Lew Rockwell Institute

I passed by a bunch of little kids recently, chasing after bubbles emitted by a bubblicious toy. What a delightful time they were having.

That’s all very well, but right now experts are worrying about an AI Bubble, as the stock market retreats some 8-10 percent from a peak at the end of October. Here’s one take from Niall Ferguson worrying about the crazy plans of the AI promoters:

Sam Altman “recently told employees that OpenAI wanted to build 250 gigawatts of new computing capacity by 2033… a plan that would cost over $10 trillion by today’s standards.” That would be equivalent to a third of current U.S. peak energy usage.

Then there is David Dayen at American Prospect. He’s worried that “Silicon Valley and Wall Street are in sync: conjuring up sketchy credit deals that are pointing us toward another financial crash.”

Last month, the big focus was “round-tripping,” the way that sundry AI and tech companies were investing in their own customers — with Nvidia giving AI companies the investment necessary to buy their graphics processing units (GPUs), and so on.

But really, why stop there? Whatabout the Green Energy Bubble that is almost certainly popping right now, President Xi? Won’t that lay waste to devoted Extinction Rebellion activists all over the world? And then there’s the real estate bubble as homeowners have charged into homebuying in the aftermath of the Fed increasing the money supply by 40 percent in 2020-21. Whatabout the stock market bubble? SPY is up from $77 in May 2009 to $659 last Friday. That’s up 755 percent since the bottom of the Great Recession. Mind you, M2 is up from $7.2 trillion to $22.2 trillion, a healthy 208 percent, in the same period.

There’s only one thing to do: check with Elon’s Grok on Financial Bubbles. The first bubble was the Dutch Tulip Mania in the 1630s. Like I say: the Dutch invented the modern world with their Dutch Finance. And you can’t have modern finance without bubbles. So the Brits got in on the action with the South Sea Bubble that popped in 1720. Recently, according to Grok, we’ve been experiencing bubbles every ten years, from the Dot-com Bubble of 2000 to the Real Estate Bubble of 2008 to the Crypto Bubble of 2021. And now the AI Bubble. Where will it end? When will it end?

I don’t know if you have noticed, but these bubbles didn’t start until after the advent of central banks, invented by the Dutch and passed on to the Brits when the Dutch William of Orange became king of Great Britain, and brought to the U.S. by Alexander Hamilton, known to all as the “bastard brat of a Scotch pedlar.” Do central banks and bubbles go together like ham and eggs? I wonder what the culinary experts and the Federal Reserve System think about that. It could be that bubbles only occur when the central bank in incompetent, as in 1929 and 2008. Probably there is nothing to fear about the AI Bubble, now that the Fed has 400 economics PhDs at work. And in the latest bubble, the crypto bubble starring Sam Bankman-Fried, the Fed went in and fearlessly bailed out all the greedy regional bankers before Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) had finished breakfast.

I wonder how all this bubble-ology has influenced the angry Groypers on the Right and the Mamdani activists on the Left. They are probably right to be angry. Think of a Boomer nicely decked out with an IRA devoted to SPY. If it amounted to $100,000 at the end of 2008, it is now $757,500, not counting dividends and RMDs. And if our Boomer recklessly invested his IRA in QQQ, his $100,000 would now be $1,900,000. But Gen Z? They got zip, zero, nada. Still, when our student Boomer was calling home from Italy in 1970 his three-minute phone call to Mom cost about $6.00. In 1970 dollars.

But I tell you what, dear Gen Zers. The worst bubble in human history is the government spending bubble, up from about 8 percent of GDP in 1900 to about 40 percent of GDP today. And let me tell you, after Social Security and Medicare for Boomers, and the money for the Military Industrial Complex and the Education Industrial Complex and the Climate Industrial Complex and the Migrant Industrial Complex and the Debt Industrial Complex, there will never be much left for you. And when the biggest bubble of all eventually pops, as all bubbles – and empires — eventually do, then you are going to see a scramble for the crumbs like you’ve never seen.

On the other hand, maybe Elon Musk is right and AI will make work optional and, per Marx,

[we will] hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticise after dinner[.]

So, maybe we better Occupy Mars.

This article was originally published on American Thinker.

The post The Perils of Our Bubblicious World appeared first on LewRockwell.

It should be against the law to use generative AI to deceive the public.

I’ve got absolutely no problem with outright government censorship in this case, and I say this as an aggressive and outspoken proponent of free speech. AI products which deceive people should be illegal in the same way fraud is illegal.

I want it to be illegal to knowingly circulate AI video footage and pass it off as real.

I want AI companies to be severely penalized if they don’t prevent people from using their products to generate fake videos that get passed off as real.

The internet is just racists posting AI-generated videos in support of their racism now. https://t.co/aaXpQ3vK8Y

— Caitlin Johnstone (@caitoz) November 17, 2025

I want generative AI companies to be forced to place highly visible warnings across all AI-generated videos with wording that explicitly says they are AI-generated — not just a little watermark in the corner that can be cropped out.

I want AI companies to be harshly penalized if their chatbots encourage users to engage in harmful behavior, or if they tell users they are conscious, or if they psychologically manipulate users into forming emotional attachments to them.

I want it to be illegal for companies to use bots which tell people they are talking to a real human being.

I want it to be illegal for politicians to use AI deepfakes of their opponents saying outrageous things in their political campaigns, as we’ve been seeing more and more often lately.

Your right to extend your fist ends at my nose. These products threaten to erode the fabric of our society. They are attacking people’s ability to understand reality and sort out fact from fiction. They are driving people insane.

If fraud is illegal, than these abuses should be illegal. Fraud isn’t considered protected speech, because it hurts people and is detrimental to a functioning society. Generative AI deception shouldn’t be protected for precisely those same reasons.

