Lew Rockwell Institute

Ellen Finnigan wrote:

Dear Lew,

I thought I’d make a war protest video that might make Christians self-reflect a little bit.

The post Time to pick a side appeared first on LewRockwell.

Writes Ginny Garner:

Lew, 

Podcaster Kate Dalley loves the Mises Institute and has had you, Mises President Tom DiLorenzo and Tom Woods on as guests. Her broadcast on 3/14 covered election fraud, President Trump’s advocacy for “freedom cities” and birthright citizenship. Freedom cities are the 15 minute cities the World Economic forum and technocrats plan for people to live in a total digital surveillance grid. In the election fraud segment (starts at 42), activist Sophia Anderson explains how the nationwide cellular network called FirstNet still exists connecting election equipment and giving federal government access to election systems. ERIC (the Election Records Information Center) is also still operational. See here.

In the interview, Anderson also states the individual who reported the pipe bombs on J6 was a senior employee of FirstNet. The article she wrote on FirstNet is still on The Gateway Pundit’s web site.

FirstNet is used at the county and state levels for county commissioner, school board, board of supervisor elections and votes on bond issues. 

Kate Dalley’s web page.

The post Election Fraud System Still in Place and Trump Promotes 15 Minute Cities appeared first on LewRockwell.

Thanks, Mike Sanders.

New Atlas

The post World’s first “Synthetic Biological Intelligence” runs on living human cells appeared first on LewRockwell.

Thanks,  John Smith. 

Common Dreams

The post ‘This Felt Like a Kidnapping Because It Was’ appeared first on LewRockwell.

Thanks, John Smith. 

See here.

The post Volunteer doctor in Gaza describes Israel brutally shooting 6-year-old Palestinian boy appeared first on LewRockwell.

Thanks, Vasko Kohlmayer.

The post Not Great appeared first on LewRockwell.

Writes Gail Appel:

Leaked to CNN. Followed up with they “might be motivated to take what they know to a foreign intelligence service”.

Where is John Ratcliffe? These “disgruntled” former employees were given 10 months severance pay, a hefty “ buyout” chunk of change, full retirement benefits and are likely to move on to cushy jobs with Teneo, Brookings Council, Aspen Forum, McKinsey or any number of other  CCP backed “ private security” and “ consulting” firms. Or Soros NGOs.

No consequences- guaranteed. Treason only applies to the opposition . Particular without having committed a crime.

The post CIA “DOGE us, there will be consequences” appeared first on LewRockwell.

German Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock this week, on entering a “new era of nefariousness”:

I say clearly and across the Atlantic, what is right and what is wrong shall never be irrelevant to us. No one wants and no one needs peace more than the Ukrainians and Ukraine. The diplomatic efforts of the U.S. are of course important here. But such a peace must be just and lasting and not just a pause until the next attack… We will never accept a perpetrator-victim reversal. A perpetrator-victim reversal would be… the end of security for the vast majority of countries. And it would be fatal for the future of the United States.

Baerbock’s declaration that a “perpetrator-victim reversal” (a Täteropferumkehr, I’m reliably informed) would be “fatal” to the U.S. was historic. It was accompanied by a promise that “as transatlantacists,” Europeans must “stand up for our own interests, our own values, and our own security.” Although new leaders are ready to take the reins in Germany, she said, there can be no waiting for the transfer of power. Immediately, “Germany must take the lead at this historic milestone.”

A few years ago Baerbock pleaded for patience with a British conservative who demanded to know why Germany wasn’t providing Leopard tanks to Ukraine.

Now, with Donald Trump cutting off weapons deliveries and shutting down access to ATACMS missiles, Baerbock’s speech is an expression of more enthusiastic European support for continued fighting.

The war in Ukraine is often called a proxy conflict between Russia and the West or Russia and the U.S., but it increasingly looks more like a fight between Baerbock’s “transatlanticists” and those who believe in “spheres of influence.” In preparing Racket’s accompanying “Timeline: The War in Ukraine,” I found both sides articulated this idea repeatedly.

In January, 2017, as he was preparing to relinquish his seat to Mike Pence, Joe Biden alluded to the recent election of Donald Trump in a speech at Davos. Describing the “dangerous willingness to revert to political small-mindedness” of “popular movements on both the left and right,” Biden explained:

We hear these voices in the West—but the greatest threats on this front spring from the distinct illiberalism of external actors who equate their success with a fracturing of the liberal international order. We see this in Asia and the Middle East… But I will not mince words. This movement is principally led by Russia.

Biden even then lumped Trump and Putin together, as enemies of the “liberal international order.” Russian counterparts like Putin and Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, meanwhile, spoke of a “post-West world order” where diplomatic relations would be based on “sovereignty” and the “national interests of partners.” These are two fundamentally irreconcilable worldviews. Was conflict inevitable, or could peace have held if Russia didn’t strike in 2022?

There’s no question who invaded whom. Hostilities began in February, 2022 with an angry speech by Vladimir Putin and bombs that landed minutes later in Ukraine. Little discussion of the “why” of the war took place in the West, however.

Phrases like “unprovoked aggression” became almost mandatory in Western coverage. Politico interviewed a range of experts and concluded that what Putin wanted was “a revanchist imperialist remaking of the globe to take control of the entire former Soviet space.” This diagnosis of Putin’s invasion as part of a Hitlerian quest for Lebensraum and a broader return to national glory might have merit, but it was also conspicuously uncontested. A differing article by University of Chicago professor John Mearshimer declaring the crisis “the West’s fault” made him, as The New Statesman just put it, “the world’s most hated thinker.” Few went there after.

Russians and Ukrainians don’t have the typical profiles of ancient warring tribes. They have a deeply intertwined history, with citizens of both countries retaining many of the same customs, jokes, and home remedies, while living in the same crumbling Soviet buildings, with fondness for the same cabbage soup and moonshine. There are huge numbers of mixed/bilingual families and many famous cultural figures (including my hero Nikolai Gogol) are claimed by both countries. They’ve fought before, but what jumped out reviewing this “Timeline” is how much it seemed that these old Slavic neighbors mostly fall out now over attitudes toward the West.

It’s hard looking back not to be struck by the superior tone of bodies like the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE), whose “reviews” of Ukrainian and Russian elections often read like zoological descriptions of inferior species. Same with a tsk-tsking report by a mission of visiting IMF economists in 2013, who were appalled by Ukrainian energy subsidies that were among of the few popular remnants of Soviet life.

These imperious Western assessments of childlike Slavs, and the panic and shame of some local officials before such foreign judgments, recall familiar satires in Russian literature (The Government Inspector comes to mind). Nationalists in both countries balked at this “advice,” and by the late nineties some came to the conclusion that the cost of cooperation with the West was greater than the benefit. These dynamics accelerated after the Orange Revolution in 2004 and the Maidan events of 2013-2014, which Russians still see as a West-backed coup and the beginning of the current war. Russians will say “first blood” was drawn in military operations against Donbass protesters around the same time. Those in the West will point at the 2014 annexation of Crimea as the beginning of territorial war.

The idea of Germany “taking the lead” in a war to secure the primacy of “transatlanticists” worries me more than trying to pronounce Täteropferumkehr. However, whether or not you think Baerbock is right, and a peace deal now would be a worthless “pause,” depends a lot on how you read this history. What do you think, and why?

This originally appeared on Racket News.

The post Is Russia at War With Ukraine, or With the West? appeared first on LewRockwell.

The war in Ukraine is, but in reverse, the same situation that America’s President JFK had faced with regard to the Soviet Union in the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis, when the U.S. would have invaded Cuba if Khrushchev wouldn’t agree to a mutually acceptable settlement — which he did, and so WW3 was averted on that occasion. But whereas Khrushchev was reasonable; Obama, Biden, and Trump, are not; and, so, we again stand at the brink of a WW3, but this time with a truly evil head-of-state (Obama, then Biden, and now Trump), who might even be willing to go beyond that brink — into WW3 — in order to become able to achieve world-conquest. This is as-if Khrushchev had said no to JFK’s proposal in 1962 — but, thankfully, he didn’t; so, WW3 was averted, on that occasion.

How often have you heard or seen the situation in the matter of Cuba being near to the White House (near to America’s central command) being analogized to Ukraine’s being near — far nearer, in fact — to The Kremlin (Russia’s central command)? No, you probably haven’t encountered this historical context before, because it’s not being published — at least not in America and its allied countries. It’s being hidden.

The Ukrainian war actually started after the democratically elected President of Ukraine (an infamously corrupt country), who was committed to keeping his country internationally neutral (not allied with either Russia or the United States), met privately with both the U.S. President Barack Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in 2010, shortly following that Ukrainian President’s election earlier in 2010; and, on both occasions, he rejected their urgings for Ukraine to become allied with the United States against his adjoining country Russia. This was being urged upon him so that America could position its nuclear missiles at the Russian border with Ukraine, less than a five-minute striking-distance away from hitting the Kremlin in Moscow.

The war in Ukraine started in 2014, as both NATO’s Stoltenberg and Ukraine’s Zelensky have said (NOT in 2022 as is alleged in the U.S.-controlled nations). This war was started in February 2014 by a U.S. coup which replaced the democratically elected and neutralist Ukrainian President, with a U.S. selected and rabidly anti-Russian leader, who immediately imposed an ethnic-cleansing program to get rid of the residents in the regions that had voted overwhelmingly for the overthrown President. Russia responded militarily on 24 February 2022, in order to prevent Ukraine from allowing the U.S. to place a missile there a mere 317 miles or five minutes of missile-flying-time away from The Kremlin and thus too brief for Russia to respond before its central command would already be beheaded by America’s nuclear strike. (As I headlined on 28 October 2022, “NATO Wants To Place Nuclear Missiles On Finland’s Russian Border — Finland Says Yes”. The U.S. had demanded this, especially because it will place American nuclear missiles far nearer to The Kremlin than at present, only 507 miles away — not as close as Ukraine, but the closest yet.)

Ukraine was neutral between Russia and America until Obama’s brilliantly executed Ukrainian coup, which his Administration started planning by no later than June 2011, culminated successfully in February 2014 and promptly appointed a rabid anti-Russian to impose in regions that rejected the new anti-Russian U.S.-controlled goverment an “Anti-Terrorist Operation” to kill protesters, and, ultimately, to terrorize the residents in those regions in order to kill as many of them as possible and to force the others to flee into Russia so that when elections would be held, pro-Russian voters would no longer be in the electorate.

