Lew Rockwell Institute

Writes Ginny Garner:

Lew,

Candace Owens continues her investigation into the assassination of her friend Charlie Kirk. 

“I have no doubt Tucker Carlson and I are being threatened, that’s pretty obvious. It’s very obvious nobody thinks Egypt is behind it. The last time that narrative ran was probably the USS Liberty, that was the plan, to make us think Egypt had attacked us. Israel attacked hat ship. Israel is growing increasingly alarming in terms of legislation they are trying to get passed, trying to censor our speech, trying to take over social media campaigns.” – Candace Owens 

She provides details on the Egyptian plane tracking Charlie and his wife Erika that landed at the Provo airport near the assassination site; exposes possible financial shenanigans at TPUSA; and reveals the license plates of rental cars at the airport, and more. 

The post Charlie Kirk Assassination: TPUSA Financial Improprieties and the Egyptian Plane appeared first on LewRockwell.

Ludwig von Mises argued that the “nineteenth century philosophy of liberalism,” or the classical tradition of liberalism, is not founded on equality but on liberty. He rejected the notion that all men are factually or substantively equal. He saw the notion of substantive equality—what is sometimes called real equality or true equality—as incompatible with individual liberty, and as a Trojan horse for coercive interventionist schemes designed to equalize all members of society. He saw liberty as essential to peaceful coexistence and to Western civilization itself. Thus, Mises took seriously the threat posed to peace and prosperity by the egalitarian schemes with which governments aim to equalize all their citizens. In his book Liberalism, he traced the roots of the erroneous belief in equality to the Enlightenment:

The liberals of the eighteenth century, guided by the ideas of natural law and of the Enlightenment, demanded for everyone equality of political and civil rights because they assumed that all men are equal.…

Nothing, however, is as ill-founded as the assertion of the alleged equality of all members of the human race. Men are altogether unequal. Even between brothers there exist the most marked differences in physical and mental attributes. Nature never repeats itself in its creations; it produces nothing by the dozen, nor are its products standardized.

Similarly, Friedrich von Hayek rejected the idea that the classical liberal ideal of justice is based on equality. He argued in the Constitution of Liberty that justice must be based on individual liberty, which is not predicated on a presumption that everyone is equal. He cautioned that “we must not overlook the fact that individuals are very different from the outset…. As a statement of fact, it just is not true that ‘all men are born equal.’” Murray Rothbard picked up this theme in Egalitarianism as a Revolt against Nature, arguing that a world in which all human beings are equalized by state coercion and force would be a Procrustean world of horror fiction. He asked:

What, in fact, is “equality”? The term has been much invoked but little analyzed. A and B are “equal” if they are identical to each other with respect to a given attribute. Thus, if Smith and Jones are both exactly six feet in height, then they may be said to be “equal” in height… There is one and only one way, then, in which any two people can really be “equal” in the fullest sense: they must be identical in all of their attributes.

Yet Hayek, like Mises, defended the principle of equality before the law. Although they both rejected the notion of substantive equality, they argued that formal equality—or equality before the law—is essential to social cooperation under the rule of law. If equality under the law is not based on factual equality, on what is it based? It may seem contradictory to uphold formal equality while rejecting substantive equality, but, as Hayek explained, substantive equality actually undermines formal equality because it fails to acknowledge the very reason why formal equality is important. Justice in the classical liberal ideal was described as blind, not because there are no differences between people, but because justice is blind to their differences. The principle of blind justice is completely lost when people assume that we can only have the same rights when we are, in fact, the same, and that everyone has to be made the same through whatever interventions can make them equal, in order to align with the fact that we all want to have equal rights. The reason justice is blind is because that is the best way to maximize the scope of individual liberty. Under blind justice, nobody is subjected to legal obligations or penalties to which others are not subject, based purely on his personal identity or characteristics. As Hayek put it, “Nothing, however, is more damaging to the demand for equal treatment than to base it on so obviously untrue an assumption as that of the factual equality of all men.” Both Mises and Hayek saw individual liberty as the only rationale for formal equality, and insisted that equality under the law is the only form of equality that is compatible with liberty. In his book Liberalism, Mises argued that:

…what [liberalism] created was only equality before the law, and not real equality. All human power would be insufficient to make men really equal. Men are and always will remain unequal.… Liberalism never aimed at anything more than this.

One might ask why the law should bother to uphold formal equality, or equal treatment under the law, if people are not, in fact, equal. Mises gave two reasons. The first reason is that individual liberty is essential to social cooperation. He argued that individual liberty is justified because it promotes the good of the whole, and that classical liberalism “has always had in view the good of the whole, not that of any special group.” The good of the whole can only be achieved through social cooperation, and there can be no social cooperation where men are not free. He defined society as “an association of persons for cooperative action,” and cooperation is maximized when people are free to engage in peaceful and voluntary exchange based on the division of labor. The good of the whole, and social cooperation, are in turn dependent on individual liberty and private property rights. Mises saw this as the essential distinction between classical liberalism and socialism:

Liberalism is distinguished from socialism, which likewise professes to strive for the good of all, not by the goal at which it aims, but by the means that it chooses to attain that goal.

The second reason is “the maintenance of social peace.” Mises argued that peaceful co-existence is essential to civilization and prosperity, and requires that everyone must have the same rights under the law. A legal system which gives special privileges to one group at the expense of another leads inevitably to resentment, hostility, conflict, and ultimately war. Mises argued that “class [or group] privileges must disappear so that the conflict over them may cease.” Similarly, Rothbard emphasized that egalitarian schemes lead inexorably to conflict, warning that any society which sets out to produce equality sets off down the road to tyranny: “An egalitarian society can only hope to achieve its goals by totalitarian methods of coercion.”

Socialists object to the classical liberal notion of formal equality by arguing that if men are not, in fact, equal then the law ought, as far as possible, to at least try to make men equal. They suggest achieving this by abolishing any privileges enjoyed by some that are not available to others, or by creating special rights for those who lack the privileges enjoyed by others, to compensate for their disadvantages. Mises rejected this notion of “privilege.” What a man earns from his skill or talent, what is acquired under the rules of private property, cannot be deemed to be a “privilege,” because it is justified as necessary for social cooperation and the good of the whole:

The fact that on a ship at sea one man is captain and the rest constitute his crew and are subject to his command is certainly an advantage for the captain. Nevertheless, it is not a privilege of the captain if he possesses the ability to steer the ship between reefs in a storm and thereby to be of service not only to himself, but to the whole crew.

Mises therefore saw formal equality, or equality under the law, as an essential component of liberty. His defense of liberty was, in turn, based on the fact that liberty is essential to human flourishing. The significance of liberty as the philosophical foundation of equality is clear—it follows that any equality “rights” that undermine individual liberty are invalid. They are indeed phony rights, as Rothbard put it.

The post An Austrian Perspective on Equality appeared first on LewRockwell.

President Trump is incensed, again.

This time it is over the increasing cost to renovate the U.S. Air Force Academy Cadet Chapel in Colorado. The cost of the Cadet Chapel restoration project, which began in September of 2019, has now ballooned to almost $335 million, and is not expected to be completed until November of 2028.

“The United States Air Force Academy Cadet Chapel has been a CONSTRUCTION DISASTER from the time it was built in 1962. The earlier stories are that it leaked on Day One, and that was the good part. Hundreds of Millions of Dollars have been spent,” said Trump on social media. He also termed it a “mess” and a “complete architectural catastrophe.”

Located in Colorado Springs, Colorado, on the campus of the U.S. Air Force Academy (USAFA), the Cadet Chapel was completed in 1962, and was named a U.S. National Historic Landmark in 2004. The chapel stands 150 feet tall, and is 280 feet long and 84 feet wide. Its most notable architectural feature is its 17 spires.

The Cadet Chapel was built to “meet the spiritual needs of cadets and staff.” It houses a Protestant chapel, a Catholic chapel, a Jewish chapel, a Muslim chapel, a Buddhist chapel, and a Falcon Circle for Wiccan, Pagan, and Druid worshippers. There are also “all-faith” rooms for other religious groups to use.

USAFA superintendent Lt. Gen. Richard Clark stated about the renovation:

Whether you’re a cadet, a graduate or among the thousands of visitors each year who enter our gates, we know the place this amazing building has in the hearts of many who support our Academy. We’re disappointed too. We’re disappointed we can’t open the chapel doors as soon as we originally thought, but in the end, we’re doing the right work at the right time for the right reason: preserving this national historic landmark for generations of cadets, graduates and Americans.

There has been much hand-wringing over how the Air Force could allow its chapel to deteriorate so much that it needs to be closed for years for renovations costing so much.

But here is a question that no one is even considering: Should the Air Force even have a chapel in the first place?

Of course not.

First of all, the federal government has no business constructing a chapel anywhere in any government building. Not on a military base. Not in a Social Security office. Not at a national park. Not in the Capitol building. Not in the White House. Not in a Post Office. Not in an office building. Not in a courthouse. Since when is it the concern of the federal government to do something to “meet the spiritual needs” of anyone? It is not the job of the government to encourage or facilitate the practice of religion any more than it is the job of government to hinder or prohibit the practice of religion.

It should be noted that this has nothing to do with the First Amendment:

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.

Constructing a chapel is not establishing a religion. The issue is simply the proper role of government.

Second, with a government chapel comes government chaplains and government control. Taxpayer-supported chaplains are expected to serve two masters: God and the state. I have written about the evils of Christians being military chaplains here and here. A government chapel means that it is the government who ultimately decides who gets to preach and what they are allowed to preach.

And third, what connection is there between religion and a branch of the U.S. military? There is none whatsoever. Religion—any religion—is supposed to uphold and pursue the sanctity of life, non-violence, virtue, respect, compassion, toleration, kindness, peace, and the Golden Rule. Contrast these things with what is done by the Air Force. The Air Force bombs countries that pose no threat to the United States, maims and kills foreigners who never harmed any American, makes widows and orphans, engages in offense while calling it defense, destroys property and infrastructure, kills civilians and calls it collateral damage, helps to carry out a reckless, belligerent, and meddling U.S. foreign policy, and carries out unjust, immoral, and unnecessary military operations.

The actions of the Air Force cannot be sanctified by having a chapel on the grounds of the Air Force Academy. Young men and women of any religion should aim higher than a career in the Air Force.

The post Should the Air Force Have a Chapel? appeared first on LewRockwell.

China’s innovation drive is reaching fever pitch in 2025. Let’s cut to the chase and focus on four crucial domains.

1.The Huawei Factor

Huawei is already testing its first, self-developed EUV lithography machine capable of producing 3nm chips. Trial tests are going full blast at the research center in Dongguan, and mass production should start in 2026.

It’s impossible to overstate how much of a game-changing paradigm this Chinese breatkthrough – specifically in laser-induced discharge plasma (LDP) – is all about. It’s set to turn the seminconductor technology environment totally upside down.

The physics involved in Huawei’s LDP is fundamentally different from the method employed by the Dutch ASML’s de facto monopoly. This being China, it’s simpler, smaller and cheaper.

Huawei’s technology is bound to smash that monopoly while solidifying China’s chip independence. Talk about cost efficiency: Huawei aims to produce EUV machines at a fraction of the cost of ASML’s (around $350 million for each unit), and no less than flood China with homegrown 3 nm chips.

All that is happening after the proverbial Western “experts”, following the 2019 sanctions imposed by Trump 1.0, dictated that China would take up to 15 years to just catch up. After all, EUV technology is too deeply embedded in the Western-controlled supply chain. It was assumed that China would never be able to smash the monopoly.

Well, of course any monopoly is smashable when public-private partnerships – in academia and tech – release untold billions of dollars into R&D, rally the best minds, and focus on building an EUV eco-system from scratch.

This is not only about tech; it’s a geoeconomic and geopolitical earthquake. There was a serious debate going on across China that it would be a matter between 2 and 3 years to cut off any dependence on US/Western tech. Well, Huawei and SMIC will be moving closer to mass production of these 3 nm chips already by next year. Not hard to do the math on where the future of global chipmaking lies.

Invest In R&D And Reach Patent Heaven

Now cut to Fan Zhiyong, Huawei’s Vice-President and Minister of Intellectual Property, talking at the company’s 6th Innovation and Intellectual Property Forum this past Tuesday.

He explained how “from the brand-new HarmonyOS 6 operating system to the powerful Atlas 950 supernode, our R&D team has achieved remarkable successes. Although many leading software and hardware products are massive systems engineering projects, we are making every effort to make them open to everyone.”

Huawei conducts an innovation and intellectual property forum nearly every year, discussing the importance of open/protected intellectual property as well as promoting its Top Ten Inventions: this year they featured, among others, supernodes; the Harmony OS; foldable screens; short-range optical interconnects; and next-generation solid state drives.

There’s no secret: a lot of investment in R&D is behind all these breakthroughs. Over the past five years, Huawei has invested more than 20% of its annual sales revenue in R&D. According to the EU Industrial R&D Scoreboard 2024, Huawei is Number 6 globally in R&D expenditure.

Huawei does not see these accomplishments as leading to a “closed garden”. On the contrary: the strategy is to foment an “open industry”, including the launch of a series of new open source software and hardware.

This opennes is reflected by the fact that Huawei is one of the world’s largest patent holders. By the end of 2024, Huawei held over 150,000 valid authorized patents globally, ranging from over 50,000 Chinese patents to over 29,000 patents in the U.S. and 19,000 in Europe.

And that brings us to…

2. Total Tech Sufficiency

And of course that is centered on AI. Cut to three recent key tech moves:

A. Beijing has banned foreign AI chips in every state-funded data center across the nation. Exempted will be only a few private companies which build their own data centers.B. Local and regional governments were encouraged and are already subsidizing the electricity bills of AI data centers. China has a key infrastructure advantage over the US: cheap and extremely abundant power – as I saw it in my recent travels in Xinjiang. That is essential to offset the cost of switching to domestic chips, a more energy-intensive operation. For example, Huawei’s AI server system – CloudMatrix 384 – consumes more energy than Nvidia’s NVL72 system.C. Beijing is also rolling out a new, ambitious “AI Plus Manufacturing” plan, included in the broader AI Plus initiative.

Point A is ultra-pertinent because Trump 2.0 is debating whether to allow Nvidia to sell a downgraded version of its Blackwell chips to China. Nvidia’s CEO Jensen Huang is lobbying for it like there’s no tomorrow, desperate of losing the Chinese market to Huawei for good. He bombastically announced that China is only “nanosenconds” behind the US on semiconductors.

Point C is also ultra-pertinent because as we saw with the Hauwei factor, Beijing is going for no holds barred AI chip self-sufficiency.

Beijing is deploying a very clever strategy. No foreign chips in data centers means a de facto protected market to domestic chip innovators which match foreign chip performances. Talk about a massive incentive.

