Lew Rockwell Institute

International Man: Historically, financial markets have often ended in euphoric blow-offs or painful crashes. Do you think today’s environment resembles past periods like the late 1920s, the 1970s, or the dot-com bubble?

Doug Casey: There’s an old saying in the market: “Money makes the mare run.”

The markets have tended to move much more radically since the Federal Reserve, the creator of money, was itself created. For generations, we’ve had a whole class of market savants, known as Fed watchers, who try to second-guess what Fed bureaucrats are going to do with interest rates, bank reserves, and money creation, because they realize that those things translate into market action.

Because of the Fed’s increasing importance, you can expect more radical moves than ever in the markets. Compare it to an elevator going up and down with a lunatic at the controls—which impresses me as a good analogy.

International Man: Some argue we could see a final, euphoric rally—a “melt-up”—before any collapse. What would need to happen for that to play out?

Doug Casey: A melt-up is not unlikely. Trump is actively trying to control the Fed by replacing its governors with sycophants who see things the way he does. In other words, print lots of money and manipulate for low rates. Trump wants the Fed to do what he tells them, despite the Fed’s theoretical independence. Of course, Fed independence has always been a fiction. But if he succeeds in dropping the pretense, we can count on a genuinely wild and crazy monetary policy.

The odds of a melt-up are high based on that, despite some extremely shaky and unsound fundamentals. Frankly, the government almost has no choice but to keep printing and suppressing interest rates. If they don’t, the economy is likely to have a catastrophic, deflationary collapse. They want to avoid that at any cost.

International Man: If there is a melt-up, do you see it being concentrated in specific sectors like tech, AI, or commodities, or across the broader market?

Doug Casey: By every parameter, the market is more overvalued now than ever before in history. How you play it depends a lot on your view of history, your own psychology, and your own skill set. But right now, mining stocks and energy stocks are super cheap.

Mining stocks are particularly interesting. They’ve been in a quiet bull market this year, starting from extremely low levels. Many of the smaller, obscure stocks have tripled and quadrupled, completely under the radar. Who knows, or cares, what companies with market caps of, literally, a few million dollars do? Even if they go up a thousand times from here, they still only be “small caps,” too tiny for major institutions to buy. Some of the big miners have gone up 50% or even doubled. Despite that, they’re still close to the cheapest levels they’ve ever been in history.

I’ve always been friendly toward small mining stocks for reasons I’ve explained in the past. But especially now, since they’re at the beginning of a gigantic bull market. The market hates energy stocks as well right now, and they’re the other place to be. Many have dividends—depending on whether we’re talking oil, gas, coal, or uranium—of up to 10% or 15%.

The way I see it, the stock bubble is headed there. Should you stay in tech, which has been in a humongous, unparalleled bull market for what seems like forever? There’s another old market dictum: “High tech, big wreck.” It’s especially true when the whole world is concentrating on it. These stocks are, to use a patented Trumpism, “at levels you can’t believe, that nobody’s ever seen before.”

International Man: On the other hand, what do you see as the biggest triggers for a market melt-down? Debt, geopolitical risk, currency crisis?

Doug Casey: You just named the Trifecta of the next financial panic.

Debt is created directly and indirectly through the Federal Reserve, most importantly with the reserve requirements of the commercial banking system. A sound banking system would operate on 100% reserves. A dollar someone deposits for 3% might be lent for 6% for a one-year term. End of story. In today’s world, where money can be created by the banks, a dollar can be lent, redeposited, and used as a reserve to create more money ad infinitum. It’s a daisy chain based on nothing. That’s on top of the distinction between time deposits and demand deposits being totally lost.

Unlike the 1929 collapse, there’s now a huge amount of mortgage, automobile, credit card, and student loan debt. None of these things were problems back in the late 1920s. Mortgages were typically for five years. There were no student loans. Cars were bought with cash. Credit cards didn’t exist.

And on top of that, add government debt, which was trivial back then. Debt is the major risk for a deflationary credit collapse. If anybody can’t pay, neither can the next guy. Down go the dominoes…

Number two: geopolitical risk. The big current catalyst is tariffs. Bear in mind that the amount of trade in the world today—in both relative and absolute terms—is vastly greater than it was pre-1929. The Smoot-Hawley tariffs made imports too expensive for Americans. Since the Europeans couldn’t sell to us, they couldn’t afford to buy from us. The result was corporate bankruptcies and massive unemployment. That compounded the deflationary debt collapse. It’s much more serious now than it was pre-1929.

We should, rather obviously, include war as a geopolitical risk. The Ukraine war isn’t over by any means. In fact, it’s clear that Europe, idiotically, is gearing up for a major war against Russia. The Israel-Iran war isn’t over, nor is the Israel-Palestine war. That wouldn’t matter, except that the US treats Israel as the 51st state. And maybe we’ll see some problems with Qatar, whose security the US has just guaranteed—oddly, just when nuclear-armed Pakistan is guaranteeing the security of Saudi Arabia. We have lots of overlapping treaty obligations, similar to what we saw before World War I. The same thing could happen again.

In addition, Trump is looking to launch an unprovoked attack and perhaps an invasion of Venezuela. The geopolitical risk today looks extraordinarily high, as the US looks for new tar babies to punch around the world.

Number three: the currency. The whole world sees the dollar as a hot potato; it’s an unsafe, depreciating asset. As the rest of the world uses the dollar less and less, for all the reasons we’ve covered in the past, it will lose value rapidly. Remember, the dollar, not soybeans or Boeings, is by far our largest export, and greatest liability. At some point, trillions of offshore dollars will come home to buy title to American assets, and that will create a giant political problem. It’ll be bad for everything—except the price of gold.

International Man: For the everyday investor who doesn’t have access to complex strategies, what should they be doing right now to prepare?

Doug Casey: This question merits a book for an answer. But what stands out to me right now is that everybody and his dog is in the stock market. And unbelievably, over a third of the stocks traded today are ETFs. Of every description, even ETFs on just one stock, using debt or options to internally leverage the moves in that stock. While they can be convenient, ETFs amount to a scam for Wall Street to siphon an additional 1% or so of fees per year out of the markets. Their existence is further proof of how overfinancialized the US economy is.

Reprinted with permission from International Man.

The post Coming Melt-Up or Meltdown—and How To Protect Yourself appeared first on LewRockwell.

The BLS has come out with another huge rug-pull on its nonfarm payroll count. And also, predictably, this has triggered loud blathering from both Wall Street and the White House on behalf of exactly the wrong conclusion.

To wit, we don’t need any more Fed rate cuts! And we don’t need a new eruption of money-printing, either, because the real cost of debt is already dirt cheap.

For instance, here is the inflation-adjusted Fed funds rate over the last four decades:

Since the turn of the century, the geniuses on the FOMC have pegged the real Fed Funds Rate at negative levels nearly 80% of the time. And even as of July 2025—three years after allegedly pivoting to inflation-fighting—the real Fed funds rate is only positive by 110 basis points. That’s far below real rates of 250 to 500 basis points, which prevailed before Greenspan went all in on money-printing in response to the dot-com bust.

Still, based on the blatant noise in the BLS’s “useless” jobs numbers, as they were described by even JD Vance, the rate cut chorus implies that the current skinny 110 basis points of positive return to savers and depositors is way too much.

Supposedly, the dire economic weakness implied by the BLS error confession means that the real cost of overnight money for gambling and other short-term purposes should be shoved back below the zero bound yet again in order to keep the economy from tumbling into the recessionary drink.

To be sure, another recessionary spell may well be underway. But for crying out loud—it’s not due to high interest rates. To the contrary, it is the easy-money fostered mountain of public and private debt—now totaling $103 trillion—that has ground economic expansion to a halt.