The U.S. Government had engaged the Gallup polling organization, both before and after the coup, in order to poll Ukrainians, and especially ones who lived in its Crimean independent republic (where Russia has had its main naval base ever since 1783), regarding their views on U.S., Russia, NATO, and the EU; and, generally, Ukrainians were far more pro-Russia than pro-U.S., pro-NATO, or pro-EU, but this was especially the case in Crimea; so, America’s Government knew that Crimeans would be especially resistant. However, this was not really new information. During 2003-2009, only around 20% of Ukrainians had wanted NATO membership, while around 55% opposed it. In 2010, Gallup found that whereas 17% of Ukrainians considered NATO to mean “protection of your country,” 40% said it’s “a threat to your country.” Ukrainians predominantly saw NATO as an enemy, not a friend. But after Obama’s February 2014 Ukrainian coup, “Ukraine’s NATO membership would get 53.4% of the votes, one third of Ukrainians (33.6%) would oppose it.” However, afterward, the support averaged around 45% — still over twice as high as had been the case prior to the coup.

In other words: what Obama did was generally successful: it grabbed Ukraine, or most of it, and it changed Ukrainians’ minds regarding America and Russia. But only after the subsequent passage of time did the American billionaires’ neoconservative heart become successfully grafted into the Ukrainian nation so as to make Ukraine a viable place to position U.S. nuclear missiles against Moscow (which is the U.S. Government’s goal there). Furthermore: America’s rulers also needed to do some work upon U.S. public opinion. Not until February of 2014 — the time of Obama’s coup — did more than 15% of the American public have a “very unfavorable” view of Russia. (Right before Russia invaded Ukraine, that figure had already risen to 42%. America’s press — and academia or public-policy ‘experts’ — have been very effective at managing public opinion, for the benefit of America’s billionaires.)

Then came the Minsk Agreements (#1 & #2, with #2 being the final version, which is shown here, as a U.N. Security Council Resolution), between Ukraine and the separatist region in its far east, and which the U.S. Government refused to participate in, but the U.S.-installed Ukrainian government (then under the oligarch Petro Poroshenko) signed it in order to have a chance of Ukraine’s gaining EU membership, but never complied with any of it; and, so, the war continued); and, then, finally, as the Ukrainian government (now under Volodmyr Zelensky) was greatly intensifying its shelling of the break-away far-eastern region, Russia presented, to both the U.S. Government and its NATO military alliance against Russia, two proposed agreements for negotiation (one to U.S., the other to NATO), but neither the U.S. nor its NATO agreed to negotiate. The key portions of the two 17 December 2021 proposed Agreements, with both the U.S. and with its NATO, were, in regards to NATO:

Article 1

The Parties shall guide in their relations by the principles of cooperation, equal and indivisible security. They shall not strengthen their security individually, within international organizations, military alliances or coalitions at the expense of the security of other Parties. …

Article 4

The Russian Federation and all the Parties that were member States of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization as of 27 May 1997, respectively, shall not deploy military forces and weaponry on the territory of any of the other States in Europe in addition to the forces stationed on that territory as of 27 May 1997. With the consent of all the Parties such deployments can take place in exceptional cases to eliminate a threat to security of one or more Parties.

Article 5

The Parties shall not deploy land-based intermediate- and short-range missiles in areas allowing them to reach the territory of the other Parties.

Article 6

All member States of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization commit themselves to refrain from any further enlargement of NATO, including the accession of Ukraine as well as other States.

And, in regards to the U.S.:

Article 2

The Parties shall seek to ensure that all international organizations, military alliances and coalitions in which at least one of the Parties is taking part adhere to the principles contained in the Charter of the United Nations.

Article 3

The Parties shall not use the territories of other States with a view to preparing or carrying out an armed attack against the other Party or other actions affecting core security interests of the other Party.

Article 4

The United States of America shall undertake to prevent further eastward expansion of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and deny accession to the Alliance to the States of the former Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.

The United States of America shall not establish military bases in the territory of the States of the former Union of Soviet Socialist Republics that are not members of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, use their infrastructure for any military activities or develop bilateral military cooperation with them.

Any reader here can easily click onto the respective link to either proposed Agreement, in order to read that entire document, so as to evaluate whether or not all of its proposed provisions are acceptable and reasonable. What was proposed by Russia in each of the two was only a proposal, and the other side (the U.S. side) in each of the two instances, was therefore able to pick and choose amongst those proposed provisions, which ones were accepted, and to negotiate regarding any of the others; but, instead, the U.S. side simply rejected all of them.

On 7 January 2022, the Associated Press (AP) headlined “US, NATO rule out halt to expansion, reject Russian demands”, and reported:

Washington and NATO have formally rejected Russia’s key demands for assurances that the US-led military bloc will not expand closer towards its borders, leaked correspondence reportedly shows.

According to documents seen by Spanish daily El Pais and published on Wednesday morning, Moscow’s calls for a written guarantee that Ukraine will not be admitted as a member of NATO were dismissed following several rounds of talks between Russian and Western diplomats. …

The US-led bloc denied that it posed a threat to Russia. …

The US similarly rejected the demand that NATO does not expand even closer to Russia’s borders. “The United States continues to firmly support NATO’s Open Door Policy.”

NATO-U.S. was by now clearly determined to get Ukraine into NATO and to place its nukes so near to The Kremlin as to constitute, like a checkmate in chess, a forced defeat of Russia, a capture of its central command. This was, but in reverse, the situation that America’s President JFK had faced with regard to the Soviet Union in the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis, when the U.S. would have invaded Cuba if Khrushchev wouldn’t agree to a mutually acceptable settlement — which he did agree to, and so WW3 was averted on that occasion. But whereas Khrushchev was reasonable, America’s recent Presidents are not; and, so, we again stand at the brink of WW3, but this time with a truly evil head-of-state (America’s recent Presidents), who might even be willing to go beyond that brink in order to become able to achieve world-conquest.

Russia did what it had to do: it invaded Ukraine, on 24 February 2022. If Khrushchev had said no to JFK’s proposal in 1962, then the U.S. would have invaded and taken over Cuba, because the only other alternative would have been to skip that step and go directly to invade the Soviet Union itself — directly to WW3. Under existing international law, either response — against Cuba, or against the U.S.S.R. — would have been undecidable, because Truman’s U.N. Charter refused to allow “aggression” to be defined (Truman, even at the time of the San Francisco Conference, 25 April to 26 June 1945, that drew up the U.N. Charter, was considering for the U.S. to maybe take over the entire world). Would the aggression in such an instance have been by Khrushchev (and by Eisenhower for having similarly placed U.S. missiles too close to Moscow in 1959), or instead by JFK for responding to that threat? International law needs to be revised so as to prohibit ANY nation that is “too near” to a superpower’s central command, from allying itself with a different superpower so as to enable that other superpower to place its strategic forces so close to that adjoining or nearby superpower as to present a mortal threat against its national security. But, in any case, 317 miles from The Kremlin would easily be far “too close”; and, so, Russia must do everything possible to prevent that from becoming possible. America and its colonies (‘allies’) are CLEARLY in the wrong on this one. (And I think that JFK was likewise correct in the 1962 case — though to a lesser extent because the distance was four times larger in that case — America was the defender and NOT the aggressor in that matter.)

If this finding appears to you to be too contradictory to what you have read and heard in the past for you to be able to believe it, then my article earlier today (March 4th), “The Extent of Lying in the U.S. Press” presents also five other widespread-in-The-West lies, so that you will be able to see that there is nothing particularly unusual about this one, other than that this case could very possibly produce a world-ending nuclear war between the U.S. and Russia. People in the mainstream news-business are beholden to the billionaires who control the people who control (hire and fire) themselves, and owe their jobs to that — NOT really to the audience. This is the basic reality. To ignore it is to remain deceived. But you can consider yourself fortunate to be reading this, because none of the mainstream news-sites is allowed to publish articles such as this. None of the mainstream will. They instead deceived you. It’s what they are hired (by their owners and advertisers) to do, so as to continue ruling the Government (by getting you to vote for their candidates).

Furthermore, I received today from the great investigative journalist Lucy Komisar, who has done many breakthrough news-reports exposing the con-man whom U.S. billionaires have assisted — back even before Obama started imposing sanctions against Russia in 2012 (Bill Browder) — to provide the ‘evidence’ on the basis of which Obama started imposing anti-Russian sanctions, in 2012 (the Magnitsky Act sanctions), recent articles from her, regarding how intentional the press’s refusals to allow the truth to be reported, actually are: on 28 February 2025, her “20 fake US media articles on the Browder Magnitsky hoax and one honest reporter from Cyprus”, and on 4 December 2024, her “MSNBC killed reporter Ken Dilanian’s exposé of the Wm Browder-Magnitsky hoax. State Department knew about it.”

This isn’t to say, however, that ALL mainstream news-reports in the U.S. empire are false. For example, the Democratic Party site Common Dreams, headlined authentic news against the Republican Party, on March 4th, “Trump Threatens Campus Protesters With Imprisonment: ‘Trump here is referring to pro-Palestine protests so you won’t hear a peep from conservatives or even pro-Israel liberals,’ said one journalist.”, by Julia Conley; and so did the Republican site N.Y. Post, headlining on 15 October 2020, against the Democratic Party (which Democratic Party media similarly ignored), “Emails reveal how Hunter Biden tried to cash in big on behalf of family with Chinese firm.” However, NONE of the empire’s mainstream media publish reports against the U.S. Government or against its empire; so, the lies that have been covered here are virtually universal — go unchallenged — throughout the empire.

This originally appeared on Eric’s Substack.

The post Why America, the EU, and Ukraine, Should Lose to Russia in Ukraine’s War appeared first on LewRockwell.

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When I started this publication, my primary goal was to help those injured by the COVID-19 vaccines, as other vaccines had severely damaged many people I was close to, but what I was seeing with the COVID-19 vaccines was rapidly eclipsing all the injuries those earlier vaccines had caused.

Sadly, as I’ve seen again and again, one of the most significant challenges people in that situation face is getting any type of recognition for their situation as it’s in too many people’s interest to sweep everything under the rug and deny the injury ever occurred, so in many cases, creating that simple recognition is one of the most critical steps to take. Consider for example, this woman’s experience, which sadly is quite representative of what the injured are going through.

Recently, I was asked to review “Follow the Silenced” a new documentary (which the above clip is from) that attempts to shed light on what the vaccine injured are going through and is having its premier in Hollywood this Saturday (and I highly encourage you to attend if you are in the area).

After watching it, I realized the documentary accomplished two things that are quite challenging to do: provide a clear window into what the vaccine injured are really going through and piece together how an inconceivable catastrophe like this could have ever happened.

Design Constraints

Frequently, when trying to understand a complex and disorienting process from the outside, one of the most beneficial approaches is to understand the fundamental constraints under which those orchestrating it are working, and then use those constraints to predict and model their behavior.

Sensitivity and Specificity

One of the most common constraints is the trade-off between sensitivity (ensuring you hit your intended target) and specificity (ensuring you do not overshoot your target and cause collateral damage), which often forces you to prioritize one over the other. For example:

•Do you want a justice system that consistently convicts criminals (“guilty until proven innocent”) or one that prevents wrongful convictions (“innocent until proven guilty”)?

