Lew Rockwell Institute

There is a sentence that has long bothered me.  It is treated as a piece of universal wisdom that humans gain with experience, and surely every member of a modern, industrial society has heard it in some form.  Whether spoken by a close friend or complete stranger, its utterance usually comes with a sly grin that invites the listener to reconsider a fundamental belief.  Here it is: That’s not how the real world works.

That dirty, little sentence slithers into conversations meant to turn a person’s perception of reality upside down.  We hear it when we question why people who commit the same criminal offenses are often punished differently.  We hear it when we question why less qualified people are admitted to schools or offered jobs to other applicants’ detriment.  We hear it when we question why certain businesses always seem to get government contracts, even when they routinely overcharge and underperform.  We learn that laws, merit, moral character, and hard work exist alongside nepotism, prejudice, favoritism, corruption, and other invisible factors that magnify or hinder individual opportunity.

What’s particularly strange about this lesson is that most of us do not learn it firsthand until we have neared the end of our teenaged years.  For those who have been fortunate enough to grow up in good families with loving parents committed to moral principles, it can be jarring to step into the “real world” to discover a society awash with malign influences and untruths.

An eighteen-year-old who joins the military is inclined to believe that the government would never recklessly endanger servicemembers’ lives; military life, however, quickly teaches that reckless endangerment is a large part of the job.  A twenty-two-year-old who joins a company is inclined to believe that the best employees will earn promotions; work life, however, quickly teaches that professional advancement is not always fair.  A young person who has never held a job is inclined to believe that taxpayers should “pay their fair share”; a new hire who sees a third or more of his paycheck deducted for a litany of government programs has a much different perspective.

It takes most of us two decades to grasp that a great deal of what we have been told about life is different in the “real world.”  That’s an awful waste of adolescence, isn’t it?  Can you imagine an ancient tribe teaching its youngest members the wrong ways to track and hunt prey only to reveal much-needed survival skills after two decades of life?  Of course not.  Only in modern, industrial societies does it somehow make sense to disguise the “real world” from the youngest generation until its members stumble into adulthood.  Then we shake our heads in dismay and wonder why so many young adults are stumbling.

However, there is something far more nefarious about these abrupt “real world” lessons: they reveal that much of society is based on deception.  In the West, young people are taught that their societies embrace free markets, free speech, and democratic forms of government.  In the “real world,” central banks distort currency values and manipulate markets, while regulatory burdens make it difficult for regular people to own and operate independent businesses.  In the “real world,” governments censor speech that challenges official policy, and prominent public figures, such as Hillary Clinton, openly call for the imprisonment of citizens who express unapproved points of view.  In the “real world,” unelected bureaucrats and espionage agencies manage most domestic and foreign policies with scant interest in the opinions of the national populations they purportedly represent.  Young Westerners are taught that bigger and more oppressive forms of government will make them “free.”  Only later in life do some discover that State-controlled economies and institutional policing of speech achieve the exact opposite.

What would be so bad about teaching children how the real world works?  Shouldn’t they be told from an early age that governments are the greatest threats to their lives and liberties?

After all, government agents decide what they can and cannot do, what kinds of property they may and may not possess, and how much of their future earnings they must hand over to the State.  Government agents decide whether they are “extremists” who should be kept under surveillance, whether their private communications will be intercepted, and whether their doors will be kicked down in the middle of the night.  Government agents decide which religious practices, civil rights, and forms of speech will be safeguarded and which will be criminalized.  Government agents decide which groups of people will be protected and which groups will be prosecuted.  Government agents decide when borders will be kept secure.  Government agents decide when to mandate experimental pharmaceutical injections.  Government agents decide what levels of toxicity in food and water supplies are acceptable.  Government agents decide when to send the youngest generations off to fight in foreign wars.

To prepare children for the “real world,” we should teach them that governments are not cuddly stuffed animals that hand out free hugs; they are the monsters in the dark that unleash real-life nightmares.

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The post We Must Teach Children To Love Freedom More Than Government appeared first on LewRockwell.

Many of the problems we currently see in medicine are not new, but rather iterations of things that have been forgotten and occurred countless times in the past. For example, the COVID mRNA vaccines are not the first time the medical field has experienced irrational exuberance for a dubious remedy, even as some of their colleagues spoke out against it (at great risk to their professional standing). Here, we’ll look at what happened with corticosteroids, both because it provides a critical window into much of what’s gone awry with medicine and because steroids are some of the most problematic but widely used medications on the market.

Allopathy

Because of the work that has been done to enshrine our system of medicine as the gold standard everything else must measure up to, many are not aware it is just one of many approaches to healing that has been developed throughout history, or even that in previous eras, it had its own label rather than just being “medicine.”

Note: one of the major challenges I run into when writing is that there is no widely accepted term for our system of medicine, as they either simply assert it is “the standard” (e.g., conventional medicine or modern medicine) or frame it in a cultural context (e.g., “Western Medicine”). Of the accepted options, “biomedicine” is probably the most accurate (but largely unknown to the general public), whereas “standard medicine” (a term I made up) has become my favorite as it encapsulates it being the orthodox approach, the need of medicine to treat patients through standardized algorithms that ignore their individuality, and highlights J.D. Rockefeller’s monopolization of medicine in the early 1900s (as he named his oil monopoly “Standard Oil”).

Almost two thousand years ago, Galen, a Greek physician in Rome, collated, systematized, and refined existing approaches to medicine, particularly those originating in Greece, and then disseminated them worldwide. Central to Galen’s approach were the importance of anatomy (gained through continuous dissections) and the humoral theory of disease, which dominated Western medicine until around the 1850s.

For context, Hippocrates’ humoral theory of disease posited that health depended on the balance of four bodily fluids, known as humors: blood, phlegm, yellow bile, and black bile. Each humor was associated with specific qualities (hot, cold, wet, dry), elements (air, water, fire, earth), and temperaments (sanguine, phlegmatic, choleric, melancholic). Within this framework, disease resulted from an imbalance of these humors, caused by factors such as diet, environment, or lifestyle. Treatments, including bloodletting, purging, and dietary changes, aimed to restore humoral balance.

