Lew Rockwell Institute

Have you ever had the impression you are living in a world stage theatre of clowns and jokers, who make you laugh and cry? And when you walk out of the theatre, you smile to yourself, “It’s just been a little drama play, but if we don’t take it seriously, they will take us over and down.”

So, let us take it seriously. What at times looks, sounds, and appears like a joke, in reality, is not a joke at all. Like Trump the peacemaker. Nine months into his second presidency, there is no peace in sight in Ukraine, and there is no real peace in Palestine, let alone the rest of the Middle East and the world.

Even if President Trump claims credit for the fragile Israel-Gaza ceasefire he says he brokered – we do not know, whether it is going to hold, or will fall apart like all the previous ones?

Just this one seems to have achieved an exchange of Hamas-taken hostages (in the dozens) and Israeli prisoners (in the thousands). Is Israel indeed releasing all her political prisoners?

If Trump’s election campaign promises of peace were serious, he could have stopped the Zionist-Israeli aggression almost from one day to the next, by saying nyet to his buddy, Bibi Netanyahu, no longer supplying weapons, nor money. In the two years since the infamous 7 October 2023, US taxpayers have dished out more than 21 billion dollars to keep the Israeli Gaza killing machine – and others – oiled and going.

Is this latest – hopefully real — “breakthrough” a Trump achievement because he thought it would bring him his long-coveted Nobel Peace Prize? Hardly. Because his channels must have told him in advance that the Prize would be awarded to the Venezuelan opposition lady, Madame María Corina Machado – and that Machado’s Peace Prize would strengthen and even justify his, Trump’s aggression and “regime change” efforts in Venezuela. It is a two-in-one fusion.

Ms. Machado is known to have attempted coups against the Maduro government on various occasions. So, is the Norwegian Nobel Committee awarding a hybrid Peace Prize to please conventional reigning politics?

A controlled, multi-concocted move in favor of Trump’s US of A? If this behind the curtain motion will prove successful, giving the US eventually control over the world’s largest hydrocarbon reserves, it may have been worth, waiting for perhaps another year (?) for his self-nominated and so desired Peace Award.

Could Mr. Donald Trump have been put in his current presidency as controlled opposition? Well-chosen by Tavistock (the UK-based social engineering agency), because of his super-ego, manifested daily, and his erratic personality, an egocentric buffoon, confusion, and chaos creator, thus, divider of society?

Is Trump given orders by these powerful invisible underground forces, told to first defy them and then follow them, for more of peoples’ credibility and confusion?

Though no tangible proof is available, all is possible, especially if in the end he gets his “piece of sugar”, a benefit towards his other mantra (other than the peacemaker), MAGA, Make America Great Again. With Venezuela under the roof, he would have added a substantial chunk of wealth to his MAGA.

The powers behind the rotten, corrupt, and criminal world system that so far successfully controls our civilization, point to an immensely commanding financial stronghold, like the city of London and its offshoots around the world: Paris, Frankfurt, Tokyo, New York, and not to forget, Zurich (financially) and Geneva (politically and financially).

The invisible Powers-that-Be do not want peace with Russia. They never did. And they have their hands on enough money to keep trying subduing Russia, buying off Germany’s Fritz Merz, France’s Emmanuel Macron, and Brussels unelected European Commission (EC) Queen Madame Ursula Von der Leyen. But they will not succeed – ever.

However, they create an intimidating ambiance of war and fearmongering meant for appeasing western societies for easier dominance.

Germany has again been chosen to be in the forefront as an aggressor on Russia – like in the two preceding world wars. Why? Because Germany was long ago identified as one of the western countries most obedient and submissive to orders. Tavistock 101.

Although Trump officially questions the worldwide intro and promotion of AI (artificial intelligence), the digitization of our lives, the control over the people worldwide, to the point of dominating our lives in a way of no return. However, he allows it to happen in the US at warp speed – after all, the motto is competing with China.

Mr. Trump may not know that this was the play-script he was given to advance the world a little bit closer to full globalization, speak a fast-accelerating blow-up – what he pretends he does not want. His non-action on the global scene of decay allows causing a bit more damage, more killing, more submission, more torture. He did not and does not want to know, because his ego tells him constantly that he is stronger than the screenplay he is acting on.

