the care they earned.

The Bottom Line?

Cutting $100 billion from the Pentagon budget isn’t just a pipe dream—it’s a tangible, achievable plan that could deliver real benefits to everyday Americans. While it’s just a starting point, this reduction would allow us to prioritize what truly matters: healthcare, education, infrastructure, and the well-being of our people. If we’re going to spend taxpayer dollars, let’s make sure they go toward initiatives that directly benefit the lives of the citizens who fund them.

The original source of this article is Global Research.

The post Dear DOGE: Here’s How to Cut the Pentagon Budget by $100 Billion in Six Easy Steps appeared first on LewRockwell.

Over the last week, one of the legacy media’s chief talking points is that the Trump administration is precipitating a “constitutional crisis” by, among other things, criticizing federal judges. It’s ok to criticize judges. Just ask Justice Elena Kagan, who says we should criticize the Supreme Court if we don’t like their decisions. Justices Kagan, Sotomayor, and Jackson have not hesitated to harshly criticize the Court’s conservative majority in speeches and interviews. There is a long history of elected officials criticizing judges, and that shouldn’t surprise us, because judges and elected officials are all part of the unending struggle for political power to bend the state apparatus to the will of the party that won the last round.

Democrats have been lambasting the Supreme Court for years without concern about the separation of powers or fear of fomenting a constitutional crisis. Joe Biden urged sweeping constitutional changes to mandate term limits for Supreme Court Justices, whose decisions he characterized as “extreme opinions,” and a “code of ethics” to give their opponents opportunities to force them off decisions or impeach them. Democrats, now parading as defenders of the separation of powers, have demanded they obtain a such a code to give them leverage over Justices who stray from their preferred interpretations of law. Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer threatened Justices by name in front of the Supreme Court building during oral arguments. When Justices don’t follow the Democratic Party line, Democrats denounce them as “extreme” and “far-right,” forgetting the tender place in their hearts for the separation of powers.

Presidents criticizing the courts and even questioning their authority is nothing new. In fact, it has happened repeatedly throughout American history. In Marbury v. Madison (1803), the case that established the principle of judicial review, Secretary of State James Madison refused to present his case to the Court, being convinced that the Supreme Court lacked the authority to make him deliver a commission to Petitioner William Marbury to serve as a D.C. Justice of the Peace. Chief Justice John Marshall, Madison’s predecessor as Secretary of State and his political opponent, managed to strengthen the power of the judiciary with the principle of judicial review and avoid ordering Madison to deliver the commission, which Madison and President Thomas Jefferson would certainly have refused to do. In Georgia v. Worcester (1832), President Andrew Jackson refused to enforce a judgment of the Marshall Court that the State of Georgia could not imprison Vermont missionary Samuel Worcester for going onto Cherokee territory, where he had preached and encouraged the Cherokee to seek legal relief from efforts to expel them from Georgia. “John Marshall has made his decision,” Jackson is reputed to have said. “Now let him enforce it.” Abraham Lincoln, in response to Dred Scott v. Sandford (1857), which held in part that the federal government could not regulate slavery in the territories, attacked judicial review as antithetical to republican government and signed into law a statute that banned slavery in the territories, ignoring the Court’s Dred Scott decision. Lincoln also disregarded the Court’s decision in Ex parte Merryman (1861) that only Congress could suspend the writ of habeas corpus, attacking the Court in his 1861 address to a Special Session of Congress, where Merryman’s and Dred Scott’s author Chief Justice Taney was present: “would not the official oath be broken if the Government should be overthrown when it was believed that disregarding the single law would tend to preserve it?” Theodore Roosevelt invoked Lincoln’s rejection of judicial supremacy in attacking Supreme Court decisions that rejected Progressive encroachments on limited government and freedom of contract.  In perhaps the most well-known of these incidents, Franklin Roosevelt presented to the public and Congress a plan to pack the Supreme Court with new Justices who would support his New Deal policies, suggesting that the current Court suffered from a “hardening of the judicial arteries” and was out of touch with the country’s needs. This plan was abandoned after Justice Owen Roberts changed his vote in an important case that opened the way for much of Roosevelt’s New Deal legislation.

Alexander Hamilton famously suggested that the judiciary would be the “least dangerous” branch of government under the Constitution, meaning that courts would not have the policy making role reserved for the elected branches. This is one prediction about the Constitution that has not aged well. The courts have acquired a policy making role, and it is for this reason that we should expect to see conflict between the elected branches and the courts during periods of high political tension. The examples from American political history make clear that this has happened repeatedly, so it is reasonable to hypothesize that we will see it in times of severe political conflict. Furthermore, research has made clear that the ideology and policy preferences of judges exert a powerful influence over their decisions, so it is not an idle claim that judges may have done so in a particular case. The left wants you to believe that President Trump’s criticism of the courts means that a unique and perilous “constitutional crisis” is looming. They are hoping that you have forgotten about their recent attacks on the Supreme Court and historical examples of presidents criticizing the courts and questioning their authority in periods of high political tension.

It is a myth that judges are apolitical arbiters of sacrosanct legal principles. Judges are policymakers who seek to get results they want in cases and to establish legal principles and policies they prefer. They are fully part of the struggle for power that is the essence of politics. Their decisions are fair game for criticism, and they always have been.

The post A Phony Crisis appeared first on LewRockwell.

According to the United Nations, “Climate change is a global emergency that goes beyond national borders.” From the World Economic Forum, “Urgent global action must be taken to reduce emissions and safeguard human health from the multi-pronged negative impacts of climate change globally.”

From every multinational institution in the world, we hear the same message. From the World Bank, “The world is battling a perfect storm of climate, conflict, economic, and nature crises.” From the World Health Organization, “Between 2030 and 2050, climate change is expected to cause approximately 250,000 additional deaths per year from malnutrition, malaria, diarrhea, and heat.”