While this framework somewhat resembled what other cultures had come up with (e.g., the “fire” of the five elements in Chinese Medicine and “Pitta” of Ayurveda largely matched “yellow bile”), like surgery, it was more unique in its tendency to use forceful measures to correct a perceived humoral imbalance in the body. This in turn, gave way to a system of medicine where drugs that created dramatic physiologic changes (e.g., mercury, lead, arsenic, and opium) became the therapeutic mainstays of Western medicine, particularly since it was much easier to tell a drug “worked” if it created a dramatic effect.

Unfortunately, in many cases, those dramatic effects (e.g., it rapidly inducing vomiting) were due to the drug being highly toxic so many were injured by these early drugs, which in turn required the medical profession to aggressively double-down on the importance of their approach (particularly since so many people were being severely poisoned by mercury based drugs).
Note: during my training, another doctor proudly showed me the bag his father had brought to many visits, and sure enough, it had mercury in it (which remarkably the doctor did not even realize was mercury).

Because of the poor outcomes this form of medicine often produced, a variety of alternative approaches came into existence (e.g., Homeopathy in 1796, Eclectic Medicine in 1827, Osteopathy in 1874, Chiropractic in 1895 and Naturopathy in 1901), all of which were based on supporting the body’s ability to heal itself rather than trying to force the body into its desired state. To cement this distinction, the founder of Homeopathy used the term “Allopathy,” (“allo” means ‘other’ or ‘different’) as it highlighted allopathic medicine’s tendency to use external interventions (e.g., drugs or surgery) that created effects opposite to the existing disease in order to bring the body towards its desire state.
Note: initially, Allopathy was a derisive term, but in time some MDs adopted it to distinguish themselves from their competition, however once Allopathy used a variety of monopolistic tactics around 1910 to take over the medical marketplace (which was necessary to save the dying profession), Allopathy faded into obscurity and Allopaths simply referred to themselves as “doctors” while Allopathic medicine became “medicine” (and all the other approaches to healing largely faded into obscurity despite many offering immense benefit to patients).

As Allopathic medicine evolved (e.g., new drugs were discovered) it gravitated towards drugs which suppressed the unpleasant symptoms in the body (e.g., fevers or skin eruptions), in part because this matched its pre-existing mentality of forcefully overriding illness and in part because this was the easiest way to create a dramatic change in a patient (hence inspiring confidence in both the doctor and patient).

At the same time however, the competing schools of medicine became more and more aware of the damage Allopathic remedies created and gradually concluded that while suppressing symptoms could lead to short term improvements, it often also lead to the subsequent creation of severe illnesses (which coincides with Allopathic medicine being excellent at treating acute emergencies but poorly equipped to treat chronic diseases).

A key insight during this debate (Hering’s Law of Cure) came from a Homeopath who concluded that healing occurs in a specific order (e.g., from the inside out, from the head down, and in the reverse order of symptom appearance) and that disease occurs in the opposite direction (e.g., initially at a superficial level and then eventually at a deep one). Thus, by allopathically suppressing symptoms (which were often the body’s attempt to expel a pathogenic factor), rather than curing the illness, the pathogenic factor was instead pushed deeper into the body, creating a more severe illness in the future.

Note: Chinese medicine holds a similar perspective and argues that the defensive energy of the body which reacts to illness (the “Wei Qi)” functions to prevent external pathogenic factors from penetrating into the body. Chinese medicine in turn maps a progression of increasing severity of disease as the pathogenic factor travels from the superficial to the deep energy channels of the body (something I believe correlates with increasing blood stasis and loss of zeta potential obstructing larger and larger vessels). As such, Chinese Medicine’s treatments are often aimed at expelling a pathogenic factor rather than counteracting the symptomatic reaction to it. Conversely, some schools of Chinese medicine advocated for suppressing the initial reaction to the more dangerous plagues (as this was lifesaving at the time), but acknowledged this resulted in a chronic infection in the future.

Throughout my career, I have seen numerous extremely compelling cases of Hering’s Law of Cure (e.g., children with significant reactions to vaccines being given Tylenol for their fevers and then experiencing a much more severe illness, such as autistic regression, or COVID-19 patients crashing after their unpleasant fever is suppressed). Unfortunately, this principle remains largely unrecognized, and as a result, many standard medical practices are simply aggressive suppression of symptoms.

Note: Hering’s Law of Cure subsequently expanded to recognize that the “deeper” layer of physical symptoms were emotional and mental in nature, and then even deeper ones were spiritual symptoms

The Global Loss of Vitality

Early on, when I began reading about the largely forgotten history of medicine, I was struck by two things:

• How profoundly damaging many of the early Allopathic remedies were (e.g., I’ve previously written about the smallpox vaccines, and this book does an excellent job at shedding light on the damage mercury did over the centuries).

• How much healthier people (who weren’t poisoned by a mercury prescribing doctor) were and how much more effective many natural therapies were in the past than they are now.

This second point prompted me to begin asking older doctors (from various medical schools) if they had observed a general decline in human vitality in the patients they saw at the start of their careers compared to the end, and all of them shared that they had. Additionally:

• They noted that beyond patients becoming much sicker and having conditions they’d never seen before, it was also much harder to treat them as each therapy they used had shifted from making a dramatic improvement to a more minuscule one, which required numerous successive treatments to bring about an improvement.

• They typically attributed this shift to a loss in human vitality. They cited a variety of correlates (e.g., the average human body temperature dropping, people becoming less able to mount fevers, infants being less able to produce a brisk cry, or increasing degrees of fluid stagnation in their patients).

• They stated some of the treatments that had been developed by their profession were specifically made to address this loss of vitality, as their original treatments no longer worked. Conversely, some shared that when patients were placed in environments that restored aspects of their vitality (e.g., by being somewhere with exceptionally clean air), much less needed to be done to improve their condition.

•One doctor I spoke to had asked this same question of their mentor, while another had asked a mentor who’d also asked their mentor—all of whom corroborated that this decline in vitality had been continually in motion since at least the late 1800s.