They make us people believe that two (East and West) or more forces are fighting each other – divide and conquer style – and achieve dividing us, the people, the potentially real power that is. And we fall for it, as always.

Another Tavistock 101.

There is no real proof for either option: a genuine Trump, or a controlled Trump. Nevertheless, his role as Controlled Opposition – a bit like Bernie Sanders of the US Congress but less obvious — becomes an ever-stronger gut-feeling, as increased Trump-caused or initiated chaos is waging around the globe.

People stand down or even lie down, doing NOTHING against it, letting the very society / civilization, an achievement of the people, be flushed down the drain.

And the MAGA chief, whether controlled or not, in the end will get his pound of flesh.

And We the People? Let us enjoy the daily spectacle with humor, as the world is blown to pieces in slow motion, as what it is – a world stage theatre into which we have been compromised for Inaction.

The original source of this article is Global Research.

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Given that the Federal Reserve has obviously abandoned its 2 percent target for the rise in prices brought on by its own paper-money inflationary policy, it’s important that we keep in mind how our nation’s paper money-system and the Fed’s inflationary policy plunder and loot the American people.

There is the plunder and looting that takes place through the simple inflationary expansion of the money supply. By inflating the amount of money in circulation, the Fed reduces the value of money sitting in people’s savings accounts or that they receive in income. Their savings and income buy less than before simply because the federal government, through its inflationary policy, has debased the value of money.

This is what has been occurring ever since the U.S. government converted to a paper-money standard during the President Franklin Roosevelt administration during the 1930s. Prior to that time — in fact, for more than 125 years prior to that time — the official money of the American people had been gold coins and silver coins. That’s because the Constitution mandated gold coins and silver coins as the official money of our nation.

But gold coins and silver coins cannot be printed, like paper money can. So, FDR used the excuse of an economic “emergency” to declare a permanent end to our constitutional monetary system. Indeed, he did it without even the semblance of a constitutional amendment. And the U.S. Supreme Court upheld his extraordinary “emergency” power to effectively amend the Constitution through executive order and congressional law, even though the Constitution does not delegate“emergency” powers to either the president or the Congress.

Ever since then — year after year, decade after decade — the value of the paper dollar has gone down. That’s because the federal government found it more convenient to pay for its out-of-control welfare-warfare-regulatory programs through newly printed money than by simply raising income taxes on people.

After all, people get upset when public officials raise their income taxes. With rising prices that come with inflation, most people have no idea that it is federal officials who are causing the prices to rise through inflationary debasement of the value of people’s money. So, they get angry at people in the private sector who are raising their prices to reflect the lower value of the money rather than get angry at people in the government sector who are causing the rising prices through inflationary expansion of the money supply.

Even at an inflationary rate of 2 percent per year, the citizenry are still getting plundered and looted to the tune of at least 2 percent per year. When one compounds that amount year after year, the amount of plunder and looting increases substantially.

But there is another factor to consider — the benefit that an inflationary policy brings to state and local governments in the form of higher property taxes on people’s homes.

Over the years and decades, the Fed’s inflationary policies have caused the value of people’s homes to soar. While this phenomenon has caused people to feel like they are increasing the equity in the home, it actually doesn’t make any real difference at all. Why? Because all the home values in the surrounding area have increased too.

Thus, people quickly discover that selling their home in the hope of acquiring a better home doesn’t work out. In order to benefit from the increased inflationary-induced value of their home, they have to move to another part of the country — one where home values are relatively lower.

The people who love the inflationary increase in home values are state and local government officials. That’s because they rely on property taxes to fund their operations — and those property tax revenues are based partly on the assessed value of people’s homes.

Thus, as the value of people’s homes increase due to the Fed’s inflationary debasement policies, the real-estate taxes that state and local officials are assessing on people’s homes are constantly going up. That means that while people are receiving no real benefit from the increase in their home values, they are suffering a constantly worsening situation in terms of the real-estate taxes they are paying, which are going up year after year, decade after decade.

According to ChatGPT, with a 2 percent inflation rate, the nominal value of someone’s house, given compound interest, will increase by 22 percent over a ten-year period, meaning, as ChatGPT states, its “real purchasing power remains about the same.”