And we do mean a near halt. Industrial production, for instance, has been essentially flatlining since Q2 2023.

The truth is, the Fed’s elephantine balance sheet and interest rate-pegging regime are also still fueling dangerous financial bubbles and rampant speculation.

The Fed’s interest rate repression has so distorted the debt markets, in fact, that it has enabled the Wall Street nincompoop running the US Treasury to buy back tens of billions of long-term US Treasury bonds, of all things, and finance these purchases by issuing T-bills into the phony FOMC-controlled short-term money market.

What unfathomable insanity. There is no other way to put it.

So, yes, the good folks at the BLS have disappeared another 911,000 jobs for the year ending in March 2025. But so what?

After all, there is nothing new about the agency’s gross incompetence, given that this latest rug pull comes on top of the 818,000 jobs the BLS disappeared for the year ending March 2024 and the 306,000 jobs for the year ending March 2023 that also got a “just kidding” markdown. That’s 2.035 million jobs gone up in revisionary smoke during the last 36 months in the context of 12 material downward benchmark revisions in the last 20 years (versus only four material upward revisions).

Obviously, a lot more people should be fired than the hapless BLS commissioner who got canned by Trump a while back.

To wit, what’s not fit for purpose here isn’t merely the numbers crunchers at the BLS, but the 12-person monetary politburo at the FOMC, which has been foolish enough to make the monthly nonfarm payroll survey the be-all-and-end-all of the “incoming data” by which they supposedly macro-manage the entire $30 trillion US economy.

Reprinted with permission from David Stockman’s Contra Corner.

The post A Nation Managed by Misreads: Payroll Revisions, Rate Suppression, and the Debt Crisis appeared first on LewRockwell.

Many individuals I’ve spoken to believe Peter Marks is the government official most directly responsible for the entire COVID catastrophe, and those I know who directly interacted with him despise him. For that reason, six months ago, I published a detailed exposé of his conduct throughout the pandemic, both to highlight the systemic issues within our healthcare bureaucracy that must be fixed and to disincentivize other health officials from following in his footsteps. Since that time:

• Despite immense industry pushback, he was replaced with MAHA appointee Vinay Prasad

• Marks has made statements on the national media which display either a profound degree of ignorance of vaccines or a cult-like devotion to them, such as telling CBS the MMR vaccine absolutely does not cause encephalitis—despite this specific injury being one of the only vaccine injuries the Federal Government acknowledged as real and eligible for compensation when it created the the National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act of 1986.
Note: the primary reason DMSO (a safe and affordable substance with remarkable therapeutic applications against a wide range of “incurable” ailments) never entered mainstream medical practice was because the FDA, feeling DMSO’s broad therapeutic potential threatened their control of American medicine, waged a multi-decade war against it despite widespread opposition from the public, Congressmen, scientists and physicians across the country. One journalist who interviewed the successive FDA commissioners throughout this saga was struck by how “lacking [they were] in solid information about the most spectacular and controversial drug of our time” and how often they simply quoted nonsensical misinformation the FDA had previously put out about the drug without a basic understanding of it—something I would argue also applies to Peter Marks.

• Yesterday, it was announced that Peter Marks had started working with Eli Lilly, where he will oversee molecule discovery and infectious diseases at Lilly. While his salary has not been publicly announced, the AI systems I queried said given the existing precedent, he would likely get 2-6 million this year (a big upgrade from his roughly $200,000.00 FDA salary)—and possibly much more (e.g. 10-15 million).

This understandably enraged the vaccine injured parties who directly interacted with Marks over the last four years, so I felt it was important to revisit exactly what Marks did and discuss the broader revolving door in regulatory medicine.

Note: last year, the FDA approved Eli Lilly’s anti-amyloid monoclonal antibody for the treatment of Alzheimer’s disease (granting the application Fast Track, Priority Review, and Breakthrough Therapy designations). I showed in last weekend’s article, that these costly drugs do close to nothing (they may slightly slow the progression of Alzheimer’s disease) while simultaneously creating a variety of severe symptoms including giving over a quarter of recipients brain bleeds and brain swelling—yet remarkably, safer and much more effective Alzhemier’s therapies have languished in obscurity.

Sociopathic Structuring

A frequent criticism of corporations (which I believe also applies to governmental bureaucracies) is that their organizational structure encourages sociopathic behavior. This is because members of these entities are shielded from legal or personal accountability for their actions, with any wrongdoings being attributed to the corporation as a whole. In contrast, the main form of accountability most members face is the pressure to advance the institution’s mission (e.g., make more money), leading to the proliferation of increasingly unethical methods to achieve that goal.

To illustrate, consider this quote from Peter Rost, a former executive at Pfizer and one of the few pharmaceutical leaders to speak out against the industry:

It is scary how many similarities there are between this industry and the mob. The mob makes obscene amounts of money, as does this industry. The side effects of organized crime are killings and deaths, and the side effects are the same in this industry. The mob bribes politicians and others, and so does the drug industry … The difference is, all these people in the drug industry look upon themselves – well, I’d say 99 percent, anyway – look upon themselves as law-abiding citizens, not as citizens who would ever rob a bank … However, when they get together as a group and manage these corporations, something seems to happen … to otherwise good citizens when they are part of a corporation. It’s almost like when you have war atrocities; people do things they don’t think they’re capable of. When you’re in a group, people can do things they otherwise wouldn’t, because the group can validate what you’re doing as okay.

In looking through what went awry with the COVID-19 response, while Fauci was commonly blamed for all that went amiss, I kept running into another less-known individual who, while hidden within the FDA bureaucracy, I believe was directly responsible for many of the mishaps that happened

This was because Peter Marks was:

•The primary person who covered up the reports of COVID vaccine injuries (and instead repeatedly told the world they were “safe and effective”).

•Kept on pushing the FDA’s chief vaccine scientists (who were very pro-vaccine) to accelerate and condense the approval timelines for the COVID vaccines (as those approvals were needed to legally implement Biden’s vaccine and booster mandates). Eventually, Gruber and Krause reported their were no more corners they could cut to further accelerate the COVID vaccine approvals, at which point they were removed from the COVID vaccine approval process and Marks took it over (at which point the unjustifiable approvals and mandates quickly followed).

As such, I felt Marks should not be in the agency and put together a detailed summary of his gross malfeasance at the FDA throughout COVID-19 in the hopes his abhorrent conduct could become widely known. Shortly after, Marks announced his resignation in a spiteful letter that concluded with:

I was willing to work to address the Secretary’s concerns regarding vaccine safety and transparency…However, it has become clear that truth and transparency are not
desired by the Secretary, but rather he wishes subservient confirmation of his misinformation and lies.

This, in turn, prompted Robert Redfield (Trump’s 2018-2021 CDC director) to make a Twitter account to state:

Secretary Kennedy and Commissioner MartyMakary have the responsibility to build their own team at the FDA to move our nation forward. It was extremely disappointing to see Dr Peter Marks’ vindictive comments towards Secretary Robert Kennedy Jr. in his resignation letter. I firmly believe RFK will be the most consequential Health Secretary in our nation’s history.

Note: Redfield, to my knowledge, is the only CDC director who went into private practice (he treats long COVID) after leaving the CDC (whereas in contrast most directors accept lucrative or prestigious positions following their tenure).

Following Mark’s resignation (which many news outlets claimed was forced), many news outlets attempted to paint him as saint and a victim of RFK’s “war against science”

This gushing coverage of Marks, in turn, I would argue was due to his background. Specifically:

• Prior to joining the FDA, Marks was an academic hematologist and oncologist with an “average and unimpressive publication history” (none of which related to vaccines, but one of which extensively discussed the global need for fully informed consent and stated “those that have only pretended to move [towards informed consent] will have the greatest difficulty”).