Note: typically this decline in vitality proceeds in a linear fashion and then spikes at certain times (e.g., after the introduction of the smallpox vaccine, the 1986 law which granted immunity to vaccine manufacturers and led to a rapid proliferation in the vaccine schedule, and after the COVID vaccines). In each case, this increase in disease gets normalized and forgotten by the next generation of doctors (who entered practice after the last wave of sickness had become the “new normal”) and by the time its noticed, it’s often too late for them to share it (e.g., I was just speaking to a colleague who entered practice in the early 1970s and remarked that he used to have many patients in their 90s and 100s who were very mentally clear, that the dementia we frequently see in the elderly now was quite rare then, and that time it was rare to see cancers except in fairly old patients).

In turn, while I thought this model of decreasing vitality was valid (particularly since countless datasets have shown an explosion in the rates of chronic illness over the decades), it was much harder to say what was responsible as a good case could be made for so many different factors in our environment that the answer one arrived at was nearly guaranteed to be the product of one’s biases and specific focus rather than an objective assessment. Nonetheless, when I asked a variety of skilled practitioners who’d successfully treated the “unsolvable” chronic illnesses over the decades, they shared that they typically found the root issue in those diseases was one of the following:

• Heavy metal toxicity
• Dental issues (particularly root canals).
• Pharmaceutical drugs
• Vaccines
• Chemical toxicity
• Dysfunctional dynamics perpetuating in their family constellation
• Electrosmog (e.g., EMF sensitivity)
• Toxic scars (e.g., from surgeries)

Note: while not a direct cause, many also believed the demineralization of our soil (which leads to nutritionally deficient foods) and modern technology making us be disconnected from all the natural rhythms that regulate the body were also major contributing factors.

When I looked at all of this, I realized a common thread over half shared was them creating fluid stagnation (or exacerbating the consequences of fluid stagnation such as insufficient nutrients being present in the remaining blood that reaches tissues—something, which for example, often underlies macular degeneration).

Next, since Chinese Medicine holds one of the longest medical records of humanity, I was curious to see if it had observed any significant changes in humanity’s health and found out that around 1830, the concept of “blood stasis” became established as a primary cause of disease (and since that time has come to be seen as having a greater and greater importance). Since many of the highly unusual and severe injuries caused by the smallpox vaccine, introduced in 1796, matched those attributed to blood stasis in Chinese medicine, I looked up when it was first introduced to China—1805, which corroborates this theory.

Note: all of this could easily be expanded into multiple books. For those wishing to learn more, I covered the smallpox and blood stasis aspect of it in more detail here, the general loss of vitality here, how vaccines cause fluid stagnation here and the data demonstrating the profound damage vaccination has done to our society here.

Because of this, I am inclined to believe that the introduction of the smallpox vaccine (and the vaccines that followed) radically shifted humanity’s health, and that much of this was a direct consequence of the fluid stagnation (e.g., due to a loss of physiologiczeta potential) that humanity experienced. However, while there is a good case for my argument, it could also be a product of my own biases, as my approach to medicine places a heavy emphasis on fluid stagnation, and I constantly see how it links to a myriad of diseases).

Systemic Suppression

Since it is often possible to make so many different credible and persuasive arguments for a topic at hand (e.g., what’s causing this global loss of vitality), one of my approaches for filtering through them is seeing which ones then accurately predicted the future (as most don’t ultimately pan out or are retroactively crafted to explain the past).

In turn, I’ve never forgotten a conference which happened in the 1970s (I believe it was in 1974) where one of the world’s leading homeopaths convened a panel to discuss what the likely consequences would be in the upcoming decades of Allopathic medicine routinely suppressing symptoms (e.g., it aggressively treating all fevers with medications and preventing the childhood febrile illnesses with vaccination—something studies have repeatedly linked to cancer later in life).

Note: throughout the literature on the 1918 influenza, doctors from every school of medicine found influenza patients who had been treated with the fever suppressing medication aspirin (which was excessively distributed by MDs of the era) tended to be much more likely to die, while conversely, they discovered that the most effective treatments for the illness were those which then caused the fever to break on its own. Similarly, after I learned of the arguments against suppressing fevers, when I came down with a flu and did not feel well, I decided to try heating my body to see if it would accelerate the clearance of the infection and discovered not only that it did, but also that I immediately felt much better once I heated myself. This led me to conclude the discomfort the body experiences during a fever (assuming it is not an extreme fever) is not due to the heat, but rather the effort being expended to heat the body up and since then I’ve had many cases where heating the bodies (but not heads) of febrile patients greatly benefitted them.

At that conference, building upon Hering’s Law of Cure (along with the recent mass introduction of suppressive steroids), they predicted that if Allopathic medicine continued to proliferate in its mass suppression of symptoms, in the decades to follow, we would see:

•We would see a global shift from less severe illnesses to more severe ones (e.g., cancers).

•That this suppression would cause physical illnesses to be pushed deeper into the body and be replaced with psychiatric illnesses, and in time spiritual ones (particularly when the psychiatric illnesses were also suppressed with medications).

Note: the predicted psychiatric illnesses included common ones (e.g., anxiety along with depression, which at the time was rarely an issue), psychopathy, mass shootings, self-harm and self-mutilation, and the public becoming willing to do crazier and crazier things. The spiritual ailments, included people wanting to be robotic rather than spiritually connected to life, and people knowing they were spiritually adrift because they’d lost their connection to life (which otherwise would have prevented much of this dysfunctional behavior).

It was hence quite noteworthy to me that many of these shifts indeed happened, and likewise to compare just how different patients in the 1970s (especially older ones) were. However, I also feel a very strong (albeit retrospective) case can be made that the increasing proliferation of vaccinations explains this shift.

All of the previous thus touches upon one of the central criticisms of Allopathic medicine: anytime an external agent is used to forcefully change a process which is unfolding within the body (rather than aiding the body’s ability to resolve it) you run the risk of a minor temporary issue being exchanged for a severe chronic one—especially when this is repeatedly done throughout the course of someone’s life. In some cases, this risk is very justified (e.g., in a life-threatening emergency or with a relatively safe drug that has limited long-term complications). At the same time however, a general unwillingness to acknowledge this issue pervades Allopathic medicine. Now everyone’s gradually become habituated to patients “just being” sicker and sicker, and not much being possible to do about it.