But notice something important: while the real purchasing power remains the same, the same can’t be said of the amount of property taxes that must be paid to state and local officials. The property tax burden is constantly increasing because the taxes are being assessed on the nominal value of the home, not the real purchasing-power value of the home.

Thus, it’s important to keep in mind that America’s paper-money monetary system that FDR foisted upon our nation on a permanent basis, which is reinforced by the inflationary policies of the Federal Reserve, which was established in 1913, ends up looting and plundering people not only at the federal-government level but also at the state and local government level.

Reprinted with permission from The Future of Freedom Foundation.

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When Donald Trump came down that escalator in 2016, just like The Simpsons foretold, I just kind of shrugged. A billionaire running for president. I’ve seen that movie before. But his rhetoric became increasingly radical, even revolutionary. He lashed out at immigration, bad trade deals, “globalists,” and the “senseless wars.”

I wasn’t really sure who Roger Stone was when he contacted me that year, telling me how much he loved my book Hidden History. Talk turned to his long time friend Trump, who’d just announced his candidacy. “He knows about all the conspiracies,” Stone assured me. “You’re going to love him.” I don’t know that I ever loved him, but I did start paying more attention. Much of that rhetoric sounded pretty good to me. And long, long overdue. Trump blasted our Third World infrastructure, which has been largely untouched for more than sixty years. He talked about bringing the troops home from the over 150 countries around the world where they are still nonsensically stationed. He called out the corruption in Washington, D.C.; the “Deep State.” He vowed to “Drain the Swamp.” He especially focused on his villainous opponent, career criminal Hillary Clinton, dubbed her “Crooked,” and promised to prosecute her. He inspired millions, who loved it when he called out “Fake News.”

Naming Mike Pence as running mate was alarming, but JFK had been pressured into putting LBJ on the ticket, and it didn’t stop him from trying to reform things. Trump’s first Inaugural Address was stunning, the best since JFK’s. Among the guests he invited to watch the ceremony was Dr. Andrew Wakefield, who first spread the word about the obvious links between vaccines and autism. Wakefield had been smeared by the state controlled media. It took courage to invite him. The response to his election from the Deep State Trump was critiquing daily was unprecedented. Shrieking women lined the streets in “pussy hats,” screeching “Not my president!” All of Hollywood stood in unison against him. He received countless threats of physical harm, proudly posted publicly on social media. Grown college students were assigned “safe spaces” with crayons, because they couldn’t “deal” with Trump’s election.

But once he entered office, things began unraveling. At least for people like me, who had found it hard to accept the abrupt transformation from lifelong liberal playboy and trash talking reality TV star into a renegade crusader. Almost as soon as the White House door shut behind him, Trump was urging supporters to stop chanting “Lock her up!” in regards to Hillary Clinton. He declared that the Clintons were “good people.” And he didn’t do anything that he said he’d do “on my first day in office.” No executive orders banning birthright citizenship or sanctuary cities. It quickly became clear that Trump was more about talking than doing. Weeks, and then months passed. No mass deportations. No grand infrastructure proposal. No troops called home. Trump’s first term became a mishmash of juvenile food fights online with vacuous celebrities, partisan impeachment efforts, and constant flip flopping. The COVID psyop didn’t help, but it can never be forgotten that Trump presided over it.

Trump’s maddening flip flops on COVID alone are thoroughly documented in my book Masking the Truth: How COVID-19 Destroyed Civil Liberties and Shut Down the World. It’s still the champion- the most shadow banned book in the world. Trump continues to brag about the diabolical “warp speed” vaccine which has in reality killed and maimed millions. He seems to enjoy trolling his most loyal supporters, whom he obviously knows are strongly opposed to him on this issue. That is the essence of the Trumpenstein Project; an “outsider” who is viciously attacked by every corner of the establishment. Who feigns solidarity with dreaded conspiracy theorists and Thought Criminals. Who is always “considering” doing things which really might make this country better. Improve the lives of the People. But who ultimately, when push comes to shove, always sides with the Deep State. The undrained monsters in the Swamp.