Tech plutocrats should not be allowed to profit from sowing deception, confusion, and mental illness. The collective has the right to protect itself from harm from destructive individuals. The state is a gentler tool for this than guillotines. Governments should intervene to end these assaults on our ability to perceive and understand our world.

my whole feed is just ai generated cctv videos being used to spread islamophobia and right wing propaganda. but not that long ago i was getting called crazy for saying this very thing would happen. https://t.co/eS7gTp1YN9

— Evie ♡ (@EFCevie) November 8, 2025

I really don’t care how much force needs to be used to rein this shit in. If people can’t perceive and understand reality clearly, then everything goes to hell. Nobody knows what to think, how to act, how to vote or how to live if they can’t determine what’s true or false. Bring these new technologies to heel by any means necessary. It’s about basic self-defense at this point.

And I don’t expect any of this to happen any time soon; the rich and powerful are way too excited about generative AI and what it can do for them, and they tend to get what they want. Trump is already drawing significant backlash over reported plans for an executive order which would ban states from regulating AI companies on their own.

So it looks like we’re getting these abusive technologies shoved down our throat in whatever way benefits the zillionaires and Zionists of the imperial power structure, whether we like it or not.

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Tomorrow, November 22, marks the 62nd anniversary of the U.S. national-security establishment’s assassination of President John F. Kennedy. Yes, I know, there are still Americans who buy into the official “conspiracy-theory” line and the official lone-nut theory of the assassination, but I most definitely am not one of them. For me, there is no doubt whatsoever that this was a regime-change operation based on protecting “national security” from a president whose policies, they were convinced, posed a grave threat to “national security.”

How do I reach this certainty? Not by the evidence relating to the assassination itself. That evidence is persuasive but for me it’s not dispositive. If I was serving on a jury in a criminal prosecution of the national-security establishment and if the burden of proof was one that is used in civil cases — one that the law calls a “preponderance of the evidence — which means “more likely than not” — then, yes, I would convict the U.S. national-security establishment—e.g., the Pentagon and the CIA — of the assassination. But if the burden of proof is the standard one in criminal cases — “beyond a reasonable doubt” —  then based on all the evidence surrounding the assassination, I would vote to acquit. In my opinion, the evidence is simply not sufficiently persuasive to convict on that basis.

Thus, I can totally understand why many Americans still do not cross the line and conclude that the assassination was, in fact, a national-security-state regime-change operation. I’m with them there.

Given such, how then have I concluded that JFK was assassinated by the Pentagon and the CIA as part of a regime-change operation intended to protect “national security”? The answer lies in the Pentagon’s and CIA’s actions after the assassination. It is their post-assassination actions that unequivocally establish guilt on the part of the national-security establishment.

When I finished reading Douglas Horne’s 5-volume book Inside the Assassination Records Review Board, that was it for me. As a former lawyer, I realized that Horne, more than anyone else, had broken the case wide open. By establishing that the military had conducted a fraudulent autopsy on President Kennedy’s body just a few hours after the assassination, Horne had established that the military had participated in the assassination itself.

That’s because there is no innocent explanation whatsoever for a fraudulent autopsy. None! No one has ever come up with one, and no one ever will. A fraudulent autopsy necessarily means cover-up. Just a few hours after the assassination, the military establishment was carrying out a fraudulent-autopsy cover-up. That obviously could not be a sudden spur-of-the moment fraudulent autopsy. After all, why would any innocent entity come up with the idea of conducting a fraudulent autopsy on the body of a president of the United States who has just been assassinated? That makes no sense whatsoever. A fraudulent autopsy cover-up had to be built into the assassination itself. And the only entity the military would be covering up for was itself.

I won’t go into all the aspects of the fraudulent autopsy in this article. That’s what I do in my relatively short, easy-to-read book The Kennedy Autopsy, which is actually just a synopsis of Horne’s five-volume book. But anyone who takes the time to read and study Horne’s five-volume book will, I believe, inevitably arrive at the same conclusion that I did.

Or consider Horne’s recent masterful documentary establishing the three casket entries into the Bethesda military morgue on the evening of the autopsy. Those three casket entries cannot be innocent, especially given that the military knowingly, deliberately, and intentionally kept them secret. That’s why they ordered the Navy and Marine personnel who participated in the autopsy to keep their mouths shut on what they had witnessed and also threatened them with criminal prosecution if they ever revealed anything about this top-secret operation. Those three casket entries had to be part and parcel of the fraudulent autopsy itself. Once one comes to the realization that there were, in fact, three casket entries that evening, that realization inevitably leads one to conclude that a fraudulent autopsy was, in fact, conducted. There is no innocent explanation whatsoever for those three casket entries and the massive secrecy and deception surrounding two of them.

Or consider the two brain examinations that took place, notwithstanding the fact that the military pathologists steadfastly and falsely maintained that there was only one brain examination. Why would they lie about that? There was a big reason: the second brain examination didn’t involve the brain of President Kennedy. When there are two different brain exams, one of which involves a brain of someone other than the deceased, there is only one conclusion that one can reach: fraud. And fraud necessarily equates to guilt in the assassination itself.

Or consider the statements of the Dallas physicians, which established that the president had a massive exit-sized wound in the back of his head, which contradicted the official military photographs that show no such wound. Or consider the sworn testimony of Navy petty officer Saundra Spencer in the 1990s, who, when shown those official military photographs, stated unequivocally that they were not the autopsy photographs she developed on the weekend of the assassination; the ones she developed showed a big wound in the back of JFK’s head, which was what the Dallas treating physicians had stated 30 years before.

If one doesn’t wish to take the time to read Horne’s five-volume book, another option is to view his video presentations in the multimedia section of FFF’s website, not only as part of the various JFK conferences we have held but also Horne’s multipart series entitled “Altered History,” which continues to be the most downloaded FFF video since our founding in 1989.

So, for me, the JFK case is over. Because of the fraudulent autopsy, I have no doubts whatever that the JFK assassination was, in fact, a national-security-state regime-change operation.

What do I mean by that? The answer turns on the type of governmental system under which we have all be born and raised — a national-security state. In this type of governmental system, the military-intelligence establishment wields the omnipotent power to assassinate or otherwise remove threats to “national security.” That’s its job. It has the grave responsibility of keeping us “safe” from all threats to our “national security,” both foreign and domestic.