Note: I believe this blindness arises in part because medical training requires doctors to be knowledgeable in a wide range of topics leading to many complex subjects being reduced to simple axiomatic truths that are memorized and then never questioned and because so much of the Allopathic therapeutic toolbox carries long term risks that it would be very difficult for doctors to practice medicine if they were fully conscious of those issues (discussed further here)

Suppressive Antibiotics

While steroids are one of the medications most associated with “suppressing” illness, many others are too. For example, for years, many natural medicine practitioners (e.g., homeopaths) also told me they’d frequently seen antibiotics “treat” an acute infection but turn it into a chronic one. I wasn’t sure what to make of this (as microbiome disruption could partially but not fully explain it) then discovered something similar existed in Chinese Medicine::

The concept of Latent Heat is very old in Chinese medicine, having been mentioned for the first time in the ‘Yellow Emperor’s Classic of Internal Medicine’. Latent Heat occurs when an external pathogenic factor penetrates the body without causing apparent symptoms at the time; the pathogenic factor penetrates into the Interior, and ‘incubates’ there, turning into interior Heat. This Heat later emerges with acute symptoms of Heat: when it emerges, it is called Latent Heat.

Note: in modern Chinese Medicine, antibiotics and vaccines are now proposed as sources of latent heat.

Much later, when I read Cell Wall Deficient Forms: Stealth Pathogens all of this finally made sense. This book argued that when bacteria are exposed to lethal stressors, particularly cell wall destroying antibiotics, while most will die, some will instead enter a primitive survival mode and transform into misshapen cell wall deficient (CWD) “mycoplasma like” bacteria which can radically change their size or morphology (and hence look very different). While these bacteria are hard to detect (and when seen, due to no one knowing they “exist,” often mistaken for cellular debris and ignored), with the correct techniques they can be detected. In turn, the book provides a wealth of evidence that CWD bacteria:

• Are found within many “aseptic” tissues undergoing an autoimmune attack, with specific CWD bacteria associated with many different autoimmune disorders which have no known cause.

• Once the environment is “safe” can transform back into their normal form and cause a sudden recurrence of an infection—suggesting chronic infections are due to antibiotics creating a dormant CWD population rather than continual reinfection.

Note: many popular alternative schools of medicine (e.g., those of Rife, Naessens, and Enderlein) came from microscopes which could directly observe these pleomorphic bacteria continually shifting into new morphologies, and that diseases states (e.g., cancer) correlated to specific morphologies, while other morphologies resulted in a symbiotic state of health (e.g., this a video of the organisms Naessens observed). Since the morphologies adopted correlated with the internal state of the body, this gave rise to the belief that treatments should aim to create “healthy terrains” within the body, which would give rise to non-pathogenic forms of the bacteria rather than antibiotics that provoked pathogen transformation.

All of this has influenced how I (and quite a few colleagues) practice medicine in some unique ways:

• First, around 10% of chronic conditions I come across seem to have a “pleomorphic” component and improve once that is addressed.

• Second, while sometimes helpful and necessary, I try to avoid using cell wall targeting antibiotics (e.g., penicillin) as they are particularly prone to provoking the CWD transformation.

• Third, I have found many therapies which help autoimmune conditions (e.g., ultraviolet blood irradiation) often also happen to be highly lethal to CWD. As such. I have long wondered if certain rheumatologic drugs work in this manner. For example, there was a prolonged period where minocycline (which is potent against mycoplasma) was successfully used to treat rheumatoid arthritis (RA), but eventually abandoned as (like all tetracycles) it had some side effects, it only worked in a subset of RA cases but not others, and there was no mechanism to explain how it could be working.

Note: a case has been made that there are widespread mycoplasmal infections in the population (that possibly were lab engineered). The drug that best treated those infections was doxycycline, and I have long wondered if the reason why integrative practitioners find it helps inflammatory conditions like Lyme disease is because it is actually eliminating pathogenic mycoplasma.

Likewise, one of the most popular drugs in rheumatology, methotrexate, “works” by depleting folate production in the body, but oddly still works when folate is given to counter (some but not all) of its side effects—implying folate elimination is not its actual mechanism. Conversely however, it also has potent antibacterial properties (against specific bacteria), and rather than targeting the cell wall, it reduces bacterial DNA synthesis.

Note: many integrative physicians find that chronic autoimmune illnesses are linked to a wide range of chronic but unrecognized infections (possibly because the organisms contain antigen sequences matching normal tissue and hence provoking an autoimmune attack against it).

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The post Steroid Dangers and Safe Autoimmune Treatments appeared first on LewRockwell.

We really need a name for the mental illness that comes with obscene amounts of wealth. Elon Musk’s bizarre progeny obsession. All the weird shit Michael Jackson did. The stories you hear about rich families making their servants clean their toilets after every use or throw away plates after every meal.

Call it rich-brain or something. That psychological phenomenon where extreme wealth causes people to lose their mental moorings and spin off into deep space because there’s no one in their lives telling them “no” or holding them to any standards of normal human behavior. Where their ability to shape their day to day lives however they want with no limitations lets them fly off into uncharted psychological territory where they’ll have whole teams of people orchestrating elaborate scenes and projects to accommodate their debilitating neuroses.

We need a good label for this phenomenon because these are the individuals who are shaping our world. Many people suffering from psychological disorders will come up with unhealthy ideas for how society ought to be run, but they don’t have the means to turn their vision into a reality. The people who are made insane by obscene amounts of wealth are not restricted in this way. Their mental illnesses can actually directly influence how human civilization plays out on this planet.

As billionaires take more and more control over our world, we are finding ourselves increasingly led by those least qualified to lead us. We are trapped in a dystopia that is ruled by lunatics. We should probably do something about that.

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They’re ripping kids in half right in front of us and telling us we need to be mad at Kneecap and Ms Rachel.