A major problem with all this unanimity over this “emergency” is the fact that for at least half of all people living in Western nations in 2025, the UN, WEF, WHO, and World Bank have no credibility. We don’t want to “own nothing and be happy” as our middle class is crushed. We don’t want the only politically acceptable way to maintain national economic growth to rely on population replacement. And with only the slightest numeracy, we see apocalyptic proclamations as lacking substance.

For example, while 250,000 “additional deaths per year” is tragic, worldwide estimates of total deaths are not quite 70 million per year. These “additional deaths” constitute a 0.36 percent increase over that baseline, just over one-third of one percent. Not even a rounding error.

Similarly, an alarmist prediction from NASA is that “Antarctica is losing ice mass (melting) at an average rate of about 150 billion tons per year, and Greenland is losing about 270 billion tons per year, adding to sea level rise.” Let’s unpack that a bit. A billion tons is a gigaton, equivalent in volume to one cubic kilometer. So Antarctica is losing 150 cubic kilometers of ice per year. But Antarctica has an estimated total ice mass of 30 million cubic kilometers. Which means Antarctica is losing about one twenty-thousandth of one percent of its total ice mass per year. That is well below the accuracy of measurement. It is an estimate, and the conclusion it suggests is of no significance.

One may wonder about Greenland, with “only” 2.9 million cubic kilometers of ice, melting at an estimated rate of 270 gigatons per year. But that still yields a rate of loss of less than one one-hundredth of one percent per year, which is almost certainly below the ability to actually gauge total ice mass and total annual ice loss.

What about sea level rise? Here again, basic math yields underwhelming conclusions. The total surface area of the world’s oceans is 361 million square kilometers. If you spread 420 gigatons over that surface (Greenland and Antarctica’s melting combined), you get a sea level rise of not quite 1.2 millimeters per year. This is, again, so insignificant that it is below the threshold of our ability to measure.

These fundamental facts will turn anyone willing to do even basic fact-checking into a cynic. What’s really going on? We get at least a glimpse of truth from the above quotation from the World Bank, where they ascribe the challenges of humanity to several causes: “climate, conflict, economic, and nature crises.” There’s value in the distinctions they make. They list “nature crisis” as distinct from “climate,” and at least explicitly, they don’t even cite “climate” as resulting from some anthropogenically generated trend of increasing temperatures and increasingly extreme weather. They just say “climate.”

Which brings us to the point: Conflict and economic crises are far bigger sources of human misery, and we face serious environmental challenges that have little to do with climate change and more to do with how we manage our industry, our wilderness, and our natural resources. And we are face “climate” challenges even when catastrophic climate events have nothing to do with any alleged “climate crisis.”

A perfect example of how the climate “crisis” narrative is falsely applied when, in fact, the climate-related catastrophe would have happened anyway is found in the disastrous floods that devastated Pakistan in 2022. Despite the doomsday spin from PBS (etc.), these floods were not abnormal because of “climate change.” They were an abnormal catastrophe because in just 60 years, the population of that nation has grown from 45 million to 240 million people. They’ve channelized their rivers, built dense new settlements onto what were once floodplains and other marginal land, they’ve denuded their forests, which took away the capacity to absorb runoff, and they’ve paved thousands of square miles, creating impervious surfaces where water can’t percolate. Of course, a big storm made a mess. The weather didn’t change. The nation changed.

The disaster story repeats everywhere. Contrary to the narrative, the primary cause is not “climate change.” Bigger tsunamis? Maybe it’s because coastal aquifers were overdrafted, which caused land subsidence, or because previously uninhabited tidelands were settled because the population quintupled in less than two generations, and because coastal mangrove forests were destroyed, which used to attenuate big waves. What about deforestation? Perhaps because these nations have been denied the ability to develop natural gas and hydroelectric power, they’re stripping away the forests for fuel to cook their food. In some cases, they’re burning their forests to make room for biofuel plantations, in a towering display of irony and corruption.

Read the Whole Article

The post Challenging the Climate Crisis Narrative appeared first on LewRockwell.

Writes Tim McGraw:

Hi Ed,   Do You Think You’ll Ever Know? Ed Curtin

I enjoyed reading your latest article on LRC. Yeah, you got it all right. Well done! It is very frustrating how the media, government, religion, or any other institution never tells us the truth. We only get images, sound bites, half the story, or less. As you say, no conclusions are drawn—well, unless the conclusion is a lie, e.g., CO2 causes global warming or Bin Laden organized the 9/11 attacks (the passport from a hijacker found in the street under the towers proves it.)

You are right about movies, too. Every movie I’ve seen, well, almost every one, since 2002, has a subtle message or ten telling me to believe in the state and not to believe in individuals or the family. In almost every TV show, the father is absent, an idiot, or the killer.

I rarely read articles on the internet anymore. Yours are always an exception. I enjoy your observations and writings. I still read books, if slowly. I am currently reading “Love & Terror on the Howling Plains of Nowhere” by Poe Ballantine. It’s a good non-fiction book set in Chadron, Nebraska of all places. The characters are interesting, and there is a murder on the prairie. I haven’t finished the book, but I don’t think the murder has ever been solved.

The bad guys do get away with murder. I see it in the news every day. That’s a fact.

The post Do You Think You’ll Ever Know? appeared first on LewRockwell.

Obituary for my father.

Richard Warner Carlson died at 84 on March 24, 2025 at home in Boca Grande, Florida after six weeks of illness. He refused all painkillers to the end and left this world with dignity and clarity, holding the hands of his children with his dogs at his… pic.twitter.com/4lMygMkSIT

— Tucker Carlson (@TuckerCarlson) March 26, 2025

The post Tucker Carlson’s Obit for His Father appeared first on LewRockwell.