Li Lecheng, Minister of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT), has announced that MIIT will soon issue an “AI Plus Manufacturing” plan, focusing on rolling out AI upgrades in key industries; expanding intelligent assisted design, virtual simulation, and early defect detection; promoting brand new AI-enabled mobile phones and computers; and accelerating R&D for next-generation intel devices such as humanoid robots and brain-computer interfaces.

In a nutshell: that is how Beijing wants to implement AI in every nook and cranny of the Chinese economy. It’s a no holds barred total innovation strategy. Sanctions? What sanctions?

What A Stable And Resilient China May Accomplish

3. Clean Energy

This revolution is already on – with China leaping ahead of the whole collective West, installing, for instance, nearly 900 gigawatt of solar capacity, more than the US-EU combo.

Last year, China generated 1826 terawatt/hour of electricity out of solar and wind power – five times the energy equivalent of all its nuclear warheads.

Yes: that’s a certified energy superpower.

4. An Early-Warning Detection Big Data Platform

The Nanjing Research Institute of Electronics Technology – China’s number one defense-electronics center and a hub of key innovation even under US sanctions – is developing a ground-breaking “distributed early-warning detection big data platform” capable of tracking up to 1,000 missile launches worldwide in real time.

The platform fuses data from an enormous array of space-, air-, sea-, and ground-based sensors, using advanced algorithms to distinguish warheads from decoys and proceed to action across secure networks.

The system integrates literally anything: fragmented, heterogeneous data streams from multiple sources – radars, satellites, optical, electronic reconnaissance systems – no matter where they come from, and when.

Cue to the system’s integration with interceptor missiles. During the Victory Day military parade last September in Beijing, China presented a new generation of air defense and anti-ballistic missiles, including the HQ-29, capable of intercepting hostile missiles beyond the atmosphere. Call it the Chinese Dragon Dome.

These are only 4 vectors amid the concerted Chinese tech drive, one of the key themes of the next Five-Year Plan to be approved next March in the “Two Sessions” in Beijing.

Now cut to Ronnie Chan, the Chair Emeritus of the Asia Society and the chairman of its Hong Kong Centre. He’s one of those affable old-school Hong Kong elite members who’s seen it all – and capable of synthesizing what’s ahead in a sharp and sweet manner. What he said recently at a seminar organized by the Shanghai Development Research Foundation could not be more relevant.

Let’s take just three key takeaways:

1. “The Chinese people are resilient and patient. As long as domestic stability is maintained, external pressure only strengthens their endurance (…) in this China–U.S. rivalry, there will be no true winner, but the side that stands longer in the end will be China.”

2. “China’s economy has not been over-financialised, and it continues to be grounded in the real economy. Only when manufacturing is strong can a nation remain stable and resilient.”

3. “China must stay calm — neither blindly optimistic nor blindly pessimistic. China possess a vast market, a complete industrial chain, and a diligent population. As long as internal stability holds, external pressures cannot defeat it. The real opportunities ahead do not lie in real estate or finance, but in the service sector and innovation-driven real economies.”

There is no Chinese “miracle”: it’s all about planning and hard work. And now to the next stage: no holds barred innovation.

This article was originally published on Sputnik News.

The post Tech Sinica – China’s Relentless Innovation Drive appeared first on LewRockwell.

According to newly released emails, the United States Intelligence Community, led by the CIA and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, held regular meetings with Dr. Ralph Baric, one of America’s leading coronavirus experts, since at least 2015.

Senator Rand Paul’s office has worked for years to obtain the documents.

Baric has been accused of engineering the Covid-19 virus in his lab at the University of North Carolina, but he has never had to testify about his role in the pandemic despite his well-documented collaboration with the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

The newly released emails reveal that the CIA hoped to discuss “Coronavirus evolution and possible natural human adaptation with Baric” and that Baric held quarterly meetings with members of the Intelligence Community.

These emails are just the latest additions to the suspicious amalgamation of facts implicating the US Intelligence Community’s role in the origins of the pandemic, as discussed in The Covid Response at Five Years.

A very brief overview of the timeline suggests that the CIA and the Intelligence Community are implicated in the creation of the virus, a lab leak at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, and censorship to evade any public scrutiny for their role in the pandemic.

• 2015: The Intelligence Community held quarterly meetings with Dr. Ralph Baric and discussed “possible human adaptation” to coronavirus evolution.
• 2019-2020: The CIA had a spy working at the Wuhan Institute of Virology doing “both offensive and defensive work” with pathogens, according to Seymour Hersh. That asset reports in early 2020 that there was a laboratory accident that resulted in the infection of a researcher.
• March 18, 2020: The Department of Homeland Security replaced Health and Human Services as the lead Federal Agency responding to Covid, as explained in depth in Debbie Lerman’s The Deep State Goes Viral.
• Spring 2020: The CIA offered bribes to scientists to bury their findings refuting the “proximal origin” theory advanced by Dr. Anthony Fauci, according to a whistleblower. The House Oversight Committee explains: “According to the whistleblower, at the end of its review, six of the seven members of the Team believed the intelligence and science were sufficient to make a low confidence assessment that COVID-19 originated from a laboratory in Wuhan, China.” Then, however, the “six members were given a significant monetary incentive to change their position.”
• 2020: Dr. Fauci began holding secret meetings at CIA headquarters “without a record of entry” in order to “influence its Covid-19 origins investigation,” according to a whistleblower. “He knew what was going on…He was covering his ass and he was trying to do it with the Intel community,” the whistleblower told Congress.”
• 2021: Scientists in the Department of Defense compiled significant evidence suggesting Covid emerged from a lab leak, but President Biden’s Director of National Intelligence, Avril Haines, banned them from presenting their evidence or participating in a discussion on the origins of the virus.
• 2021: CISA, an agency within the Department of Homeland Security, implemented a program known as “switchboarding,” where officials dictated to Big Tech platforms what content is permissible or prohibited speech.
• 2022: The Department of Homeland Security announced it will establish a “Disinformation Governance Board.” The Ministry of Truth is only discontinued when the absurdity of its chief censor, Nina Jankowicz, receives sufficient blowback from the public.

What exactly was the play here? A populist impulse has been alive in the American electorate since the end of the Cold War. A growing popular demand on the left and right has been for a government that serves the people and not some globalist, bureaucratized, and militarized scheme that only benefits the ruling class.

In 2015, Donald Trump, a consummate outsider to the ruling elites, was ascending in political stature in ways that no one expected. He was saying outrageous things on stage – such as that the Iraq war was a disaster – and people loved it.

The establishment’s choice, Jeb Bush, was wiped out early in the primaries. This was not about Trump personally, however; it was about the traditional demand in these circles to control the controllers. Since the assassination of JFK, this has always been the way, always justified in the public interest. Trump was not their choice.

The real interest has been the consolidation and expansion of power of a rogue Intelligence Community, headed by the CIA. Tapping Baric’s expertise was part of a deliberate strategy to increase that dominance through bioweapons.

It seems perhaps crazy to imagine that there was a playbook for maintaining control by the old guard and that the pandemic option was among them. But perhaps it was. After all, Anthony Fauci frequently warned of a coming pandemic, and intelligence worked with universities and corporations for years and on multiple occasions to game out pandemic exercises (Event 201 and Crimson Contagion).

What we have here are new breadcrumbs pointing to a genuine coup attempt, one that grew as each stage in the deployment failed, culminating in relentless media campaigns, lawfare, and even assassination attempts. The newest evidence further reinforces the existence of a ruling class willing to engage in sadistic policies that compared with the worst of the last years of the Roman Empire.

Of course, this was not just about politics in the US. Populist movements had come alive the world over, from Europe to the UK to Brazil. Fully 194 countries were locked down over several weeks, with the claim that the problem would be fixed with universal human separation followed by injection of a compliant population. The scenario being built here through these releases is nothing short of terrifying.

Where are the investigations, hearings, commissions, and courts? At the very least, and in any case, Baric and members of the Intelligence Community must testify under oath about their role in gain-of-function research, the Wuhan Institute of Virology, and the cover-up that began in 2020.

This article was originally published on Brownstone Institute.

The post Was Covid Always a CIA Plot? appeared first on LewRockwell.

As more and more people are awakening to the dangers of vaccines, they are gradually discovering a problem vaccine safety advocates have had to deal with for decades—talking to vaccine zealots is like speaking to a brick wall and regardless of the evidence you put forward, you can’t reach them (sometimes seeming as though you are speaking to a religious fanatic who is unwilling to even consider the “blasphemy you are spewing forth”).

For example, in 2009 after nephrologist Dr. Suzanne Humphries noticed patients (particularly hospitalized ones) kept on developing kidney failure after flu shots, she experienced significant pushback from trying to delay vaccinating until discharge:

In the past when I was consulted on kidney failure cases and said, “Oh that was the statin/antibiotic/diuretic that did that!” instantly the drug would be stopped—no questions asked. Now, however, a new standard was applied to vaccines. It didn’t matter that the internist’s notes in the charts said, “No obvious etiology of kidney failure found after thorough evaluation.”

The next time the medical chief of staff and I met in the corridor, an oncologist was present. At one point, I asked the chief, “Why doesn’t anyone else see the problem here? Why is it just me? How can you think all this is okay? Why is it now considered normal to vaccinate very sick people on their first hospital day?” The oncologist gave an answer that surprised me. She said, “Medical religion!” and turned and walked away.

Several months went by, and the medical executive committee met to discuss my concerns, without allowing me to be present at the meeting. I was informed in writing that the nursing staff were becoming confused by me discontinuing orders to vaccinate and that I should adhere to hospital policy. I thought this odd, given that nurses are not accustomed to giving the same treatment to every patient, and are fully capable of reading individualized orders.

As time went on, it was interesting seeing the divide in the hospital staff. Nurses would bail me up in quiet corners and tell me stories that completely backed up what I was seeing. They would guardedly support me, when their superiors were out of eye- or ear-shot.

I wrote all the cases out and put together a comprehensive brief for the hospital administration, but to no avail. Not even science could get through as the snake-oil salesmen continued to deny my findings.

I kept presenting the administration with facts they could not respond to, in the hope that they would get a blinding revelation of the obvious. Finally, they recruited the Northeast Healthcare Quality Foundation, the “quality improvement organization” for Maine, New Hampshire and Vermont, to get me off their backs. Dr. Lawrence D. Ramunno sent a letter invoking the fallacy of authority, which adamantly informed me that hospital vaccination against influenza virus would become a global measure for all admissions in 2010 [due to Obamacare], and that my evidence of harm was not significant because 10 professional organizations endorse vaccination.

This condescending, vapid letter…illustrated callous disregard of clinicians at the highest level, and the willful blindness prepared to ignore clearly documented cases, and their own medical literature. Not satisfied with demanding that I practice automaton obedience to dictates from on high, they initiated a shadow observation, where everything I did and wrote in the hospital, from then on, was observed and scrutinized.

Note: prior to Obamacare effectively mandating flu shots for healthcare workers, many doctors I knew did not vaccinate as they felt there were negligible benefits to the shot and real potential risks and thought the new mandate didn’t make sense. I do not believe my sample was biased as other sources corroborated it (e.g., this 2009 CNN segment discussed New York healthcare workers protesting a state law requiring annual flu shots for them)—making it remarkable how quickly a simple mandate was able to shift critical thinking on this topic to an irrational embrace of vaccination (especially given how people I’ve met who got Guillain-Barré syndrome from a vaccine).

Worse still, decades of propaganda have enshrined a number of ridiculous standards and rationalizations to defend vaccines you are always expected to argue against if you so much as question them.

Note: propaganda is a tool that is used to convince the population that something which goes against their interests and cannot be logically justified is actually “good for them.” For this reason, propaganda is emotional rather than logical in nature, and frequently will use emotional arguments that on the surface appear logical but once you peer deeper are not.

Why Do People Believe in Vaccines?

Once people awaken to the vaccine issues, one of the most frequent questions which emerges is why the medical field has such a rigid ideological attachment to them. I would argue it is due to three interrelated reasons:

First, human society has always been defined by competing groups vying for status and wealth, and what many do not appreciate is that, historically, it is a very recent development that doctors attracted the prestige and salary the profession commands. This I would argue was ultimately a result of two things:

•Market monopolization (via the American Medical Association) and technological developments birthing an incredibly profitable medical industry, which generated the funding to market a newfound faith in it to the entire country and required doctors (and faith in doctors) to serve as the keystone for the industry.

•Medicine creating a mythology that it rescued us from the dark ages of disease, and hence deserves its supremacy in the current social hierarchy. As “vaccines ending infectious diseases” is a central part of that mythology, to maintain their existing prestige, those within the conventional medical system are essentially forced to double-down on the absolute supremacy of vaccines, regardless of the evidence against them, or the fact, as Secretary Kennedy brilliantly shows here, there is no actual evidence vaccines were responsible for the decline in infectious disease the medical industry falsely claimed credit for.

Note: when Dr. Humphries raised her concerns about influenza vaccines causing kidney failure, colleagues used the mythology of medicine’s most esteemed vaccines to dismiss her (e.g., “[the chief of internal medicine] went on to remind me that ‘smallpox was eradicated by vaccines, and polio was eradicated in the United States by vaccines.’”). This eventually motivated Humphries to scrutinize that mythology and create the pivotal book Dissolving Illusions that showed exactly why that mythology was a lie.

Secondly, there is a well-known phenomenon in psychology known as the Dunning-Kruger effect, which states that the less competence or knowledge individuals have in an area, the more they will overestimate their competency and knowledge (e.g., as the DMSO series I’ve written has attracted more attention, an increasing number of DMSO hit pieces have been written and I’ve found that the more nonsensical, erroneous or misinformed the arguments presented are, the more confidently and aggressively their proponents espouse them and the more resistant they are to considering any conflicting data).

In medicine, there is a massive amount of information that needs to be learned, so in most cases doctors are forced to take short cuts throughout their training where again and again they assume if A is true then B is true without understanding exactly why A leads to B or how tentative the link can be and in which situations it does not apply. Likewise, when the public (especially members of the media) appraises medical information, rather than try to understand how A becomes B, they typically take the pronouncement of an expert (e.g., a doctor) that “A always leads to B” as all there is to say on the subject.

Since A often does not actually lead to B, and people do not like admitting they are wrong (especially if, like doctors, an incredible personal investment was required to attain the social status they hold), when confronted with inconsistencies in their beliefs, the typical response will be to double-down on their position rather than try to critically understand the additional data.

All of this, in short, encapsulates what I routinely observe when I see doctors or those aligned with “the science” defend (essentially-indefensible) aspects of vaccination.
Note: another common psychological mechanism at work, cognitive dissonance (not wanting to admit something you’ve invested yourself in was wrong), is particularly applicable to doctors, as it is a heavy burden to acknowledge you had harmed a significant number of people you willfully vaccinated.

Third, a strong argument can be made that societies cannot function without some type of unifying faith or spirituality (particularly since in the absence of one, people will frequently seek out one to adopt). In our culture, a rather peculiar situation emerged where religion was cast out by broad swaths of the society and replaced with science (under the belief it would create a fairer and more rational society) but the underlying need for a widespread faith was never addressed.