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A Palestine supporter witnesses new footage every day of children being mutilated, shredded and burned to death by Israel. An Israel supporter spends every day avoiding looking at that same footage. This one fact tells you very clearly who is on the wrong side of history here.

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When you witness an injustice you can either oppose it, look away, or make up some reason why the injustice is okay. Only the first option can lead to the cessation of the injustice. Ignoring the Gaza holocaust looks different from justifying it, but both yield the same result.

There are people opposing the genocide and there are people justifying it, but the largest group by far are those standing in the middle and shrugging. These people may tell themselves that they are morally superior to the ones actively cheerleading a mass atrocity, and at first glance this may appear to be the case, but in practice both are choosing an option that allows the mass atrocity to continue. One is just more photogenic than the other. It allows a certain type of person to feel nice about themselves while still facilitating an active genocide.

This is almost everyone with the loudest and most influential voices in our society today, by the way. The celebrities. The people with the largest platforms. Most of them are not actively supporting the Gaza holocaust, they’re just sitting there watching it happen, like a psychopath sitting back watching a toddler drown to death in a swimming pool. They know something terrible is happening, but they know they’ll pay a professional price if they oppose it, so they avail themselves of the many distractions afforded to the wealthy and keep their attention fixed on the insignificant.

And the end result is that this nightmare continues. Day after day. Month after month. Year after year. Because too many people, when faced with history’s first live-streamed genocide, have chosen to do nothing.

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It would be a mistake to view the Chinese people’s skyrocketing quality of life as miraculous or extraordinary. Beijing made some very clever decisions over the years, but ultimately it’s just doing the normal thing: spending the nation’s wealth on the public instead of on war.

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When capitalism simps want to shit on China they call it communist. When they want to dismiss its accomplishments they say it only happened because China became capitalist. When you ask why your country can’t do what China is doing in order to share those same accomplishments they circle back around to “No, that’s communism!” again.

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And meanwhile the war in Ukraine rages on, for no reason other than the fact that under our psychotic status quo it is much easier to start a war than to end one.

The risk of nuclear war is far lower than it was in the early months of the conflict, but Ukrainian lives are still being thrown into a proxy war to no one’s benefit but the war profiteers. NATO’s never going to directly enter the war, and without a massive escalation on that level it’s inevitable that this thing ends with a peace deal where Ukraine has to give up a fair amount of land. At this point it’s just a bunch of men killing each other and blowing each other’s limbs off for no good reason while they wait for that conclusion to arrive, because a bunch of corrupt bureaucrats far away from the fighting keep postponing it.

It’s so, so ugly and so, so stupid. Such a pointless, idiotic thing for all this suffering and dying to be happening for. This whole nightmare could have been avoided with a little diplomacy and a few low-cost concessions from the US empire, but they decided to provoke a war to move a few pieces around on the grand chessboard for the advancement of their goal of planetary domination instead.

The world is ruled by sociopaths.

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The post We Are Trapped in a Dystopia That Is Ruled by Lunatics appeared first on LewRockwell.

Even some of our brightest scientific minds are projecting that there is absolutely no positive future for our civilization if we stay on our current course.  Perhaps one of the reasons why our society has become so obsessed with short-term results is because most of us can’t bear to think about the long-term consequences of our actions.  I have a website that focuses on “economic collapse”, but it isn’t just the economy that is headed for catastrophe.  Virtually every aspect of our society is coming apart at the seams all around us, and the era that we are moving into will be more nightmarish than most people would dare to imagine.  But our political leaders continue to insist that everything is going to work out just fine somehow, and most people choose to believe them.

This week, an old MIT study from 1972 that projected that our civilization will collapse at some point during the 21st century made headlines on several major news sites…

So for the number of deaths to rise 30 percent above that level in just one year is really, really tragic.

At the same time, our system of public education continues to rapidly deteriorate.

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The post Warning About The Collapse of Civilizations. appeared first on LewRockwell.

This question came to mind from reading Edward Curtin’s essays, “At the Lost and Found,” (Clarity Press, 2025), in which he shares with readers his intellectual encounters with the rising criminality of the governments of the United States since the 1960s. Edward Curtin is a decent person with a sense of justice and a moral conscience, traits more common in his time than today.  I found his moral responses reassuring, and wonder if recent generations would respond in the same way.

Curtin, I suspect, was a member of the old moderate left, which was concerned with fairness and pushing a reform here and there.  Today this left remains only in its elderly remnants.  The modern left is not reformist.  It is revolutionary, committed to using law, government, and media to overthrow traditional society and replace it with a Sodom & Gomorrah Tower of Babel in which merit is regarded as a white racist tool.

Today the left, as epitomized by the Biden regime, pushes DEI over merit, sexual perversity over love between a man and a woman, sexualization of young children, demonization of white people as racists, and ideology over truth. Today for the left the truth resides in the ideological agenda, not in facts.

Despite the digital revolution, the Internet, social media, email, and texting, the acquisition of truthful information has become ever more difficult.  The reason is that for almost all parties concerned, it is the agenda that is important, not the facts.  A consequence is that, unlike in the past, today we live in narratives orchestrated to serve agendas. As Curtin puts it, “we are living in a pretend society” in which truth is not present.

Curtin’s essays, like my own, vary in quality, but every decent person will enjoy escape from social media into thought about what is happening to us.  I am not going to attempt to organize Curtin’s essays around a theme.  I am going to limit my comments to two of his essays. 

The first is about what has become of Christmas.  As my readers know, for several decades it has been my habit to republish my Christmas essay, “The Greatest Gift of All,” to remind people that Christianity gave us freedom and meaning in our lives.  In the Massachusetts town in which Curtin and his wife live, Christmas fireworks are a feature.  As he and his wife inside their home sit holding and trying to calm the family dogs, “sentient animals with deep feelings,” who are quaking uncontrollably, Curtin thinks of “children in Gaza quivering in fear as the Israelis bomb them night and day in savage attacks” and thinks of “the visceral sense of what those Palestinians  must be feeling as they hold their trembling children” who are declared by Israel’s leader to be “useless objects.”  