Ginny Garner wrote:

Lew,

It is difficult for some people to understand why so many others, even family members and friends, do not understand the seriousness of the circumstances we find ourselves in in America and throughout the world. Archbishop Fulton Sheen had very prescient, indeed timeless, words that explain why this is so.

pic.twitter.com/J0UEgJMOVZ

— Sanoj Thomas (@Sanothomas) March 26, 2025

The post Why Are So Many Blind to Reality? Archbishop Fulton Sheen Explains appeared first on LewRockwell.

David Martin wrote:

“The Kennedys tried to fix the problem.”  –  Alice Irby

The post The JFK Israel Connection by Candace Owens appeared first on LewRockwell.

Click Here:

Adam Garrie

The post Dr. Jay Bhattacharya and Dr. Marty Makary Confirmed to Lead NIH and FDA, Respectively appeared first on LewRockwell.

The post US Intel: Iran Is NOT Building A Nuclear Weapon (So Why Are We Threatening Them?) appeared first on LewRockwell.

Dom Armentano writes:

Despite the Trump Administration’s nonsense claim that the alleged “drone” activity in New Jersey and elsewhere was “FAA authorized”, the actual UFO mystery continues and becomes even more mysterious. 

See this latest summary of events.

The post The “Drone” Mystery Continues appeared first on LewRockwell.

Thanks, John Smith. 

Gold Coast Bulletin

The post Dutch Christian groups fund illegal Israeli settlements in the West Bank appeared first on LewRockwell.

One of the dumbest narratives we’re asked to swallow about Palestinians is that they are guilty of anti-Jewish prejudice which makes them comparable to Nazis. Palestinians didn’t choose the religion of their oppressors; any hatred they have toward Israelis is because Israelis are the ones oppressing and murdering them, not because of their religion. Expecting Palestinians not to hate the oppressors who hate them just because those oppressors happen to be Jewish is shitbrained thinking.

Every so often you’ll see the IDF plant a copy of Mein Kampf in a building in Gaza and then wave it around as though it would somehow justify what Israel is doing to the Palestinians, and it’s just so stupid. The reason we’ve come to abhor hatred toward Jews in the west is because we know the west has an extensive history of committing atrocities against Jewish people because of their religion.

Palestinians harbor no such prejudice and are guilty of no such crimes. Any violence they’ve inflicted upon Israelis has been in an effort to keep their land and resist tyrannical oppression, not because they have some weird European Hitlerite hatred toward Jews. Anytime you hear Palestinians talk about “the Jews” they’re always talking solely and exclusively about their oppressors in the context of the occupation; they’re not talking about some Jewish guy in Canada.

Palestinians would hate their oppressors whether the oppression was being inflicted by Hindus, Buddhists or Catholics. That’s normal. That’s how people’s minds and emotions work; we hate people who hate us, and we hate people who abuse us. Any failure to understand this is a failure to put yourself in someone else’s shoes and imagine what it would be like to live in their situation. It’s a sign that you lack normal human empathy.

❖

The world needs Israel. Without Israel where would sexual predators go for safety and protection? Where would we get our surveillance technology? Who would use human targets to field test new kinds of murder robots, military explosives and AI systems used to kill entire families?

❖

One of the most evil things happening in the world today is the way human beings in Gaza are being used as laboratory guinea pigs to field test new technology for the military industrial complex. https://t.co/yF3wY4WbV0

— Caitlin Johnstone (@caitoz) March 22, 2025

❖

Critics of Israel should familiarize themselves with Hitchens’s razor: “What can be asserted without evidence can also be dismissed without evidence.”

Whether it’s beheaded babies, mass rapes, Hamas bases in hospitals, or Hamas killing the Bibas kids with their bare hands, if it’s being asserted without evidence, it can be immediately dismissed.

❖

It is a well-documented fact that Israel and its supporters use lobbying, campaign funding and blackmail to exert influence over western nations. It is also a fact that the US empire has the power to stop Israel from doing this at any time, but chooses not to. The empire managers in the official elected government don’t do anything to stop these influence operations, nor do the empire managers in the far more powerful unelected national security state. Does anyone really believe Israel would still be exerting such massive influence over the US government if the CIA determined that this was impeding their agendas of global domination?

It follows that the Zionist influence operations exist because the empire wants them to. The artificially manufactured support for Israel has been deemed a necessary evil to help ensure constant violence, division and instability in the middle east and justify endless military presence in a crucial geostrategic region which, if left to its own devices, might unite and conduct its affairs in a way that is disadvantageous to western interests.

There are many other nations in the middle east who are aligned with the US and are used to advance its interests in the region, but none of them are fully dependent on support from the US government for their continued existence. It’s a completely artificial construct that was inserted into the middle east like a glass shard into a foot, and its continued existence benefits both the settler colonialists who live there and the long-term hegemonic interests of the US-centralized empire.

I say all this to point out that the west isn’t some passive innocent victim of manipulations by the big mean tyrant Israel. It is just as guilty of Israel’s crimes as Israel itself, because those crimes are inseparable from the western empire as a whole. You see some on the right trying to argue that the west would be this wonderful virtuous place if not for the malign influence of those nasty Jews, but this narrative is refuted by the entire historical existence of the western world. The west has always been a warmongering, genocidal civilization driven by conquest and domination, and the western settler-colonialist project of Israel is just one more manifestation of the dystopia we are living in.

❖

The only reason they keep framing this naked ethnic cleansing operation as a “war” is so that they can later say “Of course Palestinians lost that land, they fought a war and they lost” again, like they’ve been doing ever since Israel was founded. https://t.co/VrZCNMl6jL

— Caitlin Johnstone (@caitoz) March 21, 2025

❖

Defending Trump’s warmongering in the middle east by babbling about his peacemaking efforts in Ukraine is the same as saying it’s okay for him to torch Gaza because he’s not bombing Argentina. It’s nonsensical. You don’t negate your crimes by being less criminal somewhere else.