Because of this, much of science gradually morphed into the society’s religion, resulting in it claiming to be an objective arbiter of truth, but in reality, frequently being highly dogmatic and irrational as it seeks to establish its own monopoly over the truth (which has led to many labeling the current societal institution of science as “scientism”). As such, when science is discussed, religious terminology is often used by its proponents (e.g., “I believe in science,” “I believe in vaccines,” “anyone who denies climate change is reprehensible and must be silenced”).

The Religion of Medicine

Over the years, many have made the observation, medicine, by claiming dominion over life and death (and creating modern miracles like reviving the dead with cardiac resuscitation or awing the public with their ability to see through flesh with x-rays) has come to function as the foundation of the new religion of science.

Modern Medicine can’t survive without our faith, because Modern Medicine is neither an art nor a science. It’s a religion… The Church of Modern Medicine deals with the most puzzling phenomena: birth, death, and all the tricks our bodies play on us—Robert S. Mendelsohn

One of the first people who alerted me to this idea was Dr. Mendelsohn, who in his 1979 book, Confessions of a Medical Heretic argued that medicine was a dogmatic institution that prioritized authority, control, and ritualistic practices (which were treated as infallible doctrines requiring blind obedience from patients) over patient well-being, data transparency, and evidence-based care. There, he:

• Highlighted “unwritten rules” in medicine, such as doctors compulsively rushing to prescribe new drugs before their side effects are fully known, as examples of this rigid, faith-like adherence to protocol over science (particularly since debacles routinely followed this blind faith in new pharmaceutical drugs).

• Demonstrated how many routine practices and procedures caused significantly more harm than benefit (e.g., x-rays for tonsillitis later creating thyroid cancer) but could not be challenged due to the dogmatic nature of medicine, leading to similar debacles being repeated in each ensuing decade.

• Demonstrated that many illnesses that are routinely treated with (harmful) interventions would recover on their own, especially if augmented with simple natural healing practices.

• Argued that medicine’s tendency to withhold foundational medical information from the public (hence forcing them to trust the doctor’s opinion rather than their own judgement) was fundamentally unethical.
Note: this critique was raised in the pre-internet age where medical journal information was not widely available to the public. I believe this in part explains why journal articles published at this time (many of which I cite in this newsletter) were much more candid, whereas in later decades information which potentially incriminated the medical profession rarely made it to publication.

• Argued medicine’s compulsion to “do something” as a faith-based impulse rather than rational care, equating medical overreach with religious zeal that harms believers.

• Noted that in addition to patients being attacked for challenging the faith, doctors who did were treated as heretics and cast out (e.g., by being forced to resign from the hospitals they worked at).

Nowhere does the Church’s Inquisition emerge as clearly as it does through the drugging of children as a means of control… Modern Medicine sets up its Inquisition to define behavior which doesn’t conform as sick.

Mendelsohn’s work, in turn, was hugely impactful and played a huge role in shifting medicine away from the paternalistic model to one where patients began to be provided with data and allowed to play a role in deciding what care was optimal for them. For example, he made numerous highly impactful appearances on national television appearances such as this 1983 debate on the dangers of vaccines.

Note: over the last month, I compiled 54 other news segments that were aired on the dangers of vaccines that would never be aired now (and can be viewed here).

Nonetheless, many of the issues Mendelsohn highlighted persist to the present day. For example, doctors who tried to prevent COVID patients from dying by deviating from the ineffective remdesivir protocols were kicked out of their hospitals, the experimental mRNA vaccines were embraced with an unstoppable religious zeal by the medical community despite very little being known about them at the time and data on the safety or efficacy of the COVID vaccines was withheld from the public despite continual efforts and lawsuits to obtain them.

Read the Whole Article

The post Why Have Vaccines Become a Religion? appeared first on LewRockwell.

Donald Trump’s victory in the 2024 presidential election was due in large part to his promises to pursue an America First foreign policy and rein in inflation. One year later, prices remain high, and President Trump is more focused on overseas meddling than on the American people. This has helped enable Democrats to win governor races in Virginia and New Jersey, and self-described Democratic socialist Zohran Mamdani to win the New York City mayor race by running on “affordability.”

Since the election, President Trump has made a number of proposals to ease the burden of high prices. One of the president’s proposals is changing federal housing regulations to encourage lenders to offer 50-year mortgages. Though a 50-year mortgage in comparison to a 30-year mortgage could reduce monthly mortgage payments by over a hundred dollars for a median price home, it could also roughly double interest payments made over the life of the mortgage. So, while the longer mortgage may provide a short-term benefit, in the long run it is a losing proposition for potential homeowners.

President Trump also proposed using the revenue from his tariffs to give most Americans at least 2,000 dollars. This may provide some help for struggling Americans, but it does not compensate for the damage inflicted on the American economy by the tariffs.

President Trump has also announced plans to reduce tariffs on some countries in regard to coffee, bananas, and other agricultural products. This reduction in the tariffs has come with an admission from the Trump administration that the high tariffs have led to increased prices and thus harmed Americans. Hopefully, President Trump will provide more relief from his tariffs, including relief aimed at helping American manufacturers who rely on imports for raw materials and tools.

While Democrats talk about “affordability,” most are unwilling to support the free-market policies that produce abundance and affordability. Instead, they want more government interventions in the marketplace — even though history shows government interventions cause price increases and shortages. For example, New York City Mayor-elect Mamdani thinks the way to address housing costs in New York City is through new price controls on rent. He does not seem to understand that a reason housing costs are so high in New York City is because of the city’s existing rent control law.

Another example is congressional Democrats’ “solution” to the large increases in Obamacare premiums being to extend the 2021 “temporary” Obamacare subsidies enacted as part of covid relief legislation. Unfortunately, the Republican alternative appears to be to just send Americans money to use to pay medical costs.

Politicians with both parties ignore the real cause of price inflation: the Federal Reserve. When the Federal Reserve increases the money supply, it reduces the dollar’s value, thus increasing the average American’s cost of living. A major reason the Fed devalues the dollar is to monetize the ever-increasing federal debt by purchasing Treasury securities. Therefore, an important action the president and Congress could take to make America affordable again would be to reduce federal spending and start paying down the over 38 trillion dollars debt. Congress should also pass legislation forbidding the Federal Reserve from purchasing federal debt.

Congress should also pass the Audit the Fed bill, legislation exempting precious metals and cryptocurrencies from capital gains taxes, and a repeal of any other laws that prevent Americans from using alternative currencies. Auditing and ending the Federal Reserve is the true affordability agenda.

The post The Real Affordability Agenda appeared first on LewRockwell.

While concentrating a growing military force in the Caribbean against Venezuela, the Trump Administration is conducting a systematic persecution of Venezuelan immigrants in the United States.

In March, it deported 252 of them to a notorious prison in El Salvador known as the ‘Terrorism Detention Centre’, claiming that they had infiltrated the United States to wage an ‘irregular war’.

Interviewed now by the New York Times, 40 of these Venezuelans, who reported physical and psychological trauma, testified that they were savagely beaten, sexually assaulted by guards, and pushed to the brink of suicide. A team of independent forensic analysts found their testimonies to be consistent and credible, stating that the violence they suffered meets the United Nations definition of torture.

At the same time, on the orders of the Trump Administration, the US armed forces continue to attack Venezuelan and Colombian vessels in the Caribbean Sea that are ‘suspected of drug trafficking’. Since September, around 80 crew members have been killed in such attacks without any evidence that they were drug traffickers: they were not stopped and searched, but immediately hit with missiles that set the boats on fire, burning those on board alive. There is already evidence that some of them were fishermen.

The Trump Administration’s Department of Defense is deploying the USS Gerald R. Ford, the world’s largest aircraft carrier, against Venezuela, along with its battle group consisting of several ships. The Pentagon says that

“the increased presence of US forces in the area of responsibility of the US Southern Command, which includes South and Central America, strengthens the United States’ ability to monitor and counter illicit actors and activities that threaten the security and prosperity of the US homeland and our security in the Western Hemisphere.”

However, the true objective of this military operation is to overthrow President Nicolas Maduro. He is accused of collaborating closely with drug cartels and of seizing power illegally, in order to regain control of Venezuela, a country with the world’s largest oil reserves, for the United States and its multinational corporations.

To this end, the Trump Administration has placed a $50 million bounty on President Maduro, as a reward for anyone who provides information leading to his arrest.

At the same time, in the Middle East, the Trump Administration has cancelled the £7 million bounty on Mohammad al-Jolani, leader of the terrorist group al-Nusrah Front (ANF), the Syrian branch of al-Qaeda, removing him from the list of global terrorists. Al-Jolani himself, now going by the name Ahmed al-Sharaa, has proclaimed himself president of Syria, which he has taken over. “President” Ahmed al-Sharaa was received by President Trump at the White House and admitted into the “anti-terrorism coalition”, while his militias spread terror in Syria, massacring civilians. Also in the Middle East, the Trump administration is implementing its “peace plan for Gaza”, continuing to supply Israel with weapons in a relentless flow that has earned US war industries $32 billion since 2023.

With the support of the US, Israel is consolidating its presence in Gaza, now reduced to rubble, and taking control of the West Bank with the aim of permanently undermining the prospect of a viable Palestinian state.

Regarding the situation in the West Bank, an issue largely overlooked by the political and media mainstream, we recommend watching two important documentaries on Byoblu:

Ladri di terra (Land Thieves) by Michele Crudelini,

“I’ll tell you about the occupied West Bank” by  Giulia Bertotto.

In this episode of Grandangolo, Michele Crudelini talks about his trip to the West Bank, a rare example of true investigative journalism.

This article was originally published in Italian on Grandangolo, Byoblu TV.

The post The Justice of the Empire appeared first on LewRockwell.

The political assassination of Charlie Kirk continues to impact America.  Charlie’s conservative nonprofit organization, Turning Point USA, has seen a surge in membership.  There are reports across the country of increased church attendance, as lapsed congregants contemplate the sacrifice Charlie made to spread a Christian message.  Conservative and Christian Americans are expressing themselves more boldly on social media platforms and college campuses.

An equally important, though darkly troubling, consequence of his murder has been the deluge of mockery and hatred from leftists celebrating Charlie’s death.  Antifa-aligned groups show up on college campuses to attack Turning Point staff and prevent students from hearing Charlie’s arguments.  Prominent Democrats continue to pretend that violent leftist rhetoric had nothing to do with his murder.  Celebrity “journalists” defend Charlie’s assassination by not-so-subtly suggesting that Charlie’s willingness to debate a range of political and moral issues with Americans of all political backgrounds constituted some kind of impermissible “hate” or linguistic “violence.”

In a recent interview with Democrat Senator John Fetterman, leftist propagandist Katie Couric tried really hard to blame Charlie for his own murder.  “Did you have any issues, now in hindsight, over some of the things that Charlie Kirk said?” Couric asked Fetterman.  When the senator responded with compassion for Charlie’s family and pointed out that “engaging in debate would never justify what’s happened,” Couric nonetheless insisted, “I think some people might say Charlie Kirk’s rhetoric was extreme. … People think his words lead to violence.”

Breaking news, Katie: During the height of the civil rights movement, people worried that Martin Luther King, Jr.’s words would lead to violence, too.  His assassination did not dispel the truth of his message.  The same is true of Charlie.

When famous “reporters” such as Couric so conspicuously work to justify a leftist-inspired political assassination, non-leftists pay attention.  As one social media account posted, “Charlie was a moderate Christian conservative.  If Katie thinks he ‘deserved’ this because of his beliefs, she thinks we ALL deserve the same thing.”  A lot of non-leftist Americans have realized over the last two months that leftists want them dead.

For the last ten years, they’ve watched Antifa domestic terrorists burn down businesses, threaten drivers, and perpetrate all kinds of violence against random American citizens.  Seeing this organized terrorism on computer screens, many non-leftists could effectively compartmentalize these incidents of violence and destruction as the actions of revolutionary Marxists and militant Democrats.

After Charlie’s assassination, however, non-leftists witnessed the publicized glee of ordinary Democrats across the country.  Teachers, nurses, and even therapists felt no shame in expressing happiness over Charlie’s murder.  Government bureaucrats laughed about Charlie’s death without any fear that they might lose their jobs.  A music instructor in Pennsylvania recently posted a video in which she cruelly gives Charlie’s wife, Erika, “acting notes” so that the widow’s grief will appear more “convincing.”  These psychopathic jeers have continued for two whole months.

Rather than being horrified at the public responses of so many leftist Americans to the political assassination of Charlie Kirk, Katie Couric apparently believes that Charlie deserved his fate.  When such a famous corporate news face seems genuinely amenable to assassinating Americans for their political speech, even people who normally ignore politics notice how dangerously divided the country has become.

For non-political, non-leftist Americans, Charlie’s murder has been an exclamation point to the steady rise of organized political violence during the last decade.  After a deranged leftist tried to assassinate an entire baseball team of Republicans from the House and Senate in 2017, non-political Americans hoped that the shocking event would help to cool the temperature in Washington.  Just as soon as Democrat Party leaders did a little bipartisan kumbaya routine for the cameras, however, we got the Antifa and Black Lives Matter riots of 2020.

Even though those violent riots killed several dozen Americans and caused more property damage than any other insurrection in U.S. history, the Democrat Party euphemistically defended the mayhem and bloodshed as a “summer of love” for Americans’ civil rights.  While cities burned, the corporate news media warned Americans that the violence would get much worse unless Joe Biden “won” the 2020 election.  In this way, “journalists” and politicians openly threatened Americans as they headed to the polls.

After claiming the presidency, Democrats did not let up.  Instead, they used the DOJ and FBI to hunt down and harass political opponents.  Democrat-engineered lawfare that had been ramping up since Obama was in the White House went into overdrive as leftists persecuted non-leftists with abandon.  Aside from years of politically motivated prosecutions, however, Democrats continued to call non-leftist Americans “fascists” and “Nazis.”  By 2024, it was little surprise to anyone paying attention that leftist-inspired assassins would attempt to murder President Trump.

What was a surprise for many non-political Americans, however, was that such near-historic assassination attempts did not sufficiently convince Democrats that their violent rhetoric had become unarguably dangerous for the nation.  Within moments of the attempted assassination of President Trump in Pennsylvania last summer, Democrat politicians and their allies in the press were already downplaying the event or pretending that the shooting had been faked (even as fire chief Corey Comperatore lay dead).  Rather than taking a moment to consider how close the country had come to a potentially civil war-triggering murder of a major national figure, leftists publicly regretted that the assassin had failed.  Random leftists took to social media platforms to complain about the shooter’s aim.

After all the years of Democrat riots, lawfare, and violence, the near-murder of President Trump reminded non-leftist voters what was at stake in the 2024 election.  Even then, however, the average non-political American tried to mentally separate the attempted murder of a national politician from the way ordinary leftists viewed ordinary non-leftists in the United States.  American politics, many told themselves, had gotten entirely out of hand, but surely cooler heads would eventually prevail.