It is America’s shame that the entire government of the United States, including President Trump, the media, and the brainwashed and indoctrinated hapless American population  accept the destruction of a people, even enable it with weapons and money and deportation of persons with sufficient moral conscience to protest the genocide of a nation.  Curtin has every right to raise the question, what kind of people have Americans become?

The second essay is about Curtin’s “Known Knowns,” which consists of the massive lies that the US government has based its rule upon, regardless of whether Republican or Democrat, since the 1960s.  In a mere 8 pages Curtin presents the history of the US government’s degeneration into evil kept in power by lies.

He begins with the assassinations of President John F. Kennedy, Robert F. Kennedy, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, and goes on to Allan Dulles who engineered slaughter of one million Indonesians, the orchestrated Vietnam War, the Watergate scandal orchestrated by the CIA to drive Nixon from power, the neoconservatives’ Iran-Contra scandal, the orchestrated Persian Gulf War, the Clinton regime’s bombing of four countries in four months –Afghanistan, Sudan, Iraq, and Yugoslavia, the 9/11 false flag attacks on the World Trade Center, the George W. Bush regime’s fake “war on terror,” used to strip Americans of civil liberties and to attack Afghanistan and Iraq, President Obama who institutionalized the warfare state and bombed seven countries, Trump who allowed the deadly Covid vaccine to be imposed on us and subjects the conscience of America to the support of Israel’s genocide of Palestine, and Biden who engineered the anti-Russian coup in Ukraine, renewed war with Russia, and imprisoned American citizens for exercising their constitutional rights.

From the standpoint of the American Establishment, the problem with Curtin’s indictment is that it is true.  

In today’s America, to tell the truth is becoming an indication of treason for which whistleblowers, allegedly protected by federal law, are being imprisoned. This is not changing under Trump.  Instead, it is expanding.  If you criticize Israel, you are deported.  Thus, under the Trump regime, if you speak the truth about Israel, you are considered an enemy of the state.

Americans really do need to think about how they arrived at this position.  Curtin’s essays will help you.

The post Are Americans Still Americans? appeared first on LewRockwell.

The prospect of martial law being implemented seriously within the borders of the United States is terrifying for many, and though it is still statistically unlikely the chances that this will happen are more likely than they have been in six decades and are only increasing.

The time is now to start thinking about where you will go should your home be affected by a declaration of martial law.

Even though there is nothing illegal regarding prepping, all it takes is the stroke of a pen for that to change. If it does, you may find that you are now a target of the government and need to find places to conceal yourself.

Under normal circumstances, martial law will only last until the crisis has been resolved, but in cases of an EMP or economic collapse, you could find yourself under the thumb of the military for extended periods.

The time is now to start playing what you’ll do and where you go should martial law be instituted at the local, regional or national level.

To help you in that end we are bringing you a list of five places where you might successfully hide from the worst effects of martial law.

First Safe Locations to Hide During Martial Law

Outside the Bounds of the Affected Area

Probably the best and most elegant solution to avoiding the troubles and travails associated with living in an area under martial law is to simply get out from under that affected area.

No matter what happens, it is unlikely that a massive regional or nationwide implementation of martial law will occur.

Based on a response projection established to counter localized or smaller regional incidents, you can expect martial law to be in place in a tiny fraction of the country when it is in effect at all.

The solution, then, is simple. If at all possible, pack up your life and your family and head elsewhere.

Depending on the specifics of the declaration, this might be across the state, across state lines or even across the country. Don’t rule anything out, and be prepared that you might have to move a little farther than you would like.

Though this might be a dreadful challenge, the good news is that life will, more or less, go on as usual in the areas that are not under martial law.

Depending on your family and financial situation, you might even want to look into a drop everything vacation with an extended rental, be it a condo or house, even an extended stay hotel.

If your profession is amenable to working from home and especially working remotely via the internet, so much the better as this will only increase the attractiveness of this response.

As good as this option is, you must plan for a worst case scenario of the martial law declaration being expanded or implemented elsewhere.

If you are going to an area that itself is likely to see martial law declared you could be facing the classic blunder of jumping out of the frying pan and into the fire.

Consider carefully whether or not the prospective safe haven is known for commercial, industrial or political importance or if it is currently experiencing heightened levels of unrest that might provoke a serious government response.

The Wilderness

If you are of a conventional prepper mentality, your default plan to all kinds of societal trouble might be simply to head for deep country.

I don’t think it is any exaggeration to assert that a declaration of martial law, especially one in response to civil unrest would definitely qualify as societal trouble!

Heading out into the wilderness can definitely get you out from under the thumb of martial law and the troopers enforcing it, so it is a meaningful response, but more than most this plan has significant drawbacks to go with the perks. Let us start with the good and then we will move on to the bad.

In the park column, so long as you are not near any area of strategic interest, you really won’t be worrying about the day-to-day dealings with troopers or other officials like you would if you were near any kind of civilization currently under the effect of martial law.

This will allow you to relax and it generally live life as you would under the circumstances. Plus you being away from the bulk of the population means that attention is not going to be directed to you unless you are already wanted.

However, you are trading out one set of problems, those represented by martial law, for another set of problems, represented by the attendant challenges and difficulties of living way off grid in the wilderness.

All of your survival necessities, from shelter, food and water to security considerations must be attended to day in and day out or else you will start feeling the squeeze.

For anything but the most skilled of preppers living in the most abundant, pleasant climates this means a certain amount of dependency on supplies and accordingly, on resupply.

This option may be out of the question for some people entirely depending on the overall climate and weather where they live. The type of shelter that is amenable to you is entirely dependent on your group or family situation as well as the climate.

In some areas, retreating to the wilderness is a virtual death sentence where in others it will be more or less pleasant weather permitting.

Nonetheless, this is a viable option and one you should consider if your outdoor survival and sustainment skills are up to the challenge. If they are not, or you live in a hostile environment, discount it entirely unless you have no other option.

A Small Town

Small town living is attractive to many people, and it has many advantages likewise when we are trying to deal with the existential problem of martial law.