❖

Whenever I criticize Trump’s actions in the middle east I’ll get some Democrat going “I BET YOU WISH YOU’D SUPPORTED KAMALA NOW, HUH?”

That’s not what this is, idiots. I did this exact same commentary throughout the Biden administration, because Biden is also evil. I am simply criticizing the world’s most murderous and destructive power structure and whatever empire managers happen to be sitting at the front desk while it happens. This is just what it looks like when you apply scrutiny to the empire without being a partisan hack.

❖

Bernie Sanders has been such a worthless empire simp I sometimes wonder why the Democratic Party establishment even bothered sabotaging his primary campaigns. They would have gotten another Obama, selling people false hope while advancing the interests of oligarchy and empire.

❖

Our species evolved these brains of unprecedented sophistication only to use them to destroy our biosphere, invent new ways to blow each other up, and make ourselves miserable with our own thoughts.

❖

It’s not about hostages. It’s not about Hamas. It’s not about terrorism. Those aren’t the reasons, they’re the excuses. The excuses to expel Palestinians and turn more Palestinian land into Israeli land. That’s all this has ever been about. Anyone who says otherwise is lying.

__________________

My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece here are some options where you can toss some money into my tip jar if you want to. Go here to find video versions of my articles. If you’d prefer to listen to audio of these articles, you can subscribe to them on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Soundcloud or YouTube. Go here to buy paperback editions of my writings from month to month. All my work is free to bootleg and use in any way, shape or form; republish it, translate it, use it on merchandise; whatever you want. The best way to make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list on Substack, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. All works co-authored with my husband Tim Foley.

The post Palestinians Didn’t Choose the Religion of Their Oppressors appeared first on LewRockwell.

Hundreds of Democrat party political hacks who happen to have attended law school for a couple of years have been rewarded for their hackism with appointments as federal district court judges. Armed with lifetime tenure and dressed in spooky looking black robes, they behave like an army of some 700 dictators responsible and answerable to no one as they plot their coup to take over the other two branches of government with their dictatorial decrees known as “nationwide injunctions.” In every instance in the past several months these “injunctions” have been aimed at stopping any attempts to reduce the size and power of the deep state, never to protect the constitutional liberties of the American people.

The deep state’s “supreme” court mostly serves the same purpose. This was recently on display when its “chief” justice John Roberts, who magically discovered Obamacare to be one of the delegated powers in the Constitution by calling it a “tax,” scolded President Trump for deporting several hundred members of a Central American criminal gang without first saying “Mother May I” to John Roberts.

Thomas Jefferson was alarmed during his day of the threat of judicial tyranny of this sort. He feared that it could turn the Constitution into “a thing of wax” that could be “twisted into any form” (Letter to Judge Spencer Roane, Nov. 1819). Unlike congressmen and presidents, Jefferson noted, federal judges are “more dangerous [to liberty] as they are in office for life” (Letter to a Mr. Jarvis, Sept. 1820). The federal judiciary, said Jefferson, was “the subtle corps of sappers and miners constantly working underground to undermine our Constitution . . .” (Letter to Thomas Ritchie, Sept. 1820).

Jefferson reminded anyone who inquired that the Constitution does not give the judiciary the sole right to interpret the Constitution. The executive and congressional branches, “in their own spheres,” have equal rights, he said. As president, Jefferson freed everyone imprisoned by the Adams administration’s Sedition Act which made free political speech illegal. “I discharged every person under punishment or prosecution under the Sedition Law,” he said, “because I considered . . . that law to be a nullity.” The “supreme” court “Judges, believing the law constitutional, had a right to pass a sentence of fine and imprisonment, because the power was placed in their hands . . . . But the executive, believing the law to be unconstitutional, was bound to remit the execution of it” (The Political Writings of Thomas Jefferson, p. 154).

“The judiciary bodies were supposed to be the most helpless and harmless members of the government” (Letter to A. Coray, Oct. 31, 1823). Experience has shown, however, that “they were to become the most dangerous,” especially because impeachment was so scarce.

Yes, government lawyers with lifetime tenure did usurp powers not given to them by the Constitution when they began pretending that they somehow were given a monopoly of constitutional interpretation, but this idea was strongly opposed for generations by Americans in every state. The Jeffersonian position on judicial tyranny prevailed, in other words. In addition to the congress and the executive branch having the right and power to make constitutional interpretations, Jefferson said that “I know of no safe depository of the ultimate powers of the society but the people themselves,” organized in political communities at the state and local levels (The Political Writings of Thomas Jefferson, p. 154).

After “chief” justice John Marshall declared the Bank of the United States to be constitutional, President Andrew Jackson vetoed the bank’s recharter by saying “To this I cannot consent.” State legislatures issued declarations of nullification of myriad federal laws and government programs during the pre-Civil War era. New England states refused to participate in the War of 1812 and nullified the government’s trade embargo that was enacted by Jefferson in order to avoid another war with England after the British navy had kidnapped American sailors. South Carolina nullified the 1828 Tariff of Abominations by calling it unconstitutional. The Wisconsin legislature nullified the Fugitive Slave Act. Jefferson himself authored the Kentucky Resolve of 1798 that nullified the Sedition Act within the state of Kentucky. James Madison authored an almost identical Resolve for Virginia.

Jefferson and the Jeffersonians proclaimed for decades that if the day ever came when the federal government, through its judiciary, became the sole decision maker of what the limits of federal governmental powers would be, Americans would then live under a tyranny. That day finally came in April of 1865 when the Republican party succeeded in overthrowing the original constitution and its system of federalism and states’ rights, the rights of nullification and secession as checks on federal power, and most importantly, the ability of anyone but the government’s own courts to decide what everyone’s freedoms were to be.