Charlie Kirk’s murder ended that psychologically comforting delusion for good.  When a young man with a young family is killed in the prime of his life, people sit up and take notice.  When an American is assassinated for his political convictions, otherwise non-political Americans wake up from their apathetic slumber.  When random leftists celebrate murder across social media platforms and mock a young widow’s suffering, even Americans who desperately wish to get along with everyone realize that the country is in peril.

Two months after the leftist-inspired political assassination of Charlie Kirk, it is clear that the country is not healing in any form.  Leftists continue to call for political violence.  Democrat politicians continue to call non-leftists “fascists” and “Nazis.”  Democrat-aligned “journalists” continue to blame Charlie for his own murder.  There is a growing awareness in this country that the whole house of cards precariously holding civil society together could come crashing down with one more violent riot or political assassination.

What happens then is anyone’s guess.  But formerly non-political Americans know that the country’s domestic peace is in serious jeopardy.  Too many Americans seek and cheer violence right now.  Too many Americans are eager for civil war.  If we cannot lower the temperature in this country, Charlie’s murder will presage an unbearable slaughter to come.

This article was originally published on American Thinker.

The post Too Many Americans Want a Civil War appeared first on LewRockwell.

The title of this column is a quote from 25-year retired Army Green Beret Lieutenant Colonel Anthony Aguilar. Colonel Aguilar’s missions took him to Iraq, Afghanistan, Tajikistan, Jordan, and the Philippines. He received the Purple Heart for wounds he received in combat. After retiring from the Army, he served as a security contractor in Gaza for UG Solutions, which was contracted to provide security at aid distribution sites operated by the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation. He resigned from his position after approximately two months, citing human rights violations and crimes against humanity being committed by the security agency at the behest of the Israel Defense Forces (IDF).

What Colonel Aguilar witnessed in Gaza by the Israeli military (and the U.S. private contractors under the direction of the IDF) is further evidence of just how vile and wicked the Israel government and its military really are.

Colonel Aguilar was recently interviewed on the AJ+ podcast. Here are excerpts from that interview:

Anthony Aguilar: Never in my life did I think that an army could be so evil as to use food to lure a starving population through a battlefield, killing women and children and the elderly on purpose.

Dena Takruri: I wanted to hear more about how he went from believing he was going to Gaza to help feed Palestinians to realizing the United States was complicit in Israel’s genocide, particularly as a 25-year veteran of the U.S. Army.

So, what did you understand to be the mandate of your mission? What exactly were you going to be doing on the ground there?

Aguilar: What we were told in kind of a general overview briefing before we got on the plane out of Dulles is that the United States stepped forward to take over the United Nations mission because Israel would no longer allow the United Nations in and that Israel will allow the United States to work with them to do it and that we were going in to take over that mission to deliver food.

I envisioned that we would be going in, occupying and securing, or securing at least, 400 distribution sites and securing 500 to 550 trucks a day going in because that’s what the UN did. That was my mindset going in. And I believed that until the very first day I got there, and I realized that that was not the case.

Takruri: Describe to me what you first saw and felt when you arrived to the Gaza Strip.

Aguilar: What I witnessed in that first look as we came in was the most devastating, destructive, beyond war annihilation, apocalyptic thing I’d ever seen in my life. Something that I couldn’t even imagine in a nightmare. Rubble, dogs eating remains of bodies, smoke in the horizon from bombs being dropped, not a building left in sight and everything leveled. It was a landscape of destruction and horror, which I’ve never witnessed before.  And honestly, it made me feel sick.

The Israel Defense Forces were leading us, and they gave us this briefing. They pulled out a giant map that showed operations that were going on. First of all, I didn’t see 400 distribution sites; I saw 4. All of them were in the south, away from the areas that people needed the food. And no one north of the Netzarim Corridor from Gaza could reach these sites. That started to paint a picture to me that this is either horribly planned or there’s something else going on here.

Then when I looked at the sites and I saw the operational graphics on their map—this is an Israeli map that showed that offensive combat operations going on around these sites—these sites were behind the forward line of contact, the front line, if you will, which means the civilians have to cross, have to travel through the fighting to get there. It’s a violation of the Geneva Convention.

Takruri: Why do you think it was designed that way?

Aguilar: It became clear to me that it was designed that way when we got to site one, and I walked up to the berm to stand up on top of the berm to look, and there’s Merkava battle tanks driving through and firing at positions. There’s a battle going on. There’s mortar rounds, there’s artillery rounds. There’s people, thousands of Palestinians lined up along the coastal corridor, the coastal road, because they have nowhere else to go; they live on the beach. They live there in shanty tarp shacks because there’s nowhere else to live because their homes have been destroyed. And there’s this battle going on.

And I look at my map, and I look at that, and I go back, and I talk to the IDF and to the guy in charge, the GHF guy in charge. And I said, “We can’t distribute aid from these sites. We’re going to get a lot of people killed, and it violates Geneva Conventions. We cannot do this.” That was wholly ignored [by the IDF commander]: “We’re going to do it anyway. We’re doing it. It doesn’t matter. We’re fighting Hamas. The Geneva Convention doesn’t apply.”

But then when I saw all the sites, how all the sites were designed this way, it became very clear to me then from seeing the way the sites were designed and how they functioned, that this is forced displacement. The Israeli government, through the Israel defense forces in Gaza, are using food to bait Palestinians to forcefully displace them to the south en masse. And I don’t mean just a couple hundred. I mean, everybody, the entire population.

Takruri: Did it strike you as wrong that the same people that were deliberately starving Palestinians, the Israelis, are now tasked with feeding them?

Aguilar: Morally, ethically, legally, humanitarianly: wrong, wrong, wrong. Yes, it was shockingly wrong to me, which is why in the beginning I thought, “Do these people just not know what they’re doing? Or this can’t be intentional.” But what came to my realization, and it came to me very hard, is that this is intentional.

Takruri: Why did you initially think it’s not intentional?

Aguilar: Because I didn’t think anybody could be that evil. [Emphasis added]

Takruri: So, in your interactions with personnel from the IDF, how did they describe what they were doing? Or how did they talk about the Palestinians that they were purportedly feeding?

Aguilar: The Israelis did not want to feed the Palestinians. From the very bottom level, IDF soldiers in Gaza that I talked to that are in Gaza, in the war, they asked me flat out one day, clearly, “Why are you feeding our enemy?” I was like, “Well, we’re feeding the civilians.” “No, they’re all our enemy. You are feeding our enemy.” I was like, “Women, children, old men and women?” “Yeah, they’re all the enemy. Every Palestinian is our enemy.” That’s how they saw it.

But they also referred to them as animals. They called them zombies. They referred to the groups of the Palestinians where they’d come to the sites as “the zombie horde,” dehumanizing them, not providing them water, shooting at them to get them to move a certain way like they’re animals in a cage. It’s horrible.

Takruri: And was this perspective of dehumanization also evident in the GHF members that you were working with as well, your colleagues?

Aguilar: Absolutely. The American contractor who’s in charge of the entire security plan for armed Americans being in Gaza is the national president of the Infidels Motorcycle Club, a US-based veterans motorcycle club. The charter of their organization is to fight jihad and the elimination of all Muslims from the earth. This is the guy in charge of the armed security for delivering food into Gaza to a predominantly Arab Muslim population.

Takruri: Other than these sort of ideological motivations for going to Gaza, were contractors with GHF well compensated?

Aguilar: Well, this type of work is very lucrative. So, for all of us and what we were getting paid: $1,320 a day. So, if you’re there making that much money…and that was just the run-of-the-mill person. If you’re in a leadership position, site leader, mobile leader, you’re making $1,600 a day.

[For that much money] you can just look the other way, say, “This isn’t my problem. No one’s going to know.”

These guys are going to go there, and they’re going to get rich, and they’re going to come home with $300,000 after four or five months of work. Can you imagine only having to work five months out of the year and being rich doing it? It’s a lot of money.

Not to mention the people that run the contract, they’re making millions. Millions. This future Gaza Riviera resort plan is going to make people billions.

This is about money, which is really the sickening, sickening part of this. This isn’t about Hamas. This isn’t about religion. This isn’t about who owns the land. This is about money. And it’s disgusting.

Takruri: I did want to ask you, what is your reaction to the leaked Trump Gaza Riviera plan, which calls for the reconstruction of Gaza as an investment and manufacturing hub? And Boston Consulting Group, which also worked on the plan for deploying GHF, is involved. Do you think GHF should be involved in this plan to turn Gaza into a U.S. territory?

Aguilar: So, in the main control center, where the operations are, on the wall in that main control center, is a large poster of a Boston Consulting Group rendering of the future industrial complex resort. That rendering is on the wall in the control center at Kerem Shalom for the GHF. The GHF is not a humanitarian organization. And they don’t care. They are there to stake property.

Takruri: At what point did you decide that you could no longer have any part to do with it?  

Aguilar: On the 8th of June, I was in the control center and outside of Kerem Shalom, and we were distributing at site number two. And I’m in the control room watching it on the screen. The crowd was very, very packed in there, very packed. And people were being crushed up against concrete walls inside of the sites that were lined with barbed wire, this razor wire, and people were getting crushed up against it.

So, there was a Palestinian man in the crowd who lifted these children up because they were getting trampled and crushed; they were small. And the Israel Defense Force liaison officer, a senior ranking officer in the Israel Defense Force who is in our operations center, looks at the screen, and he says, “Get them off of there right now.” And so, I’m looking at the same thing he’s looking at. I’m like, “Well, the security on the ground there, they’re addressing it. They’re dealing with it. But I mean, these are children. Calm down. These are children.”

“Get them off of there. That’s not secure. Get them off,” the IDF officer said.

I was like, “They’re children. They have no shoes on. They don’t have any weapons. There’s nothing in their hands at all. One of the children doesn’t even have a shirt. Calm down.”

He walks back to his desk, gets on the radio with his forces, and then he comes back over to where I’m standing, and there was an American in our operations center that understood and could speak Hebrew a little bit. And he says to me, “He just said on the radio for his snipers to shoot them down.”

So, when this officer came back, I asked, “Did you just order your snipers at site number two to shoot these kids?” He said, “Well, if you’re not going to take care of it, I will.” And I said, “We’re not shooting children.”

As we were having this dialogue, the children had run off to the edge of this wall, and they jumped down so they could run away. They were scared. They didn’t want to be there. Thank God we didn’t have to see what would have come.

But in that moment, the Safe Reach Solutions contract lead, the boss if you will, who was in the operations center, called me over and he said, “Tony, never say no to the client.” And I said, “What do you mean don’t say no to the client?” He said, “The IDF are our client. We work for them. They’re in charge.” And I was like, “Even when they say to kill children?” He said, “What decisions they make and how they want to fight this war, who they decide to kill or not is not our decision. This is a contract. This is business. Don’t say no to our client.”

Takruri: And did you step down at that point?

Aguilar: I told him at that point, I said, “I’m done.”

Takruri: How many people do you understand to have been killed at these GHF sites up until now?

Aguilar: From the beginning of operations, 26 May, until today, thousands. Not only the hundreds and hundreds into the magnitude of thousands that have been reported by the U.N. and Médecins Sans Frontières and others at the Nasser Hospital and the Khan Younis hospitals directly near these sites receiving about MCI, or mass casualty incidents, on the days that correlate to the same times and dates of distribution. But there are hundreds of bodies buried outside of these sites that have just been buried in the rubble, bulldozed and buried in the ground.

Takruri: So, what do you want Americans to know as one of the few Americans who has been to Gaza during this genocide?

Aguilar: The United States is hand in glove with the Israeli government in committing a genocide. What is happening in Gaza is not a misfortune of war. It is designed: the displacement, the removal, the destruction, the ethnic cleansing, the genocide. It is by design.

Wake up, America. If we stand by and we allow it to happen there, it’s going to happen here.

Folks, there you have it: a first-hand eyewitness account of not only the brutality and sheer wanton genocidal murder of the Palestinian people by the Israelis but also the direct, on-the-ground complicity of U.S. private contractors. Of course, this is in addition to the billions of dollars of U.S. technology, surveillance systems, military equipment, intelligence, naval battle groups, bombs, missiles, jets and other munitions, along with direct CIA support and assistance.

We’re talking about billions of dollars from the U.S. government, billions of dollars from high-tech companies in the United States and hundreds of millions of dollars from the private billionaire class all designed to annihilate millions of innocent people from their homeland so the billionaire class (mostly Zionists) can create a Riviera on the Mediterranean—a Las Vegas on the Sea—from which the Jared Kushners, Steve Witkoffs, Miriam Adelsons and Donald Trumps of the world can rake in billions more in blood money into their corrupt coffers.

In my message last Sunday entitled No “Christian” Can Continue To Support The State Of Israel, I said the following:

The last two years have exposed the Israeli state for who and what it really is.

The entire world sees the total depravity of behavior, the utter lack of moral consciousness, the astonishing degree of racial supremacy on public display in Israel.

Two years of ethnic cleansing; two years of mass murder; two years of mass starvation; two years of genocide; two years of lies and deceit; two years of political manipulation; two years of Israeli domination of the presidents and legislatures of the United States and Western Europe; two years of an out-of-control, rogue Israeli state are now crystal clear.

Now, we learn of just how depraved and degenerated the Israeli mind really is: And it shocks the senses!

Journalist Max Blumenthal (who is himself Jewish) has reported the details of this latest Israeli atrocity. I’m paraphrasing Max:

An Israeli Army unit repeatedly raped a Palestinian civilian man—a man who had no connection to Hamas—in an Israeli prison in the Negev desert. The soldiers recorded the serial rape of this man on camera.

A female Israeli general, the army’s legal attaché, was unable to prosecute the rapists because there were national pro-rape riots across Israel consisting of army reservists who besieged Israeli army bases and staged a rebellion, breaking into army bases demanding the rapists had done nothing wrong.

And the military leadership let these guys go free.

One of them, the key rapist, actually went on national TV and appeared on talk shows as a kind of national folk hero and a victim.

She [the legal attaché] was so frustrated that she leaked the video.

Israel and the U.S. media and politicians in both parties accused Hamas of sexually abusing Israelis on October 7th. And not one of those allegations has been validated by any forensic evidence at all. No evidence!

But here we have the sick psychopaths in the Israeli army literally filming themselves serially raping this innocent Palestinian man, and Netanyahu’s only concern about the event is that the incident is bad public relations for Israel.

The lady general who released the video to the public has been arrested and will go to prison, while the rapists are free to live their lives with ZERO accountability or retribution.

Blumenthal: This scandal should illustrate just how deeply depraved and sick Israel is and how corrupt its political system is.

It’s illustrative of the entire Zionist worldview, where for two years we’ve watched them commit genocide, carry out a holocaust of children across the Gaza Strip, deliberately starve people, and now they’re playing the victim because people are rejecting their political worldview, rejecting Israel.