We all know what happened in 2020. Cities burned, historical statues were torn down, and Trump did nothing. Except tweet like a blue collar worker in a trailer park. Yes, there was even more electoral fraud than usual in 2020. Trump stomped his feet and hired the worst lawyers he could find. Then threw the January 6 protesters under the bus, while too many of them were denied due process for four years. To his credit, he did pardon almost all of them as he entered office for the second time. He also wrote some of the same executive orders he’d promised the first time. And he created DOGE, headed by another offbeat billionaire, Elon Musk. Eliminate government waste? Sounds good. But DOGE rapidly fizzled out, after some blockbuster exposures from USAID. Musk started feuding with Trump for unclear reasons. As has been the story throughout Trump’s time in office, no one was prosecuted for the fraud.

But something happened to Donald Trump a few months back. Suddenly, he became reluctant to release the files of sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein. Trump’s FBI director, Kash Patel, and his top aide, former talk show host Dan Bongino, publicly stated that Epstein killed himself. Then they, along with aging Blonde bombshell Attorney General Pam Bondi, simply said that there was no Epstein file. Never mind all the previous statements, and Trump’s own references to it. Then, Trump was asked about it at a press conference, and exploded in rage. “I can’t believe you’re asking me about Epstein!” It was the first time the public had seen this kind of anger from him. And ever since then, Trump’s character-which I have termed Trumpenstein-has taken a really dark turn and never been the same. No more broken promises about doing great things. Now it’s all frightening threats. Police state type of stuff. Basically, Trump started doing what his deluded TDS critics claimed he really wanted to do.

As it is with everything associated with Trump, it’s hard to tell exactly what he really has done, versus the nonstop loaded language, always full of contradictory twists and turns. He did send National Guard troops into the streets of Washington, D.C., much as Joe Biden had after the contested election of 2020. It seemed like an oddly belated move, given that then President Trump did absolutely nothing when the cities were burning, people were dying, and property was being destroyed in the long, hot summer of 2020. He has talked about sending troops to Chicago, Los Angeles, and other “Blue” cities. That is obviously unconstitutional, but the Right seems to care as little about the Constitution as the “Woke” Left does. At around the same time that he went ballistic over the Epstein List, Trump bombed Iran. Clearly and unequivocally at Israel’s behest. It was the most overt cuckery on the part of a U.S. president ever, and every president has been an Israeli cuck since the assassination of John F. Kennedy.

These moves cost him an unknown number of supporters. The question of just how committed our nation is to supporting Israel right or wrong started being asked, by formerly mainstream figures like Tucker Carlson and Candace Owens. It still is unclear how many MAGA supporters were unquestioning Zionists. Because of Trump’s frequent references to “senseless wars” and his campaign slogan of “America First,” it seems logical to assume that most of them weren’t unquestioning Zionists. I like to picture how many of the MAGA faithful are now scratching their heads, having endured the ridiculous QAnon psyop, and the perpetual flop flopping and backtracking. I’ve seen those lists of the hundreds of great things Trump has supposedly done so far. Most of them amount to vague claims of anonymous sex traffickers being arrested, with some of them tried secretly at Guantanamo Bay, where the likes of Swamp Queen Hillary Clinton were also supposedly prosecuted.

Read the Whole Article

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The seven study categories were overall, thyroid, gastric, colorectal, lung, breast, and prostate (see chart below). The sample was of over 8.4 million South Koreans.  Pretty hard to ignore.  (The first study was of approximately 300,000 residents of Pescara province in Italy monitored for 30 months and indicated that the Covid mRNA shots significantly increased the risk of overall, breast, bladder, and colorectal cancer.)

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LYNDON BAINES JOHNSON is a president who has escaped the scrutiny and judgment of history despite considerable documentation that should make him an outstanding candidate for historical review, critique, and analysis. His primary biographer, Robert Caro, consistently gets rave book reviews from mainstream media for his disingenuous puff piece books on LBJ. It’s entirely possible that LBJ is the most evil or one of the most evil presidents in US history. (ILLUSTRATION: The USS Liberty post-Israeli attack)

Some researchers believe that LBJ was the mastermind behind JFK’s assassination and researcher Phillip F. Nelson wrote a book documenting his investigation on this issue: LBJ: The Mastermind of JFK’s Assassination.