•Do you want a diagnostic test that consistently doesn’t miss any cases of the disease (e.g., COVID-19 or cancer) or a test that avoids many false diagnoses?

•Do you want to protect the most vulnerable members of society (e.g., with lockdowns and mandates) or consider the general population’s well-being (e.g., making the COVID policies voluntary)?

In turn, I would argue that many problems in our society result from an existing policy or technology having either poor sensitivity or poor specificity and neither side (the one that wants sensitivity or the one that wants specificity) being willing to see the importance of the other side’s position and find a palatable compromise between them.

Likewise, in many cases, there are no “easy” compromises, so frequently the compromise our society has (and the institutions built around accommodating that compromise), while not ideal, took an immense amount of work to arrive at. This is important to recognize because in most cases if attempt to quickly create a compromise between these two conflicting polarities out of scratch, it will often fall short and have many major issues that are arguably far worse that what preceded it (e.g., you frequently see this in countries after the existing government collapses and people try to create new institutions out of thin air).

Note: in many cases, if it’s impossible to find a satisfactory balance between sensitivity and specificity on an issue, it means that the wrong approaches are being used to navigate the situation. For example, I always believed it was fundamentally impossible to address COVID by “stopping the spread” and mass vaccination. In contrast, if we’d made the effective early COVID-19 therapies available to the public, this would have solved COVID (as natural immunity was vastly superior to vaccine immunity and the existing treatments were effective enough that they kept you out of the hospital and thus all the societal consequences of COVID-19). In contrast, when these unsatisfactory trade offs exist, the government will typically default to using its power to force the public to comply with its chosen approach.

Drug Dosing

In the case of drug design, a similar issue exists, as you want a drug to “work” but you also want to avoid “toxicity.” Since everything has a toxic dose (with the possible exception of oxygen), every drug must be dosed so that there’s enough of it for it to “work,” but simultaneously not enough that it causes significant side effects. In the real world, this results in major challenges such as:

•While some drugs have a fairly wide window between an effective and toxic dose (e.g., ivermectin) others have a fairly narrow one (e.g., chemotherapy). Because of this, some drugs will inevitably have side effects, and in many cases the more toxic ones (e.g., chemo) need to be given in a very controlled manner (e.g., intravenously at an infusion center) where acute side effects can be immediately managed.

•Everyone metabolizes drugs differently, so as a result, the standard dose is often not appropriate. For example, the elderly have a slower drug metabolism and thus are more likely to develop toxic blood levels of a drug (but nonetheless get the same dosing as young adults) and many members of the population are much more sensitive to pharmaceuticals, so they will react to much lower doses that the standard patients.
Note: “sensitive” patients (discussed here) share many characteristics (e.g., joint hypermobility), but despite being quite common are rarely recognized by the medical system, something I believe is a result of their existence undermining the existing pharmaceutical dosing paradigm.

In turn, I believe the correct solution for all of this is to tailor your dose to the individual patients (e.g., many pharmaceuticals that frequently cause a large number of problems have a vastly improved risk benefit profile when far lower doses are used and as a result many of my colleagues often use these non-standard lower doses).

Unfortunately, the business of medicine requires doctors to quickly evaluate patients and then prescribe a medication to them, so if doctors needed to take the time to precisely ascertain the correct dose for each drug they gave out, this would radically reduce their prescribing (and thus drug sales). As such, doses are routinely chosen that will inevitably injure a certain number of patients.
Note: while I disagree with many of the standard doses, a lot of work goes into creating them (e.g., it frequently takes years of research to bring a “safe enough” and “effective enough” drug to market). As a result, the odds are quite high that a rushed pharmaceutical developed in under a year (e.g., the COVID-19 vaccines) will have incorrectly chosen doses that create significant issues

Vaccine Dosing

Vaccines are more complex to dose than standard medications because they work by creating a permanent immune response, and hence persist long after being given to the recipient. Since people’s immune systems vary, the degree to which they persist varies greatly. As a result, it is much harder to find vaccine doses that have an acceptable balance of sensitivity and specificity (efficacy and safety). Because of this, the “solution” has been to declare all vaccines ‘safe and effective’ and then simply bury the inevitable injuries that come up. For example:

•An extensive apparatus has been created to demonize and discredit anyone who does not believe vaccines are entirely safe and effective (e.g. which I’ve seen happen to many people I knew who were injured by dangerous products like the HPV vaccine).

•Drug regulators all prioritize efficacy over safety. This in turn, incentivizes drug manufacturers to use excessive doses that are guaranteed to elicit the desired antibody response rather than ones that avoid unneeded toxicity.

•Thanks to the 1986 The National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act, vaccine manufacturers cannot be sued for injuries from their products.

•Since the justification for many routine vaccines is quite questionable, a vast framework of vaccine mandates has been created to sidestep informed consent or discussion of vaccines prior to taking them.
Note: as detailed here, the risk to benefit ratio of vaccines varies greatly (e.g., some of the routine vaccines given to our children cannot be justified), so the industry cannot afford ever to have discussions on those topics commence (as that would significantly reduce sales).

COVID Vaccine Dosing

With the development of vaccines for COVID-19, a few additional challenges emerged such as:

•It was very hard to develop a vaccine for SARS as the virus rapidly mutated, and vaccines would frequently worsen SARS infections.

•There was a huge rush to get a vaccine to market as quickly as possible, in part because whoever got the first ones to market would get the billions allocated for the vaccines and in part because it was likely the virus would disappear on its own (due to herd immunity or it mutating to a less dangerous strain) so before long the market would disappear.
Note: despite not vaccinating, COVID disappeared in many parts of Africa that did “nothing” to stop the virus, whereas in contrast COVID has persisted in the countries that jeopardized our herd immunity by pushing vaccines.

In turn, the mRNA platforms offered an enticing solution to addressing the pandemic, as it was both:

•A technology individuals had wanted to get to market for years (but until an “emergency” could not due to the immense difficulty of finding an mRNA dose that was both somewhat effective and safe enough to bring to market).

•A platform that made it possible to produce a vaccine in a few months rather than waiting far longer with the more traditional vaccine designs.

Unfortunately, the mRNA vaccines also had a significant number of issues, such as it being an untested technology (with serious safety issues that had remained unsolvable for decades). Furthermore, it was even more difficult to determine the correct dose for them, as:

•There was very little time to conduct the studies needed to determine the correct dose.

•The vaccine functioned by mass producing spike protein in the body. This both created acute and chronic issues, due to the clots it created (e.g., due to the spike protein being highly disruptive to the physiologic zeta potential of the body) and due to the spike protein (along with the vaccine being designed to have those spike proteins coat your cells) being highly highly conducive to creating autoimmune disorders (which often could not be detected in brief clinical trials).

•There was not enough time to create a robust and consistent manufacturing process (which led to significant variations in the doses people received and many “hot” vaccine lots).

•Since the amount of vaccine produced in the body depended upon how long the body decided to turn its mRNA into spike protein, the total dose wildly varied—to the point that it was essentially not possible to predict what a given dose would ultimately correlate to inside the recipient. To “address” this, the industry decided to modify the mRNA so that it resisted degradation (thereby ensuring “enough” spike protein would be produced), which unfortunately had the consequence of causing it to persist for years in some of the recipients.

Note: given all of this, I was immensely curious to see what dose would be chosen. In turn, Pfizer (despite being notorious for pushing profitable but unsafe products on the market) decided to use a dose 3.3X lower than Moderna (which I attributed to Moderna’s desperation to get a successful product to market). Remarkably, despite Moderna causing 50% more injuries than Pfizer, the drug regulators never recommended against it.

Vaccine Trials

To address many of these issues, large double blind clinical trials are conducted to figure out the best path forward, which due to their “robustness” are given a very heavy weight by the drug regulators and doctors in practice. Unfortunately, adverse events will frequently emerge in these trials due to the inherent difficulty in making “safe” vaccines.

In turn, since so much money is invested in the vaccine and its costly trial, the trials will inevitably be doctored so that vaccine efficacy is inflated and most of the injuries are swept under the rug (e.g. by relabeling them as something benign or claiming they were completely unrelated to the vaccine).
Note: a 2014 Cochrane review proved that smaller (affordable) observational trials will get the same results as larger RCTs

As such, appalling conduct is frequently observed throughout vaccine clinical trials. For instance, I was able to predict most of the gross malfeasance that happened throughout the COVID vaccine trials because the exact same thing had occurred throughout the HPV vaccines trials—but despite being repeatedly informed about it (and petitioned by many parties to do something) the FDA refused to admit the vaccines were not safe or effective and instead actively worked to cover up the evidence of their harm.
Note: in this article, I showed how the exact same gross malfeasance we saw with the HPV vaccines occurred throughout the COVID-19 trials.

Fortunately, due to the public spotlight on the COVID vaccines, the large number of people in the trials and a robust alternative media (e.g., Substack) being will to cover what transpired, many whistleblowers from the trials came forward to share exactly what actually happened in the (fraudulent) vaccine trials—many of whom are featured in Follow the Silenced.

Marketing the COVID Vaccines

If a product or policy has poor sensitivity or specificity, a few common mechanisms exist to prevent it from being rolled out. These include:

•Having drug regulators require a product to prove it is safe and effective before allowing it to be sold.

•Lawsuits being filed against a manufacturer for the injuries their product creates.

•Mass political protest against it (and dissident politicians being willing to advocate for the protesters within government).

•The public refusing to comply with the policy or buy the product.

Since the safety and efficacy of the COVID-19 vaccines were quite poor and much remained uncertain, one of the industry’s greatest challenges thus was ensuring people would take them. As such, the standard protections were quickly eliminated (e.g., the regulators green-lighted the vaccines regardless of the issues brought to their attention, and the COVID vaccines were given complete immunity from lawsuits).

Since this was not enough, a massive effort was made to sell the vaccines which used increasingly severe tactics to convince people to vaccinate, each of which was phased in once the previous one had done all it could and harsher tactics gradually became politically feasible as the unvaccinated constituted a smaller and smaller minority of the population.

Essentially, that campaign went as follows:

1. Create as much fear about COVID-19 as possible (which was made possible by the mass media initially denying COVID would ever turn into a problem).
2. Use that fear to justify heavy disruptions to everyday life (e.g., lockdowns and social isolation).
3. Present vaccines as the wondrous solution that could get us our freedom and lives back and then have the entire media relentlessly promote them regardless of what happened.
4. Politicize the vaccine issue so many (on the left) would become vaccinated purely to “win” and hence not examine the risks and benefits with the vaccines.
5. Have healthcare workers initially market the vaccines since they have the highest rate of compliance with vaccination and their recommendations are highly trusted by the public.
6. Initially sell the vaccines under a scarcity model where many demographics weren’t yet eligible to have it (and as a result people would jump on the chance to get the vaccines the moment they could).
7. Use incentives (e.g., gift cards, lotteries, junk food, drugs or sex workers) to convince those on the fence to vaccinate.
8. Blame the (“95% effective”) vaccine’s inevitable failures on people not vaccinating, and use that to justify both social stigma toward the unvaccinated (particularly from those politically invested in the issue) and soft mandates.
9. Use the soft mandates to pave the way for harsh mandates.
10. Slip in boosters (and then booster mandates) once no one was looking and the regular vaccine sales market had been saturated.
11. Do all of the previous quickly enough, that people would not have time to discover the vaccines were unsafe and ineffective before getting theirs.