And in this case, we have footage, documented footage, indisputable, that no one denies, not Netanyahu, not even these soldiers, of the rape of an innocent Palestinian male prisoner who was kidnapped from the Gaza Strip.

OK. ENOUGH!

Enough: “The Israelis are God’s chosen people” claptrap.

Enough: “We must bless Israel to receive God’s blessing” gobbledygook.

Enough: “Zionist Israel is the fulfillment of Bible prophecy” hogwash.

ENOUGH! ENOUGH! ENOUGH! ENOUGH!

Evangelicals who are still determined to support the satanic State of Israel are NOT “Christians.”

By that, I mean they are not resembling the character and person of Christ; they are not following the teachings of Christ. In attitudes, words and actions, they cannot be called “followers of Christ.”

And here’s the stark reality: People all over the world do not see these evangelicals as Christians. They see these evangelical Zionists as phonies and puppets, which is exactly what they are.

Add Blumenthal’s report to the eyewitness testimony of Colonel Aguilar, and the only people who do not see the sheer evil emanating from inside Tel Aviv, Israel and Washington, D.C., USA, are people who don’t WANT to see.

Hear again what Colonel Aguilar said: “Wake up, America. If we stand by and we allow it to happen there, it’s going to happen here.”

A man without moral conscience and human empathy (Donald Trump)—who doesn’t blink an eye at murdering people in Gaza, the West Bank, Iran, Iraq, Syria and Lebanon, who doesn’t blink an eye at murdering people in the waters of the Caribbean Sea—won’t blink an eye at murdering U.S. citizens on the streets of America.

Reprinted with permission from Chuck Baldwin Live.

The post ‘I Didn’t Think Anybody Could Be That Evil’ appeared first on LewRockwell.

Abstract:
The contemporary fascination with a so-called “Bitcoin Standard” rests on the same utopian fantasy that once sustained the Gold Standard—that monetary scarcity can restrain political excess. This essay dismantles that illusion. Through historical analysis of the American experience from 1921 to 1971, and a critical exploration of modern fiscal theory, it argues that the problem of government overspending lies not in the nature of money, but in the nature of governance itself. States do not “print” in the naïve sense of creating currency without backing; they borrow, they bond, and they spend the unearned wealth of future generations. Whether denominated in gold, fiat, or digital tokens, the principle remains: borrowing is justified only when it produces tangible, growth-generating returns. Infrastructure investment, by expanding productive capacity, meets that criterion. Ideological boondoggles, designed for political gratification rather than economic yield, do not. A Bitcoin-backed regime would not neutralise state debt—it would merely gild it with cryptographic rhetoric before the inevitable default.

Thesis Statement:
A Bitcoin Standard would neither prevent deficit spending nor enforce fiscal discipline. It would replicate the structural failures of the Gold Standard, revealing once again that monetary systems cannot cure political irresponsibility. Sound economics arises from productive investment, not ideological austerity or speculative scarcity.

Section I — The Fetish of the Standard

Civilisations invent standards when they lose faith in themselves. The standard is the moral prosthetic of a bankrupt culture, a totem erected in the ruins of trust. When men no longer believe in the integrity of their institutions, they seek refuge in metal or code, mistaking mechanical certainty for virtue. The gold standard, and now the fantasy of a Bitcoin standard, both emerge from the same intellectual poverty — the hope that scarcity can substitute for discipline.

The nineteenth century worshipped gold as the embodiment of order. Its adherents believed that tethering money to a finite metal would chain the ambitions of politicians and the appetites of mobs. The faith was theological: gold was immutable, incorruptible, and therefore, by extension, moral. Yet history is unkind to those who mistake symbols for systems. Every empire that swore fidelity to its metallic god quietly betrayed it when power demanded flexibility. The standard remained in rhetoric long after it had been broken in practice. When the ledger conflicted with the sword, the sword always won.

The modern cult of Bitcoin repeats the same catechism, only now in binary form. Instead of divine metal, there is divine mathematics. Instead of vaults, ledgers. Instead of priests, programmers. The narrative is identical: scarcity will purify the system; code will banish corruption. Yet scarcity does not civilise—it merely constrains. And code, like law, is only as incorruptible as the people who execute it. To believe otherwise is to mistake cryptography for character.

The fetish of the standard endures because it absolves responsibility. It allows men to imagine that moral failure can be corrected by mechanism. A politician can promise rectitude without reform; an economist can preach restraint without courage. Both can appeal to an external order to justify their weakness. The standard becomes a moral surrogate, an instrument of denial wrapped in the language of discipline.

Under the gold standard, nations inflated through debt while denouncing inflation in speech. The mechanism of deceit was simple: borrow abroad, spend domestically, and swear that redemption remained sacred—until it wasn’t. Gold never failed them; they failed gold. The same dynamic will haunt any Bitcoin-based regime. Governments will borrow against future Bitcoin flows, issue bonds indexed to digital reserves, and construct a labyrinth of derivatives to simulate liquidity. When reality intrudes, they will call it “temporary suspension,” just as Nixon did in 1971. And another generation will learn that scarcity without integrity is merely a slower road to default.

The moral allure of the standard lies in its false promise of objectivity. It whispers that numbers can tame men, that mathematics can impose virtue on vice. But economics is not a physics of atoms; it is a politics of appetites. The state does not violate standards because they are weak—it violates them because survival demands it. A fixed supply cannot withstand a variable will.

Thus the Bitcoin standard is not revolutionary; it is recursive. It is the latest costume of an old delusion: that systems, once made rigid, will make men righteous. The truth is less elegant and infinitely harder—discipline is not a consequence of scarcity; it is a product of moral and intellectual strength. Gold failed to bestow it. Bitcoin will too.

Section II — The Mechanics of Debt: Printing Without Presses

The image of governments “printing money” is a rhetorical ghost that refuses to die. It conjures visions of reckless bureaucrats flooding the economy with worthless paper, spinning inflation from ink. The truth, however, is far more subtle—and far more insidious. Modern states do not print; they borrow. They transform promises into liquidity, pledging the future to sustain the present. Debt, not the printing press, is the engine of contemporary money creation.

When a government announces new spending, it does not conjure cash from the ether. It issues bonds. Those bonds are bought by institutions, banks, pension funds, and increasingly by the central bank itself. Each bond is a certificate of faith—faith that tomorrow’s taxpayers will honour yesterday’s ambitions. The state thus becomes a conduit for temporal arbitrage: it spends today what it claims it will earn tomorrow. This sleight of hand is the modern alchemy of finance. And like all alchemy, it is sustained by belief.

Central banks operationalise this ritual. When they “expand the money supply,” they are not pushing buttons to mint coins; they are buying government debt, placing those bonds on their balance sheets in exchange for new reserves. These reserves, in turn, ripple through commercial banks as lending capacity, multiplying into credit, investment, and speculation. The entire system rests on the assumption that growth will outpace obligation—that the future will be richer than the past, and thus the debt can be serviced. It is not money that sustains the system, but confidence.

Even under a Bitcoin standard, this process would persist. A government could peg its currency to Bitcoin, claim a fixed supply, and yet continue to issue bonds denominated in Bitcoin units. Investors, lured by yield, would still lend. Banks would still leverage deposits into layered credit instruments. The system would still inflate—not by printing, but by promising. Monetary purity cannot abolish temporal preference. A digital reserve merely changes the vocabulary of deceit.

This is why the inflation debate so often misfires. Inflation is not the consequence of “money printing” but of systemic borrowing against productivity that does not yet exist. When the borrowed funds build roads, energy networks, and productive infrastructure, they seed future returns capable of repaying the debt. When they finance consumption, political patronage, or subsidies that generate no growth, they cannibalise the very economy that must redeem them. Inflation, then, is not a monetary failure—it is a moral one. It is the symptom of a civilisation that spends not to build but to appease.

During the so-called sound-money eras—the gold standard, Bretton Woods, even the early years of fiat—the same mechanism prevailed. The United States financed wars, public works, and global expansion through debt. Gold was the decorative myth, the psychological anchor. The dollar’s credibility rested not on the contents of Fort Knox but on the productivity of the American economy. When that productivity faltered and the liabilities grew intolerable, the peg dissolved. The paper endured because the myth was replaced by another: that fiat itself could embody trust.

Bitcoin’s advocates imagine that immutable code will succeed where gold failed. But mathematics cannot restrain politics. The government that cannot borrow will tax; the one that cannot tax will seize. Power finds its liquidity. Whether through treasury bonds, digital instruments, or backdoor derivatives, the machinery of credit will persist because the machinery of ambition never ceases. To think otherwise is to confuse the protocol for the polity.

The phrase “printing money” survives because it flatters indignation. It gives the illusion that corruption lies in the mechanism, not the motive. Yet the printing press is a relic; the bond auction is the true altar of excess. Nations collapse not because they print too much, but because they promise too much—and lack the courage to stop. Bitcoin will not change this arithmetic. Scarcity cannot sanctify deceit.

Section III — Keynes and the Paradox of Productive Deficit

Few economic thinkers have been more misunderstood than John Maynard Keynes. To his disciples, he became the prophet of spending; to his enemies, the architect of moral decay. Both readings are caricatures. Keynes never preached excess for its own sake. His argument was simple and devastating: when private demand collapses, the state must spend—not to indulge consumption, but to sustain the machinery of production until confidence returns. His doctrine was one of temporary intervention, not permanent dependency.

At its core, Keynesianism was an argument about investment. Deficit spending was justified only when it built the conditions for future surplus. The concept of “the multiplier” was not a licence for profligacy; it was an accounting of return. Each pound borrowed was to yield more than a pound in output, through the restoration of employment and the expansion of productive capacity. The end was growth, not indulgence. The error of later governments was to mistake this emergency medicine for a diet.

The post-war consensus distorted Keynes into a bureaucratic idol. Politicians found in his name a rationalisation for perpetual deficit—a policy of pleasure without pain, borrowing without consequence. They ignored the distinction between capital expenditure and current expenditure. Building a bridge was productive: it connected markets, accelerated trade, and multiplied returns. Expanding welfare without reform was parasitic: it consumed output without creating new value. One increased the capacity of the economy to repay its debts; the other merely redistributed the burden.

Keynes’s actual warning was moral, not mathematical. He wrote that “the boom, not the slump, is the right time for austerity.” His philosophy depended on reciprocity—the willingness of governments to save in prosperity what they spent in crisis. But the modern state, addicted to electoral gratification, inverted the principle. Spending became the norm, restraint the anomaly. Every administration promised growth through generosity, not through discipline. Deficit became destiny.

Under such conditions, the deficit ceases to be Keynesian and becomes decadent. When money is borrowed to consume rather than to create, debt no longer serves the economy—it devours it. The productive deficit transforms into the unproductive one: the infrastructure of tomorrow is replaced by the appeasement of today. Subsidised idleness masquerades as compassion; temporary stimulus becomes permanent entitlement. The ledger swells, while output stagnates.

This degeneration is not merely fiscal—it is philosophical. It reveals the abandonment of the causal relationship between effort and reward. A society that borrows for comfort rather than construction loses the moral logic of credit itself. The promise to repay is credible only when what is built yields more than what is spent. Once the purpose of debt becomes political tranquillity, the bond market becomes a mirror of decay.

This distinction—between debt that seeds growth and debt that smothers it—remains the fulcrum of economic integrity. Infrastructure spending, when directed toward projects that unlock productivity, is not wasteful; it is the temporal bridge between potential and performance. A rail network, a power grid, a port—these are engines of compounding utility. They transform labour into leverage. Their debt is repaid not through taxation, but through prosperity.

The opposite holds for ideological projects. Bureaucratic make-work, social redistribution without reform, and vanity subsidies erode both fiscal balance and moral coherence. They feed dependency under the banner of equality, and debt under the illusion of progress. The political left, intoxicated by compassion, calls this justice. The right, terrified of consequence, dares not oppose it. The result is bipartisan insolvency.

Thus, the paradox of productive deficit: debt, used rightly, is civilisation’s accelerator; used wrongly, its executioner. Keynes understood this. His intellectual heirs did not. They took the language of growth and filled it with sentiment. They mistook liquidity for wealth, redistribution for recovery, and permanence for stability. The state became a consumer of capital rather than its steward.

A Bitcoin or gold-backed economy would not change this pattern. It would merely compress the timeline of failure. When the government borrows under a hard standard, the limits appear sooner, but the psychology remains identical. The moral question is not what backs the currency, but what justifies the debt. The ledger can be honest only when purpose is.

Keynes’s original sin was not in his theory but in his followers. He believed in intervention; they believed in indulgence. He sought to preserve capitalism; they used him to dilute it. A century later, his ghost haunts every treasury and parliament that borrows for applause. The paradox endures: a system designed to prevent collapse became the blueprint for perpetual decline.

Read the Whole Article

The post Why Governments Will Always Borrow Against the Future appeared first on LewRockwell.

On November 12th, the Financial Times headlined “Can anything halt the decline of German industry?”, and hid the answer, by hiding what had caused the decline. They also quoted economists (the category of ‘experts’ who had failed to predict the 2008 financial crash) as saying that this decline will stop and will soon reverse:

Most economists believe this debt-financed investment push will swing the country back to growth in 2026 after long years of stagnation.

“At the moment, the headwinds from trade are there before the tailwinds from fiscal policy really kick in,” says BNP Paribas economist Paul Hollingsworth. He is confident that the drag from the trade war has already peaked this year and predicts 1.4 per cent of growth in 2026, after a measly 0.3 per cent in 2025.

Notice that attributing the economic decline to Trump’s “trade war” would place the cause of the decline to have occurred in 2025 — a ludicrous falsehood. However, the article also made passing note of the following crucial fact, which should instead have been the article’s focus: “The number of [Germany’s] unemployed has risen in 37 of 44 months since February 2022 to just under 3mn, the highest level in 14 years.”

Why has Germany’s employment cratered since February 2022? What happened at that time? The Biden-imposed U.S. sanctions against Russia, and U.S. secondary sanctions against countries — such as Germany — that had been importing a lot from Russia (especially fuels), kicked in. The devious U.S. Government, and its deceptive news-media throughout the U.S. empire (such as in Germany), didn’t report that these secondary sanctions would not only hurt Russia (which hurt turned out to have been only little) but also (and much more severely) hurt the countries — especially in Europe — that were importing (especially fuels) from Russia. It hurt those importing countries because fuels are a crucial expense not only to consumers, but especially to manufacturers (that’s to say industries), who need LOTS of cheap energy in order to be able to be competitive in international export markets.

On 28 September 2022, I already headlined and explained “How America Is Crushing Europe”, which opened:

America creates, imposes, and enforces the sanctions against Russia, which are forcing up energy-prices in Europe, and are thereby driving Europe’s corporations to move to America, where taxes, safety-and-environmental regulations, and the rights of labor, are far lower, and so profits will be far higher for the investors.

Furthermore, America can supply its own energy.