• Prior to joining the FDA, he’d also worked for several years the pharmaceutical industry (although oddly, no information exists online as to which companies he worked for—although one was likely Novartis).

• While at the FDA, he prioritized pushing through extremely expensive gene therapies (22 in total—most of which cost over half a million dollars), including some highly questionable ones (e.g., he overruled three FDA review teams and two top officials to push through a failed muscular dystrophy treatment which subsequently killed a patient).
Note: Robert Malone recently showed that Peter Marks was not qualified to be a senior regulator and had minimal knowledge or background in molecular biology, immunology or vaccinology (and worse still, repeatedly chose to overrule the FDA scientists who did).

• Marks was seen as a global leader in commercializing this field (e.g., he helped direct Germany’s national program to develop gene therapies, his resignation shook the entire sector, and following his resignation, large drops occurred in the stocks of key gene therapy companies).

Fake Empathy

Roughly a century ago, a new industry which combined propaganda, marketing and the emerging science of psychology was created by Freud’s nephew and rapidly took off because of how effectively it shifted public opinion. Since that time Public Relations (PR) has been continuously refined and this invisible industry has gradually gained a monopoly over pubic discourse and gotten a stranglehold on our society.

Since so many backwards policies (e.g., medical ones) originate from PR campaigns, I’ve thus tried to expose the common tactics this industry uses (e.g., having “experts” spam a persuasive soundbite across every media platform), as when you can’t see it, those tactics exert a powerful subconscious pull on the listener, but once you are able to see them, they become immensely transparent and you begin to see through so many of the lies that are fed to us.

Note: I have long found it immensely aggravating how often public figures (e.g., politicians) will successfully repeat PR lines you can tell they clearly do not believe what they are saying as there is no conviction behind their words and frequently they will subsequently say or do things which clearly demonstrate they did not mean what they’d said at the time). Likewise, I have always greatly disliked how when corporations do something evil and get caught, and it will puts out a statement which begins with “we are deeply saddened by …” and then somehow are absolved of their culpability for what happened

In my eyes, one of the most critical points to understand about PR is that the industry has made it much easier (and cheaper) to create a positive perception by paying a PR firm to do that than it is to earn the positive perception through one’s actions. Similarly, public policy has shifted towards policies being determined by whether or not a PR firm can sell them to the public rather than if the electorate supports them.

Note: much of the PR apparatus depends upon having a total monopoly over information (so that nothing can challenge the absurd narratives millions are spent to make be entrenched in our society). One of most profound shifts in our society has been the ability of information to freely diffuse across social media, thereby breaking the monopoly on truth which used to be afforded to those PR campaigns and allow contrary narratives which challenge the absurdity of many of these PR campaigns to rapidly disseminate and dispel those campaigns (e.g., I’ve had numerous times where this Substack successful dispelled a multi-million dollar propaganda campaign and since I am just one of many people doing that, it’s not financially feasible for traditional PR campaigns to continue to control the narrative).

Within medicine, one of the most common complaints patients have is that their doctors “don’t show empathy” towards them—a situation I believe ultimately results from the fact doctors have so little time with all the patients they see that the fundamental human capacity to be present to another’s experience gets overloaded and they instead default to interacting with their patient’s through an abstract script to get through the day.

In turn, while I sometimes come across individuals (e.g., doctors or politicians) who have the capacity to quickly be present to large numbers of people, normally the only viable solution to this problem is to spend more time with each person. Unfortunately, the current insurance payment scheme incentivizes those short visits (which I believe is incredibly shortsighted as many chronic issues can only be solved with longer visits that cost much less than the innumerable short visits that take their place).

As such, the medical industry chose to address this lack of empathy not by giving patients what they wanted (a doctor they felt connected to) but rather by creating the facade of empathy. This for example was accomplished by training medical students to robotically repeat “empathy statements” (e.g., repeating back what the patient said or stating “I’m sorry to hear that”), as in many cases, that indeed works.

Note: due to how profitable medical students are, there has been a proliferation of medical schools which has required gradually dropping the standards for admission (as our declining education standards has led to a lack of qualified college graduates). Because of this, the profession recently relaxed some of core graduation requirements such as their first board exams being switched to pass/fail and the pass/fail in-person basic assessment of clinical skills (where physician “empathy” was evaluated) being permanently cancelled due to COVID social distancing.

Most recently, I saw this on display in a viral video where a popular YouTube doctor (who’s taken a lot of pharmaceutical money) “debated 20 anti-vaxxers” and then received many variants of these two responses:

• “I am deeply impressed by the incredible empathy and compassion Dr. Mike gave these people.”

• “I cannot believe how moronic and misinformed those people were; Dr. Mike is a saint for talking to them the way he did.”

Conversely, after I watched it the following points jumped out at me:

1. Many of the people selected to appear challenged vaccination by promoting extreme and hard to defend views, thereby making it possible to make viral clips of their statements to smear all criticism of vaccines (whereas in contrast individuals with extensive familiarity on many of the topics were not invited so that Dr. Mike’s “expertise” could go unchallenged).

2. His responses typically were a mixture of standard vaccine talking points (e.g, all evidence of vaccine injury presented to him did not count because “correlation is not causation”) followed by “empathetic” statements.

3. Because of the smooth hypnotic pace he used, false statements that went unchallenged were peppered in such as:

• He asserted VAERS overreports vaccine injuries when in reality less than 1% of injuries make it into VAERS (as the government never wanted a publicly available injury database and once a law forced its creation, the government has worked for decades to undermine VAERS).

• He “compassionately” claimed the Federal vaccine injury compensation program existed to help individuals injured by vaccines and that they could sue a vaccine manufacturer if they were unsatisfied with the verdict—when in reality it is nearly impossible to have most injuries be acknowledged by that program and even harder to be able to sue a manufacturer outside of it).

• He argued that “vaccine immunity is superior to natural immunity” (which is false as vaccine immunity often creates a very narrow immunity pathogens rapidly evolve a resistance to). Then as people started to point that out, he pivoted to stating “vaccines do not put you at risk of infection like an actual infection so they are superior due to the lower risk entailed in become immune” and was not called out for moving the goalpost from efficacy to safety.
Note: there is also strong evidence vaccine side effects are often much greater than those from a natural infection (best demonstrated by how many more people have permanent complications from the vaccines than a COVID infection.

In short, his actions were a classic example of the (incredibly cruel) gaslighting many patients experience when, after being injured by a pharmaceutical, they are told the injury is entirely in their head. In some cases that’s done in a rude and confrontational way, but in many others, it’s instead done in a deceptive and compassionate manner which still traps you in the same box.

Note: one noteworthy fact about this doctor is that in addition to “combating misinformation” throughout COVID, he also used his large platform to repeatedly advocate for social distancing and mask wearing—but like many other proponents of that doctrine, subsequently got caught flagrantly violating it (in his case at his birthday party where he was maskless and tightly packed amongst women he’d invited—after which he essentially refused to apologize for his hypocrisy).

Read the Whole Article

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Israel continued to hammer Gaza with military explosives on Thursday despite the announcement of the first stages of a ceasefire agreement with Hamas.

Israel always does this. When normal people get a ceasefire agreement they think “Good, this means we can finally stop fighting and killing.” Whenever Israelis get a ceasefire agreement they go, “This means we have to hurry up and kill as many people as possible before it takes effect.”

But it does appear that the killing and abuse will at least diminish for a time, which is an objectively good thing no matter how you slice it.

The first stages of the agreement reportedly entail a partial withdrawal of IDF troops, Israel’s starvation blockade officially ending, humanitarian aid being allowed into the enclave, and both Israel and Hamas releasing captives and stopping the fighting.

Drop Site News reports that according to Hamas sources, subsequent ceasefire phases will entail “No surrender, no disarming, no mass exile, but most of all a permanent end to the war.”