First, assuming you are dealing with a regional or otherwise widespread implementation of martial law smaller towns are less likely to be strategically or tactically important and so accordingly are less likely to be seriously staffed or watched by soldiers and other officials.

It is even entirely possible that there might not be an active military presence in the region at all.

Beyond the obvious benefits of being less likely to fall under the watchful eye of military forces, the culture of small towns might make them entirely more suitable for enduring martial law while you are there, whether or not the town is affected properly.

The stronger bonds between people and their ties to the community means folks are more likely to pull together and help each other in times of trouble.

At least, they are if you are known to them and in good standing with the community. Villains and outsiders are less likely to be treated with hospitality to say the least.

It is also worth considering that small towns, especially agrarian communities, are far more likely to be able to meaningfully self-sustain during the attendant economic and logistical fallout that will result from a serious implementation of martial law.

Food, water and other essentials are likely to be more plentiful, along with the skill sets needed to procure more of both. Blue collar lifestyles are alive, well and flourishing in small towns and this breeds a culture of personal readiness and grit.

However, it is worth considering second and third order effects that are likely to affect small towns if martial law is declared for reasons of domestic security.

Our military has learned time and time again that small towns and their insular nature is often amenable to the sheltering or raising of insurgents, and partisan or gorilla forces throughout history have often relied on remote villages and small towns as part of their underground network.

It goes without saying, the military already has well established and effective plans for dealing with just such a contingency.

Read the Whole Article

The post Best Places To Hide During Martial Law! appeared first on LewRockwell.

Captain Chaos definitely does not have the cards – which as even South Pacific penguins know, are all made in China.

SHANGHAI and HONG KONG – So, predictably, Captain Chaos did blink first. As much as he – and his sprawling media circus – could not possibly admit it.

It all started with “tariff exemptions” – from smartphones and computers to auto parts – on products imported from China. Then it veered towards carefully manicured leaks implying tariffs “could” be reduced to a range between 50% and 65%. And finally a terse admission that if there’s no deal, a “tariff number” will be unilaterally set.

China’s Ministry of Commerce was unforgiving: “Trying to trade away others’ interests for temporary gains is like bargaining with a tiger for its skin – it will only backfire”.

And it got fiercer. The Ministry was adamant that any Trump 2.0 claims of any progress on bilateral negotiations have “no factual basis” – de facto depicting the US President as a purveyor of fake news.

Tigers, tigers burning bright: the image does not recall poetry superstar William Blake, but Mao’s legendary depiction of the US Empire as a “paper tiger” – a flashback that struck me over and over again last week in Shanghai. If the US Empire was a paper tiger already in the 1960s, the Chinese argue, imagine now.

And the pain will increase, not only for the paper tiger: any dodgy deals made by foreign – vassal – pussycat governments at the expense of Chinese interests simply will be not be tolerated by Beijing.

Last week in Shanghai I was reminded over and over again – by academics and business people – that the weaponized Trump Tariff Tizzy (TTT) goes way beyond China: it is a desperate offense ordered by the US ruling classes against a peer competitor that scares the hell out of them.

The best Chinese analytical minds know exactly what’s going on in Washington. Take for instance this essay originally published by the influential Cultural Horizon magazine breaking down the “triangular power structure” of Trump 2.0.

We have all-power Trump forming a “super-establishment”; Silicon Valley money politics, represented by Elon Musk; and the new right-wing elite represented by VP J.D. Vance. End result: a “governance system that is almost parallel to the federal government.”

European chihuahuas – caught in the crossfire of Trump 2.0 – are simply incapable of such synthetic and precise conceptualization.

Paper tiger meets fiery dragon

What a deep dive in Shanghai has revealed is that China has been handed over a rare earth-like opportunity by Trump 2.0 to consolidate its strategic initiative solidifying the role of leader of the Global South/Global Majority, at the same time carefully managing the risk of a New Cold War.

Call it a Sun Tzu move that may paralyze the Empire in its tracks. Professor Zhang Weiwei, with whom I had the pleasure to share a seminar in Shanghai on the Russia-China strategic partnership, would agree.

China is on the move across the spectrum. Chinese Premier Li Qiang sent a letter to Japanese Prime Minister Shigeru Ishibe urging a joint drive, right now, to counteract the tariff dementia.

President Xi’s top message in his Southeast Asia tour last week was to stand up against “unilateral bullying”.

Xi deftly moved between Malaysia – current rotating chair of ASEAN, always avoiding taking sides – and Vietnam – with its “bamboo diplomacy” always hedging between US and China.

Xi told Malaysia’s Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim, directly: “We must safeguard the bright prospects of our Asian family”. Translation: let’s create an exclusive sphere of influence close to the ‘community of shared destiny’ but that does not include outside powers such as the US.

In parallel, there has been a strong debate – from Shanghai to Hong Kong – that transcends the role of China as the world’s factory: what matters now is how to redirect some of China’s astonishing manufacturing capacity towards the domestic market.

Of course there are problems – such as the lack of purchasing power among scores of Chinese domestic consumers, even as the bulk of national China income is directed to fixed-asset investments. A great deal of China’s rural elderly population survives on a monthly pension of roughly $30 a month, and the hourly rate for the gig economy has stagnated at around $4.

Meanwhile, in several high-tech fronts, China just built the fastest high-speed train on the planet: 400km/h, soon to run between Beijing and Shanghai. China is already receiving orders for the C919 commercial wide-bodied airliner. And China has come up with the world’s first thorium-powered nuclear reactor. Translation: unlimited cheap and clean energy is at hand.

The Mafia way of doing business

Hong Kong is a very special case. HSBC executives, for instance, worry about a possible decoupling between US and China – and wonder whether Hong Kong may survive without US trade.

Yes, it can. The US is Hong Kong’s third largest trade partner; yet Hong Kong’s export and import to the US are only 6,5% and 4%, respectively, of its total global exports and imports, including transshipment of goods back and forth from the mainland.

HK is a world-class logistics hub and free port. So as long as Trump 2.0 does not forbid trade with Hong Kong – well, anything can happen – imports should not be affected. Anyway, most of what HK exports – electronics, luxury goods, clothes, toys – can easily find alternative markets in Southeast Asia, West Asia and Europe.