Consider the dozens of people who the military has recently killed in the Caribbean. Those are state-sponsored assassinations. The military is killing those people because it is convinced that they pose a grave threat to U.S. “national security.” In the minds of the military people who are carrying out those killings, they aren’t doing anything evil or immoral. On the contrary, in their minds they are doing what they are supposed to be doing — keeping America “safe” by extinguishing grave threats to “national security.”

There is no difference in principle between those state-sponsored assassinations in the Caribbean and the national-security establishment’s assassination of President Kennedy. Human life is human life. Nobody’s life is any more valuable than any other person’s life. Kennedy might have been a president of a big country and those boat people who are now dead might be just plain ordinary fisherman trying to eke out a living by transporting some illicit drugs, but all their lives are equally sacred.

What makes their deaths similar is that they were all deemed to be threats to U.S. “national security” and, therefore, had to be extinguished. In fact, given that Kennedy was president, in the minds of the U.S. national-security establishment he posed a much graver threat to national security than those boat people or anyone else they have assassinated or tried to assassinate, including Cuban leader Fidel Castro or that Iranian general, Qasem Soleimani.

Kennedy’s war with the national-security establishment involved a conflict of visions. After the Cuban Missile Crisis, Kennedy achieved a “breakthrough” that enabled him to see that the national-security establishment’s Cold War was nothing more than a deadly and destructive racket, one that was quite possibly going to lead to all-out, earth-destroying nuclear war. He was determined to move America in an entirely different direction than the Cold War direction that the national-security establishment had moved America and was determined to continue moving America (such as with an expanded war in Vietnam to stop the Reds).

Kennedy set forth his vision at his famous Peace Speech at American University in June 1963. That speech, more than anything, launched his open war against the U.S. national-security establishment, a war that ended in Kennedy’s defeat and death on November 22, 1963. For people wishing to study the nature of this war, I recommend FFF’s book JFK’s War with the National Security Establishment: Why Kennedy Was Assassinated by Douglas Horne, who, by the way, served on the staff of the Assassination Records Review Board.

And then there is the CIA. Once I came to the realization that the CIA had produced an altered copy of the famous Zapruder film on the very weekend of the assassination, I knew that no one could ever come up with an innocent explanation for doing that. By altering pertinent parts of the film at its top-secret state-of-the-art film facility in Rochester, New York, the CIA could have the film dovetail perfectly with the fraudulent autopsy that its counterparts in the military were conducting on that same weekend. The entire sordid tale is detained in my book An Encounter with Evil: The Abraham Zapruder Story.

Over the years, it has been gratifying for me to see ever-growing numbers of people studying Horne’s work and reaching the same conclusion I have reached.

One of the fascinating things for me is why there are still Americans who buy into the national-security state’s lone-nut theory of the assassination or who steadfastly do not want to delve into or study the fraudulent autopsy. Why is that?

Over the years, I’ve come up with a few explanations:

1. For many Americans, the national-security establishment is their god. It’s their everything. For them, it keeps them “safe” from all the dangerous creatures in the world — the Reds, Muslims, Cuba, North Korea, Russia, China, Venezuela, drug dealers, narco-terrorists, regular terrorists, illegal immigrants, and all the rest of the scary creatures who are clearly coming to get us. These Americans simply cannot bring themselves to question or challenge their god, much less advocate the dismantling of their god and restoring our founding system of a limited-government republic to our land. To do so is just too frightening and disconcerting.

2. For many Americans, it is simply inconceivable that the national-security establishment would take out a U.S. president. Boat people? Yes. Foreign presidents? Yes. Iranian generals? Yes. Accused terrorists? Yes. Accused drug dealers? Yes. Accused communists? Yes. But not a U.S. president. The Pentagon and the CIA would simply never do anything so evil. It’s our friend, not our enemy. What these Americans won’t let themselves see, however, is that the national-security establishment, from its perspective, was acting as their friend when it assassinated Kennedy. They “knew” that Kennedy had become a grave threat to “national security.” If he was permitted to get his way, America, they were convinced, would have fallen to the Reds during the Cold War, just like Cuba did. If it was okay for the national-security establishment to try to remove by force Cuban president Fidel Castro, Guatemalan president Jacobo Arbenz, or, later, Chilean president Salvador Allende as threats to “national security,” it was even more appropriate to remove Kennedy on the same basis. ‘

3. Even though they would be loathe to admit it, even to themselves, my hunch is that there are a number of Americans who, deep down, believe that the U.S. national-security state did the right thing by removing Kennedy from office. They are convinced that the assassination did, in fact, keep us “safe” and that we should not be questioning the judgment of the branch of government that has been charged with protecting “national security.”

In any event, as I have long maintained, there is no way that people who live under a national-security-state form of governmental structure can possibly be considered to be living in a genuinely free society. A government that wields the power to assassinate anyone it wants for whatever reason it wants cannot possibly be reconciled with the principles of freedom. A necessary prerequisite for restoring freedom to America is the dismantling of the national-security-state form of governmental structure and the restoration of our nation’s founding system of a limited-government republic.

Reprinted with permission from Future of Freedom Foundation.

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On Wednesday’s episode of the Peter Schiff Show, Peter returns to his show to walk listeners through what he sees as multiple asset bubbles and why those bubbles matter beyond headline market moves. He calls out the AI stock mania, a fragile housing market propped up by policy, and the crypto circus — all potential bubbles inflated by easy money.

He opens by framing the broader problem: we don’t just have one overheating market, we have many, and policy choices make their unwinding more dangerous:

The bigger question is not just whether or not this is a precursor for other bubbles to pop because there are a lot of bubbles. We have a bubble in AI stocks and I’ll talk about that too. On this podcast, we got Nvidia earnings out after the close today, but we have the AI bubble. There’s a bubble in housing, which, you know, the government is really trying to prevent from deflating, which of course they need to allow it to deflate, but they’re afraid of what might happen.