This was celebrated by “progressives” like Woodrow Wilson who, in his book Constitutional Government in the United States (p. 178), wrote triumphantly that “The War between the States established . . . this principle, that the federal government is, through its courts, the final judge of its own powers.” Only a dictator and a tyrant would celebrate such a thing.

Law-and-order conservatives who fancy themselves to be constitutionalists, and who hang on every word from any black-robed deity called a “ federal judge,” are aiding and abetting the destruction of American freedom by acquiescing in the idea that no one – not even the president, let alone the people – has a right to question or disobey their decrees and “injunctions.”

The post Judicial Tyranny: Tip of the Deep State Sword appeared first on LewRockwell.

Most people rarely think about where their electricity comes from—until it’s not there. Long-term power outages remain relatively infrequent. But with aging infrastructure, ever-worsening extreme weather events, and geopolitical instability increasing, long-term blackouts are becoming more common. When a long-term power outage does hit, it can create havoc.

The last few years have shown that even long-reliable electrical grids can experience catastrophic problems—leaving many thousands of homes without power for hours and sometimes even days. With global climate change worsening, power outages are poised to become a much more common event in our daily lives.

But just because blackouts are becoming more frequent doesn’t mean you can’t protect yourself. Preparation is critical to surviving a long-term power outage.

Common Reasons for a Long-Term Power Outage

Power outages can result from a whole catalog of issues, the most common being natural disasters and extreme weather. Weather-related events account for roughly 83% of all power cuts.

• Extreme weather: The most common reason for long-term power outages is when high winds, snow, ice, or extreme temperatures, such as an extended heat wave, arrive.
• Spikes in power demand: During periods of high power demand, usually in either very hot or cold weather, aging electrical grids and infrastructure can struggle to keep up.
• Power surges: A power surge is an unusually high voltage event that typically lasts for a short period. A surge can cause an outage itself or occur after utility providers restore power, potentially damaging home appliances.
• Human error: One of the worst outages in U.S. history, the Northeast Blackout of 1965, was caused by a maintenance worker incorrectly laying a protective relay on a transmission line.
• Trees/Vehicles/Animals: Fallen trees, often during storms, are a significant source of outages, while simple vehicle collisions with a utility pole can be hugely damaging. You’d also be amazed at how much damage squirrels, rats, and other animals can do to electrical equipment.
• Natural disasters: Power outages often follow in the wake of earthquakes, tornadoes, hurricanes, floods, wildfires, and volcanic eruptions.

How Likely Is an Extended Power Outage?

With aging grid infrastructure unable to keep up with growing demands for electricity, power outages will likely be a factor in our lives for many years to come. With increasingly erratic weather patterns and extreme weather events due to climate change, it can sometimes feel like we are always just a few steps away from disaster.

To date, most power outages in the United States remain relatively small scale. The average person experienced eight hours of power interruptions in 2020. U.S. utility customers experienced a total of 1.33 billion outage hours, higher than in 2019 but lower than in 2018, much of it due to a series of natural disasters that year, such as Hurricane Isaias. Maine, West Virginia, and California experienced the most prolonged outages, with residents of Maine experiencing 15 hours’ worth of outages per year on average.

While there are certainly hotspots, other parts of the country see far fewer outages, with the District of Columbia coming out on top, with just 77 minutes of power interruptions each year.

In 2021, Texas suffered a major power crisis. Over 4.5M homes and businesses were left without power in the dead of winter, many for days. At least 246 people died due to the long-term power outage.

It’s easy to get into a Doomsday scenario when thinking about an extended power outage. The Northeast Blackout of 1965 affected over 30 million people. It lasted 14 hours, making it one of the most widespread outages in U.S. history. But what would happen if something like that continued for days or weeks?

The U.S. government has contingency plans for such an event that would probably see the Army and National Guard step in to prevent widespread panic.

A 14-hour outage pales compared to Venezuela’s five-day blackout in 2019, which affected 70% of the country. The results were dramatic and frequently harrowing. In hospitals, vital life-saving equipment failed, leaving medical professionals battling alone while people remained trapped in lifts, on public transport, or even in their homes.

Extended power outages in the U.S. remain relatively infrequent. Still, with an ever greater strain placed on our power grids—along with increasingly extreme weather—we will probably see more blackouts in the future. Preparation has never been more vital.

What to Do to Prepare for a Long-term Power Outage

Unless you’re living completely off-grid, it’s difficult to escape power outages altogether. But there are numerous things you can do to prepare.

Safe Drinking Water

While your water supply won’t necessarily fail during a long-term power outage, it is possible. Humans require around half a gallon of water per day to remain healthy. It’s essential to stock up on clean drinking water for you, your family, and your pets before a disaster strikes.

Food & Supplies 

Food is not as vital to the human body in the short term as water. But it will soon be a top priority during an extended power outage. Stock up sufficiently on non-perishable food, such as canned meats, fruits and vegetables, fruit bars, granola, peanut butter, and other high-energy foods that don’t require refrigeration. If you have an electric stove, keep in mind that you won’t be able to use it if you don’t have home backup power.

Remember the little things like a manual can-opener, and be aware of the necessities for good health. You might be able to survive for a while on Twinkies and chocolate bars, but it won’t be pretty.

Consider what other supplies you might need if you can’t leave your home for several days. If you rely on prescription or over-the-counter drugs—or other medical supplies—try to keep at least a week’s supply at home—if not more.

Lighting

When everything goes dark, it’s crucial to have lighting alternatives close to hand and ready to go. Keep a box containing LED lights, flashlights, and extra batteries, in an easily-accessible place. Candles have long been a go-to solution during blackouts but are not recommended as they pose a significant fire hazard.

Personal headlamps are inexpensive and give people more freedom to navigate a pitch-black environment.