Note: since this push was so aggressive and unprecedented, many still wonder if there was an ulterior motive (e.g., convincing the population to vaccinate before they became personally aware of how dangerous the vaccines were, population reduction, changing the genetic makeup of humanity or eliminating unvaccinated controls that could show how harmful the COVID vaccines were to their recipients).

Since this progression was fairly logical (given the constraints being worked with), I thus knew the moment vaccine incentives came out that mandates were around the corner. At the same time however, given how unsafe and ineffective the vaccines were, enacting it placed significant stress on our institutions, which in turn required them enacting a series of draconian tactics that forestalled (but did not eliminate) the public’s loss of trust in the vaccines and eventually resulted in the public losing their trust in both our healthcare authorities, doctors and hospitals and the mass media.

Those tactics included:

•Having the mass media use every tactic possible to promote the vaccines (e.g., the H.H.S. spent almost a billion dollars marketing them).

•Having the FDA and CDC stonewall all evidence of harm and relentlessly push the vaccines.
Note: as I showed in a recent article, this was done to such an extreme degree that the FDA’s two top vaccine scientists (who had been in their positions for over a decade and deeply believed in vaccines) eventually resigned because they felt a few months was not enough time to complete a rudimentary safety assessment of the vaccines.

•Targeting any doctor who spoke out about the vaccines (so others would be too scared to speak out), and censoring any criticisms of vaccination from both the mainstream media and social media (despite this being unconstitutional).

•Politicizing the vaccine issue so much that individuals who were injured did not feel safe speaking out about their injuries (as they would be attacked for “fueling vaccine hesitancy”).

•Encouraging doctors to disregard vaccine injuries from their patients.

Read the Whole Article

The post What Happens After a Vaccine Injury? appeared first on LewRockwell.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), one of the 13 agencies Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Robert F. Kennedy oversees, last week quietly linked to a database (via an X post) that lists conflicts of interest within the CDC’s powerful vaccine decision making committee — the Advisory Commission on Immunization Practices (ACIP).

The post on the agency’s website last Friday is part of Kennedy’s drive to promote ‘radical transparency’ within HHS. While refreshing, it’s also worrisome how much some members of ACIP have direct ties to Big Pharma.

Established in March 1964, the ACIP is composed of fifteen regular members, who are experts in the fields of immunization practices and public health; in the use of vaccines in clinical practice or preventive medicine; in clinical or laboratory vaccine research; and in the assessment of vaccine efficacy and safety. The ACIP also requires that at least one member have expertise in consumer perspectives and/or social and community aspects of immunization programs.

On its face, it looks like ACIP takes necessary steps to prevent conflicts of interest: Members are disallowed to be employed by, or involved with, employees of vaccine manufacturing companies – and individuals who hold patents for a vaccine can not be on the ACIP.

But the ACIP also includes ex-official members from Federal agencies involved with vaccine issues, and non-voting liaisons from medical and professional societies and organizations. That raises red flags.

The group typically meets in front of the public three times a year. Once voted on and approved by the director of the CDC, the vaccines that are given a green light are typically mandated for children by individual states. Little known fact: ACIP members are the people who decide what vaccines your children must take to be permitted to attend public schools.

The companies that make the vaccines – Merck, Pfizer, Moderna, among others – are granted protection from civil liability under the National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act of 1986. This is why claims of vaccine injury are brought against the Secretary of HHS – not pharmaceutical companies.

All this aside, the CDC recent posting reveals compelling details about ACIP members’ conflicts of interest and thereby opens the organization up to further scrutiny.

One case in point of a conflict of interest the CDC revealed involves Dr. Wilbur Chen, who served on the ACIP from December 13,2020 to June 30, 2024. At a February 28, 2021 meeting, Chen reported that, according to the CDC posting, he was “involved in clinical studies of COVID vaccines until October 2020. He abstained from COVID-19 vaccine approval vote.”

This is interesting information, and it is good that Dr. Chen did not participate in the vote. However, one must wonder about the influence of Chen on the ACIP members who were voting on research on a vaccine with which he was deeply involved. Dr. Chen is clearly a person with great influence in the field of vaccinology, as described here.

Chen served as a principal investigator under Dr. Anthony Fauci at the National Institute on Allergic and Infectious Disease (NIAID) and received funding for his work by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. Chen is connected to the most influential power brokers in the world of vaccinology and virology. How can we assess the impact of Chen on the votes of other commission members? Just because he recuses himself on one or more votes, is it ethical for him to be a voting member of the ACIP at all?

Another example: Dr. Robert Atmar, who served on the ACIP from July 1, 2016 to June 30, 2020. At the December 19-20, 2020 meeting Atmar, the CDC revealed, “Abstained from COVID-19 vaccine vote and voted on a general vote on prioritization for which no members need to abstain.”

Atmar, the CDC’s new post reveals, reported that he “is serving as the Co-Director of the Clinical Operations Unit (COU) of the National Institutes of Health (NIH)-funded Infectious Diseases Clinical Research Consortium (IDCRC) that is working within the COVID-19 Prevention Network (CoVPN) to evaluate Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome Coronavirus-2 (SARS-CoV-2) vaccine candidates in Phase 3 clinical trials. He is the Site Principal Investigator (PI), including those produced by Moderna, AstraZeneca, Janssen, Novavax, and Sanofi.”

Dr. Atmar is yet another federally-funded principal investigator, another person of great importance in vaccinology as explained here. Being a principal investigator on federal research initiatives is a highly desirable position for scientists.

According to the National Institutes of Health (NIH), “The Principal Investigator (PI) has overall responsibility for the design, conduct, reporting and scientific integrity of the research.” Further, “The NIH PI may assign responsibility for specific aspects of the conduct of the research to appropriately qualified individuals. However, at all times the PI retains overall responsibility for the conduct of the research and must assure both the protocol and the research team’s actions are compliant with law, regulation, and policy.”

Again, just because these disclosures about Dr. Atmar have been made, it still begins the question: why was he permitted to be a voting member of ACIP at all?

In his book The Real Anthony Fauci, Kennedy documented Dr. Fauci’s use of PI’s as agents for his agenda going back to his handling of the HIV crisis in the 1980s and the promotion of the toxic drug, AZT.

In just the above two examples from the CDC webpage, we see the pervasive involvement of ACIP members with the pharmaceutical industry. Dr. Chen and Dr. Atmar may well be good people, but it is clear that both men are industry insiders.

The American people should know that and be able to assess whether members of the ACIP are beholden to them or to Big Pharma.

One would think that the legacy media would support Kennedy’s moves for transparency.

One would be wrong.

In its reporting on the recent CDC disclosures, NBC downplayed the issue. It instead rolled out experts who immediately criticized the conflict-of-interest disclosures.

One such expert – Arthur Caplan, head of the division of medical ethics at NYU Langone Medical Center in New York City. “The database could be used to sow doubt about the advice given by ACIP, giving a false appearance that members have strong ties to the industry,” Caplan told NBC.

The two samples I selected demonstrate that Caplan is wrong. ACIP members are deeply embedded within the Pharmaceutical Industrial Complex.

Could it be that Caplan’s employer, NYU, also has pharmaceutical industry ties which influence Caplan’s comments?

This National Library of Medicine report exposes the ties between medical schools and drug companies.

NYU professor Dan Littman, for example, is on the Board of Pfizer.

NYU adjunct instructor, Raymond Kerins, has long standing ties to Merck, Bayer, and Pfizer.

Here are the Pfizer’s Board Members. You might recognize Dr. Scott Gottlieb, the former FDA Commissioner.

NYU and Merck have worked together on vaccines in the past, as shown here.

It should also be noted that Caplan’s employer, NYU, received over 72 million dollars spread out over 131 federal grants, as detailed in this NIH report.

One would think that Dr. Caplan, a medical ethicist, might be a little more forthright about the pervasive influence of Big Pharma, given his own employers’ deep ties to the larger complex of organizations that constitute the Pharmaceutical Industrial Complex.

NBC also featured another industry expert – the ubiquitous Dr. Paul Offit – who criticized Kennedy, saying the HHS Secretary is wrong to suggest Big Pharma influences vaccine policy. “There is not a single shred of evidence showing that is true,” Offit proclaimed.

In my article in The Kennedy Beacon last week, “Measles Mania: What the Legacy Media Won’t Tell You,” I noted that in 2009, Age of Autism’s Dan Olmsted and Mark Blaxill reported that Offit earned 29 million dollars from a vaccine he invented that the ACIP approved while he was an active commission member.

Just like in the examples of current ACIP members shown above, Dr. Offit also recused himself from that vote. But does that really put him off the hook?

In the end, Dr. Offit and the rest of the Big Pharma insiders still got exactly what they wanted.

Is 29 million dollars enough evidence for you, Dr. Offit?

The corruption at the CDC’s ACIP runs deep. Offit, Chen and Atmar are just the tip of the iceberg.

This originally appeared on The Kennedy Beacon.

The post The CDC Reveals ACIP Members’ Conflicts of Interest. It’s Just the Tip of the Iceberg. appeared first on LewRockwell.

This collection of essays by experts in diverse fields applies libertarian philosophy and free-market economic theory to literature and media. The volume proceeds largely according to the chronological order of the works under consideration, moving from sixteenth-century literary texts and drama to comic books to contemporary cinema and television series. Several chapters bring to bear the contrast between capitalism and statism, mostly focusing on the workings of the market economy versus central planning but with some attention also devoted to the theme of freedom versus government coercion. Some of the more specific economic concepts used in the analyses—such as the principle of marginal utility, scarcity, division of labor and autarky, private property, and entrepreneurism—not only provide insights into the economic and political premises embedded in creative works but can help clear up common misconceptions related to capitalism as well.

As the subtitle suggests, the project was inspired by the achievement of Paul A. Cantor (1945–2022), Clifton Waller Barrett Professor at the University of Virginia. One of the most adventurous culture critics of our time, Cantor was edgy and iconoclastic while always deeply grounded in historical research. He achieved a large scholarly and popular following in part because he was interested in everything—from Shakespeare to South Park, from H. G. Wells to Gilligan’s Island. His scholarship was so prolific and all-embracing that it led some to question whether the same person could have authored such a breadth of work. “Yes,” replies Peter Hufnagel, creator of the website prof.Cantor, “the Paul A. Cantor who writes about Averroism in Dante’s Divine Comedy is the same Paul A. Cantor who writes about Walter White as a tragic hero in Breaking Bad” (“The Nature of the Website”). As John Rodden has put it, “Cantor was not just an eminent scholar of the European Renaissance but a Renaissance man himself in the sphere of arts and letters” (“Paul Cantor: Renaissance Scholar as Renaissance Man”).