SCOOP: this is the agreement document between Israel and Hamas under the title “Comprehensive End to the Gaza War” – including the signature of the mediators. More details of my story – at @kann_news pic.twitter.com/1qGPGFck7q

— Gili Cohen (@gilicohen10) October 9, 2025

It remains to be seen if there will be any movement toward a lasting ceasefire beyond the first stage. When an agreement was reached late last year it never made it beyond the first phase and then the Trumpanyahu administration declared a siege and resumed the killing.

The far right members of the Netanyahu regime certainly seem like they don’t expect the ceasefire to hold.

Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich said in a statement that Israel has a “tremendous responsibility to ensure that this is not, God forbid, a deal of ‘hostages in exchange for stopping the war,’ as Hamas thinks and boasts,” and that “immediately after the hostages return home, the State of Israel will continue to strive with all its might for the true eradication of Hamas and the genuine disarmament of Gaza.”

Israel’s National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir issued similar remarks, saying that he and his Jewish Power party will use their leverage to dismantle the Netanyahu government if it “allows the continued existence of Hamas rule in Gaza.”

Netanyahu himself has been studiously avoiding any talk of commitment to a lasting ceasefire, mostly limiting his public statements to the significance of freeing Israeli hostages.

Notice how it doesn’t say words like “ceasefire,” “withdrawal,” or “end of war.” pic.twitter.com/HqSWje4313

— Assal Rad (@AssalRad) October 9, 2025

So there’s not a whole lot to feel optimistic about here. If the killing does stop on a lasting basis, it will be a pleasant surprise.

If it does, we can only surmise that the US and Israel calculated that the worldwide PR crisis created by the genocide was getting too severe to sustain, which would be a win for all of us. Trump has gone on record to say that “Bibi took it very far and Israel lost a lot of support in the world. Now I am gonna get all that support back.”

Either that, or they calculated that they’re going to need all their firepower for a planned war with Iran. Which would of course be terrible for everyone.

We shall see. For now at least it will be nice for everyone to have a breather. If things really do calm down I’m going to do something I’ve never done in my entire writing career and try to take a full weekend off work to decompress. Focusing on a live-streamed genocide for two years takes a toll on the mind and body.

Here’s hoping for a better future.

_____________

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The Kremlin is urging American foreign-policy makers not to give Ukraine long-range Tomahawk missiles it can use to strike deep within the Motherland, pointing out this would directly implicate the U.S. Stateside noninterventionists worry their country may be catapulted into another hot war.

Giving Kiev missiles with a range of up to 1,500 miles will lead “to a new serious stage of escalation of the Ukrainian crisis,” said Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova on Wednesday. Moreover, it “will not just send the confrontation into a downward spiral, but also cause irreparable damage to Russian-US relations,” since the missiles’ use is “simply impossible without the direct involvement of the US military.” She added that this would be a shame, especially since the two sides “have just begun to display certain elements indicating the resumption of a bilateral dialogue.”

According to reports from early this month, somebody with President Donald Trump’s ear convinced him that providing Ukraine with weapons and intelligence to strike inside Russia is a good idea. Trump personally signed off on the decision, per The Wall Street Journal. The rationale is that hitting Russia where it truly hurts, its energy infrastructure, will cripple its ability to fund the war. Energy, particularly gas and oil, is Russia’s primary revenue generator. India and China are its main clients. While Europe has significantly decreased its dependence on Russian energy, some analysis indicate that India and China have more than made up for those losses over the last few years. At the same time, the Ukrainians’ swarm of drone attacks on Russian oil refineries appear to be somewhat effective. The Russians are now importing gasoline from their neighbor and ally Belarus, The Moscow Times admits.

Trump the Peacemaker?

Trump is once again frustrated with the Kremlin. Despite holding several talks with and rolling out the red carpet in Alaska for Russian head of state Vladimir Putin, the war rages as intensely as it ever has. The two sides are lobbing drones and missiles at each other nonstop.

Trump insists his goal is to foster peace. His series of talks with the leaders of both nations, his hitherto refusal to level more sanctions against Russia, despite persistent pressure from American and European warhawks to do so, and his record of peace-brokering in other conflicts (news is breaking that his involvement has helped secure the release of the remaining Israeli hostages) suggest the president genuinely seeks peace. But this latest decision, along with his refusal to completely halt all American aid to Ukraine, casts some doubt.

Before Trump met Putin in Alaska, Ukraine had warmed up to the idea of giving up territory, or “land swapping,” as Trump called it, particularly the area which is already occupied by Russia and is overwhelmingly ethnically Russian. But there has been no indication that they’re willing to give up on seeking membership in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). This, the Russians have consistently contended, is the primary “root cause” of the war. As we have pointed out in several previous reports, this Russian grievance is legitimate.

Noninterventionists like Ron Paul and retired General Michael Flynn have criticized continued U.S. involvement in this war. Another group of people who would likely have opposed how the Trump administration is dealing with this situation are America’s wise early leaders.

The Founders on Foreign Folly

In our June 23, 2025 print issue, we republished an older article titled “Minding Our Own Business” in which we reminded readers of what three early American presidents thought about U.S. meddling abroad.

George Washington saw Europe as a region full of drama that does us no good to be ensnared in:

Europe has a set of primary interests, which to us have none, or a very remote relation. Hence, she must be engaged in frequent controversies, the causes of which are essentially foreign to our concerns…. Why quit our own to stand upon foreign ground? Why, by interweaving our destiny with that of any part of Europe, entangle our peace and prosperity in the toils of European ambition, rivalship, interest, humor, or caprice? It is our true policy to steer clear of any permanent alliance with any portion of the foreign world.

Then there’s the famous maxim from John Quincy Adams about the  problem with going half a world away to hunt down dragons:

America goes not abroad in search of monsters to destroy. She is the well-wisher to the freedom and independence of all. She is the champion and vindicator only of her own…. She well knows that by once enlisting under other banners than her own, were they even the banners of foreign independence, she would involve herself beyond the power of extrication in all wars of interest and intrigue, of individual avarice, envy and ambition, which assume the colors and usurp the standards of freedom.

And for those who remain unconvinced, here is what the author of the Declaration of Independence, Thomas Jefferson, had to say about getting involved in foreign entanglements:

Our first and fundamental maxim should be, never to entangle ourselves in the broils of Europe; our second, never to suffer Europe to intermeddle with cis-Atlantic affairs. America, North and South, has a set of interests distinct from those of Europe…. She should therefore have a system of her own, separate and apart from that of Europe.

In that same TNA article, we cited the prophetic words of essayist William Graham Sumner. Writing in regard to the Spanish-American War, Sumner predicted that a dangerous precedent had been set:

[E]xpansion and imperialism are at war with the best traditions, principles, and interests of the American people, and they will plunge us into a network of difficult problems and political perils…. The people … who now want us to break out, warn us against the terrors of “isolation.” Our ancestors all came here to isolate themselves from the social burdens and inherited errors of the old world…. What we are doing is that we are abandoning this blessed isolation to run after a share in the trouble.

This article was originally published on The New American.

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The reason war archives are withheld from publication for years after the war is over is that time is needed for court historians to instill in the minds of the population that the official narrative is correct and that any deviation from the official narrative is a conspiracy theory. The claim that the withholding of the actual facts is a national security matter is a complete lie. The war is over. The enemy is defeated. No “national security” is any longer involved.  But the facts have to be suppressed until a false explanation can prevail.

That Americans have swallowed false narratives time and again raises the question whether the American population is intelligent.

Recently I had a conversation with a normal Republican.  The media, which is hostile to Republicans, has nevertheless successfully set in stone that Putin and Russia are evil enemies seeking our destruction. When I explained the actual facts, he said that we had different opinions. In other words, facts are not facts. They are just opinions. So the official explanation has the same weight as the facts.