Read the Whole Article

The post How Likely Is an Extended Power Outage? appeared first on LewRockwell.

In 1971, the US abruptly went off the gold standard, and in making the public announcement, US President Richard Nixon looked into the television camera and said, “We’re all Keynesians now.”

I was a young man at the time and had previously bought gold, albeit on a very small scale, but I recall looking into the face of this delusional man and thinking, “This is not good.”

However, the world at large apparently agreed with Mister Nixon, and within a few years, the other countries also went off the gold standard, which meant that, from that point on, no currency was backed by anything other than a promise.

Party Time

It didn’t take long before countries began playing with their currencies. At one time, the German mark, the French franc, the Italian lire, and the British shilling had all been roughly equivalent in value, and four or five of any one of them was worth about a dollar.

That had already begun to change prior to 1971, but following the decoupling from gold, the governments of the world really began to see the advantages of manipulating their own currencies against the currencies of other nations.

From that point on, a currency note from any country, which was already no more than an “I owe you,” was increasingly degraded to an “I owe you an undetermined and fluctuating amount.”

This fixation with monetary manipulation began much like the 1960s youths’ experimentation with drugs, and by the millennium, had morphed into something more akin to heroin addiction. Unfortunately, those who had become the addicts were the national leaders in finance and politics.

Well, here we are, in the second decade of the millennium. The party has deteriorated and is soon to come to a bad end.

As we get closer, those of us who have, for many years, predicted an eventual realisation that Mister Keynes and Mister Nixon were dead wrong and that the world will once again look to gold are, at this late date, gaining a bit of traction.

We’re seeing an increase in the number of people who recognise that all fiat currencies eventually come to an end and gold will continue to shine.

But there are two remaining questions that have even the best of prognosticators puzzling.

1. What Will the Role of Gold Be in the Future?

When currencies collapse, will there be an immediate and complete switch to gold? Unlikely.

Will further fiat currencies be put forward as solutions to paper money? Almost definitely.

Will future currencies be backed by gold? Probably, especially as so many governments and banking institutions are quietly scrambling to buy gold whilst trying not to let on the extent of their stockpiling.

Will gold-backed currencies stabilise money for the rest of our lives? Quite unlikely.

Even those countries who may agree to audits to demonstrate they own the gold they claim to own will, at some point in the future, look for ways to “do a Nixon” and once again get off the gold standard. (The short-term benefits of fiddling with currency is too tempting.)

2. Who’s Got the Gold?

Currencies come and go in the world with remarkable frequency (the last hundred years has been witness to over twenty hyperinflations worldwide).

In that quiet scrambling we were talking about, no one is being really truthful about how much gold they have. In addition, even between the foremost experts on the subject (and here, I refer not to the pundits on television, but to those economists that I personally hold in the highest regard), there is broad speculation as to who holds what.

One school of thought has it that, although the US has long claimed that it possesses roughly 8,000 tonnes of gold in Fort Knox, there has not been an audit of Fort Knox since 1953. (That’s not encouraging.) Is it 8,000 tonnes? 4,000? None? We’re unlikely to ever get a truthful answer on this question.

In addition, the US has held roughly 6,000 tonnes of gold for European countries since the Cold War.

Now that the US has become the world’s foremost debtor nation, Europe is getting a bit antsy, and some are asking to have it back. In response, the Federal Reserve has sent Germany a small portion of their gold but avoids shipping the remainder and denies them even the ability to inspect the remainder. (Again, not encouraging.)

On the other hand, we have equally astute economists—US government insiders—who state that they are fairly certain the gold is there—in both Fort Knox and the New York Federal Reserve Bank’s underground vault. In the latter case, they state that, although much or all of the gold has been leased to the bullion banks, it has never left the building.

What does this mean to the rightful owners? There are multiple legitimate claims on the very same bars of gold.

Might the Fed burn the rightful owners—the European nations—and burn the bullion banks? Might they just confiscate the gold (assuming it’s still there) to create a new gold-backed currency for the US, and thumb their collective noses to all other claimants?

And does the People’s Bank of China hold roughly 2,500 tonnes of gold, as has been suggested? Or do they hold 5,000, or even more? Certainly, it’s to their advantage to claim the lowest amount that might be believable at present. Some US government insiders have insisted that the low number is the true number.

The argument over this question may seem moot, but it is not. “Who has the gold” may very well decide which countries will recover from the currency crashes with their skin still on.

Whoever holds the most gold will hold the most real wealth and, by extension, gain the most prominent seat at the bargaining table for decades to come. Whether that table will be the IMF, the new AAIB (Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank), or any future central economic entity, the future will go to the player with the most metal, as he will be able to create the most currency, in whatever form it may take.

Reprinted with permission from International Man.

The post Who’s Got the Gold? appeared first on LewRockwell.

When Karol Wojtyła stepped onto the balcony of St. Peter’s Basilica in 1978 as John Paul II, he was only 58. Though that seemed unusual at the time, the previous century saw Pius IX elected at 54. Although we aren’t likely to see a pope as young as 20-year-old Benedict IX, elected in 1031, it’s safe to say that Pius and John Paul have broken the mold and made it possible for virtually anyone to be elected to the See of Peter.

Elderly popes had been the norm for several reasons. Wisdom, of course, comes with age. So does a proven track record. Near-octogenarians have also been elected as “stop-gaps,” such as John XXIII who followed upon the 20-year reign of Pius XII. Although il papa buono occupied the throne for less than five years, he rocked the Barque of Peter by convoking an ecumenical council now known as Vatican II.

Pope Clement X, elected just shy of his 80th birthday in 1670, had enough vigor to pass the five-year mark and preside over the Holy Year of 1675 before dying the following year. Albino Luciani, 65 when elected as John Paul I in 1978, was not meant to be a stopgap, but still, he only lasted 33 days. Non si sa mai, as the Italians say (“you just never know”).