The crucial point is that over half of Hong Kong trade is with the mainland. And the key fact is that China can easily survive without US trade. Beijing has been carefully preparing for it since Trump 1.0.

From Shanghai to Hong Kong, the best analytical minds are in tune with the inestimable Michael Hudson, who has emphasized, over and over again, how “the United States is the only country in the world that has weaponized its foreign trade; weaponized its foreign currency, the dollar; weaponized the international financial system; and treated every economic relationship in an adversarial way, to weaponize it.”

A self-confident, high-tech savvy China, from academics and business people to xiao long bao and pulled noodles vendors, graphically understands that the Empire of Chaos, in its drive to “isolate” China, is only isolating itself (and its chihuahuas).

Moreover it’s such a joy to see Michael Hudson also referring to the same “paper tiger” syndrome that I witnessed in Shanghai these past few days: “Well, America has become a paper tiger financially today. It doesn’t really have anything to offer except the threat of tariffs, the threat of suddenly disrupting all of the trade patterns that have been put in place over the last few decades.”

In Shanghai, I heard serial implacable dismissals of the so-called “Miran plan” – as in the paper published last November by Trump’s economic advisor “restructuring the global trading system”. Miran is the brain behind the Mar-a-Lago accord – whose rationale is to weaken the US dollar by forcing major economies – from China to Japan and the EU – to sell US dollar assets and swap short-term US Treasuries for 100-year bonds with zero interest.

Miran’s brilliant idea boils down to nations having only two options:

1.Meekly accept these US tariffs, without retaliation.

2. Write cheques to the US Treasury.

Zhao Xijun, co-dean of the China Capital Market Research Institute at Renmin University, destroyed the scheme succinctly: transferring money to the US Treasury like this is like “collecting protection money on the streets”. Translation: that’s the Mafia way, “a thuggish and domineering act, merely dressed up with the lofty justification of providing public goods”.

Meanwhile, in the Grand Chessboard, Beijing keeps working steadily side by side with Russia towards a Eurasian-wide security architecture anchored on a balance of powers: it’s all about the new Primakov triangle (RIC – Russia, Iran and China).

Top BRICS members Russia and China will not allow the Empire to attack fellow BRICS member Iran. And support comes in more ways than one. Example: more imperial energy sanctions on Iran? China will increase imports via Malaysia, and invest even more in Iran’s infrastructure, in tandem with Russia in respect to the International North South Transportation Corridor (INSTC).

In a nutshell: Captain Chaos definitely does not have the cards – which as even South Pacific penguins know, are all made in China.

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

The post China, Hong Kong and The Art of Blinking appeared first on LewRockwell.

Thanks,  John Smith. 

Mondoweiss

The post We need to talk about the pro-Israel lobby in the UK appeared first on LewRockwell.

Thanks, John Smith. 

The post Dr Gabor Mate answers question about October 7th during conference appeared first on LewRockwell.

Thanks, John Smith. 

The Guardian

The post Who is really pushing the strings? Pro-Israel group says it has ‘deportation list’ and has sent ‘thousands’ of names to Trump officials appeared first on LewRockwell.

Chris Sullivan wrote:

Whatever You Do, Don’t Watch This Coachella Protest Against Israel & Netanyahu

I’ve never heard of this group, but I expect that they will get lots of bad publicity

or maybe fall off the edge of the earth.

The post Whatever You Do, Don’t Watch This Coachella Protest Against Israel & Netanyahu appeared first on LewRockwell.

Thanks Emmanuel Charles McCarthy.

The post Selective Planning and Planting of Ambiguity in Church teaching appeared first on LewRockwell.

David Krall wrote:

This is both fun and impressive to watch.

The post Something nice for a change. appeared first on LewRockwell.

Writes Gail Appel:

Hi Lew,

Can’t make it up. And my reaction while reading it was not normal. Demonic, uncontrollable ,explosive laughter . I’m waiting for Al Pacino to appear.

See here.

The post SATAN- When the UK is no longer hiding who’s pulling the strings appeared first on LewRockwell.

Thanks, Johnny Kramer. 

Pope Francis Funeral: Frail Joe Biden given helping hand by wife Jill and bishop as he struggles down stairs

The post Frail Joe Biden given helping hand by wife Jill and bishop as he struggles down stairs at Pope Francis’s funeral appeared first on LewRockwell.

Gail Appel wrote:

I hope Gen Flynn is wrong, but I fear he’s right.

Everybody’s looking in the wrong direction. Misdirection. 

See here.

The post Europe’s Next War Won’t Be In Ukraine appeared first on LewRockwell.

Thanks, Bruce McLane.

BBC News

The post It’s always suicide: Virginia Giuffre, Prince Andrew and Jeffrey Epstein accuser, dies by suicide appeared first on LewRockwell.

Thanks, John Smith. 

The cutting-edge StormBreaker was only recently confirmed as being used in combat and could be of major intelligence value to an adversary.

The post StormBreaker6 Advanced Glide Bomb Lands In Yemen Largely Intact appeared first on LewRockwell.

Thanks to old friend.

Virginia Bishop Barry Knestout suspends Rev. Mark White over blog about clergy sex abuse – The Washington Post

The post Let us pray and hope the new Pope cleans out the corruption of the church. appeared first on LewRockwell.

Patrick Foy wrote:

This is an outrage and unconscionable on all levels. Way over the line. You can’t make this up. Clearly members of the Trump administration are taking their marching orders from Israeli front organizations operating inside the U.S. who are monitoring and doxing college students critical of Israel’s action in Gaza. 

For background on this, I recommend James Bamford’s latest book, Spy Fail. It is, in part, a shocking exposé of Israel espionage against the U.S., its covert molding of American public opinion through propaganda, its control of U.S. politicians with money and intimidation, and effectively handcuffing the FBI from intervening. Quite a story, now brought to its apotheosis under Trump.

The post Update on Abduction & Jailing of Tufts Student Rümeysa Öztürk appeared first on LewRockwell.