However, one of the greatest unknown chapters in LBJ’s presidency is that he personally gave the order to Israel to bomb and utterly destroy the USS Liberty and its entire crew of 294 Americans. Astoundingly, when the mission went awry and Sixth Fleet Commanders were ordering the rescue of the besieged and bloodied USS Liberty crew, LBJ ordered that rescue operations be called back, at least twice. Against all odds, the USS Liberty survived but after the attack, 34 Americans lay dead. Except for four worthless .50 caliber machine guns, the USS Liberty was unarmed and defenseless against the far superior firing power of the Israeli navel and air force armada that descended upon it with relentless and unspeakable terror.

Not a whole lot has been written about the USS Liberty. It’s just another critically important issue that has been buried in history, but two extraordinary books document the truth. James M. Ennes Jr., is a retired US Naval Officer and a survivor of the Liberty attack who wrote a book that documents his investigative disclosure of the truth, here.

Peter Hounam, an investigative journalist, wrote Operation Cyanide, Why the Bombing of the USS Liberty Nearly Caused World War III. Hounam’s extraordinary book, published in 2003, relies heavily on the work of Ennis and also documents numerous interviews that Hounam conducted with the USS Liberty survivors as well as other folks in the US, British, and Israeli governments.

The “official” story of the USS Liberty, according to the government and mainstream media version of the event, is that on June 8, 1967 the Israelis accidentally bombed the Liberty off the coast of Egypt and killed 34 American sailors.

The real story is that President Johnson, who was being battered in the polls over the Vietnam War and facing a general election loss and even losing the Democrat primary, asked the Israelis to bomb the Liberty to create a casus belli and to secure a Gulf-of-Tonkin-style resolution to explode the world into war — because in America everybody loves an outraged and indignant president who will use the full force of the military at the slightest provocation, even a government-planned false flag attack.

The USS Liberty, however, encompasses far more than a murderous psychopathic American president resorting to hideously evil deeds to get re-elected. In addition to ordering the total destruction of the USS Liberty and potentially sending 294 Americans to a watery grave in the Mediterranean Sea, LBJ also ordered the nuclear bombing of Cairo, an event specifically designed to create a nuclear war by blaming the entire USS Liberty affair on Russia or Egypt. More horrifying, it’s documented that US planes were on emergency standby orders as pilots waited on the runways in their planes armed with nuclear weapons. The nuclear bombing of Cairo was called off only three minutes before the nuclear bomb drops.

As fate would have it, LBJ’s plan blew up in his face and the world got a reprieve from a US-induced nuclear holocaust.

How did all this happen? First, it must be understood that the USS Liberty was supposed to be destroyed and sunk within minutes and without any survivors.

The actual attack on the USS Liberty commenced at 2:00 p.m. Israel time on June 8, 1967. The USS Liberty was 13 miles off the coast of Gaza and moving slowly at five knots. The crew had observed several flyovers by Israeli reconnaissance planes earlier in the day.

When the USS Liberty was struck, it was struck with an awesome force. According to USSLiberty.org, a website created by the survivors to document and expose the truth, the ship was first struck by Israeli fighter aircraft:

“Israeli fighter aircraft launched a rocket attack on USS Liberty. The aircraft made repeated firing passes, attacking USS Liberty with rockets and their internal cannons. After the first flight of fighter aircraft had exhausted their ordnance, subsequent flights of Israeli fighter aircraft continued to prosecute the attack with rockets, cannon fire, and napalm. During the air attack, USS Liberty’s crew had difficulty contacting Sixth Fleet to request assistance due to intense communications jamming. The initial targets on the ship were the command bridge, communications antennas, and the four .50 caliber machine guns, placed on the ship to repel boarders.

After the Israeli fighter aircraft completed their attacks, three Israeli torpedo boats arrived and began a surface attack about 35 minutes after the start of the air attack. The torpedo boats launched a total of five torpedoes, one of which struck the side of USS Liberty, opposite the ship’s research spaces. [20] Twenty-six Americans in addition to the eight who had been killed in the earlier air attacks, were killed as a result of this explosion.

Following their torpedo attack, the torpedo boats moved up and down the length of the ship (both the port and starboard sides), continuing their attack, raking the ship with cannon and machine gun fire.[21] In Malta, crewmen were later assigned the task of counting all of the holes in the ship that were the size of a man’s hand or larger. They found a total of 861 such holes, in addition to “thousands” of .50 caliber machine gun holes.”, link here.

USS Liberty Timeline, here.

0600: Israeli Nord 2501 Noratlas (flying boxcar) reconnoiters Liberty….