Peter is careful to separate hype from technological promise — he believes AI could genuinely reshape productivity and living standards — but warns that enthusiasm is fueling speculative excess rather than sober investment:

When I talk about an AI bubble, I am not saying that there isn’t potential in artificial intelligence. In fact, I think there’s tremendous potential. I think there’s probably more potential there than in anything I’ve seen, which would include the internet, which had a lot of potential. I think that AI could be the most transformative invention as far as lifting the standard of living of all of humanity.

Shifting from tech to crypto, Peter points to recent price action as evidence that much of the Bitcoin story is built on air — a sharp drawdown is “a pretty big bear market in nothing,” and he prefers measuring crypto’s value relative to gold rather than dollars:

Earlier this afternoon, Bitcoin traded below 88,500. Now, of course, that’s still a ridiculously high price to pay for nothing, but it’s about 30% below what you had to pay for nothing a couple of months ago. All right. So that is a pretty big bear market in nothing; Bitcoin down 30%. In terms of gold, which again is a better way to measure the price of Bitcoin, because after all Bitcoin is marketed as being digital gold, as being an alternative to gold that is going to replace gold because it’s better than gold.

Ironically, Peter says, the one real constructive outcome from the crypto craze could be greater utility for actual money: tokenized gold. If blockchain tech makes gold more liquid and transferable, that can strengthen gold’s role rather than replace it — because tokens are only as meaningful as the asset backing them:

Ironically, the one thing that might come out of the whole crypto bubble is tokenized gold. Gold may be the only real winner. Rather than killing gold, blockchain may have just given it a new lease on life by making gold even more efficient than it’s ever been as a means of exchange, making it more liquid, making it more divisible, making it more portable. All the characteristics that people think Bitcoin has that are better than gold are worthless without the underlying value of gold.

Finally, Peter reads the Fed’s recent comments as dangerously complacent. He notes that members of the FOMC (Federal Open Market Committee) appeared to downplay inflation risks tied to tariffs, suggesting any price increases from trade barriers may be temporary — even as tariff policy changes are being used politically to try to cool prices:

I thought what was significant, and it should have produced a bigger reaction, but it did not, was that the FOMC members seem to believe that the inflation threat that they thought may have come from tariffs isn’t there. And to the extent that prices are higher, that it’s not, you know, a permanent thing, that it’s like a one and done situation. And of course, Trump has been rolling back more tariffs recently, a lot of items. 

This article was originally published on SchiffGold.com.

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In April 1939, American unemployment reached 20.7 percent. For Henry Morgenthau Jr., Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Secretary of the Treasury, this was bad news. In a private meeting he confessed to two senior congressmen: “We are spending more than we have ever spent before and it does not work… After eight years of this administration, we have just as much unemployment as when we started. And an enormous debt to boot.”

Today, Americans know how the Great Depression ended. It ended with the onset of war in Europe. FDR truly believed that, if Britain and France went to war with Germany, the quagmire would make the British and French Governments heavily dependent on access to U.S. credit markets and resources, thereby ending America’s economic Depression. FDR welcomed the stimulus that war provided.

In 1939, Joseph Stalin hoped war in the West would be a quagmire fatally weakening Germany and its opponents. Stalin believed this development would open the door to a massive Soviet invasion from the East that would supplant Nazism with Communism. Thus, Stalin eagerly supplied the German war machine with the oil, iron, aluminum, grain, rubber, and other mineral resources Berlin needed to launch its war against Britain, France, and the Low Countries.

Ultimately, both FDR and Stalin miscalculated just how costly and risky the new conflict in Europe would be. War broke out in 1939, and in 1940 German military power rapidly defeated Western allies, though Britain fought on. The next year Germany invaded the Soviet Union.

Today, the Trump administration faces some conditions that FDR would recognize. Scott Bessent, President Donald Trump’s Treasury Secretary, confronts a national sovereign debt of approximately $38 trillion. Liquidity strains also persist in parts of the financial system, and the dollar’s long-term reserve status is under significant pressure and scrutiny.

Among the ideas under discussion by Bessent is a more enthusiastic official embrace of stablecoins—cryptocurrencies deliberately engineered to remain boringly pegged one-for-one to the dollar by holding equivalent reserves of cash or high-quality cash-equivalents in regulated accounts. In plain language: digital dollars that promise never to fluctuate like Bitcoin but can circle the globe in seconds without ever touching a traditional bank.

Bessent publicly argues that well-regulated stablecoins will also extend the dollar’s dominance into the blockchain era. Trump appears sympathetic; there is, after all, not enough gold on the planet to return to a metallic standard, and simply printing more fiat currency will further debase the dollar. Wall Street, ever helpful, is delighted to assist in kicking the can a little further—ideally down a blockchain-paved road.

Meanwhile, the Trump White House is charting a new course to war, this time in the direction of Venezuela. Has the administration concluded that the rapid conquest of Venezuela could induce the kind of economic stimulus that rescued FDR’s failed policies and restore economic prosperity inside the United States?

Compared with the Russian or Iranian armed forces, Venezuela’s military is almost Lilliputian. Nicolás Maduro presides over a hard-left, bitterly anti-American regime that is bankrupt, internationally isolated (save for Havana, Moscow, and Tehran), and yet sits atop the world’s largest proven oil reserves—303 billion barrels, according to OPEC’s latest assessment.

In addition, Cuba still depends on Venezuela for the overwhelming majority of its subsidized oil imports. A post-Maduro government amenable to Washington could, in theory, sever that lifeline and simultaneously open the spigots to international operators able to produce without the chronic interruptions that have reduced output from over 3 million barrels a day to less than 1 million.

Read the Whole Article

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Banks with credit card businesses are currently charging an annual interest rate of 19.24 percent on purchases. If you use their card for cash advances, the interest rate you pay is 29.99 percent.  If I remember my medieval history, 30% is higher than the usury Jews charged that led to pogroms and is higher than the percentage of serf labor to which feudal lords had claim..

I got to wondering what percentage of banks’s profits came from credit card interest and bank fees.  In other words, does it pay banks to finance new investment in plant and equipment when they can get 20% or 30% from lending to hard pressed Americans living on their credit card?