Yet it is not only the stunning range of Cantor’s interests that motivated this volume, but also, and especially, his pioneering interdisciplinary methodology which brought libertarian philosophy and sound economic theory to bear on matters of culture. Working against the grain, Cantor turned specifically to free-market economics in his analysis of literature and media. As Alberto Mingardi aptly remarked, such an approach made Cantor a “rare thing,” that is, “an intellectual in the humanities— even more, a literary critic—who had some sympathy for capitalism. At one level, this sympathy emerged in the very fact that he was not a snob: together with his Shakespeare studies, he cultivated an interest in popular culture that he understood as a living thing, and sometimes a beautiful thing too” (“Paul Cantor RIP”).

[…]

The present collection of essays, like Cantor and Stephen Cox’s seminal volume Literature and the Economics of Liberty: Spontaneous Order in Culture (Mises Institute, 2009), applies libertarian criticism across different genres and media, time periods, and geographical locations.

[…]

The first three chapters may serve as a reflection on and further development of the methodology in different ways. The opening chapter provides further insight into Cantor’s interpretations of Shakespeare’s Roman plays with the assistance of Cantor’s private correspondence on the subject (David Gordon). The next chapter uses tools of libertarian analysis to develop a new theory of comedy and then test it against various types of humor, including some that have not fit previous theories (Stephen Cox). The third essay of this group applies an Austrian lens to the “commercial self-fashioning” of an early seventeenth-century public and literary figure known as the Roaring Girl, arguing that “capitalism does not constrain but enables the disruption of rigid frameworks that govern who or what one can be” (Katharine Gillespie).

The following five chapters provide new readings of canonical English, Russian, Italian, and German literary works from the seventeenth to the early twentieth centuries, namely, Ben Jonson’s comedy The Alchemist (Peter Hufnagel), Leo Tolstoy’s historical novel War and Peace (Edward P. Stringham and Spencer D. Brown), Carlo Collodi’s children’s book Pinocchio (Salvatore Taibi), H. G. Wells’s science fiction novel The War of the Worlds (Michael Valdez Moses), and Hermann Hesse’s spiritual novel Siddhartha (Jo Ann Skousen). Each chapter moves deftly between the literary and historical context of the author and a close reading of the text. While all five uncover a contrast between collectivist and free-market visions within the fictional work itself, two contributors find this opposition to be part of the author’s educational intention while the other three contributors see the varied representations of capitalism and state power to be the result of the authors’ ambiguous or contradictory economic notions.

But canonical literature is only half the interest—and half the fun—of this book. In keeping with Cantor’s deep interest in the popular and the vernacular, contributors offer much that is new about non-literary genres. The chapter analyzing the evolution of Scrooge McDuck (Alberto Mingardi) may serve as a bridge between the previous five essays focused on single- authored classics of early modern and modern literature to the volume’s subsequent chapters devoted to popular film and television. Tracing the development of this fictional character—one of Cantor’s favorites—across comic book and TV cartoon series from the late 1940s to the early 1990s, this chapter brings to light different attitudes toward business in American society.

The final four chapters bring a libertarian perspective to the study of film and television in the United States. The chapter on four films by different directors centered on the 2007–2009 financial crisis both analyzes the techniques used within the films to represent the crisis and assesses the accuracy and completeness of the narratives, particularly with regards to the governmental actions and policies that led to the problem (Stefano Adamo). The next two chapters explore television shows that take us to the fictional frontier of outer space and the American Far West, respectively. The chapter on science fiction TV series reveals ways in which some of the most popular shows from the 1970s to the 2020s dramatize core economic issues and concepts (Matthew McCaffrey and Carmen-Elena Dorobat). The chapter on “the Yellowstone universe,” in particular the prequels 1883 and 1923, analyzes recent TV Westerns along the lines established by Cantor and McMaken in their scholarship on the American Western genre (Matt Spivey).

The concluding chapter of this section and of the volume as a whole, written by Paul A. Cantor himself, scrutinizes the treatment of capitalism in the reality show Undercover Boss. This global television series, which originated in England in 2009 and has continued to the present there, has been both independently produced and rebroadcast in several countries. Cantor sets the U.S. version of Undercover Boss against another reality television series featuring the business world, Shark Tank, which premiered in the United States in 2009 and follows the format of a Japanese reality show originating in 2001.

In sum, Libertarian Literary and Media Criticism aims to contribute to the scholarly conversation in this burgeoning field by bringing together some of its newest as well as some of its most prominent voices. The volume not only builds upon Cantor’s groundbreaking work but offers a range of directions for libertarian literary and media scholarship in the future. The essays in this collection should be of interest to both humanists and social scientists working across disciplines, traditions, languages, and eras. It is also designed to capture the attention of general readers outside the academy. Analysis of the arts, after all, is a vital part of “praxeology,” the term coined by Mises to indicate the analysis of all human action. What one learns from the study of Shakespeare—or Scrooge McDuck—can provide authentic insights into the workings of the world we inhabit.

[The above paragraphs are excerpted from the volume’s introduction.]

The post Libertarian Literary and Media Criticism: Essays in Memory of Paul A. Cantor appeared first on LewRockwell.

“Currency” only has meaning when there is the luxury of a marketplace. If the world is in survival mode then there is no marketplace, there is only survival.

A reasonable example of this was the Pilgrims in Massachusetts between 1620 and 1660.

When the Pilgrims arrived here, they did not use “currency”. There was no marketplace. They were too busy doing what it took to survive to buy and sell. The few tools and small amount of food they had was parceled out according to rules that they had: if you didn’t work, you didn’t eat, unless there were extenuating circumstances. That was, for example, the mother of Peregrine White, the first child born in America, on the Mayflower while it was anchored in Plymouth. Although she wasn’t “idle” she certainly wasn’t doing the kind of heavy labor the others did.

And it was a lot like the apocalypse: 45 of the 102 passengers died the first year, just like they would in an apocalypse and the biggest cause was scurvy and malnutrition. They simply couldn’t find enough to eat and enough of the right foods to eat, just like any apocalypse survivors.

And like survivors of the end of the war, they suffered attacks by roving bands of outsiders who wanted their guns and metal tools and the little livestock they had. Otherwise, the Pilgrims had nothing the Indians wanted. And like any real apocalypse, disease was rampant, particularly Smallpox which wiped out the Indians at a much greater rate than the Pilgrims, but they died too over the ensuing years, at a 30 percent rate annually (The Indians died at a 70 percent rate; by the time of the King Philips War, 3/4s of all the Indians in New England were dead). The only thing that kept the colony from collapsing was the arrival of new ships with more people – and more food.

Over the next 10 years the Pilgrims moved from merely survival to building a society. Unlike the notional drawings we have of them, they did not live in houses. They lived in mud huts made of coppiced branches built into a dome. Sometimes they dug into the hard packed sand and made multi-room caves with wooden doors. Only one actual building existed those first years, and it was a crude meeting house surrounded by a pallisade. The last of the Pilgrim caves was bulldozed away in 1920 because no one thought those things were worth keeping then, a hole in the ground, and bums were by then living in them. Everything they needed was passed around, especially axes and adzes and iron tools used to dig or work wood. Nothing was “owned”. No one could say, “That axe is mine, you can’t use it.” We know exactly, to the number of nails, how many iron tools arrived on the Mayflower.

This is the Peak House in Medfield, Ma, built in 1651, the only example of Medieval Elizabethan architecture left in the US. This tiny house had a huge number of people living in it and includes one room and a loft. Most of the house is taken up by the fireplace. By the time this house was being built, the diamond shaped glass windows were going out of style and being replaced by single pane on a hinge or 6 over 6 panes. Glass was incredibly expensive as the Pilgrims couldn’t find the right kind of sand to make it (Eventually, the sand of Sandwich was discovered to be the right kind and a massive glass works was built there. Side note: any town with the word “wich” at the end was a place where salt was made. Salt was the most important industry in the area at the time). Most houses couldn’t afford or find glass and instead used oiled, white paper to cover the window and let in light which is why tiny panes were needed.

The Pilgrims figured out that surviving through the winter was the key to survival so they had to put enough away to be self-sufficient for a year; that is, until the crops came in. As time went on, they made and grew everything they needed. They didn’t have iron or the ability to make it, so everything they made was from wood or clay. In those days, owning a Pewter tankard or spoon was so important that sometimes the only possession willed to a child or family member was the metal spoon. The Pewter tankard was reserved for the Elder or a guest. Otherwise, spoons and plates and cups were carved out of wood and considered of no real value. When wooden buildings were made, they consisted of one room with a massive stone fireplace – and no chimney. The chimneys were added later or made of wood covered with mud and houses burned down a lot. This is because building “up” required contributed manpower and everyone was busy. If another room was added, it was used as the “storeroom and manger” because otherwise your animals lived with you and all your possessions. The houses were never painted and it wasn’t until the 1700s that painting – on the trim only – came into being, and when paint did start, every house was painted red because “Indian Red” ochre was the most common dye substance available. Eventually, the interiors were painted with lime wash and made white. When wallpaper finally made it’s way here it was a big, big deal but that was later, after “Apocalypse Time” was over.

The most important thing people could get were apples. Apples were the savior of the colonies, and fish. A family went through eight barrels of apple cider a year and at least one barrel of vinegar. Vinegar was precious. The pilgrims noticed within 15 years that they were overfishing the rivers and oceans and that they had to move further and further away from home to find any deer. Just like in an apocalypse, there were no restrictions on hunting or fishing and within 15 years, they had to put restrictions because they were hunting and fishing the stock out of existence. On the other hand, apples could be stored for a year in barrels filled with sand as long as they didn’t touch each other. (“One bad apple ruins the whole bunch”) and were separated by layers of beach sand.

In those days, other trade goods were blankets. Blankets were precious items. To make a single blanket could take a 100 hours of labor, if you had the sheep to shear. You had to shear the sheep, card the wood, wash the wool, spin it into yarn and then hand knit or loom it into something usable. A man’s coat took a minimum of 60 hours to make – and that was between all other tasks. It wasn’t 60 hours straight out. Clothes made out of linen were even harder (but wore better) because linen was an incredibly labor intensive operation to create, even before it was spun into cloth. Many times, worn out ship sails were made into clothing, called “duck pants”.