The media indoctrinated Americans that Putin invaded Ukraine as the opening gun of reestablishing the Soviet Empire. This has been the Western propaganda, and it has succeeded in preventing any focus on what the real issue is.

As I have stressed, when the real issue cannot be acknowledged, the opportunity for more misinformation is created, and war results from the inability to see clearly enough to make good decisions.

When facts are overwhelmed by propaganda,  it guarantees the failure of civilization.

The post War Is Our Future appeared first on LewRockwell.

The President of the Unites States Donald Trump had demanded to be given the Noble Peace Price. But following that demand would have been disastrous for the already blemished prestige of the Noble. The government of Norway, which strongly influences the decisions of the Nobel Peace Price committee, was in a pickle:

With hours to go until the announcement of this year’s Nobel peace prize, Norwegian politicians were steeling themselves for potential repercussions to US-Norway relations if it is not awarded to Donald Trump.
…
Mr Trump has long been outspoken about his belief that he should be awarded the peace prize, an honour previously bestowed on one of his presidential predecessors, Barack Obama, in 2009 for his “extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and cooperation between peoples”.

In July, Mr Trump reportedly called Jens Stoltenberg, Norway’s finance minister and the former Nato secretary general, to ask about the Nobel prize.
…
The newspaper columnist and analyst Harald Stanghelle speculated that retribution from Mr Trump – if it were to come – could take the form of tariffs, demands for higher Nato contributions or even declaring Norway an enemy.

After some talks behind the scenes it was decided to give the price to a different person than Trump but with the very obvious intent to also satisfy Trump by furthering a major foreign policy aim of his:

The Nobel Peace Prize was awarded Friday to Venezuelan opposition leader María Corina Machado who lives in hiding after attempting to run against President Nicolás Maduro.

Machado, 58, was recognized for keeping “the flame of democracy burning amidst a growing darkness” and “ever-expanding authoritarianism in Venezuela.”
…
She leads the Vente Venezuela opposition party, but was blocked from running as the nation’s president and expelled from office in 2014. She now lives in hiding and faces “serious threats against her life,” the Norwegian Nobel Committee said.

The Trump administration has long aimed at ousting Nicolas Maduro, the socialist leader of Venezuela. It has positioned its military assets around the country and is planing from regime change under false pretense:

Shortly after taking office, Trump declared Tren de Aragua to be a foreign terrorist organization that had “flooded the United States with deadly drugs, violent criminals, and vicious gangs.” In July, the president ordered the Pentagon to target certain Latin American drug cartels. By August, there were eight naval vessels—including destroyers, a cruiser, and a littoral-combat ship—operating in the Caribbean Sea. By September, the first of four boats had been struck, and 21 alleged drug traffickers have now been killed. Last week, the administration sent a confidential notice to Congress signaling its intent to carry out more strikes. The campaign could extend inside Venezuelan territorial waters or include drone strikes inside its land borders, defense officials told us.
…
But it is far from clear that the ties between Maduro’s government and Tren de Aragua are as extensive as the Trump administration has suggested, or that they exist at all. Ronna Risquez, author of the book El Tren De Aragua, told us there was “no evidence” that Maduro leads gang or drug-smuggling operations; an internal memo from the U.S. National Intelligence Council arrived at a similar conclusion. It’s also not clear that Venezuelan drug operations, centralized or otherwise, are significant enough to merit the country being singled out as a threat to American lives. Venezuela is not a major cocaine or fentanyl producer. And even though most of the world’s cocaine grows in neighboring Colombia, Venezuela is also not a major transit hub.

Trump’s ‘anti-narco terrorist’ campaign is clearly aimed at regime change. This despite extensive offers by the Venezuelan government to allow the U.S. to profit from Venezuelan riches (archived):

Venezuelan officials, hoping to end their country’s clash with the United States, offered the Trump administration a dominant stake in Venezuela’s oil and other mineral wealth in discussions that lasted for months, according to multiple people close to the talks.

The far-reaching offer remained on the table as the Trump administration called the government of President Nicolás Maduro of Venezuela a “narco-terror cartel,” amassed warships in the Caribbean and began blowing up boats that American officials say were carrying drugs from Venezuela.

Under a deal discussed between a senior U.S. official and Mr. Maduro’s top aides, the Venezuelan strongman offered to open up all existing and future oil and gold projects to American companies, give preferential contracts to American businesses, reverse the flow of Venezuelan oil exports from China to the United States, and slash his country’s energy and mining contracts with Chinese, Iranian and Russian firms.

That offer wasn’t enough for a greedy Trump:

The Trump administration ended up rebuffing Mr. Maduro’s economic concessions and cut off diplomacy with Venezuela last week. The move effectively killed the deal, at least for now, the people close to the discussion said.

The Trump administration did away with generous offer because it is confident that its plans for regime change will achieve a total domination over Venezuela.

The new Noble Peace Price laureate, María Corina Machado, plays a big role those plans.

Who is that lady you might ask. In July 2024 the NY Times published a friendly portrait of her (archived):

Ms. Machado, a conservative former member of the national assembly once rejected by her own colleagues, has not only corralled Venezuela’s fractious opposition behind her, but has also captivated a broad swath of the electorate with a promise for sweeping government change.
…
If the opposition wins, Mr. González, 74, will be president. But from Washington to Caracas, everyone understands that Ms. Machado is the driving force behind the movement.
…
She became a political activist in 2002, helping to found a voter rights group, Súmate, that eventually led a failed effort to recall Mr. Chávez. She was a darling of Washington — the U.S. government provided financial aid to Súmate — and became one of Mr. Chávez’s most detested adversaries.

But it wasn’t just the government that loathed her. Among colleagues in the opposition, she was often viewed as too conservative, too confrontational and too “sifrina” — Venezuelan for “snobbishly high class” — to become the movement’s leader.

She has said that the politician she most admires is Margaret Thatcher, the conservative icon known for her stubbornness and fealty to the free market. And Ms. Machado has long supported privatizing PDVSA, the state oil company, a move other opposition leaders say would put Venezuela’s most valuable resource in the hands of a few.

Machado, while on the U.S. payroll, was involved in a 2002 military coup attempt in Caracas:

Questions still surround Ms. Machado’s actions in 2002, when dissident military officers and opposition figures led a short-lived coup meant to oust Mr. Chávez. Ms. Machado was at the presidential palace during the installation of a new president, Pedro Carmona.

In the 2005 interview with The Times, Ms. Machado insisted that she and her mother were in the palace that day only to visit Mr. Carmona’s wife, a family friend — not to support the coup.

More recently, in a 2019 interview with the BBC, Ms. Machado called on “Western democracies” to understand that Mr. Maduro would only leave power “in the face of a credible, imminent and severe threat of the use of force.”

Machado even asked the Zionist war criminal Benjamin Netanyahoo for military support in a coup (edited machine translation) :

María Corina Machado asked the prime minister of Israel, Benjamin Netanyahu, a military intervention in Venezuela, through a document posted on its social network X in 2018.
…
Machado described the military intervention of “power and influence” against the Venezuelan government.

“Today sending a letter to Mauricio Macri, President of Argentina, and to Netanyahu, Prime Minister of Israel, to ask them to apply their strength and influence to advance the dismantling of the criminal regime in Venezuela, intimately linked to drug trafficking and terrorism,” she wrote.

In addition, the document points out that Machado was “convinced that the international community, according to the doctrine of the responsibility to protect, is called to give Venezuelans the support needed to generate the change,” a change of government.