I did a search, and there is not the information you would suspect.  I did learn that credit card companies make more money from interest on unpaid accounts than from transaction fees on purchases.  Interest charges on outstanding balances are paid by the card user.  Transaction fees on purchasers were formerly paid by merchants.  However, today many merchants have shifted these charges to their customers. When you use your credit card today, you, not the merchant, face the transaction charges.

I learned that although credit cards only account for 4.5% of banks’ total balance sheets, they generated 16.6% of banks’ interest income during 2010-2023.

In 2022 the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau reported that credit card companies charged consumers more than $25 billion in fees, especially for late payment, and that these fees represent 16% of aggregate profit of the credit card businesses.

So, the former paradigm of a bank receiving deposits from depositors, for which it paid interest, then lending the deposits to corporations at a higher interest is no longer the paradigm.  Today the paradigm is that banks rip off consumers and no not lend for the expansion of productive capacity. 

The collapse caused by the massive loans involved with subprime derivatives that brought the collapse of 2008 now threatens a repeat with what seems to be an AI bubble that is unsustainable, if Michael Burry of The Great Short is again correct while no one listens. See this.

The post What Ever Became of Usury? appeared first on LewRockwell.

“This article was created for educational purposes”

Predicting outright state collapse is inherently uncertain, but by 2040 several countries face materially elevated risk of severe state failure or collapse of central authority—meaning loss of effective governance over significant territory, large-scale internal conflict, or fragmentation. The following list identifies countries widely judged vulnerable by analysts, with the dominant factors driving risk for each. This is a probabilistic assessment (not a deterministic forecast); risks arise from combinations of governance failure, economic stress, demography, external interference, and climate and resource shocks.

High-risk (elevated probability of major failure or fragmentation by 2040)

• Sudan
  • Key drivers: persistent civil war since 2023 between military and multiple paramilitary factions; fractured elites; collapsed economy; humanitarian catastrophe; regional proxy interventions; armed militias controlling territory. Absent a credible peace process and restoration of basic services, continued fragmentation and local warlord rule remain likely.

• Libya
  • Key drivers: enduring rival governments and militias since 2011; localized war economies centered on oil; weak institutions; foreign military involvement from regional powers; fragmented security forces. Elections and stabilization have repeatedly failed; continuation of de facto partition or recurring armed confrontations is plausible.
• Somalia
  • Key drivers: decades of weak central institutions; resilient Islamist insurgency (al-Shabaab); clan fragmentation; recurring drought and food crises; limited revenue base and heavy external dependence. Federal government holds territory intermittently; risk centers on further territorial losses to non-state actors and de facto regional autonomy.
• Yemen
  • Key drivers: prolonged civil war (Houthi vs. internationally recognized government and southern movements), foreign intervention (Saudi/UAE, Iran-backed dynamics), collapsed public services, famine risk, and multiple competing authorities in north and south. A negotiated nationwide settlement before 2040 is possible but not assured; continued partition or frozen conflict is likely without major shifts.

Significant-concern (substantial vulnerability, where collapse is a realistic tail outcome under adverse shocks)

• Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC)
  • Key drivers: vast territory with weak state reach, numerous armed groups in the east, fragile institutions, resource-driven local conflicts, poor infrastructure, and refugee flows. A regional conflagration or intensified localized state retreat could yield large-scale governance collapse in parts of the country.

• Haiti
  • Key drivers: chronic political instability, powerful gangs controlling large urban areas (Port-au-Prince), weak security forces, economic collapse, natural disasters, and limited institutional capacity. Without decisive security reform and economic stabilization, de facto governance vacuums and quasi-failed-state dynamics will likely persist or worsen.
• Afghanistan
  • Key drivers: the Taliban’s hold since 2021 has not produced unified, durable governance across ethnic lines; economic collapse, international isolation, insurgent pockets, factionalism, and climate-driven shocks. The risk is not classic internationalized collapse but fragmentation, governance breakdown in provinces, and potential return of competing armed groups.
• South Sudan
  • Key drivers: weak institutions since independence, ethnicized politics, recurrent violence, dependence on oil revenues, poor service delivery, and climate stress on pastoralist livelihoods. Recurrent localized breakdowns remain likely; a full reversion to widespread civil war is a significant tail risk.

Medium-concern (fragility that could tip under severe economic, political, or climate shocks)

• Lebanon
  • Key drivers: economic meltdown, currency collapse, sectarian/political paralysis, refugee burden, and state delegitimization. Collapse into prolonged governance paralysis and localized militias is possible if economic conditions and patronage networks deteriorate further.
• Pakistan
  • Key drivers: economic crisis, political-military friction, extremist insurgency pockets, water scarcity, and institutional fragility. Full state collapse is low-probability, but severe governance crises, localized breakdowns, or loss of state capacity in border regions could occur under large shocks.
• Nigeria
  • Key drivers: insurgency in the northeast (Boko Haram/IS affiliate), banditry and farmer–herder conflict in the middle belt, separatist pressures in the southeast, weak logistics and constrained fiscal space. Collapse of the whole state is unlikely, but protracted fragmentation or long-term erosion of state authority in large regions is a material risk.

Read the Whole Article

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The French authorities commemorated the November 13, 2015 attacks. President François Hollande and his associates did everything in their power to conceal the truth from their people. In doing so, while they may have succeeded in evading their own mistakes, by depriving their fellow citizens of the truth, they deprived them of the opportunity to rebuild their lives.

France is a very strange country. To lull its population to sleep, it likes to celebrate its misfortunes. On November 13, 2025, France therefore celebrated the tenth anniversary of its defeat of November 13, 2015, when terrorists massacred 133 people and injured 413 in six attacks at the Stade de France (Saint-Denis), on the terraces of cafes, and at the Bataclan.

In his address, President Emmanuel Macron proclaimed, “This haunting question: why? We would like to find meaning in what happened… No, there is no meaning, no justification for your pain. There never will be.”