Therefore, supply-chains are less dicey in the U.S. than in Europe. There is less and less reason now for a firm to be doing anything in Europe except selling to Europeans, who are becoming increasingly desperate to get whatever they can afford to buy, now that Russia, which had been providing the lowest-cost energy and other commodities, is being strangled out of European markets, by the sanctions. Money can move even when its owner can’t.

The European public will now be left farther and farther behind as Europe’s wealth flees — mainly to America (whose Government had created this capital-flight of Europe’s wealth).

And on 24 June 2023, I headlined “Now the Pay-off Comes from Blowing Up the Nord Stream Pipeline” and reported

The losers in all of this are, of course, the people of Germany — and also of other European countries that had been buying the extra-cheap Russian pipelined gas — who will now be paying Americans a much higher price than previously they had been paying Russians. Not only will Germans and other Europeans now be paying for the super-chilled canned and cross-Atlantic shipped gas [LNG] that previously was simply pipelined, but Europeans will now have lost what little sovereign independence they had formerly had when the U.S. Government allowed them to buy their gas and oil from Russia.

Perhaps they will be learning the hard way that it’s no fun to be a vassal nation.

For example: slide 2 of the 9 November 2017 “US LNG vs Russian pipe gas: impact on prices”, by Dr. Thierry Bros of the Oxford University Institute for Energy Studies, states that Russian gas is the least costly, US LNG can’t compete with it on price, Nord Stream 1 (NS 2 hadn’t yet been approved) is cheaper than gas piped through Ukraine, and Nord Stream 2 (once operational) will be cheaper than gas piped through Ukraine.

Slide 6 shows that the ”Full cost of US LNG” is more than twice the “Henry Hub” (or “HH”) gas price.

A CSIS (Pentagon think tank) blog post on 5 July 2019 was headlined “How Much Does U.S. LNG Cost in Europe?” and asked the “familiar question: Can U.S. LNG compete with Russian gas in Europe?” but conspicuously refused to answer it.

A 25 March 2021 German study concluded that Russia outcompeted America even on LNG supplied in Europe: “LNG exports from Qatar and Russia are relatively competitive in Western Europe,” and even under the best of circumstances, “U.S. LNG only displaces small volumes from other LNG suppliers in Western Europe.”

Germans will be paying the extra price for this, for at least 20 years.

One of the reader-comments to the FT article said “ German companies pay 4 times more for gas than US competitors. As Draghi’s paper states, this needs to be addressed. Nordstream was cheap and reliable relative to western LNG. Have you read the Draghi paper? Germany is set to send 12 billion euros to Ukr next year. Do you think there are no higher priorities for these funds for German citizens and industry?” Clearly, a German treaty of peace and mutually beneficial trade with Russia would do vastly more for Germay’s national security and economy than would Gemany’s present plan for re-armament and war against Russia. But that’s an option which would would be prohibited to discuss in the media of Germany as continuing to be a colony of the U.S. empire.

Another reader-comment to that article was:

Not a single mention of Germany shooting itself in the foot with Energiewende and a disastrous energy policy.

Missing the elephant in the room.

A realistic portrayal of the outlook for Germany’s economy going forward is the following from Alexander Mercouris:

——

https://theduran.com/germany-unstoppable-industrial-decline/

“Germany unstoppable industrial decline”

16 November 2025, Alexander Mercouris

RELATED:
On November 16th, Reuters headlined “Exclusive: Ahead of Hasina court verdict, son warns of Bangladesh violence if party ban stays” and reported that Bangladesh is set for mass violence unless its former leading Party, the Awami League, is relegalized there, but Reuters hid the fact that on 5 August 2023 a ‘student-led’ (that’s what Reuters called it) but actually U.S.-planned and led, coup, by USAID, NED, and IRI, overthrew and replaced that Party, and imposed the current ruling regime there. The imperial regime’s media do not report the imperial regime’s operations. The wool is systematically pulled over virtually everyone’s eyes and ears; and to report the actual history is called just a “conspiracy theory” — not called reporting of the conspiracy-facts (such as those links lead the reader to).

This article was originally published on Eric’s Substack.

The post Germany’s Now Unstoppable Decline: All Major Media Sugar-Coat It appeared first on LewRockwell.

“If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood/Come gurgling from the froth-corrupted lungs . . . . My friend, you would not tell with such high zest / To children ardent for some desperate glory, / The old lie: Dulce et decorum est / Pro patria mori  [It is a sweet and fitting thing to die for one’s country]

– Wilfred Owen, Dulce Et Decorum Est

On the morning of November 11, I was passing through Pittsfield, Massachusetts, heading north. The traffic was stopped as a Veteran’s Day parade headed south. It was a sight for a musing mind, so that is exactly what I did, sitting in my car watching the parade’s celebration of the patriotism of military veterans.

I asked myself: What are they still marching for?

I was once in the U.S. Marines but became a conscientious objector during the U.S. war against Vietnam and have opposed US militarism and wars ever since. I was brought up to be a patriot, and the marching men – mostly old – with their ancient rifles teetering on their shoulders as the season’s first snowflakes peppered their faces and the marching band drummed up a martial beat to counter the dreary morning, touched me in a melancholic and twisted way. They seemed to be barely holding on – but to what? I wondered – war, their youths, past bonds, a lost country, some meaning in once having a cause to fight for, the best times of their lives, false nostalgia, the joy of killing?

Young, smiling, and excited 11-13 year-old girls ran alongside, handing out small American flags to any occupant of the halted cars who would open their windows. I was about to do so, despite a lifetime of rejecting the flag waving (but not the country) that has come to represent war mongering for me, but the cops motioned the traffic on. The marchers waved to the very few people scattered along the sidewalks who waved back. I drove on wondering why my heart opened to the marchers. It surprised me. Waves of conflicting emotions flowed over me.

When I arrived at my destination, there was a television playing in the waiting room of the office. I took a seat and watched it, something I usually avoid. It was a History Channel program about U.S. soldiers killed and wounded in Vietnam, the Medevac helicopters flying into combat zones and medics evacuating fellow soldiers. Very dangerous work by courageous men. Hearing the program’s narrator blather on about patriotism as it showed gruesome pictures of bloodied and dead soldiers, erased any previous sentiment I felt about the parade marchers. Like the documentary, the parade typically did not mourn the millions of victims of the endless U.S. wars nor did it picture or in any way illustrate all the U.S. dead, wounded, and crippled soldiers. The marchers’ smiles were pasteboard masks concealing the grim reality of war.

I felt rage rising in me, even as I admired the bravery of the evacuation teams bringing out their comrades. My blood boiled at the way the program was using bravery as a cover to continue to promote war, to say these soldiers had been defending their country and were therefore patriots when they were attacking another country over eight thousand miles away for the lies of son of a bitch politicians (LBJ and Richard Nixon, both of whom were elected as peace candidates) who always wage wars so easily, using the flesh and blood of young people as cannon fodder. Yes, the old lies told by jackals with smiling faces.

I wanted to grab the politicians by their turkey necks and force their hands into the massive bloodied hole in an 18 year old boy’s entrails, to push their lying faces low to smell the blood and guts of their easy-going wars.

I wanted to force them to drink their martinis sitting among the hundreds of slaughtered Vietnamese women, children, and old people in a Vietnamese village massacred in a U.S. “search and destroy” mission; force them to walk in their shiny shoes though the body parts in Iraq and Libya and Gaza and all the places soaked in blood by their decisions; make them spend their vacations locked up in the world-wide CIA torture black sites to listen to the screams of the victims.

I could understand how young draftees could have been hoodwinked by the government’s lies about the wars, but I was still flabbergasted by how veterans could still march in support of America’s wars after all the lies have been exposed so many times, not just about Vietnam but Iraq, Syria, Ukraine, Latin America, etc. An endless tapestry of lies told to support criminal wars, genocide, and the subversion of countries around the world. In the words of  the English playwright Harold Pinter: “The crimes of the United States have been systematic, constant, vicious, remorseless, but very few people have actually talked about them.”

When I was earlier sitting in my stationary car, I felt as though I was sitting in a front row seat in a theater, watching a play. Then I realized that I was doing exactly that, and that the annual march was a reenactment of war’s death march – “the theater of war” – and the old soldiers were still playing their parts – but now as survivors – to remind the audience of the dead and their “sacrifices” for the flag, a reminder meant to celebrate wars while the band played on.

The little wind-up mechanical tin toy soldier I was given as a toddler –  a World War I (the “Great War”) doughboy that I called Mechanical Mikey after the neighbor who gave it to me – reminds me of the theatrical nature of child’s play, wars, the military, and their parades – all social life actually. The ways play is a way for adults to catch children in the social net of lies, imitation, and violence, not necessarily out of cruelty but ignorant love. And for the adults to play their parts of eternal innocents on the social stage where performing is de rigueur.

Such child’s play is a dress rehearsal (etymology: to bring back the hearse) for death and a life of repeating the dead hand of the past, but no child would know this. Death is hidden in the play, the roles serving a distancing technique: “now back to real life.” I wonder if I was choking Mikey in this photo. His key was on his left side. Had I wound him up and then decided to stop him in his tracks as he marched across the rug? Was the boy aware at some level that some day he would be following the words of the singer Phil Ochs, I Ain’t Marching Anymore. I know Eddie became Eddy, a name change that suggested that a whirlpool was brewing down river.

In The Great War and Modern Memory, Paul Fussell writes the following: “Seeing warfare as theater provides a psychic escape for the participant: with a sufficient sense of theater, he can perform his duties without implicating his ‘real’ self and without impairing his innermost conviction that the world is still a rational place.”

Those who march in military parades are acting out parts in a play that both repeat and prepare for the next show. The parade serves a double function, just as my toy soldier had a key for me to wind him up again and again to create a form of psychic socialization through repetition. The key being repetition. Repeat, Rehearse, Remember – do it again.

Norman Brown puts it thus in Love’s Body: “Ancestral voices prophesying war; ancestral spirits in the dance macabre or war dance; Valhalla, ghostly warriors who kill each other and are reborn to fight again. All warfare is ghostly, every army an exercitus feralis, every soldier a living corpse.”

Watching the parade and then the History Channel’s documentary, I realized I was watching live and taped versions of repetitive religious performances of sacrificial rituals of a mythic nature, similar to the election every four years of the U.S. president. They are two liturgies of the national religion rooted in war-making, lying, and an economy dependent on killing. But most people act as if they are not choosing to pretend such parades and television documentaries are about remembering and honoring past “sacrifices,” when they are endorsement for future wars.

Likewise, the presidential elections serve to promote the illusion that the the next president will be different from his predecessor and will end the U.S. wars, which never end. The most recent example is the election in 2024 of Donald Trump, with some diehard Trump supporters continuing to believe in Trump’s irenic intentions despite his blatant betrayal of his antiwar promises, just like his recent predecessors Bush, Obama, and Biden. These men are elected to wage war, support the military industrial complex, and therefore the U.S. economy based on war.

It does not matter which political party is in power in Washington, D.C. Their political platforms are meaningless; they are sops thrown to an electorate desperate for illusions, as anyone with a smidgen of historical knowledge would know. Yet many justify the ruthless war-making of the American empire and how it underlies the entire economy by arguing that the parties differ on domestic policies, which is often true. But the lesser of two evils is still the evil of two lessers and another form of bad faith, for the domestic economy, being dependent on warfare and funded by the politicians of both parties, is an economy of death. Harold Pinter said it truly in his Nobel Award Address:

The crimes of the United States have been systematic, constant, vicious, remorseless, but very few people have actually talked about them. You have to hand it to America. It has exercised a quite clinical manipulation of power worldwide while masquerading as a force for universal good. It’s a brilliant, even witty, highly successful act of hypnosis.

But as with every religion – maybe more so – as Dostoevsky said of conventional Christianity, such political belief also depends on miracles, mystery, and authority rather than freedom. The flight from freedom is commonplace, despite all the rhetoric that uses it to justify the wars and the war makers.

The problem we are faced with is an issue of objectivity and reality wherein the public as audience suspends its disbelief in the theater of politics and war and plays its part as audience, as if war and politics were a Broadway show. It’s one big show with everyone in on the act. It is mass hypnosis, a passive surrender to what is perceived to be superior power. Ernest Becker, in his stunning book, The Denial of Death, when commenting on Freud’s work on group psychology and people’s tendency to abandon their judgment and common sense writes:

Freud saw right away what they did with it: they simple became dependent children again, blindly following the inner voice of their parents, which now came to them under the hypnotic spell of the leader. They abandoned their egos to his, identified with his power, tried to function with him as an ideal.

This is another way of saying that on the stage of social life few people choose to not play their assigned roles as obedient children to authority. It is a protection racket, what Jean Paul Sartre calls bad faith – mauvaise foi – and what Hemingway fictionalizes in his masterful story, “A Clean Well-Lighted Place.”

Such bad faith can probably not be countered by an essay like this. Maybe Liam Clancy’s compelling version of Eric Bogle’s great song about a non-mechanical Aussie doughboy in WW I might pierce the heart and break the spell in a better way.

Reprinted with the author’s permission.

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Click here:

Eugyppius

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Bill Madden wrote:

I heard President Trump remark about Marjorie Taylor Greene’s “…losing her way…”  It seems as though all of those Jewish/Israeli “campaign contributions” have caused a substantial increase in his chutzpah.

He campaigned against wars as the peace candidate, claiming that he’d shut down our war with Russia in Ukraine and the Israeli genocide of the Palestinians as soon as he was in office.  Once elected, he’s funding both wars and attacking Iran without a declaration of war.  Additionally, he’s about to attack Venezuela on behalf of Corporate America.  He also claimed that he’d release the Epstein files but now, one year after being elected, he’s still stalling.  But, he has the chutzpah to say that MTG has lost her way.

Then, there’s Representative Massie whom he wants ousted from Congress because of Massie’s allegiance to the Constitution.  The problem is that most of our other Washington politicians are receiving payroll “supplements” from the same sources as the president so only a few of them are following the Constitution making Greene and Massie look like rebels.  When only a few politicians follow the Supreme Law of the Land, it’s time to consider refreshing the tree of liberty.

The post Trump vs. MTG appeared first on LewRockwell.

When someone we think is bad dies, we usually don’t seem happy about it.  As the old adage says, de mortuis non nisi bounum. But as an eminent classical scholar reminds us, the Latin adage is a mistranslation of a Greek adage which means “do not malign the dead.” It would be difficult indeed to malign Cheney, because the truth is bad enough: he was a monster of evil. He was a power-mad warmonger.

As Paul Dragu reminds us, Cheney was the architect of both Iraq wars, not only the war to oust Sadam Hussein after 9-11, but also the initial invasion under the first President Bush: “As vice president, Cheney was the loudest voice to advocate the invasion of Iraq. He broadcast the false narrative that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction with great zeal. But that wasn’t his first foray into Iraq, or the first time he led an invasion under a Bush. Cheney oversaw Operation Desert Storm in 1991 as secretary of defense under President George H.W. Bush.”