0603: Reconnaissance aircraft reports to Israeli naval headquarters that “GTR-5” is written on the ship, identifying it as an NSA intelligence vessel.

0720: Fresh American flag is raised….

1000: Two unmarked, rocket-armed, delta-winged jets circle Liberty three times. Liberty officers can count rockets and see the pilots, but see no identifying marks on the plane. The jets radio Israeli headquarters that the ship is flying an American flag….

1055: Pinchas Pinchasy, naval liaison officer at Israeli air force headquarters, reports to Naval Headquarters that the ship cruising slowly off El Arish is “an electromagnetic audio-surveillance ship of the U.S. Navy, named Liberty, whose marking was GTR-5.”…

1100 & 1130: Israeli reconnaissance aircraft again circle Liberty.

The above information is critically important because it proves beyond any reasonable doubt that the Israelis were well aware that the USS Liberty was a well-marked US spy ship. US spy ships are extremely easy to spot because, as telecommunication vessels, they are loaded with wires, antennas and other communication gear that are easily recognized and identifiable (unlike Russian spy ships that were realistically camouflaged as trawlers and fishing boats). The reason it’s important to understand this is because the cover-up of of the USS Liberty incident was so flimsy and fictitious that both the US and Israeli governments officially stated that the USS Liberty was mistook for an Egyptian vessel that hauls horses. This is simply impossible.

As the timeline unfolds, it’s clear that the attack on the USS Liberty had two goals: 1. first destroy and disable all communication capabilities and 2. sink the ship, her crew and guarantee that there were no survivors. The timeline continues:

1358: Two unmarked delta-winged Mirage jets attack Liberty. After taking out gun mounts, they target ship’s antennae and bridge with heat-seeking missiles.

1424: Three French-built 62-ton Israeli motor torpedo boats approach Liberty in attack formation.

1435: Torpedo boats launch five German-made 19-inch torpedoes at Liberty. One torpedo strikes starboard directly into NSA area, accounting for 25 of the 34 men who would be killed. Torpedo boats then circle, machine-gunning the ship with armor-piercing projectiles for another 40 minutes.

At this point, the USS Liberty was being pummeled by air and sea with everything that attack planes and motorized torpedo boats (MTB’s) could possibly throw at them. The decks were ablaze from napalm fires, the ship was being torpedoed by the Israeli Navy and bombs and rockets from the air rained down on them.

This is where the story turns extraordinarily heroic from human ingenuity that pretty much killed LBJ’s grand plan. One of the USS Liberty’s communication transformers had been down and not functioning, something the Israeli’s must have known in advance because it wasn’t destroyed or even hit. A courageous crew member managed to fix it by stringing long wires across a burning deck and rendered it operable, and, of course, capable of sending out a mayday message to numerous US aircraft that permeated the area. However, the Israeli planes had high tech jamming equipment that successfully jammed the signal. It’s probably also true that at that point the Israeli’s were not much concerned with the USS Liberty sending out a message because they believed that all communication equipment was knocked out permanently.

Peter Hounam writes in Operation Cyanide, “Liberty radioman Richard Sturman concluded that the attackers had carefully prepared for the attack with the specific intention of preventing the ship communicating with the outside world. To do so effectively they must have had prior knowledge from shore-based receivers of the five frequencies being used by the ship, so that jamming gear could be tuned to them. Sturman recalled his anger when he discovered that the international distress frequency, used for Mayday messages, was also jammed”.

The astute crew however made a startling discovery. The Israeli jamming capabilities did not work when they were actually engaged bombing and the USS Liberty crew had windows of a few seconds of opportunity in between strikes to send out a message.

Hounam writes, “At first, the signalmen felt their task was hopeless. Plane after plane was swooping in on the ship, firing cannon, shooting missiles and dropping napalm….Then someone spotted that there was a respite from the jamming, lasting just a few seconds, when the attacking planes fired their missiles. Halman grabbed the opportunity and shouted into the mike, ‘Any station, this is Rockstar. We are under attack by unidentified jet aircraft and require immediate assistance!’”. On the USS Saratoga (call-sign ‘Schematic’) the radioman picked up the message but it was garbled, possibly by further jamming. “Rockstar, this is ‘Schematic,’ he said. ‘Say again, you are garbled.’”