It is a terrible lie that prevents all those who experienced these attacks in their flesh from finding peace: Yes, these attacks had a meaning, but our leaders chose to hide it from us so as not to have to acknowledge their mistakes.

To understand what happened that day, we must first examine the context of the events. In February 2011, France, under President Nicolas Sarkozy, sought to involve Turkey in the Western war against Libya, despite Libya being its second-largest trading partner. France secured Ankara’s commitment to mobilize the Misrata tribe, heirs to the Ottoman army, against Muammar Gaddafi. In exchange, Turkey pledged to shift the Turkish problem away from its Kurdish minority. A secret treaty was signed between the two foreign ministers, Alain Juppé and Ahmet Davutoğlu. It stipulated the creation of a Kurdish state outside of Turkey, in Syria, where many Turkish Kurds had sought refuge in the 1980s. This plan is unknown in France, but was published at the time by the Algerian press under the code name “Plan Bleu” (Blue Plan).

While President Sarkozy had committed France to the Western operation against Libya, and then against Syria, he changed his mind in February 2012 when he realized the river of blood he was fueling. His “American friends” therefore ensured his failure to be re-elected and replaced him with François Hollande. Hollande immediately reignited the war, convening the third meeting of the “Friends of the Syrian People Group” in Paris with Hillary Clinton on July 6, 2012.

On October 31, 2014, during the official visit of Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, then Turkish Prime Minister, to Paris, President François Hollande held a secret meeting at the Élysée Palace with Salih Muslim, co-president of the Syrian Kurds. The two men agreed to implement the Juppé-Davutoğlu plan at the expense of the Syrians.

However, the United States supported the PKK (renamed YPG in Syria) during the Battle of Kobani. Loyal to his “American friends,” President Hollande then received Asya Abdullah, co-president of the Syrian Kurds (loyal to Abdullah Öcalan), and Commander Nesrin Abdullah, in her leopard-print uniform, at the Élysée Palace on February 8, 2015. Salih Muslim, the other co-president of the Syrian Kurds and the only Kurdish leader in favor of the transfer of a Kurdish state to Syria, was not invited.

On July 20, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan reacted by ordering his ISIS operatives to carry out an attack against Kurds during a demonstration in Suruç, Anatolia.
On November 13, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan gave the order to attack France.

It is important to understand that France was wrong the first time to commit to transferring Kurdistan to Syria and then again to abandon its promise. Turkey, true to form, reacted by first carrying out an attack against Turkish Kurds (34 dead and 104 wounded), and then against the French (113 dead and 413 wounded).

The story doesn’t end there.

French police managed to identify and locate some of the “terrorists” they arrested in Saint-Denis. They prevented an attack in La Défense. But the team reformed, and Recep Tayyip Erdoğan ordered a second wave in Brussels.

This time, he made no secret of it. During the commemorations of the Battle of Gallipoli on March 18, he threatened the European Union Commission, which had welcomed the branch of the Kurds loyal to Abdullah Öcalan, declaring: “I appeal to the states that welcome them [the PKK] with open arms, which, directly or indirectly, support terrorist organizations. You are feeding a snake in your bed. And that snake you are feeding can bite you at any moment.”  [ 1 ] Four days later, on March 22, the same team that carried out the attacks in Saint-Denis and Paris perpetrated the attacks in Zaventem and Brussels (35 dead and 340 wounded).

You should know that one of the terrorists who participated in the attacks in France and Belgium, Mohammed Abrini, known as “the man in the hat,” was an informant for MI6  [ 2 ] . He warned London (which, on principle, supported Turkey), but neither Paris nor Brussels.

There was no third wave because, once France had created “Rojava” (the Syrian region seized by Kurdish mercenaries) in Syria, the United States intervened and stipulated that it should not be an independent state, but an “autonomous region.” The Turks were satisfied to no longer have the PKK Kurds within their borders, and the French could claim to have more or less fulfilled their promise.

A massive trial was held in Paris, lasting ten months in 2021-2022. François Hollande testified but never once mentioned his political responsibility in these tragedies. None of the judges asked him any questions on the matter.

Our leaders are not accountable to the Nation.

A museum in Paris will be dedicated to terrorism. It is doomed to failure. Indeed, according to its manifesto, its purpose is to “give meaning to the suffering endured by the victims by offering keys to understanding an ongoing history.” That is to say, everything that our irresponsible politicians are obstructing.

Moreover, terrorism, whether perpetrated by isolated individuals, groups or states, is not a fact in itself, but a method of combat that can be practiced by all military organizations without exception, including regular armies.

In 2001, after the attacks in New York and at the Pentagon, George W. Bush, President of the United States, declared a “war on terror.” To achieve this, the world’s largest army transformed itself into a band of criminals practicing torture on a vast scale.

Every time we use the word “terrorism,” we risk reacting emotionally and failing to understand what is at stake.

—

[ 1 ]  “  Erdoğan threatens the European Union  ”, by Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, Voltaire Network , March 18, 2016.

[ 2 ]  “ First Isis supergrass helps UK terror police ”, Tom Harper, The Times , June 26th, 2016. “  Terror suspect dubbed ‘the man in the hat’ after Paris and Brussels attacks becomes British police’s first ISIS Supergrass  ”, Anthony Joseph, Daily Mail , June 26th, 2016.

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Libertarians talk a lot about the need to weaken—and even to abolish—the state. And rightly so. But a necessary part of opposing the state is building up other institutions that can challenge state power and offer alternatives to the state. That is, if we are to meaningfully undermine the state, it is necessary to encourage, grow, and sustain robust non-state institutions such as churches, families, and private markets. These are the institutions of what the old classical liberals called “civil society.”

Perhaps the most important of these institutions is the family. Among all human institutions, the family is, by far, the most “natural” in the sense that it has existed always and everywhere that humans exist. It is fundamental to the human experience in a way that the state never has been, and never can be.

The state, after all, is neither natural nor necessary, and has only existed in certain times and places. Nonetheless, when and where the state does exist it seeks to weaken and replace all other institutions. During the rise of the modern state in Europe, this has certainly been true as state agents have worked to take control of churches, supplant the nobility, and abolish the independence of municipal and regional polities.