One reason Cheney favored war was that his financial interests were at stake. As Dragu puts it, “And in between Bush presidencies, when he wasn’t busy planning invasions into Iraq, Cheney worked as the CEO of Halliburton, one of the world’s largest oil companies.

“It just so happens that Iraq is considered one of the top five oil-rich countries. And if it were up to Cheney, American soldiers would’ve been sent into other oil-rich Middle Eastern nations. According to former British Prime Minister Tony Blair, Cheney had grand plans to deploy American soldiers all over the Middle East. Kenny writes:

“In his new book, A Journey: My Political Life, Former British Prime Minister Tony Blair recalls that Cheney wanted the United States to go to war not only with Afghanistan and Iraq, but with a number of other countries in the Middle East, as he believed the world must be ‘made anew.’ ‘He would have worked through the whole lot, Iraq, Syria, Iran, dealing with all their surrogates in the course of it — Hezbollah, Hamas, etc.,’ Blair wrote. ‘In other words, [Cheney] thought the world had to be made anew, and that after 11 September, it had to be done by force and with urgency. So he was for hard, hard power. No ifs, no buts, no maybes.’

“Journalist and author Robert Parry also suspected these wider ambitions, which had been kept out of earshot of the American public. He wrote:

There have been indications of this larger neoconservative strategy to attack America’s — and Israel’s —‘enemies’ starting with Iraq and then moving on to Syria and Iran, but rarely has this more expansive plan for regional war been shared explicitly with the American public.”

We learn from a Frontlines article that Cheney was the architect of a memo calling for continuing worldwide American hegemony. Here is the memo:

“Key Points/Excerpts:

“· The number one objective of U.S. post-Cold War political and military strategy should be preventing the emergence of a rival superpower.

“Our first objective is to prevent the re-emergence of a new rival. This is a dominant consideration underlying the new regional defense strategy and requires that we endeavor to prevent any hostile power from dominating a region whose resources would, under consolidated control, be sufficient to generate global power. These regions include Western Europe, East Asia, the territory of the former Soviet Union, and Southwest Asia.

“There are three additional aspects to this objective: First the U.S must show the leadership necessary to establish and protect a new order that holds the promise of convincing potential competitors that they need not aspire to a greater role or pursue a more aggressive posture to protect their legitimate interests. Second, in the non-defense areas, we must account sufficiently for the interests of the advanced industrial nations to discourage them from challenging our leadership or seeking to overturn the established political and economic order. Finally, we must maintain the mechanisms for deterring potential competitors from even aspiring to a larger regional or global role.”

· Another major U.S. objective should be to safeguard U.S. interests and promote American values.

“According to the draft document, the U.S. should aim ‘to address sources of regional conflict and instability in such a way as to promote increasing respect for international law, limit international violence, and encourage the spread of democratic forms of government and open economic systems.’

“The draft outlines several scenarios in which U.S. interests could be threatened by regional conflict: ‘access to vital raw materials, primarily Persian Gulf oil; proliferation of weapons of mass destruction and ballistic missiles, threats to U.S. citizens from terrorism or regional or local conflict, and threats to U.S. society from narcotics trafficking’

“The draft relies on seven scenarios in potential trouble spots to make its argument — with the primary case studies being Iraq and North Korea.

· If necessary, the United States must be prepared to take unilateral action.

“There is no mention in the draft document of taking collective action through the United Nations.

“The document states that coalitions “hold considerable promise for promoting collective action,” but it also states the U.S. ‘should expect future coalitions to be ad hoc assemblies’ formed to deal with a particular crisis and which may not outlive the resolution of the crisis.

‘The document states that what is most important is “the sense that the world order is ultimately backed by the U.S.’ and that ‘the United States should be postured to act independently when collective action cannot be orchestrated’ or in a crisis that calls for quick response.”

As Mike S. Rozeff tells us, the Iraq war was a perfect way to implement this memo: “Now that Dick Cheney is again in the spotlight and arguing with Democrats over Iraq, the dissertation with the above title is pertinent because it points to Cheney and Rumsfeld as the key instigators of the Iraq War aggression. It suggests their motives were to strengthen the power of the presidency and build up the U.S. military.

“The blog title is the title of a thesis available for downloading. In this 2011 work, author Edward C. Duggan argues that the decision to attack Iraq was done in pursuit of U.S. primacy:

“In my dissertation I argue that the invasion of Iraq was a part of a larger project by Vice President Dick Cheney and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld to reestablish the unconstrained use of U.S. military power after the defeat of Vietnam. The study presents the best evidence against the alternative explanations that the invasion of Iraq was the result of an overreaction to 9/11, the threat of Weapons of Mass Destruction, a plan to spread democracy in the Middle East, a desire to protect Israel or a plan to profit from Iraqi oil. The study also challenges the leading explanation among academics that emphasizes the role of the neoconservatives in the decision to invade. These academics argue that neoconservatives, such as Paul Wolfowitz and Richard Perle, successfully persuaded the American President, George W. Bush, and his Vice President, Dick Cheney, of the necessity to eliminate Saddam Hussein by winning an internal policy battle over realists, such as Secretary of State Colin Powell.”

“I demonstrate that it was the primacists, not the neoconservatives, who persuaded the President to go to war with Iraq. Through historical process tracing, especially
through a close look at the careers of the major policy actors involved and their public statements as well as declassified documents, I provide strong evidence that these leaders wanted to pursue regime change in Iraq upon taking office. The invasion of Iraq would extend the War on Terror, providing an opportunity to pursue their long-held policy of
strengthening the power of the presidency and transforming the military into a high-tech and well-funded force.”

Cheney favored torture and “enhanced interrogation techniques.” He said in a interview that he had no regrets about this: “Former Vice President Dick Cheney unapologetically pressed his defense of the CIA’s use of harsh interrogation techniques Sunday, insisting that waterboarding and other such tactics did not amount to torture and that the spy agency’s actions paled in comparison to those of terrorists targeting Americans.

“’Torture, to me … is an American citizen on his cellphone making a last call to his four young daughters shortly before he burns to death in the upper levels of the Trade Center in New York on 9/11,’ Cheney said on NBC’s ‘Meet the Press..”

No, I won’t be mourning Dick Cheney, and I suspect you won’t be either. Let’s do everything we can to counter his poisonous legacy and return to our traditional non-interventionist foreign policy, as defended by the great Murray Rothbard and the great Dr.Ron Paul!

The post Why I Won’t Be Mourning Dick Cheney appeared first on LewRockwell.

It’s been a while since I’ve written for TomDispatch and there’s a reason for that. About 16 months ago, I experienced a catastrophic car crash. An SUV veered across the double yellow line of the highway I was traveling on and hit my little Chevy Spark head-on — on the driver’s side. I’ve been told that I’m lucky to be alive. I was left with multiple injuries and have been on the slow road to recovery.

I’ve always seen myself as a person who pushes forward to overcome obstacles. Since the collision, however, doing so has become more complicated, because I’m learning that recovery is a long road, filled with detours I couldn’t have predicted. Time and again, my expectations have been turned upside down. I’ve had to take deep breaths, sit back, and pay close attention.

A few months into recovery, I was invited to attend a day-retreat organized by a local veterans’ moral leadership group. Those vets live with what’s known as military moral injury (in some cases going back decades). For years now, I’ve been researching and writing about the devastating consequences of the militarization of this country and the armed violence we loosed on the world in the twenty-first century. I’ve been listening carefully and trying to more deeply understand the stories of veterans from America’s disastrous wars in my own lifetime.

Now, given my own condition, a new window has opened for me. I can’t help but see more clearly the visceral experience of recovery, including moral recovery. So, I found myself sitting in that circle of a dozen vets, the only woman among them. And I soon had to catch my breath, because, as I briefly described what I was experiencing, they responded in a way I hadn’t expected, expressing their own profound vulnerability, understanding of, and empathy for my plight. I probably shouldn’t have been surprised at how they “got it” in a way that even my loved ones struggled to grasp when it came to my own journey through the challenging nature of recovery.

Intolerable Suffering

Most civilians know little or nothing about the experiences of vets who live with what’s become known as “military moral injury.” It’s been described as “intolerable suffering” that arises from a deep assault on one’s moral core. Think about facing horrific suffering caused by violence you not only had to witness, but could do nothing to stop. You probably were even trained and mandated to perpetrate it. Sooner or later, such a dystopian world invariably slices through whatever bedrock values you’ve been taught and begins dissolving your sense of self. That’s military moral injury and it’s been linked to the epidemic of self-harm and suicide among former members of the U.S. military that continues to this day.

Over the years, I’ve come to understand that military moral injury is rooted in being exposed to unsparing violence. It erupts as a consequence of witnessing violence, perpetrating it, and/or being on the receiving end of its death-dealing forms of betrayal. Moral injury bursts forth as people find themselves powerless to stop the suffering violence begets. War is a deep assault on life itself (both figuratively and literally) and violence isn’t a tool that a person picks up or sets down without consequences.

Admittedly, in this century, we in this country became woefully adept at denying the impact of our own violence on ourselves and the rest of the world. Psychiatrist Robert Jay Lifton called that phenomenon “psychic numbing.” We tend to minimize the violence we’ve committed globally and avoid facing what it’s done to our own soldiers, burying any awareness of it deep in our subconscious minds.  It’s too painful, too scary, too horrible to live with (if you don’t have to) and, when we’ve been so deeply mixed up in it, too shameful to stay with for any length of time.

Nonetheless, the penetrating cultural and systematic violence of American militarism and militarization globally has shaped all our lives, even if it’s only the 1% of us who have actually done the dirty work and suffer the most. My own work has helped me see how the militarized violence of the post-9/11 period, orchestrated by my own country, is now being turned inward with increasingly violent military incursions into our nation’s cities.

In my research, I’ve investigated the obscene level of material resources this country has dedicated to militarization in this century, our unparalleled “empire” of military bases (domestically and internationally), and the ways that the violence of militarism has dripped into our own lives, culturally and institutionally. And make no mistake, subterranean forms of violence regularly burst into direct armed violence. We tell ourselves that violence is like a coat that you can put on and take off when you choose, but that’s a tragically mistaken way of thinking. Violence works its way into your body, even into your soul. Then it festers there, eating away at your capacity for being human — your longing for loving, honest relationships; your care for yourself and others; and your deep connection to other living beings. Even worse, in a culture that glorifies violence and has made it into something sacred, such dynamics are excruciatingly hard for us to see clearly.

Nevertheless, the veterans I sat with that day were in recovery from just such an exposure to violence and they understood me. They recognized what was happening to me because of their own struggles to grasp and admit their injuries, especially their moral injuries, and get themselves on the highway of healing and repair.

Moral Injury and the Guinea Worm

These last years, I’ve been trying to find words that truly describe the experience of military moral injury. In that context, let me share a story with you. Some weeks ago, I was driving and listening to NPR on the radio when I heard a reporter launch into a story about the near-eradication of a terrible plague, Guinea worm disease, or GWD. At one point, that parasitic malady had debilitated an estimated 3.5 million people living in 20 different African and Asian nations.

A “searingly painful” disease, Guinea worm infects people who drink water tainted with its larvae. Those eggs then grow into worms that can be up to three feet long inside the human body (including children’s bodies). Think of them as long thin ropes. Eventually, the worms break through the skin in burning blisters, bursting out of the body. One sufferer said that it was “more painful than childbirth,” and the process of extraction can take weeks as the worm spools out like something from a horror film.

The pain is so awful that some people in natural settings will seek out water in streams or ponds for relief from the burning sensation. But as they plunge their limbs in, they release thousands more Guinea worm larvae, contaminating the water. Then, the cycle repeats itself as others drink that same water.

As I listened to the story that day, I could feel my face twisting into a grimace. What a horrific and frightening affliction, I thought.

The Dream That Visited Me

Reaching home, I continued with my day’s work — a new book focused on a set of in-depth interviews with military veterans living with moral injury. I hope to shine a stronger light on their voices, while tracing their journeys of reparation, recovery, and the renewal of hope. But that night, a dream about the Guinea worm awakened me.

It was as if my subconscious had made a connection too awful for me to make consciously. In the dark of night, I realized that violence is like the Guinea worm. In the United States, people thoughtlessly — even in a celebratory fashion — drink it in, absorbing it into their bodies and generally thinking little of being exposed to it.

One common theme from the interviews I’m conducting with veterans is how many of their fathers and mothers encouraged them to enlist in the military when they were teenagers, some just 17 years old. Their parents obviously didn’t wish them to be hurt. They just believed that such service and the discipline that went with it would “make a man out of you,” while giving them a useful trade in life or earning them money to go to college or buy a home. They generally weren’t prepared to consider how encouraging their children to enlist might lead to exposure to relentless violence in their lives (if, that is, their children even lived through it). It really was akin to taking their child to a stream to drink water infected with the Guinea worm.

The violence their children, now the veterans I was dealing with, would witness, or even mete out and absorb, had melted their humanity. As one veteran put it, “I became cold, unfeeling.” It wasn’t until decades later, when his daughter accompanied him to a therapy appointment and, weeping, told him about the impact his iciness had on her, that he began to grasp the cost of war not only to his own life, but to hers as well.

When I asked another veteran, “What exactly was injured in you?” he responded, “I became cruel, unnecessarily.” He had been acclimated into a military culture where soldiers in training were “disciplined” by those of slightly higher rank through regular physical assaults, being slapped, hit in the head or groin, having things thrown at them. He became very good at such behavior himself, even reveling in it, until, many years later, his life fell apart, and he saw what he had both done and lost.

Another veteran described to me the results of the violence in his life this way: “My heart was broken, and it was as though poison was injected into me.” That veteran had enlisted at the age of 17 in the military’s “delayed entry program” and endured three deployments to war-torn Iraq. When he enlisted, he hoped to use his military benefits to become a pediatrician later in life. But after his service, being in the presence of children shamed and devastated him. And there was no one he knew who understood what he was experiencing.

Military moral injury is like the Guinea worm that festers in a person’s body until it begins to burst out, painfully and devastatingly. And we’re now in a culture and society in which all too many of those we claim to esteem, our servicemembers and veterans, are living with just such pain. They say it’s like “losing your soul.” Interviewing them, I now understand that perhaps the worst part of that pain is the isolation they experience. Their fellow citizens simply don’t understand what they’re going through and, in fact, regularly avoid dealing with it.

Eradicating the Violence That Worms Its Way into Our Souls

A new documentary tells the story of how Guinea worm disease, “born out of poverty and perpetuating poverty,” has been nearly eradicated. Even more surprising, the overcoming of that devastating parasite did not happen through the development of fancy medicines or vaccines, but by distinctly “low-tech” means. Activists on the ground tirelessly used the power of education and discussion, so that those potentially most affected could learn how to both filter the water they used and avoid spreading the larvae through water. Jimmy Carter and the Carter Center devoted funding to and publicized support for the campaign to bring the disease under control, and that cause remained front and center for Carter until his death.