Machado is still in cahoots with  (and likely still payed by) the U.S. to further regime change in Venezuela (archived):

[U.S. Secretary of State] Rubio met with five opposition figures in May who secretly fled to the United States in what he called a “precise operation.” He has praised the opposition leader, María Corina Machado, whom he called by her nickname, the “Venezuelan Iron Lady,” in a tribute this year.
…
Pedro Urruchurtu, an adviser to Ms. Machado, said in an interview that the opposition had developed a plan for the first 100 hours after Mr. Maduro’s ouster that would involve a transfer of power to Edmundo González, who ran for president against Mr. Maduro last year.
…
“What we’re talking about is an operation to dismantle a criminal structure, and that includes a series of actions and tools,” Mr. Urruchurtu said, adding: “It has to be done with the use of force, because otherwise it wouldn’t be possible to defeat a regime like the one we’re facing.”

The opposition’s plans include persuading other governments to take diplomatic, financial, intelligence and law enforcement actions, he said.

To recap – the Noble Peace Price committee is giving the price to an opposition politician in South America who is on the payroll of the U.S. government and has been involved in previous military coups attempts in her country. Her advisor is arguing for the use force to overthrow the government. Ms. Machado’s plan is to the sell out whatever Venezuelans have to the foreign empire that pays her.

The Noble Committee and Norway may, for now, have saved themselves from Trump’s wrath but the decision to award the price to Ms. Machado is another huge blemish to its record.

Reprinted with permission from Moon of Alabama.

The post Fearing Trump’s Wrath Nobel Committee Hands Peace Price To Regime Change Puppet appeared first on LewRockwell.

In 1918, the Austrian political scientist Joseph Schumpeter delivered a now-famous lecture titled “The Crisis of the Tax State.” The question he addressed was whether or not the First World War would bring about a destructive fiscal crisis for European states. Would the burdens of post-war debt and taxation threaten to destroy these states? Many at the time believed that it would be difficult or impossible to fiscally recover from the enormous debts and tax liabilities incurred by states during the war.

Schumpeter, however, concluded that the states of Europe would easily survive whatever fiscal strains might be caused by the war. After all, he noted, the states of Europe were well developed “tax states” by the early twentieth century. In the short and medium term, at least, the ruling regimes of Europe could essentially raise revenue at will, and the state organizations themselves thus faced no existential crisis. If the states of Europe did fail, he noted, it would be for some reason other than fiscal collapse, such as conquest or revolution. Nonetheless, “the hour will come,” he noted, that the drive to endlessly increase state revenues would eventually consume and destroy the private sector. But, in 1918, he predicted (correctly) that the day of reckoning was not yet at hand.

Now more than 100 years later, it’s clear that Schumpeter was right. No states collapsed due to an inability to raise taxes. As fiscal demands increased on states, it was not the states who suffered. The taxpayers, on the other hand, fared less well.

Unfortunately, Schumpeter’s conclusions apply to the modern-day United States as well. Like the states of Europe, the United States is now a full-blown “tax state” in that lawmakers of the central government can raise taxes with minimal political or institutional effort without meaningful legal resistance from any other domestic institution. Consequently, as the burdens of debt and upward-spiraling welfare costs continue to put pressure on the Treasury, the answer will be to simply raise taxes—and the taxpayers will absorb it.

Moreover, the history of modern democratic regimes confirms that interest group politics will ensure that spending continues unabated. In other words, given the lack of meaningful obstacles to accelerated taxation, there is no institutional or legal way out of this. The only way that the power of the tax state will be meaningfully challenged is through the dismemberment of the state through secession, or through outright dissolution of the existing state and the founding of an entirely new successor state.

The US Is a Tax State 

But first: what is a tax state exactly?

Schumpeter emphasizes that the reason tax states so easily endure fiscal pressures is the fact that tax states can so efficiently, with minimal friction, extract revenues from the domestic population. This is made possible by these characteristics of tax states, which are also characteristics of modern states in general:

1. Centralization: taxes are directly imposed by the central government. The central government does not rely on regional or local governments to collect taxes or enforce tax laws. (This does not preclude regional or local governments from imposing their own taxes.)
2. Unilateral power: The central government can raise taxes unilaterally. The central government’s legislature or executive has the prerogative to raise taxes on its own authority without the permission of any other sovereign within the state’s territory. Put another way, no regional or local government has the ability to veto a tax increase or legally prevent its implementation.
3. The central government freely decides how revenues are spent. Once tax revenues are collected, the central government spends the revenues in whatever manner is preferred by the central state’s legislative power.
4. Taxes are not fees or a payment for a service. Strictly speaking, a fee is a payment that is designed to fund a specific service, and only those who “benefit” from the service pay the fee. Tax “benefits,” on the other hand, are not tied to any particular service. Tax states are not legally held to any sort of reciprocal duty to spend tax revenues in a manner that benefits those who pay the tax.

The United States government fulfills all these requirements of tax states. In the United States, the Congress can raise direct taxes on the population at any time by simply increasing the income tax.  Recent experience has also shown that the US president can unilaterally raise import taxes to any level he prefers. This doesn’t even require a vote of any kind. And, should these taxes prove insufficient to meet the needs and preferences of the central government, the central government can borrow legally unlimited amounts of money.

Moreover, when more debt is needed, the central bank will often purchase some portion of the central government’s bonds to subsidize and push down interest rates on government debt. This process is made possible through monetary inflation, allowing the central government to extract revenue via monetization of debt and an “inflation tax.”

Throughout this process, no state or local government can legally prevent these tax increases, and no institution outside the central government has any say over how the dollars are spent. Nostalgic sentimentalists may try to console themselves with feel-good stories about the United States being a decentralized, federalist state under some alleged “rule of law.” But, when it comes to taxation, the United States is clearly a de facto unitary state.

The Rising Tax Burden 

This is good news for the American state itself. As federal spending continues upward unabated, the federal government will continue to have untrammeled access to more revenue. Where a tax increase in Congress cannot be had, the central government can simply turn to monetary inflation or to new tariffs, implemented via a “stroke of the pen” at the central bank or in the Oval Office.

For the taxpayer, however, it’s all bad news. Fiscal pressures on the central government will continue to mount, but there will be no discussion of austerity, spending cuts, or anything else that would actually lessen the spending obligations of the central government.

The exigencies of democratic coalition politics will ensure cuts will not happen. To cut spending on any major program would mean political suicide for many members of Congress and endanger critical fundraising needs for candidates and party organizations. Thus, there will be no substantial cuts, least of all to the largest federal programs that put the most pressure on federal revenues: Social Security, Medicare, military, and interest on the debt. There certainly will be no cuts to spending on interest on the debt—now topping a trillion dollars per year. To do that would be to prompt a sovereign debt crisis.

Instead, the central government will just keep going back to the well of taxation over and over, either through more ordinary taxes, or through an ever growing inflation tax. We’re already seeing this at work in how the central bank has already effectively abandoned its so-called two-percent target for price inflation. The official price-inflation rate sits at 2.9 percent, and the central bank is easing monetary policy. (If price inflation does go down at this point, it will be thanks to declining economic conditions, not to restrained monetary policy.)

What the Future Holds—and the Battle of Ideas

In the short term, economic booms and busts will come and go, but over the medium and long term, the true tax burden on taxpayers will continue to grow and grow. So long as most of the American population considers the US government to be a legitimate state, there will be no impediment to the state continuing to extract ever larger amounts of revenue from the domestic population.

Over time, this will lead to more and more impoverishment for the productive population, but what alternative will the taxpayer have? It is clear that democratic elections will not reverse the trend. If elections were any threat to this trend, we would have seen some evidence of it by now. Even with rising price inflation, rising import taxes, and historic deficits, taxpayers have shown little interest in cutting federal spending. Even among those voters who claim to be for fiscal austerity, most draw the line at any cuts that endanger their favorite federal programs. For example, “hands off my Medicare” is a favored refrain for those who pretend to care about cutting government spending.