The other precious currency was salt. Salt was so precious that it was one of the first things people looked for when they came, brine pits and springs. But they didn’t find any so they had to make it from seawater. The first patent in America was to a Salem man who invented a way of making salt from sea water, a process that takes considerable time. The word “salary” comes from salt because salt was so important that it was often used as currency and it was re-used over and over. Salt was the main way that meat and fish was preserved for winter and it required considerable amounts. (When Lewis and Clark were sent off on their peripatetic journey across America later in 1805, one of Jefferson’s three goals to them was to find salt. If there was no salt, there would be no westward expansion). You cannot live a hand-to-mouth existence forever and there is no guarantee that deer is going to come along when you’re hungry so you can shoot it and eat it. And there is no guarantee you will STILL have ammunition left when it does come by. So storing up carcasses, preserved in brine or salt rubs was the only way to make sure you had food for the winter.

As time went on, things made of steel, such as knives, were of high value. The first mill in America was the Saugus Iron Works (still there in Saugus as a museum) which made pig iron, rolled iron and some nails. It went out of business in 1670 or so because it was badly run and because the Puritans hated the hard drinking, hard swearing, whoring Swedes and Finns who worked there and who refused to go to church. The only reason they weren’t hanged was because the settlers were desperate for iron.

By 1640 or so, or within 20 years of landing, Pilgrims began using “real” currency. It started with colored beads, called “wampum” after the Indian way and worked until a Dutch concern came in and started manufacturing beads in secret in Duxbury and flooded the marked and wiped out the value of the currency. After that, the Pilgrims used real money, but there was damned little of it. It created was was known as “The Great Currency Shortage”. It was English currency most of the time, but by the Pilgrims were trading with New Amsterdam/New York and other coastal communities in America. The problem was that there were five or more different currencies being used, five different monetary systems, no banks, no authority other it than the leaders who could say how many guilders were worth a shilling and so on. And there were few people who could determine exactly how many sheep were worth a barrel of cider. But then, everyone knew everyone else and the trade had to be mutually amicable or eventually, someone would condemn the other of being a witch and they would be hanged in the town common.

In a modern day apocalypse the currency would be the decision of the moment, what you need versus what you have. As Ben Franklin once said, “Necessity never made a good bargain”. I would guess that in an apocalypse, which is a world much like the Pilgrims in 1620, your main needs would be shelter, warmth, food and tools. I would guess the most fungible currency, easily carried and whose value was immediately apparent, and one that lasted a long time would be bullets.

Read the Whole Article

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Ask any federal health official—whether from the FDA, CDC, NIH, or National Cancer Institute—if vaccines contribute to neurological damage or autism, and their response will be unequivocal: No, there is no evidence of any association. In fact, they might find the very question offensive. After all, these agencies have access to unlimited resources, the brightest scientific minds, and cutting-edge research facilities at institutions like Harvard, Johns Hopkins, and Stanford. If there were any credible link between vaccines and neurological harm, surely, they would have found it by now.

And yet, despite decades of investigation and countless opportunities, their stance remains unchanged: vaccines are safe and effective. Any claim to the contrary is dismissed as conspiracy theory and an assault on the very foundations of modern medicine. This has been the dominant narrative for the past forty years. Federal health officials and policymakers have long prioritized private pharmaceutical industry interests and upheld the belief that vaccination is the single most important tool for eradicating infectious diseases. Dissent is neither tolerated nor entertained. The agencies responsible for vaccine safety, such as HHS, FDA, NIAID and the CDC, are ruled by a rigid scientific orthodoxy that allows no room for alternative perspectives.

But now, for the first time in modern history, an outsider has entered the room. Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the new head of the Department of Health and Human Services, is neither a scientist nor a physician. Unlike his predecessors, he has no allegiance to the status quo. His appointment signals a possible turning point to usher a new opportunity for a truly independent investigation into whether vaccines, either individually or collectively, contribute to neurological damage. If pursued earnestly, this could be one of the most consequential moments in American medical history.

The stakes could not be higher. Over the past few decades, childhood chronic illnesses have skyrocketed to unprecedented levels. The rise in autism spectrum disorders (ASD), ADHD, autoimmune conditions, and other neurological and developmental disorders has been explained away as the result of better diagnostic tools or genetic predispositions. But are these explanations sufficient? What if something more fundamental has changed in children’s health over the past 30 years? Federal health agencies continue to dismiss environmental factors, including vaccines, as a potential cause. But if we truly care about children’s well-being, it is time to ask the hard questions. And we must ask without fear, without bias, and without ideological blinders.

The dramatic increase in neurological disorders, including autism spectrum disorders that is now diagnosed in 1 in every 36 children, has often been attributed to improved definitions for ASD and diagnostic tools. However, a closer look at government statistics reveals alarming trends in children’s health that go far beyond better diagnostics. Since the early 1990s, there has been a staggering increase in several chronic conditions: ADHD rates have risen by 890 percent, autism diagnoses by 2,094 percent, bipolar disease in youth by 10,833 percent, and celiac disease by 1,011 percent. These numbers beg the question—what has fundamentally changed in our children’s health over the past three decades?

The media plays a crucial role in reinforcing the official vaccine narrative while systematically silencing dissenting voices. This lack of transparency allows federal health agencies like the CDC, NIAID, and HHS to evade accountability. Instead of safeguarding public health, these institutions have become politically and ideologically entangled with private pharmaceutical interests. Their close ties to the industry have led to the approval of insufficiently tested vaccines, the medicalization of normal childhood behaviors, and the delivery of subpar healthcare—all at a staggering cost of $5 trillion annually.

Medical authorities insist that vaccines, even when administered in multiple doses on a single day, are safe and do not cause chronic health problems. They claim that vaccine ingredients are either harmless or present in amounts too small to pose any risk. Any attempt to challenge these assertions is met with ridicule. Despite a sharp rise in childhood neurological disorders, there has been no significant push for reform or independent long-term safety studies on the effects of vaccines.

For decades, concerns about vaccine safety have not only come from parents and advocacy groups but also from government investigations. A three-year congressional investigation led by Rep. Dan Burton strongly criticized the CDC, FDA, and HHS for their failure to conduct proper vaccine safety studies. The committee found that federal agencies systematically downplayed risks, ignored growing evidence of vaccine-related neurological disorders, and relied on poorly designed epidemiological studies rather than clinical research. The report also exposed the failure of vaccine manufacturers to conduct adequate safety testing, highlighting decades of negligence. Despite these damning conclusions, little has changed, and concerns about vaccine safety remain unaddressed. While thimerosal has been largely removed from childhood vaccines, it remains in some flu shots and multi-dose vials, and broader concerns about vaccine ingredients and neurological damage continue to grow.

One of the most alarming revelations came from the secretive 2000 Simpsonwood meeting, where top CDC officials and vaccine industry representatives discussed an internal study linking thimerosal exposure to increased risks of tics, ADHD, speech delays, and developmental disorders. Instead of alerting the public, the attendees decided to suppress the findings and rework the data to obscure any association. This manipulation, later exposed by Robert Kennedy Jr. through a Freedom of Information Act request, exemplifies the CDC’s ongoing pattern of data suppression and scientific misconduct when vaccine safety is called into question. The congressional committee later confirmed that many participants in the vaccine debate “allowed their standards to be dictated by their desire to disprove an unpleasant theory.” Rather than conducting thorough biological studies to assess vaccine safety, federal agencies have deflected scrutiny by blaming autism and other neurological conditions on genetic factors, despite a lack of conclusive evidence supporting this theory.

Today’s CDC childhood immunization schedule recommends over 27 vaccines by the age of two, with some visits involving up to six shots at once. Parents are expected to trust that these vaccines are rigorously tested and proven safe. However, a review of hundreds of toxicology and immunology studies fails to reveal a gold standard of long-term, double-blind, placebo-controlled trials proving vaccine safety. There is also no comprehensive epidemiological study comparing the long-term health outcomes of fully vaccinated versus unvaccinated children. Without this research, public health officials rely on inconclusive data, which is shaped more by policy than by science.

Humans possess unique biochemical makeups that make them more or less susceptible to toxins. While one child may experience minor effects from environmental toxins, another may develop autoimmune disorders, learning disabilities, or neurological impairments. Vaccine safety cannot be proven simply by stating that not every vaccinated child has autism. Given the dramatic rise in autoimmune diseases, food allergies, encephalitis, and conditions like Crohn’s disease, it is imperative to investigate environmental toxins’ role in childhood health. Independent research suggests that ingredients in vaccines, even in small amounts, may contribute to these illnesses, particularly as the number of required vaccines continues to grow.

Ironically, the U.S. government’s own Vaccine Injury Compensation Program (VICP) has awarded settlements to families whose children developed autism-like symptoms following vaccination. High-profile cases such as Hannah Poling, who developed ASD after receiving nine vaccines in one day, Ryan Mojabi, whose vaccines caused severe brain inflammation, and Bailey Banks, who suffered vaccine-induced brain inflammation leading to developmental delays, demonstrate that vaccine injury can, in some cases, result in autism spectrum disorders. A broader analysis of VICP cases revealed that 83 children with autism were compensated for vaccine-related brain injuries, primarily involving encephalopathy or seizure disorders with developmental regression. These cases contradict federal health agencies’ claims that no connection between vaccines and autism has ever been recognized.

The National Library of Medicine lists over 3,000 studies on aluminum’s toxicity to human biochemistry. Its dangers have been known for over a century. Early FDA director Dr. Harvey Wiley resigned in protest over aluminum’s commercial use in food canning as early as 1912. Today, aluminum compounds, such as aluminum hydroxide and aluminum phosphate, are found in many vaccines, including hepatitis A and B, DTP, Hib, Pneumococcus, and the HPV vaccine (Gardasil).

In the 1980s, a fully vaccinated child would have received 1,250 mcg of aluminum by adulthood. Today, that number has risen to over 4,900 mcg, a nearly fourfold increase. Aluminum exposure is further compounded by its presence in municipal drinking water due to aluminum sulfate used in purification. A 1997 study published in the New England Journal of Medicine found that premature infants receiving aluminum-containing intravenous feeding solutions developed learning problems at a significantly higher rate than those who received aluminum-free solutions.

Dr. James Lyons-Weiler at the Institute for Pure and Applied Knowledge has criticized vaccine aluminum levels, pointing out that dosage guidelines are based on immune response rather than body weight safety. Alarmingly, aluminum exposure standards for children are based on dietary intake studies in rodents rather than human infants. He notes that on Day 1 of life, newborns receive 17 times more aluminum than would be permitted if doses were adjusted per body weight.

Despite these findings, federal agencies continue to dismiss concerns over aluminum toxicity in vaccines. The refusal to conduct comprehensive long-term safety studies, coupled with regulatory agencies’ deep entanglement with the pharmaceutical industry, has led to a public health crisis. The growing prevalence of neurological and autoimmune disorders in children demands urgent, unbiased investigation into environmental and vaccine-related factors. Until federal health agencies commit to transparency and rigorous scientific inquiry, parents will be left to navigate vaccine safety decisions without the full picture of potential risks.