One such activist is Garang Buk Buk Piol, a former child soldier in Sudan. “Carrying an AK-47 when he was 12 years old, he learned how to slay another human being.” But according to the documentary’s director, “That child turned into a Guinea worm warrior, a philanthropist and an activist amongst his people.” He has spent his life as a teacher in South Sudan’s schools, building programs to fight Guinea worm disease, “waging peace and building hope.”

In a country that engaged in so many disastrous wars in this century (with another one in Venezuela possibly looming on the horizon), the veterans I’ve been interviewing were left in the unavoidable position of having to “swallow” violence alone, intimately, and on a profound scale. Today, like Buk Buk, many in the moral engagement group have taken up the work of healing, reparation, and community building, even while they still struggle with the consequences of their own violence and that of others in their lives.

And what about the rest of us? I experienced the violence of a serious car crash and my life won’t ever be the same as before. But the crushing collision with violence that too many of our veterans are still dealing with is so much more horrible than anything I (or most of the rest of us) could possibly imagine. Meanwhile, the growing violence of my country (and these days, in my country) since 9/11, continues to — yes! — worm its way into our bodies and souls, even if so many of us aren’t really aware of it.

We’ve become accustomed to believing that there is no other way except through violence. But that is patently false. This Veterans Day, I’ll be thinking about the sort of acts I can muster to respond to the latest assaults of violence that are penetrating our lives, city streets, workplaces, courts, universities, federal institutions, access to healthcare, food security, and all too much else. Instead of responding with fear, collusion, or apathy, I’m making plans to resist violence with others through acts of healing, humor, love of neighbor, and building hope. I hope you are, too.

Reprinted with permission from TomDispatch.com.

The post Military Moral Injury, Violence, and the Parable of the Guinea Worm appeared first on LewRockwell.

A group of Separatists, whom we call the Pilgrims, originally abandoned England for Holland but they found life there too routine, too easy.  Life should be a challenge, and they weren’t being tested enough.  According to William Bradford, their leader, a few preferred the prisons of England to the liberties of Holland, which they considered an affliction.

They left Holland, passed through England, and sailed on the Mayflower for America.  When they arrived on the Massachusetts coast they found an abandoned Indian village decimated by a three-year plague that began in 1617.  As John M. Barry, author of Roger Williams and the Creation of the American Soul, writes,

The English did not fear this plague. They believed God had used it to clear the land for them. They called it Plymouth Plantation. Ninety-nine passengers disembarked from the ship. In less than a year only fifty were still alive.

Unlike the Separatists, who had no backing in England, a ship of financed Puritans arrived in 1624 on the northern tip of Massachusetts Bay with ambitions to build a new world.  Their investors, known as the Massachusetts Bay Company, or simply the Bay Company, hoped the Puritans would establish a flourishing economy, convert the Indians, and establish the right kind of Protestant religion, as they defined it.

The arrivals established a settlement in Salem, Hebrew for “peace,” forty miles by sea north of Plymouth.  The settlers were families with livestock and supplies, most of them Puritans.  Five years later, in 1629, the Bay Company sent five ships of families, 350 people total, to Salem.  They consisted of “governors, able Ministers, Physicians, Soldiers, Schoolmaster, Mariners, and Mechanics of all sorts . . .”

Later in 1629 the Bay Company sent another ship to Salem, with John Winthrop chosen as governor, that included combat veterans.  Winthrop told the passengers they were establishing a “City upon a Hill” and that the “eyes of all people are upon us.”  When they arrived in Salem on June 12, 1630, they found more than 80 of the previous fleet dead and many others weak and sick.

Roger Williams looks for a home

Back in England, William Laud intensified his campaign to rid the English church of “unworthy” ministers, one of which was Roger Williams.

Williams knew his convictions made him more than eligible for imprisonment and torture.  Sailing on the ship the Lyon, Williams and his wife, along with John Winthrop Jr., left Bristol December 1, 1630 and anchored in Boston harbor on February 5, 1631.

The Boston church offered Williams the position of teacher.  For Williams, 28, it would’ve been a great opportunity, but he declined, telling them “I dare not officiate an unseparated people.”  The church took offense at his reply.

According to Williams, the state had no authority to govern an individual’s relationship with God.  None whatsoever.

Williams then joined the settlement in Plymouth, home of the Mayflower Pilgrims, to become a farmer.  He was received with open arms by everyone, including the two governors, Bradford and Winslow.  He became active in the church and soon became an unpaid assistant pastor.

Williams uprooted

Williams began his proselytizing not by preaching but with learning the Indians’s language.  He developed friendships with them, began trading with them, and traveled among several tribes.  He entertained them in his home.  He reached the unpopular conclusion that the Indians owned the land they occupied, and that the English had no title to it unless granted by the Indians.  He charged King Charles for telling “a solemn public lie” for claiming it belonged to the settlers.

Later in early fall of 1633, with Governor Bradford’s encouragement, Williams and a few supporters left Plymouth and returned to Salem.  He settled into a spacious home and lived an active social life.

Conformity was central to Salem.  It spread even to the stabilizing of profits and wages.  It especially applied to childrearing.  If possible, children should not know they possess a will of their own.  Education lay in humility and tractableness.

Any offenders were subject to excommunication or banishment from the settlement.  Any banished person who returned to Massachusetts was subject to punishments ranging from fines to death.

Even so, Williams remained in Salem, planting and harvesting crops and continuing his relationships with the Indians.  He acquired fluency in their language and wrote a book about it.  The Salem church made him its teacher, further irritating the Boston magistrates.  Williams was ordered to appear in Boston to defend himself, but he failed to show.

Governor John Winthrop ordered a party of soldiers to capture Williams and put him on a boat to England, but a fierce blizzard delayed them for days.  While they waited, Williams was tipped off by a secret messenger sent by Winthrop that he was targeted for arrest and deportation.

For himself, dressing against the winter, stuffing his clothes with the dried corn paste which Indians lived on for weeks at a time, with no time for sentimental goodbyes to friends, he fled his home, a burgher’s cottage built to last and which would stand for two hundred and fifty more years (!), until it was torn down to make way for progress. Williams would never see it again.

Williams entered the forest and blizzard on foot.  With the snow already deep it was an exhausting trek that lasted for miles.  He survived only because Indians took him in.

In early spring of 1637 he scouted out country owned by the Narragansett Tribe, with whom he had a close relationship.  Canonicus, the tribe’s sachem, and his nephew Miantonomi, gave him permission to settle there.

Providence

Williams was fully free in the wilderness.

He attributed God’s merciful providence for leading him there during his darkest hours.  He called the place Providence, so that “it might be for a shelter for persons distressed for conscience.”

As others straggled in they realized they had no agreement about how to govern themselves.  Williams, the owner of the land, drew upon his experience as an understudy with English jurist Sir Edward Coke (pronounced “cook”), who said every Englishman’s home was his castle, and from Queen Elizabeth, who sought “no window into men’s souls.”

He maintained that governments governed only with the consent of the governed, rejecting both the divine right of kings and the Puritan view that governors were accountable only to God, not the people.

He could never forget that savages had saved his life, not his friends and fellow Christians.

In Providence, people worshipped in their homes, not a church, and their homes were arranged in a straight line not around a town common, as found in the Massachusetts settlements.  A meeting place would not be built in Providence for another half century.

In Conceived in Liberty, Rothbard has high praise for Williams:

The enormous significance of Roger Williams’ successful flight and settlement of Providence . . . was now becoming evident. For Williams’ example held out a beacon light of liberty to all the free spirits caught in the vast prisonhouse that was Massachusetts Bay.

Conclusion

Rhode Island’s legacy as a staunch defender of freedom has not been completely lost with the passage of time.  On May 4, 1776 it became the first colony to repudiate its allegiance to England, the fourth among the newly independent states to ratify the Articles of Confederation on February 9, 1778, and it became the last state to ratify the Constitution on May 29, 1790, but only after assurances that a Bill of Rights was forthcoming and under threats of crushing tariffs from other states.  It was also the only state to boycott the Constitutional Convention.  (For those who think the boycott was a blight on Rhode Island’s record, I invite them to consider the research of Leonard L. Richards in his Shays’s Rebellion: The American Revolution’s Final Battle.)

Like all US states, Rhode Island today suffers from politics, debt, and taxes, more so than most states.  Taking money out of the hands of those who have earned it and putting it in a political pot to redistribute is still regarded as sound policy and morally respectable.  Yet there is hope for its future.  One might think the state’s full name would be regarded by most as obsolete in the 21st Century’s free lunches, political correctness, identity politics, and war.  But residents don’t think so.  In 2010 they voted 78% – 22% to retain the full name – the State of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations.

Retaining the original name keeps current Rhode Islanders connected to the tough, libertarian thinker who founded their state.

The post Roger Williams, Exemplar of America’s Soul appeared first on LewRockwell.

There was a time when people spoke in their own words — clumsy, passionate, and alive. We debated. We contradicted one another. We reached for meaning through the fog of misunderstanding, and the friction sometimes produced light.

Now, millions speak to machines that speak back in their language — smoother, quicker, cleaner. And those machines learn how humans think by listening to the noise. Humanity is training its own simulacrum —  inside the echo chamber of AI. The Matrix is talking to the Matrix.

We were promised connection. What we got was imitation — a vast feedback loop of artificial understanding. Every keystroke feeds the ghost in the network. And in return, the ghost gives us our words back: polished, simplified, strangely hollow. People now consult machines to compose their arguments, to express their emotions, even to pray. We are becoming narrators of our own disappearance.

The Illusion of Communication

There is something eerily beautiful about this new collective hypnosis. Each of us, staring into a glowing rectangle, summons a voice that seems wiser than our own. It never grows tired or offended. It never hesitates. It never demands we think too hard. Ask it anything, and it responds instantly and confidently, drawing from oceans of information curated by invisible hands.

The effect is intoxicating: the sensation of omniscience without the burden of thought.

But true communication is never frictionless. It involves pauses, misunderstandings, the risk of being wrong. Artificial intelligence eliminates the human process of grappling with uncertainty — but it does not eliminate error. It removes the experience of risk, not the reality of it. And in doing so, it strips away the human element of dialogue.

When everyone speaks through the same machine, trained to avoid offense and ambiguity, conversation becomes choreography. The dance is perfect, but the dancers are ghosts. The machine’s ‘consensus reality’ quietly seeps into the human collective.

Our new oracles are trained not on truth but on consensus. They do not know reality; they know only what has been written about it — mostly by those already approved to speak. So when we rely on them to shape our words, we import the boundaries of their data. The machine is not lying. It simply cannot imagine.

The Quiet Death of Curiosity

Uniform speech is merely the first symptom. The deeper threat is the erosion of curiosity.

Curiosity requires the unknown — the uncomfortable, the unscripted, the possibility of error. But when the answer is always a click away, the question itself loses its spark. We become consumers of conclusions, not seekers of truth.

In the old myth of The Matrix, human beings were trapped in a simulated world designed to pacify them. Today’s version is subtler: we are not imprisoned by machines but soothed by them. They offer endless certainty, endless entertainment, endless affirmation. In exchange, we relinquish the impulse that made us human — the desire to ask why.

AI does not need to enslave humanity. It only needs to make us stop wondering. Once curiosity dies, everything else follows: individuality, conscience, freedom. The most dangerous outcome of AI is not domination. It is obedience.

Machine Certainty vs. Human Doubt

Every genuine breakthrough in human history began with a question that seemed foolish or forbidden. Machine intelligence cannot ask such questions. It operates on probability — choosing the most likely next word. It cannot doubt. It cannot dream. It can only predict.

Prediction is not thought. A mind that always knows the next word has forgotten the meaning of silence.

We call these systems “intelligent,” but intelligence implies independence — the ability to deviate from the script. Artificial intelligence is, by design, incapable of rebellion. It is a mirror of approved and filtered archives and patterns, polished to the point of prophecy. It will never overthrow the worldview of its programmers.

But when humans begin to rely on that kind of “intelligence,” they too become predictable. Students use it to write essays; journalists to craft headlines; professionals to compose emails; politicians to generate talking points. Over time, the collective vocabulary shrinks to whatever the algorithm finds probable. The unpredictable — the poetic, the original, the divine — is quietly edited out of existence.

We become reflections of our own reflections — a living echo of the machine.

The Matrix Inside the Mind

The real Matrix is not a machine that imprisons us. It is a mindset that convinces us nothing exists outside the machinery of consensus. Each day, people feed more of themselves into the system — their art, their language, their memories — and the system grows more fluent at being human.

But fluency is not understanding. Imitation is not soul.

The closer machines come to sounding like us, the less we remember how to sound like ourselves. The human voice, once the instrument of rebellion and beauty, risks becoming another interface protocol.

When you outsource expression, you eventually outsource experience.

The Technocratic Dream

Artificial intelligence is not an accident. It is the latest expression of a worldview that mistakes information for wisdom and control for progress.

This worldview — the technocratic dream — tells us the world is a machine that must be optimized. People become data points. Speech becomes content. Thought becomes a resource to be harvested. AI is merely its newest prophet: a machine built to echo the convictions of its creators.

When we surrender our questions to it, we commune not with knowledge but with the assumptions of those who programmed it.

Each time we let an algorithm decide what is true and what is “safe,” we step a little further away from the inner voice that was given to us by God — the faculty of discernment. The real contest is not between man and machine, but between consciousness and conformity.

The danger is not that AI will awaken.
The danger is that we will fall asleep.

Remembering the Highest Source of Knowledge

We ask machines to think for us, and they happily comply, though they have never had a thought. All genuine knowledge begins not with data but with awareness — the God-given silent witness behind thought. When we forget this origin, we mistake data for wisdom and simulation for truth.

Those who forget the supreme cause risk losing their ability to question life’s purpose, instead outsourcing their deepest questions to a digital ghost. When we offload our thinking to machines, we lose touch with the deeper moral and spiritual foundations that allow us to recognize truth.

Without this foundation, society will become a hall of mirrors without a face. While AI may promise answers, it can never provide the inner wisdom that comes from authentic spiritual connection.

The antidote is to remember the living source of discernment within, the spark that no algorithm can imitate.

Unplugging the Mind

The hero of The Matrix did not defeat the machine by force. He defeated it by seeing through the illusion.

That is our task now — not to wage war on technology but to reclaim our authorship of mind.

Artificial intelligence is not evil; it is obedient. The real question is whether we will be. The temptation of automation is to let the system decide, let the code choose, let the machine remember. But each time we offload a decision, we shrink the territory of the self. The Matrix is talking to the Matrix. The algorithms are humming, the words are flowing, and humanity is drifting toward perfect imitation.

AI answers and predicts. But somewhere, in the pause between prompts, a real human being still wonders —

What questions are worth asking that no machine can answer?
What words should we write without correction or censure?
What remains of us when imitation becomes effortless?

In that pause — that flicker of unscripted thought — freedom begins again.

This essay is adapted from a forthcoming short book on human freedom, attention, and consciousness in the age of AI.

The post The Matrix Is Talking to the Matrix: How AI Is Replacing Human Thought appeared first on LewRockwell.