Similarly, the state has sought to supersede the family. This it has done with a myriad of strategies including government schooling, the military draft, the welfare state, and inheritance taxes. Families have always been a threat to state power because families often attract the loyalty of individuals away from state institutions, and families can be critical in offering individuals economic and social stability.

In this endeavor to destroy the family, the state has been increasingly successful in recent centuries. Although the family still exists today, it does so in a greatly weakened state.

This has implications for all other institutions of civil society, as well. Research in recent decades has shown that married couples with children—i.e., intact families—are foundational to the sustainability of religious institutions, charitable organizations, volunteerism, neighborhood stability, and for local social institutions that build the fabric of stable communities. The decline of the family—which has been precipitous since the 1960s—has been a key factor in the decline of these other institutions as well.

In other words, family demographics have been a critical factor. As marriage rates and birth rates have declined, civil society has declined and state power has grown.

Indeed, from the perspective of the state, the ideal demographic makeup of society is likely one composed of single parents raising a small number of children in irreligious households. These types of weakened families are shown to be less engaged civically, more fragile, more mobile, less economically prosperous, and less engaged with religious institutions. All of this this helps ensure weak social bonds coupled with perennial dependence on the state.

Families Are More Active in Building Civil Society 

Civil society has always been much more than the market institutions that exist within it. A functioning society is comprised of countless informal social networks among institutions, within neighborhoods, and within families themselves. Without this, there can be no “high-trust” societies and the result is higher levels of social isolation, crime, and poverty. Moreover, the social skills and loyalties central to the preservation of civil society must also be passed down to future participants.

For many years, some social scientists pushed the theory that members of stable families are less social and less inclined toward civic engagement. Evidence to the contrary continues to pile up, however, and popular books like Robert Putnam’s Bowling Alone shows what has long been obvious to many: that the abandonment of earlier marriage and childrearing patterns has led to more social isolation.

Married parents are often the key group that is essential to maintaining these networks and institutions. For example, in a 2010 study, Richard Caputo found that

Families play an important part in the transmission of civic-mindedness: horizontally through interactions with other adults in community and church-related activities which reinforce and help spread civic culture and vertically as parents socialize their children. …

Married persons were found to volunteer more than unmarried, due primarily to increased opportunities to do so arising from their children’s school among other venues … the modal volunteer was found to be the married parent with children, especially of school-age, living in the household.

“Civic engagement” can mean a lot of things, but married persons were found to be especially active in “non-activist” civic engagement such as community fundraisers, supporting local businesses, and donating time to non-political organizations. Caputo notes “more than one-fourth of married persons (28.5%) were non-activist volunteers, nearly twice that of persons who were separated, widowed, or divorced (17.4%) and of nevermarried persons (14.4%).”

(In contrast, unmarried people tend to be more engaged in political activities such as volunteering for a political party.)

Moreover, a 2018 Australian study concludes:

Parents seem to play a key role in providing a route into civic participation and encouraging our young participants to get involved – even more so than a positive experience at school or through friendships with peers. The data we present undermine the idea that strong families do not contribute to civil society – and suggest instead that strong bonds forged within the family can lead to linkages outside it.

Much of the contribution from married couples with children in this regard can be described as “accidental.” That is, as Caputo notes, the process of raising and educating children tends to simply thrust families into more social and interconnected roles within the community. Moreover, married couples with children tend to move around less, therefore contributing to more stable neighborhoods and communities. For one, married parents stay together longer than unmarried co-habiting couples. The relative longevity of married parents leads to more stability for the home lives of children. Moreover, even when adjusted for income, high levels of residential mobility are associated with “negative outcomes including suicide attempts, criminality, psychiatric disorders, drug abuse, and unnatural mortality.”

As a study for the US Department of Housing and Human Services found, “twice as many single-parent families moved compared with two-parent families (26 percent and 13 percent, respectively).” . The presence of children often encourages married parents to avoid even short-distance moves. Parents may be instinctively concluding what other reasearch has shown—namely that frequent moves lead to disruptions in a child’s life and correlate with negative social outcomes.

The Link Between Families and Religion 

Like families, religious institutions—at least in the West—have offered competition for state institutions and have been central to the independence of civil society.  The key building block of religious institutions have been families with married parents.

For example, a substantially larger portion of married people attend religious services compared to never married and separated/divorced adults. This is reinforced when children enter the equation.

A number of studies show a sizable overlap, in terms of behavior and lifestyle, between married people and religious people. This is because married people tend to be religious and vice versa. As summarized by Hanna Seariac:

Additionally, married people are generally more likely to be religious and stay religious.

Both religion and marriage have demonstrable benefits. Research shows actively religious people tend to be happier, more civically engaged, participate in more communities, report some health benefits and engage in more philanthropy. Marriage has benefits for individual couples and their children, but also is instrumental in creating economic stability. …

Researchers have discovered that children who grow up in a single-parent household are more likely to disaffect from their religion and less likely to attend religious services. … As children observe the rupture of their parents’ marriage, they become less likely to be religious growing up and more likely to either not marry or have an unstable marriage.

There is a feedback loop here. Research on civic engagement has shown that much of that engagement involves volunteering for religious institutions and related charitable organizations. This, in turn, encourages more and continued engagement between these married people and their religious institutions.

Data has also shown that those people who regularly attend religious services tend to be married more often and experience much lower rates of divorce. This leads to longer marriages, which in turn leads to more volunteering and community engagement, and so on.

Political Views of Married People and Religious People 

Increased non-political civic engagement among married people likely reflects an ideological bent that is more skeptical of state power.

In his research on attendance at religious services, Ryan Burge concludes “There is almost no ‘liberalizing religion’ in the United States … The more people attend [church], the less liberal they are.” (”Liberal” in this context means “leftist” or “progressive” or “social democrat.”)