Christopher Exley at Keele University analyzed brain tissue from children and teenagers diagnosed with ASD and found consistently high aluminum levels, among the highest recorded in human brain tissue. The aluminum was concentrated in inflammatory non-neuronal cells across various brain regions, supporting its role in ASD neuropathology. In a systematic review of 59 studies, Exley found significant associations between aluminum, cadmium, mercury, and ASD, further underscoring aluminum’s neurotoxic impact. His research strongly advocates for reducing vaccine-derived aluminum exposure in pregnant women and children to help mitigate the rise in autism.

Despite the CDC’s consistent denials, researchers at Imperial College London found a significant correlation between rising ASD rates and increased vaccination. Their 2017 study in Metabolic Brain Disease showed that a 1% increase in vaccination rates correlated with 680 additional ASD cases, raising urgent concerns over vaccine components as environmental triggers.

CDC whistleblower Dr. William Thompson provided thousands of pages of internal research revealing a cover-up of vaccine-autism links. His documents proved the CDC had prior knowledge that African American boys under 36 months had a significantly higher autism risk following the MMR vaccineand that neurological tics—indicators of brain disturbances—were linked to thimerosal-containing vaccines like the flu shot. Yet, instead of acknowledging this risk, federal agencies buried, in fact shredded, the findings, ensuring that vaccine safety concerns were dismissed as conspiracy theories rather than investigated as public health imperatives.

The official denial of a vaccine-autism connection has become entrenched dogma, unsupported by a single gold-standard study definitively disproving such a link. Meanwhile, the health of American children continues to decline, ranking among the worst in the developed world. Neurodevelopmental disorders like autism and ADHD are at crisis levels, yet federal agencies remain unwilling to conduct the comprehensive safety studies that could expose the full impact of mass vaccination on childhood health.

Now, with Robert F. Kennedy Jr. at the helm of the Department of Health and Human Services, a long-overdue reckoning may finally be at hand. Unlike his predecessors, Kennedy is an advocate for transparency and accountability. If pursued earnestly, Kennedy’s leadership could potentially reshape public health policies and exposing the truth about vaccines’ role in the rise of neurological disorders, including autism. The question now is: Will the truth finally be allowed to come to light?

The original source of this article is Global Research.

The post Do Vaccines Cause Autism? appeared first on LewRockwell.

The X account of one Rupert Lowe MP (@RupertLowe10) comments on the ills of immigration. He refers to his homeland of the United Kingdom. (emphasis added)

I look at what uncontrolled mass immigration has done to our country, and I just get so very depressed.

It’s THE root cause of almost every issue.

Put simply, there are far too many low-skilled migrants who take FAR more than they give.

That’s an awkward, but undeniable fact.

Mr. Lowe makes a great point about immigration being problematic. Massive migration changes the character of a place. The things one likes about America are unlikely to exist there if one replaces the people there with let’s say, the people of rural Uganda or the people of downtown Beijing.

Immigration Has Led To Some Vile Things In America

Borderless immigration is not a tool of freedom. It is a weapon the globalist and Marxist alike can use to destroy communities, families, lives, cultures, languages, and countries in ways that make a local population easier to control.

Immigration has come to be used as a tool to bring death and destruction upon a place. All but the most savvy political observers 1.) do not see that, 2.) refuse to see that, 3,) and/or refuse to comment on that detail. I entirely appreciate that Mr. Lowe places a high level of importance on stopping immigration as we are presently seeing it take place.

He also, however, retains the air of a central planner — one who knows the exact right numbers to use, one who thinks there is probably some perfect number that will make societal ills go away. And if we tweak that number just enough, everything will work out.

Who could possibly disagree with his suggestion that there is a moderate path that will lead to wiser immigration policy?

I do.

It is hardly about immigration. It is about artificially created incentives to immigration. It is about getting the right incentive to remove a person (a would-be immigrant) from the place he is needed and wanted and transplanting him to a different place where he is not needed and not wanted and to do so with massive incentives meant to distort reality for all people involved.

Seldom talked about, great ill is created for immigrants in the process of immigration. This detail is often overlooked. Seldom is the first generation anything but a massive loss for the immigrant family. The tremendous downside to leaving one’s homeland and heading west is seldom considered rationally in our era of relatively easy global travel.

Despite all this, there are far more important fundamental concerns that need addressing when speaking about societal ills.

There at two great ills that have most terrorized Western culture and America. When they are ignored you are dealing with cowardice or lack of understanding. Neither are desirable in a trusted figure. I would caution against aligning yourself closely with anyone who does not speak often and openly of these two ills.

Central Banking Impoverishes A Land — Both Spiritually and Materially

Guido Hulsmann in his book The Ethics of Money Production paints a picture of the vast moral harm caused to a society that welcomes a state-sanctioned monopoly on money creation. This includes tyranny, war, the debt burden of a society, moral hazard, business cycles, hyperinflation, regulation, and all manner of other perversion of a individual values and societal standards take place. The family has been replaced with the welfare state.

Do you hate tranny reading time for children? Roman Catholic Jose and Maria and their eight kids coming across the border from the rural hinterlands to the south are not the source of the problem. However, the unlimited funding of the Federal Reserve Bank is, as it provides limitless resources for the most perverse pet projects of politicians and bureaucrats alike. The easy money policy that leave a culture unoccupied and wealthy lends itself to it. The inflationary policy that perverts the idea of time preference does as well. While Jose and Maria and their eight children cannot be blamed for that, a generation from now, America may have led their children down that same perverse path.

On that concept of time preference, Ludwig von Mises writes that the effects of inflation are “especially strong among the youth. They learn to live in the present and scorn those who try to teach them ‘old-fashioned morality and thrift.’ Inflation thereby encourages a mentality of immediate gratification that is plainly at variance with the discipline and eternal perspective required to exercise principles of biblical stewardship — such as long-term investment for the benefit of future generations.”

The US central bank is the greatest pariah institution on American life. This is especially the case with the status of the Federal Reserve Note as world reserve currency, which can seemingly endlessly export inflation. It gives it vast resources to destroy American culture. The great cultural and spiritual harm done through this institution dwarfs the economic harm done by this institution.

Divorce From God Impoverishes A Land

More fundamentally problematic for a land than central banking is a Christian country that has ceased to be Christian. Central banking is not at the heart of all evil in a place. Turning away from God is at the heart of all evil in a place.

David Aikman, former Beijing Bureau Chief for Time Magazine starts his book Jesus in Beijing with this insightful quote that hits at the heart of something too few Westerners and too few Americans understand. Aikman refers to it as “an enthusiastic observation of Christianity by a member of China’s academic elite.” (emphasis added)

The eighteen American tourists visiting China weren’t expecting much from the evening’s scheduled lecture. They were already exhausted from a day of touring Beijing. But what the speaker had to say astonished them.

‘One of the things we were asked to look into was what accounted for the success, in fact, the pre-eminence of the West all over the world,’ he said. ‘We studied everything we could from the historical, political, economics and cultural perspective. At first, we thought it was because you had more powerful guns than we had. Then we thought it was because you had the best political system. Next we focussed on your economic system. But in the past twenty years, we have realized that the heart of your culture is your religion: Christianity. That is why the West has been so powerful. The Christian moral foundation of social and cultural life was what made possible the emergence of capitalism and then the successful transition to democratic politics. We don’t have any doubt about this.’

This was not coming from some ultra-conservative at a think tank in Orange County, California or from Jerry Falwell’s Liberty University in Lynchburg, Virginia. The was a scholar from China’s premier academic research institute, the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences (CASS) in Beijing, in 2002. Though CASS has had a reputation since its inception for gently pushing the envelope of acceptable areas of research in China, it is hardly a viper’s nest of liberal dissent.

In the 1913 Catholic Encyclopedia, Constantin Gutberlet defines materialism as “a philosophical system which regards matter as the only reality in the world, which undertakes to explain every event in the universe as resulting from the conditions and activity of matter, and which thus denies the existence of God and the soul.”

Some Chinese thinkers recognize Christianity as little more than a materialist shortcut that outperforms any materialist thinker. We could call it Christian materialism, which to rely on Gutberlet’s definition would be the opposite of Christianity. This Chinese professor’s thought process is a predictable thought process from a Marxist-influenced thinker. It is also a predictable thought process from a sober pragmatist of any political stripe.

Unfortunately, many in the West have been blinded to this thought process. The Bible can change a person for the better. Being around a Christian faith community can change a person for the better. Even going through the motions of worship can change a person for the better. I would rather have a Christian who seeks God for materialist reasons do so, rather than ignore the desire that God has to provide.

Christians of one thousand theological views will read this piece as will non-Christians. Please forgive my oversimplification of Christian views. There is power in the serving the Lord, that goes beyond the simple benefit that comes from mimicking the daily practices of Christians. Knowing Jesus is bigger than following some behaviors.

Not only have Americans stopped following those behaviors, but many have resolutely determined that they have no desire to know Jesus. I write this as a former atheist.

The Root Cause Of Everything Is Not Immigration

The root cause of everything is not immigration. Immigration is a symptom of a nation in tremendous moral decline.

Mass migration happens to a people who do not consider themselves made in the likeness of God (Genesis 1:26), who perhaps do not even consider God. Be fruitful and multiply and replenish the earth and subdue it (Genesis 1:28) mean nothing to them, for they are now having tiny families (if at all) and being convinced of why a million migrants a month are a great thing to support the government social system upheld by theft. The radical Somalis that George Soros, the Lutheran church, and the Catholic church help enter America are a problem, but pointing to them as anything but a symptom misses that fact that they are not the source of any Western country’s problem.

Many social problems seem to accompany immigration: crime, strained safety net, cultural division, malfunctioning educational system, increased unemployment, deceased pay, strained communities. That so many social problems accompany immigration is not because of immigration. There are many interrelated symptoms of social decline that take place all at once.

Overcrowded classrooms and strained budgets are the norm in areas with high immigration rates. That is true. Hardly can such dynamics be considered the cause of a educational system that has been producing illiterates for decades.

Thousands of Amish communities in America educate their children in the Bible and end formal education after eighth grade. If you watch an Amish have a discussion with an “English,” the remaining decade of education that is common among the English is proven ridiculous. One sounds wise (the one with the eighth grade education), while one sounds like a fool (that one with the advanced degree).

America has divorced itself from wisdom (Proverbs 9:10). It has ceased to teach its children wisdom. 18 year olds exist who have less sense than 18 month olds. The sense has been educated out of them. The more time spent in school, the less wise a person becomes.

High immigration rates strain welfare budgets. Where there are high immigration rates, there is less welfare money available for native born hispanic, black, and white families. Hardly can immigration be deemed the key problem for a Great Society program that has been destructive to families since the 1960s, and a New Deal program that’s been destructive to communities since the 1930s.

You were born into a land of plenty, a land largely dedicated to God, a land full of prosperity and wisdom, and precisely because you have been fooled into distraction about so many topics, you are so prone to leave your descendants a far more economically impoverished land and a far more spiritually impoverished land. Immigration is one of those distractions.