By the time Karol Wojtyła entered the Sistine Chapel in October of 1978, he had been a cardinal for over a decade and was among the electors who chose John Paul I just two months earlier. Wojtyła wasn’t well-known, but he certainly was not unknown. The average age of the College at that time was 67, and one of the Archbishop of Kraków’s main contenders, Giovanni Benelli, Archbishop of Florence, was only 56. The other, Giuseppe Siri, was already 72.

St. John Paul II, fluent in eight languages, was a splendid communicator and brilliant philosopher. He was also a goalie, a skier, and an avid outdoorsman. The Church adored him precisely because he acted younger than his age. His remarkable story was translated into gripping comic books that I avidly consumed as an 8-year-old growing up in Chicago, the largest Polish metropolis outside of Poland. There was no reason to think he would be leaving anytime soon. And indeed, his 27-year pontificate will go down in history as one of the most prolific.

Now, 20 years later, is it time for another young pope? Setting Paolo Sorrentino’s television drama aside, let’s look at two candidates.

Giorgio Marengo, I.M.C, is currently Apostolic Prefect of Ulaanbaatar, a missionary territory covering all 600,000 square miles of Mongolia. The country is the 19th largest by area but home to only 3.5 million, 1,500 of whom are Catholic. That’s almost a 10,000 percent increase over 30 years thanks to the fall of communism and the assiduous work of missionaries such as the Consolata, a religious congregation founded by Blessed Giuseppe Allamano in 1901.

Two years after his priestly ordination, Fr. Marengo was sent to Mongolia along with four Consolata comrades. He spent 14 years in Arvaikheer, 280 miles southwest of the capital, where he established a small parish and immersed himself in charitable work. Appointed shepherd of those hinterlands by Francis in 2020, His Eminence has increased the number of priests in Mongolia to about 25. The Prefecture is also blessed with 30 religious men and 30 women.

I and others who studied alongside Giorgio at the Pontifical Gregorian University in the late 1990s were impressed with his missionary heart and his insatiable desire to learn about other cultures and religions. He describes his approach to evangelization as “sussurrare il Vangelo” (“to whisper the Gospel”), meaning to build trust with the Buddhist natives and form relationships that open the door to a personal sharing of faith. If the cardinals want a missionary evangelist with extensive experience in interreligious dialogue and the heart of a pastor, Giorgio is their man.

Read the Whole Article

The post How Young May the Next Pope Be? appeared first on LewRockwell.

In January of 2025, President Trump took office. The week of January 13-20, Brooklyn was still in chaos. So was Manhattan. It was a chaos I have sought to describe in past essays, but things had reached a crescendo.

All of the world, it seemed, had descended upon the Five Boroughs.

From the floodgates that opened in 2022, and right up until Inauguration Day, Brooklyn and Manhattan had been under siege. I had never seen anything like it.

Due to the hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of illegal newcomers, with thousands more arriving every day, the city had been transformed. There was no coherent culture, social contract, understanding of how one gets through a day. It was a circus of confusion, entitlement, aggression and chaos, all of it performed upside-down.

These millions had been ‘magicked’ to this city, then housed, cosseted, clothed and fed, on the dime of the Biden administration (meaning: on our taxpayer dime) and with the funding of the United Nations.

Manhattan and Brooklyn had been thronged with strangers – -people who were not the usual newcomers to the city who arrive legally, have family or business here, and then set about soberly to learn the language, seek out a job, pay taxes, raise kids, and settle into an American life. Legal immigrants in the past have been self-selected; they have thought for a long time about immigrating to America, taken steps to do so under the law, planned and prepared. They have been self-selected in the past, too, because it is their own drive or initiative, without external assistance, that led them to make it lawfully to our shores.

In contrast – and this is not a racist or even ethnocentric observation; it is about people differently situated, differently motivated — the millions abruptly, unlawfully streamed among us, were indeed deeply, truly strangers. Unlike earlier waves of legal immigrants, these folks were not self-selecting, self-propelled, or self-assisted in their journeys. They were people who seemed to have been scooped out of whole villages far elsewhere; people who had been doing other things entirely, making other plans altogether; and who then had been simply lifted up into space, transported, transplanted. They were indeed hoisted up out of other lives, other communities, other sensibilities, virtually other timelines, and transported hither, via the immensely powerful assistance of some of the most massive forces on earth.

Given the massive apparatus built up on three staging nations in order thus to transport this tide of humanity – that is to say, the immense powers and the millions of dollars deployed by the US State Department and by the UN, which I chronicled in my essay “What is a Culture?” — this sense of chaos and alienation that engulfed the city was not surprising.

Their arrival created an immense cultural strain. According to “City & State: New York”:

“More than 210,000 migrants have arrived in New York City since the spring of 2022, many hailing from countries in Latin America and the Caribbean, though a significant number have also come from China and countries in Africa. City officials, advocacy groups, school communities, nonprofits and a bevy of elected officials have mobilized to welcome the ongoing flow of new arrivals, but it’s been a massive – and costly – undertaking.

In those two-and-a-half years, Mayor Eric Adams’ administration has stood up more than 200 emergency shelter sites, enrolled tens of thousands of migrant children in schools, gone to court to amend its right to shelter obligations, fought for federal and state funding to help handle the costs of providing services, and sued bus companies sending migrants from the border.”

The numbers involved in funding this transfer of humans, were staggering: In 2023, Mayor Eric Adams planned to spend $4.3 Billion of the city’s budget, in just one year, on “welcoming” the illegal immigrants. The Biden administration poured Federal money into the effort as well, in astonishing amounts:

“June 7, 2023: Building on the roughly $30 million in federal funding offered in May, the Biden administration agreed to provide the city with an additional $104.6 million to help officials manage the influx of migrants through the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s Shelter Services Program.”