Among those who attend weekly or more than weekly, no more than 16 percent identify as “liberal” or “very liberal.” Nearly 60 percent of those who attend religious services more than once a week identify as conservative or “very conservative.” This correlation is so solid it even cuts across racial categories.1

What do these conservatives believe? Well, for our purposes here—i.e., looking at family as a non-state institution—a 2021 Pew survey shows that people who self-identify as conservatives tend to overwhelmingly agree with the statements “government is almost always wasteful and inefficient,” and “government is doing too many things.” In contrast, the opposite is true for those who self-identify as “liberal” and lopsidedly disagree that governments are too wasteful and powerful.

At the same time, married people more often tend toward self-identifying as “conservative.” This leads to the so-called “marriage gap” in which there is a sizable difference between political views of the unmarried and the married—especially among women. Unmarried women tend to lean well to the left of married women, and adhere to a far more positive view of an activist state.

It’s easy to see why states and their agents have for so long sought to weaken families and related institutions. Without strong families at the center of civil society, many other non-state institutions are weakened as well, and state institutions like public schools and welfare programs become far more central to the lives of many.

—

1 An additional dimension to this can be found in how conservatives tend to report higher “relationship quality.” See Troy L Fangmeier, Scott M Stanley, Kayla Knopp, Galena K Rhoades,  ”Political Party Identification and Romantic Relationship Quality,” Couple Family Psychol 25, No.9 (Jun 2020)  (https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8266382/)

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Attendance at Mass has plummeted since that New Springtime for the Church, heralded by the Second Vatican Council. There has been no springtime. Indeed, in no area of human culture has there been any such—not in the fine arts, film, literature, education, social institutions, civic life, folkways; not in the ordinary interchanges of human beings outside of their homes; not even in life within the home.

People have not turned from the Church to the mosque, or to the Order of Raccoons, or to some weekly meeting of armchair philosophers. They have turned to nothing at all; or to worse than nothing, the antisocial life of social media, where all is rancor, pride, and spite, and no one need look anyone in the eye and say, “I think you’re wrong,” and begin a fruitful or at least a human discussion. The glory of God is man fully alive; the boast of Satan is to reduce man to less than man, to deaden him within, to get him to prance with pride while he becomes pettier, more predictable; to replace him with automatism, as if he were aspiring with all his tiny heart to become a machine.

I’ve visited my hometown after seven years, and I am struck by how busy the streets are with traffic and how empty the sidewalks are of persons. It is a death-in-life. A few hundred feet from my mother’s house is a small playground with a sign dedicating it to one of our old neighbors. It is empty, always. It is as if someone has mummified and decorated a corpse.

The town had promised the children in my neighborhood a playground. That was almost 60 years ago, when I was a boy. For we had had one, shabby enough, but full of life. On it stood the ruins of a tiny schoolhouse. It had no roof. The walls were scrawled with graffiti. Nails and jagged wood stuck out here and there. Of course we loved it.

One summer, the town sent a couple of teenagers there to oversee it and to do some projects with the inevitable swarm of children climbing the monkey bars, or playing wiffle ball, or hanging around. One project was to make plaster-of-Paris “statues” from rubber molds and then to paint them when they had hardened. One I recall was a bust of John F. Kennedy; another was of the Ten Commandments.

But an old lady next door couldn’t stand the noise, so she badgered the town council till they let her buy the patch of land the playground was on. They promised us a new one nearby, but by the time they got to it, times had changed, and we who had known the old playground were too big for the new one. There were fewer children, too. There it sits, unused, a monument to a feature of human life fallen away.

It is the same with the baseball fields. When I was a boy, we had only one, a sandlot that the men also used for softball and baseball, so there was no fence in the outfield. It was inadequate, but that didn’t matter.

Our small town fielded six Little League teams, with 15 boys on a team. My brother and I and seven of our cousins and three next-door neighbors played on a team that my uncle and then my father managed. But now my brother tells me that the town has only one team. When we had six teams, we played a 20-game schedule, 10 games in each half, which meant there were 60 games all told, so for 12 weeks in the late spring and summer, there were five games a week. People would wander over to the sandlot to check out what was going on. Now, nothing.

I drove past the church, and I saw that parish offices now occupy the house where the Immaculate Heart of Mary sisters used to live, when they taught in the three-story building that one of the parish’s old pastors had built. When I attended there, we had between 45 and 51 pupils in my class, all in the same room. Nobody thought that was odd. The school is no more. The parish sold the building to the town, which now uses it for its offices.

The town’s own high school stood across the street, but that was rendered obsolete after the town consolidated its school district with those of two adjacent towns. The new institution was built outside of where anybody lived. A memorial marks the place where the high school used to be. It used also to swarm with young people, most of whom would walk to and from the place, as we did at our Catholic school, so that, twice a day during the school year, there would be some 500 children on the streets, and many of these might not go straight home but rather stop for a snack at the drug store or one of the small groceries, or get a haircut, or lean over the rail of the bridge to spit in the river, or anything—anything human.

People used to do such things. Teenagers went to dances where a local band was playing—and there were innumerable such bands, everywhere in the country. In my town, they used to tack up their advertisements on telephone poles. The fire department, a five-minute walk from my house, often rented space to a band for a small fee; admission might cost a couple of dollars. Such bands acquired a local or regional reputation. One of them in our area, The Poets, played their last gig in 2019. The point is not that they have been superseded by other bands. They have been superseded by nothing.

When I went to the fire department to hear them play, I walked down a very steep road that in snowy weather you would never dare to drive on—so the man who lived at the bottom of the hill, the father of one of my classmates, set up sawhorses in the middle of the street below to keep people away. I like to think that he did so also to allow us children to sled down that hill, which ended in a 90-degree blind turn, so that we did rely on there being no cars to run us over.

On the other side of town there was a hill almost as steep but much longer. It was interrupted by a bed for railroad tracks, which under snow became a ramp for sleds to strike at great speed and sail into the air. This hill could not be cordoned off against cars, but boys would sled down it anyway, as their field of vision there was clear. I wonder how long it has been since anyone has sledded down either hill.

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