The existence of the Federal Reserve Bank is the underlying political and governmental issue afflicting America. It touches all areas of government and culture. But even that requires a deeper dive, for a greater problem underlies it. The parting of ways from God is the all-encompassing, underlying issue afflicting America that is at the root of all societal problems we today face.

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“The left became hideously, ostentatiously, unapologetically corrupt (as ruling parties tend to do). They sold out bigtime and got bigtime rich. You want to know why none of them want to cut waste anymore? because they’re the ones stealing it.” — El Gato Malo on Substack

In my quiet backwater of the Hudson Valley, an early spring drives all creation violently. The peaceful sleep of winter ends in twitches and spasms. The ground breaks open like one big egg and all living things emerge: green shafts of the crocus, scuttling sowbugs, slithering snakes, sleek garlic shoots, ‘possums in the compost bucket, ticks are back on the cat’s face, the ice in the river cracks in frightening booms, hungry songbirds infest the bare roadside lilacs, tiny voices trill darkly in the woods, a lone early moth in its first rapture of flight meets the pitiless windshield.

You can feel it. The northern hemisphere of this planet shudders, rattles, and rolls into the most tumultuous spring in memory. Everything is in play, turning, turning, while forgotten consequence rises on vengeful wings like an aggrieved god of yore. Nothing will be as it was. A most wicked spell has been broken. What does it feel like to be able to think again?

Messrs Trump and Putin sincerely seek to end the age’s stupidest war in Europe’s dumbest country, while the European Union and its outlier Great Britain go ostentatiously more insane every week. They bethink themselves storybook conquerors out of some retrograde history written by gibbering globalists. Macron and Friedrich Merz propose a grand invasion of Russia, as if Napoleon and Hitler had never existed, and they aim to get it done on about three days’ worth of ammunition. You first, Emmanuel, Merz insists. Non, non, pas de tout, Macron demurs with a deep bow.

Keir Starmer, Knight Commander of the Order of the Bath, and PM of an empire in late-stage sclerosis, does jumping jacks with pom-poms across the channel to cheer on France and Germany in their quixotic quest to conquer of Russia. “Go get’um lads!” he cries. Think of Sir Keir as a Monty Python archbishop as written by George Orwell under the direction of Franz Kafka — there’s what’s left of your jolly old England!

Meanwhile Ursula von der Leyen rehearses her part as the wannabe Joan of Arc in this political psychodrama. Her sweet grandmother’s face will smile placidly as the flames tickle her penitent’s robe. She was born for this. A million deracinated Congolese perform the twerk mazurka around her flaming pyre while the muezzins sing out the call to prayer from every minaret around Brussels. Her Hanoverian ancestors weep for Ursula through the mists of the centuries. Was Satan himself behind the contract she signed with Pfizer for as much as 4.6 billion doses of Covid-19 vaccine at a cost of €71-billion? Where did the money come from and where exactly did it go, and what did Ursula finally have to show for it? The European Court of Auditors had a look at this tangled web and blew their lunches all over the rue Alcide De Gasperi in Luxembourg City. Snails, champignon, and shards of puff pastry on the ancient stone steps. A disgrace.

You are not compelled to understand all these occult machinations roiling Europe at the moment, except to see that the continent wants to turn itself into the world’s premiere slaughterhouse once again after a seventy-year hiatus from the exciting frolics of World War Two. Almost everyone who lived through that episode is dead now. The cultural memory has faded. Europe is sick of lollygagging in the café, nibbling effete palmier and tartelette. They apparently want to wade across the chilly Vistula River and race to the east, like berserkers, hacking off Slavic limbs and heads along the way.

No, it is not true that Donald Trump’s ancestors invented the trumpet, but shrill brassy notes resound all over America these days as his enemies ululate and rend their garments. Liz Warren is yelling from streetcorners like her head’s going to blow plumb off her shoulders. Randi Weingarten was keening on MSNBC like an oboe with a broken reed. The entire two month-long spectacle has been a musical extravaganza. The President and his sidekick, Elon, keep coming at the country’s resident blob-of-evil like pit-bulls on a pack of wild hogs. Shreds of bacon have been flying all over the Beltway. I could have told you years ago that the blob was mostly lard and little meat. Now you know. It’s a sight to behold for the ages.

Yet, strange things keep happening day by day. The Democratic Party’s main grifting engine, the USAID, was deconstructed weeks ago, yet we hear that just this week USAID workers were ordered to go back into their offices to shred all their documents. Did they have anything to hide, ya think?

Questions: 1) federal janitors pried the nameplate off the building back in February, and we must suppose that somebody also locked the joint up, or what?. 2.) How did these former USAID workers propose to get in the building and do their dirty-work? 3.) Why have we not heard that the FBI or the US Marshals Service was dispatched to prevent such a document shredding party?

I wouldn’t worry too much about those cheeky federal judges around the country declaring and ordering this-and-that on Mr. Trump’s campaign to fire federal workers and close down useless agencies. This is a last-gasp ultimate lawfare operation. Let’s assume that Norm Eisen, Mary McCord, Marc Elias, and associates of theirs are the ringmasters in that circus. They will eventually be indicted for all manner of lawbreaking, possibly up to treason. And the SCOTUS will eventually put a sharp end to the judges’ monkeyshines. Judges do not administer executive action out of the executive branch. And Guess what: lawfare is not law. It’s just dirty-fighting dressed up in abstruse ceremonial language.

Reprinted with permission from JamesHowardKunstler.com.

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The U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) ordered a temporary halt to federal funding to the University of Maine System (UMS) over Democrat Gov. Janet Mills’ defiance of new federal rules conditioning such funds on reserving female-specific school athletic programs to actual women.

Last month, President Donald Trump signed an executive order requiring school athletic programs to limit female-specific teams to actual females in order to continue receiving Title IX funds.

Maine was thrust into the spotlight of the issue when Trump told Mills at a White House event, “you better comply because otherwise you’re not getting any federal funding.” His Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights subsequently opened an investigation into Maine’s compliance with the administration’s take on Title IX, citing the case of a “transgender” pole vaulter who gained a competitive advantage by switching to the girls’ team.

Now, the Daily Caller reported that on March 10 USM received an email from USDA informing them, “(t)his pause is temporary in nature while USDA evaluates if it should take any follow-on actions related to prospective Title VI or Title IX violations. Please take any necessary actions to effectuate this direction from leadership. This pause will remain in effect until further notice.”

UMS maintains that its athletic programs are “in compliance with relevant State and Federal laws,” and that it has received no further update from USDA since communicating about the initial compliance review on February 26. USDA has not yet publicly commented on the situation.

Mandatory inclusion of gender-confused individuals in opposite-sex sports is promoted as a matter of “inclusivity,” but critics note that indulging “transgender” athletes undermines the original rational basis for having sex-specific athletics in the first place, thereby depriving female athletes of recognition and professional or academic opportunities.

There have been numerous high-profile examples in recent years of men winning women’s competitions, and research affirms that physiology gives males distinct athletic advantages that cannot be fully negated by hormone suppression.

In a 2019 paper published by the Journal of Medical Ethics, New Zealand researchers found that “healthy young men (do) not lose significant muscle mass (or power) when their circulating testosterone levels were reduced to (below International Olympic Committee guidelines) for 20 weeks,” and “indirect effects of testosterone” on factors such as bone structure, lung volume, and heart size “will not be altered by hormone therapy;” therefore, “the advantage to transwomen (biological men) afforded by the (International Olympic Committee) guidelines is an intolerable unfairness.”

Critics also argue that forcing girls to share intimate facilities such as bathrooms, showers, or changing areas with members of the opposite sex violates their privacy rights, subjects them to needless emotional stress, and gives potential male predators a viable pretext to enter female bathrooms or lockers by simply claiming transgender status.

Even the left-wing United Nations has acknowledged as much via an October 2024 report by Special Rapporteur Reem Alsalem that found that more than 600 female athletes around the world have lost more than 890 medals to men in 29 sports as of March 2024. “To avoid the loss of a fair opportunity, males must not compete in the female categories of sport,” the report concluded.

This originally appeared on Lifesite News.

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President Trump’s argument for starting an international trade war is based on a socialistic-sounding plea for “fairness” and equality. Some foreign governments plunder their citizens with high tariff taxes on American imports, thereby forcing them to pay higher prices for those or competing domestic goods. The reason they are called “protective” tariffs is that they “protect” consumers from lower prices. When your foreign competitor is forced to pay a 50 percent tax on his products and you do not, you can increase your price by say, 40 percent and still underprice him. Politically connected corporations pocket this loot at the expense of their hapless, politically unorganized fellow citizens. Tariff taxes are legalized theft for the benefit of already-rich corporations and their unions (if they are unionized). They have never been anything more than yet another vote-buying scheme that empowers the politically powerful and screws the common consumer, clouded by phony rhetoric about patriotism and nationalism.

President Trump’s demand of “fairness” is as follows: Whatever tariff taxes foreign governments place on American imports, an equivalent tariff tax will be imposed on their imports into the U.S. It’s only fair, he says. This is his justification for higher – much higher – tariff taxes on imports into the U.S.

The end result of this will be an even larger degree of legalized theft as American consumers – and American corporations that use imported parts for their own manufactured products (i.e, American auto companies that import auto parts from Canada) are plundered with higher prices paid for the same (or worse quality) products. Political theft by tariff tax has always been a rob-Peter-to-pay Paul racket. How, then, is it “fair” to American consumers, automakers, and myriad other American businesses to be forced to pay higher prices? Of course it is not; it is quintessentially unfair.

There’s a saying in economics that a tax on imports is also a tax on exports. This is because if America’s foreign trading partners are impoverished by protectionist tariffs they will then have fewer dollars with which to purchase American goods in international trade, especially agricultural products. This will obviously harm American exporters and their employees and communities, This is also patently unfair. There is nothing more anti-populist than protectionist tariff taxes.

President Trump has repeatedly stated with great excitement that with his impending huge tariff tax increases “we,” meaning the federal government, are “going to take in A LOT of money.” Well now. Since when has it been the priority of the Trump administration to drain the pockets of American consumers and businesses with tariff taxes so that the federal bureaucracy can become even more enlarged and bloated than it already is. Isn’t that a flat contradiction of all of President Trump’s campaign promises, not to mention the professed goal of the DOGE?

The president can never resist boasting of his negotiating prowess and he obviously intends to use the threat of tariff taxes as his primary negotiating tool. If he really was a master negotiator who was genuinely interested in justice and fairness, he would propose the following deal to foreign governments: “We will eliminate all tariff taxes on your imports into the United States if you eliminate all tariff taxes on American imports into your country.” Just depriving the federal bureaucracy of all that tariff tax revenue alone makes this a far superior negotiating tactic than his Quixotic call for a 1930s-style international trade war.

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John Leake

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