There is no legal or institutional mechanism that will bring this to an end. Even as interest on the national debt soars, and as the requirements of federal social benefits continue to rise, the “answer” will simply be more debt and more taxes. If interest rates get “too high” the central bank will intervene with monetary inflation. This will lead to higher inflation, but this will allow the state to meet its political “obligations” with cheaper dollars.

Most of the taxpayers—few of whom understand why federal debts and federal spending increase price inflation—will be fine with this, and they’ll blame price inflation on greed or global oil prices. In short, the end game will likely look like something we witnessed in Latin America during the 1980s: ever increasing government spending coupled with runaway inflation. The state, however, will remain intact through it all.

The only way out will be through the dismemberment of the state through secession, or through the dissolution of the state—hopefully in a peaceful manner similar to that of the dissolution of the Soviet Union. Unfortunately, no true opposition is likely to materialize until the middle classes and working classes have endured years of downward mobility. It will be only then that a critical mass of the population abandons its faith in the regime—a misplaced faith formed by decades of state propaganda and public “education.”

For those who actually value freedom, prosperity, and reining in the state, the best thing we can do right now is this: work to speed up the process of state disintegration by exposing the evils of the spending-inflation scam to a portion of the public large enough to force true reforms. As we say at the Mises Institute, “we learn economics to know how we are being ripped off.” Countless millions of taxpayers are being ripped off. But they still don’t understand how or why.

On top of this work, it is critical to ceaselessly work to undermine the public’s view of the American state’s legitimacy. No state that steals, inflates, and impoverishes on such a massive scale could possibly be considered moral or legitimate, or beneficial. As the collapse of the enormous and militarily powerful Soviet state showed us, the key to winning against the state is to increasingly expose how the state mercilessly exploits the taxpayers.

Ultimately, this is a battle of ideas.  As Ludwig von Mises knew, we can only win against state power if we first win in the battle of ideas.

The post The Crisis of the American Tax State appeared first on LewRockwell.

Underneath the patina of newsworthy slogans is a moral and intellectual sewer the size of the Serengeti. I am of course referring to The New York Times, and the hailing of a cold-blooded murderer as an American hero. The latest such outrage is about Joanne Chesimard, a black 78-year-old woman who died in Havana, Cuba, last week. The Times used her “revolutionary” name—Assata Shakur—as if she were some kind of black Joan of Arc. She was nothing of the sort, just a cold-blooded murderer of a state trooper in 1973.

I will not go on about this ghastly individual whom the left has turned into a kind of Robin Hood. Robbing banks, getting willingly laid rather a lot by black gangsters, and having absolutely no remorse for killing a married father and state trooper in cold blood might make her a heroine for the Sulzberger gang, but not for little ole me. She was scum, and she will rot in hell, God willing.

My point is that like her ideology, her assumed name was a contradiction in terms. How dumb must one be to take on the name of the oppressor? I’ll tell you, they have to be both dumb and blind. That includes a few rappers and many politicians of the left, and a jerk like her obituary writer for the Times called Haberman. (Known for the minute size of his willy.)

It is indicative of her ignorance that this Chesimard woman took the name Assata Shakur, an African or Arab appellation, in order to distance herself from her American roots. Many blacks in America tend to do that, especially sports stars, which only confirms my belief that God gives athletic ability with one hand and takes away brain cells with the other. It is as if Jews adopted German names after the war, and Palestinians took on Jewish names of late.

“How dumb must one be to take on the name of the oppressor?”

Let’s start at the beginning: Slavery was a universal institution that existed from the dawn of time, and across the globe, societies employed slave labor even as troops. Five thousand years ago Egypt, Greece, Carthage, and Rome practiced slavery. Farther south, Africans were busy enslaving other Africans and selling them to the Arabs and Romans. It is a fact that the Koran and the Prophet Muhammad legitimized slavery, but somehow this is not mentioned nowadays. Algerian and Tunisian raiders enslaved more than a million white Europeans between the 16th and 18th centuries.

The Muslim slave trade endured for fifteen centuries and transported 17 million slaves, mostly Africans. The European total of transported slaves was 11 million shipped across the Atlantic. Exploiting the West’s orgy of self-flagellation, the African Union has just joined the Caribbean Community (Caricom) in demanding reparations from Britain and from Uncle Sam. The Caribbean group wants 18 trillion greenbacks, the Africans a bit more.

Racism, exploitation, and oppression are words that types from down South use as often as Americans use the f-word. The trouble is, I read and know history, and their claims are as bogus as some Hollywood female breasts. As I stated before, Africans have been enslaving other Africans for centuries. They sold them to the Romans and to Arabs in 1563, a few years before any whites arrived on the Dark Continent. The Kingdom of Kongo (yes, spelled with a “K”) exported 4,000 to 8,000 slaves annually.

Three hundred years later, Oman Arabs ran slave plantations off the east coast of Africa. In Northern Nigeria, one of the largest slave societies equaled the number enslaved in the United States (4,000,000). African rulers virulently opposed British antislavery efforts. Unsold slaves were threatened with death. Yet American blacks today continue to adopt Muslim and African names, a bit like Jews adopting Adolf as their favorite first name, or Palestinians naming their newly born Bibi.

Joanne Chesimard adopting the name she did only showed her historical ignorance. As does the N.Y. Times again and again in its futile attempts to undermine American society.

This article was originally published on Taki’s Magazine.

The post What’s in a Name? appeared first on LewRockwell.

You can call this bragging and don’t have to believe it. I got my start sorting the sublime from the repulsive at the tender age of seven. Hanging out at a slightly older boy’s house, let’s call him Mike, is when and where my standards erupted. It was the day that bloodthirsty intolerance for ugly expressions first got stoked.

The Herman’s Hermits song “Mrs. Brown You’ve got a Lovely Daughter” came on the radio. Our host felt that the Hermit’s needed accompaniment. He also seemed to believe his guests would be keen on it. My first impulse was to bolt. But the adult capacity to grin while enraged strangely came over me. The delectable snacks the mother of that house was known to lay out stopped a hasty exit from happening. It is absolutely degrading what a preteen will go through for a first-class pastry.

It’d be too cruel describing Mike’s stab at matching Scouse, Mancunian or whatever you call Peter Noone’s dialect crooning that sappy goo. Hearing “Daw-tuh” from the kid only once would bring violent emotions out of a baby-cuddly golden retriever. Dramatizing his noises busting moves extinguished any lingering traces of pity in an instant. There was a Tonka toy dump truck on the floor nearby; it looked perfect for the purpose of justifiable homicide. My brain already had a bit of a legal turn. One snag stood in the way of permanently silencing Michael. Without hearing from him themselves, could a jury be convinced of how justifiable, humane and necessary his elimination actually was? It was chicken, but I kept on grinning instead.

As years have passed, both my rationality and self-restraint have seriously eroded from those innocent days. Distance from the objects of my disgust is all that has kept me this side of the penitentiary. Society pays the price when the sensate among us cower in the face of artistic atrocity. The depravity has gone so far that aesthetic crimes against humanity are funded by governments in the name of enlightenment.

During the postwar renaissance somewhere between half and a full day’s pay – in a menial job – could place a teenybopper within fifty feet of a performing musical genius. Now, they fork out 6, 7 or 8 days pay for sounds resembling the kind Mike inflicted. And the people calling themselves critics keep cheering them on.

In 1975 a kid working an 8-hour shift at McDonald’s earned $16.80. For no more labor he could see Pink Floyd, Fleetwood Mac, Led Zeppelin, The Rolling Stones or Jethro Tull with money left for hot dogs and soda. Today, people with college degrees put in a full week, or more, for acts that may merit less than Tonka toy treatment but should certainly not go unpunished. When perv-formers go to jail for statutory, extortion or shooting each other, it is not necessarily their worst crimes being penalized.