By August of 2023, the grift was out of control: Mayor Adams expected to spend “$12 billion to house and care for migrant arrivals” for the upcoming three years, and Attorney General Letitia James launched an investigation into DocGo, a for-profit medical company, which had been awarded a $432 million no-bid contract to provide medical care to illegal immigrants (in the media of the bad days of 2023, these groups are inaccurately described as “asylum-seekers”).

Events of 2024 were as unbelievable, when it came to the Biden administration’s policies that simply opened doors to millions of illegal newcomers, then paid for their every need:

“June 28, 2024: Biden extends Temporary Protected Status to around 300,000 Haitians living in the U.S.

July 2, 2024: The city expands a pilot program to over 7,300 migrant families staying in city-funded hotels, pledging to give them debit cards to buy their own food.”

The perception that Americans were starting to have by that time — that these numbers represented “an invasion” and that illegal newcomers were being given debit cards, free housing, free medical care and other benefits unavailable to American citizens — was true.

After Election Day, the about-face in policies in New York related to illegal immigrants, was also dramatic:

“Nov. 7, 2024: The city moves to end the controversial program that provided debit cards to migrant families so they could buy food and other essentials. […]

Dec. 4, 2024: News breaks that the city is racing to remove National Guard members from migrant shelters ahead of Donald Trump’s inauguration.

Dec. 10, 2024: The city announces plans to shut down at least two dozen migrant shelters across the city and upstate by the end of March, including the sweeping family shelter at Floyd Bennett Field. The latter, which is on federal land, is expected to close by Jan. 15 – a few days before Trump’s inauguration.

Dec. 12, 2024: After meeting with Trump’s incoming “border czar” in early December, Adams told reporters that he and Tom Homan are on the same page. “We’re going to protect the rights of immigrants in this city that are hard-working, giving back to the city in a real way,” Adams said. “We’re not going to be a safe haven for those who commit repeated, violent crimes against innocent migrants, immigrants and long standing New Yorkers.”

We will look back on 2022-2024 with astonishment. President Trump has referred to the 30 million illegal entrants to our nation as an “invasion”, and he is right to do so. It is clear now, not just in the United States and Canada, but throughout Western Europe, that “Mr Global” has weaponized immigration to destroy existing cultures, and make war on sovereign nations — a cynical enough misuse of the bodies of millions of people; people who are often without options, to start with.

This was a marginalized, “right-wing” view a year ago, but it is now a common perception throughout the West and across political perspectives. There is no escaping this conclusion.

By transplanting hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of people, from nations that are themselves broken in many ways, to the heart of Manhattan and Brooklyn, the Biden administration created an atmosphere of chaos, incomprehension and fear.

What were we importing in such vast, unassimilable numbers? Attitudes and cultures alien to our own.

Haiti is a failed state. According to international think tanks, there is a nearly complete collapse of civil society and national governance in Haiti. Informally, when you talk to Haitian legal immigrants to this country, they describe the way in which crime, plunder and corruption have made what was once a beautiful, safe country, now unlivable; everyone who can leave, they say, has fled.

China is also a source of the “Biden invasion” numbers. This is frankly weird. People in Communist China cannot just up and leave. They need permission from the Chinese Communist Party:

“Article 5. Chinese citizens who desire to leave the country for private purposes shall apply to the public security organs of the city or county in which their residence is registered. Approval shall be granted except in cases prescribed in Article 8 of this Law.

The public security organs shall decide, within a specified time, whether to approve or disapprove the citizens’ applications for leaving the country for private purposes, and shall notify the applicants accordingly.”

The above is from China’s legal codes. So that means that the thousands and thousands of Chinese nationals who simply appeared in the United States from 2022-2024, were sent on their way by our existential adversaries — people who want to destroy the United States as a superpower!

Then there are the illegal immigrants from nations such as Afghanistan, Yemen, and other MENA — (“Middle Eastern and North African”) — Muslim countries. The immigration-friendly Migration Policy Institute estimates that there are between 50,000 and 200,000 illegal immigrants to the United States from MENA nations alone! While these are not failed states, they are nations that are often theocracies with values very different from our own. Today in Afghanistan, women have been virtually erased from public life by the Taliban, and are forbidden even from singing. In Yemen, according to the advocacy organization Human Rights Watch, though women have legal rights on paper, “[t]he authorities across Yemen are increasingly restricting women’s freedom of movement […] The restrictions have harmed women’s ability to access work, education, and health care, and are a form of discrimination.” In Algeria, 14% of women participate in the labor force, versus 67 per cent of men, and they are subject to Sharia law, which treats them unequally to men: “Algerian women are subject to the family code (Sharia law), a retrograde and patriarchal interpretation of Islamic law passed in 1984 by the Popular National Assembly, under the pressure of religious and conservative representatives. On the whole, laws under the family code serve to reinforce the domination of men over women, contradicting Article 29 of the Algerian constitution […]”

I could go on and on. The bottom line is that it is not racist or even ethnocentric, to object passionately to the “invasion” of the United States, or any Western country (or any country), by illegal immigrants. When you import people in large groups, you also import their cultures. We need to face the fact that the freedom, rule of law, relative peaceableness, and high level of civil society functioning, of Western nations, is an incredible achievement and an incredible gift. When you import millions of people who are not acculturated to these norms and rules, you also will import the reflexes and expectations of those who live in failed states, or under corrupt rulers, tyrannical or unequal laws, and oppressive theocracies. You simply cannot sustain the high level of functioning civil society, the peaceableness, rule of law, legal equality, etc, that characterize the West, under these conditions. And we need to stop being shy about saying so aloud.

Read the Whole Article

The post President Trump’s New York appeared first on LewRockwell.