As this is written the top five Spotified artists are Bruno Mars, Lady Gag-Gag, The Weaknd, Kendrick Lamar and Billie Eilish. Bruno will playing in Vegas. You can see him, from the next county, for $329. The Lady is on at Madison Square Garden at rates ranging from $456 to $5500. With those price ranges you can envision how far out of range the peasantry will reside – a good ear might not mind.  In 1975 you could almost touch the amps for ten bucks. Presently, with extra fees and taxes accounted for, it takes more than two days for even Californians toiling the trenches to be skied. Make that more than four in most other states. The conciliation is that amp static is only somewhat distinguishable from the “music.” In a decade, will anybody be streaming command performers from the reeking 20s of the early 21st century? People still crank up Patsy Cline six decades later.

If only the purge of pulchritude was restricted to the audio-sphere. It is easier today for a physically handicapped person to traverse a Japanese TV game show obstacle course successfully, than it is for an unconnected peon to get his script before a Hollywood producer or director. What do all these hoops and hurdles do for the cause of decent drama getting screened?

After falling asleep in the first one, going to John Wick: Chapter 4 was an act of time-to-kill desperation goaded by reviews like this from Collider:

It’s official – John Wick: Chapter 4 has taken the Keanu Reeves action franchise to new heights. At the time of writing, the film has become the top-rated film of the entire franchise as far as Rotten Tomatoes critics scores go – it’s also become the first in the series to crack the 90% barrier, currently sitting at 93% after a love-bombing from film critics.

Numerous other reviewers called it “unpredictable.” How many times do you have to head butt a sports arena wall without a helmet, like Gus Ferotte did in Jack Kent Coke stadium in 1997 with one, to find a guy doing cartwheels while making impossible pistol shots not moronic? We also hear of “plot twists.” Like what? Being found inexplicably while on the lam at every turn? Or surviving getting shot more times than both Bonnie and Clyde? Meanwhile, Wick’s foes run the gamut of occupations from desert sheiks to sushi slicers. How many chapters before a knitting grandma goes at him with her needles?

Elsewhere Denzel Washington intersperses actual acting, like in Roman J. Israel, Esq., with playing an unarmed codger crushing half-a-dozen athletic 25-year-olds training ordnance on him in multiple Equalizer inflictions. Screenwriters must spend all afternoon assembly lining these schlock-fests. For every time Robert McCall looks at his watch, watchers in theaters with functioning gray matter have look at theirs 3 more.

Of course, not all action flickery follows the same unpredictable routine. We are inundated with others where it’s family hit men trying to retire. Alas, those who live by the sword. Fortunately, they never lose their edges. It comes in handy as beleaguered heroes unpredictably vanquish forces the size of army divisions in finales. Imagine the frustration of script readers spiking treatments that so unoriginally fail to include this mandatory parting shot.

You might find the latest from Tom Cruise hard, if not an impossible mission, to sit through too. The first hour of the latest one features Ethan Hunt fawned over as the savior of mankind by everyone from the president on down. It’s like the slobbering of an Operating Thetan in the presence of L. Ron himself. Who needs supernatural superheroes when we’ve got Ethan Hunt? If he hasn’t matched every super-human deed of immortals yet, wait a few more sequels.

But what about serious drama? That’ll get us closer to brutal reality. The latest blockbuster in ’thinking man’s film,’ The Brutalist, has done a double layout with a full twist over the orca. It’s more of a ‘what were they thinking’ film.

Only a nincompoop asks why a world renowned architect leaves New York City to sweep floors in a Podunk furniture store. What fascist forces keep the land of the free from knowing who this junkie genius is? Pliant viewers are expected to walk in already aggrieved for wounded prodigies who might have to slug it out like those hideous common Americans. The film’s model, Marcel Breuer, never endured anything close. The filmmakers rely on the general dearth of erudition evident in themselves – and expected from audiences — doing this 180.

Deep in Penn’s Woods Lazlo Toth, the protagonist, works for Cousin Attila who has been Christianized by a shrill shiksa wife. She’s a catty Catholic whose Hitlerian Hebrew-phobia is soon revealed. What kind of woman, other than a nascent Nazi, has a problem when a guy misses the toilet by three feet? Put her name up there next to Irma Grese.

In the meantime, our hero is cheated out of his fee for remodeling a library by Harrison Lee Van Buren.  The gauche tycoon is later peer pressured by the smart set into liking the new space. He tracks down the man he stiffed for what turns out to be new, improved exploitation. After rescuing Laz from penury Van Buren introduces the architectural genius to society. What else could be next but a commission to design a multi-million dollar contract?

Then, true to form, the gentile town council pulls a fast one on a Holocaust survivor. The community center they’ve commissioned him to draw up must also fill the role of defining local faith. Lazlo brilliantly positions a skylight to shine a crucifix on the altar at noon. That’s a plot untwist necessary for anyone slow enough to have missed the message of exclusion viewers were hosed down with for the first 60 minutes.

The uncircumcised, who were often circumcised in the era, weren’t done with him yet. If Harrison junior can’t have Lazlo’s taciturnly traumatized niece … wasn’t there other prey in the family? When Sr. takes Toth to Tuscany pursuing marble comes the TMI moment from hell. The master builder succumbs to local revelry. Once all liquored up and staggering into the tunneled quarry is when old Harry makes his move. Like Simon Legree with Cassy, Van Buren will have his way with the servants. The next morning the sodomizee looks none the worse for wear and tear. He says “yes boss” quicker than Paul Newman blackjacked by Strother Martin. It comes as a surprise when Toth’s wife turns out to know hubby was raped. The audience didn’t even know Lazlo did. Going by the narrative depicted, did he really mind?

Aint’ that the West writ large? First they Holocaust him, then strong-arm his genius for callous Christianity and finally let him have it like a bitch-boy in the prison shower. Don’t commit the hate crime of thinking that doesn’t summarize US welcome of Holocaust survivors to a T. The only safe question is why Hollywood hasn’t confronted America with their collective guilt before now.

It is during the picnic where Harry Jr. can’t get his grimy paws on Toth niece Zsofia, when the brutal “truth” comes out. Putting Lazlo and family up and back in business, including him in Van Buren outings while providing opportunity no one else does … is really begrudgingly ”tolerating” the despised immigrant. Why, they’ve turned the Statue of Liberty upside down! Persecuted wunderkind’s only respite is a spike of euphoric horse in the arm.

It’s time to incorporate didactic messages from the enlightened. If you can’t find a way to be gay, black, trans, Jewish, Muslim, handicapped and female simultaneously … when’s the next Nuremberg Tribunal? It’ll be womanned by Joy Reid, Randi Weingarten and Al Sharpton. Calling out The Brutalist for being as inanely silly as it is, is quite verboten. We are expected to stand in awe …cuz finally we see what we really are.

Saying that there isn’t the vaguest resemblance in this tall tale to anyone’s experience ever misses the point. The audio-visual branch of the victim industry’s role eradicating hate entails manufacture of an ersatz reality coining more villains to hate. The notion that Lazlo Toth would be an object of homoerotic allure to a Daddy Warbucks like Harrison Van Buren is a shock to the senses. Whatever your taste or persuasion, that genuine plot twist would have kept Lot’s wife from looking back.

We’ve reached the point where you have to get really high to get high art. The pretentiousness of professional critics has weaseled its way into commerce. It can be costly telling clients that what they’ve been told about The Brutalist – and better believe to qualify as culturally hip — makes no sense. When prospects say otherwise it’s necessary to grin like I did at seven. Nobody wants to miss out on the treats.

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