Eventually, the USS Liberty message was acknowledged and authenticated 10 minutes after the attack began. The USS Saratoga confirmed Liberty’s message with “Roger, Rockstar. Authentication is correct…”. The messaged bounced everywhere and was even acknowledged by two US embassies in the region. Furthermore, it was impossible for the Pentagon not to know of Liberty’s attack as all messages are also automatically routed to the Pentagon and other government agencies. The Israelis must have also intercepted the radio message.

The Liberty crew was relieved and believed that help was on the way. Wrong! Although fleet commanders quickly ordered rescue operations, twice the rescue missions were ordered called back by Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, a close friend and trusted associate of LBJ. In fact, it’s documented that during one of the conversations between the the Sixth Fleet Commander and McNamara, LBJ got on the phone and roared, “We will not embarrass an ally,” to reinforce McNamara’s direct command from LBJ to not rescue the ailing USS Liberty and her crew.

According to James Ennes, the entire attack lasted 1 hour and 15 minutes, although some crew members believe it was longer. Unquestionably, the attack was sheer hell for those on board the USS Liberty and the agony was prolonged by the fact that help from the Sixth Fleet never arrived as expected.

Then something extraordinary happened. The Israelis stopped attacking despite having more than enough firepower to finish the job of sinking the USS Liberty and her crew. Its been documented that the Israelis had commando helicopter crews hovering above the USS Liberty with a crew to finish the job. Clearly, the USS Liberty crew expected to die.

But with the message out and everybody knowing about it, including the Russians who knew what was going because they were close by in their own disguised spy ships as they intercepted the message or possibly even observed the USS Liberty being attacked, the Israelis panicked, called off the attack and never finished the job. Eventually, the surviving crew was rescued and many were badly injured.

Hounam documents an interview with one of the injured USS Liberty crew members, Joe Lentini:

I woke up, it was pitch-black and I was in water. I tried to stand up and put my weight on my left leg and it wouldn’t support me, obviously I fell back down; I didn’t know at the time I had six broken ribs, a collapsed lung, a fractured skull, both tympanic membranes in my ears were blown out, shrapnel all over me in my body…it never occurred to me that I didn’t have a leg and it never occurred to me that I was about to die.

Shockingly, the USS Liberty tragedy did not begin at 2:00 p.m. Israeli time according to the sanitized official version. It began earlier. According to Hounam, he interviewed a retired Air Force pilot, Jim Nanjo, who spent 20 years on the H-bomb attack force. The job of such pilots who lived on US air bases was to be ready to jump into a plane and carry out orders immediately.

Nanjo told Hounam about how he was awakened on the morning of 6/8/67 between 2:00 a.m. and no later than 4:00 a.m. by an alert that told him an emergency situation existed and he needed to man his plane immediately. Other bomber pilots were also manning their planes and revving up their engines waiting for the “go” order and their orders. They knew nothing about their mission and Hounam writes:

Nanjo was in no doubt that the world was near to Armageddon that day…

There was however one other significance of his story that he had not spotted. The klaxons had woken him at between 1 am. and 4 am; he was certain it was no later, but the Liberty was not attacked until 5 am California time. How were the American military and their commander in chief, Lyndon Johnson, able to anticipate the attack, and yet apparently not know the Israelis were behind it.

Hounam also documents that Nanjo was aware that other US Air Force bases were under the same highest alert in Guam, Britain, Moron, Spain as well as in the US. What was Nanjo carrying? Hounam writes:

Even after 35 years, he was reluctant to provide details of the bombs carried by his squadron that morning.: ‘Other than to say it was a weapon of mass destruction. I am not able to give you the nomenclature.’ Then he confirmed that they were carrying thermonuclear weapons — H-bombs…

It’s well documented that LBJ and his trusted Secretary of Defense, Robert McNamara, were deeply and personally involved in the USS Liberty tragedy, the cover-up of the truth and even a scheme to explode the world into nuclear warfare.

To comprehend the severity of the situation, it’s imperative to understand the Cold War, the backdrop against which it was played, the prevalent paranoia at the time of the Communist threat and the incredible rise of America’s military industrial complex to the world’s sole superpower. Many who knew LBJ well feared that he was unstable, mentally ill, a psychopath, or even worse. He was notoriously crude and vulgar. Denis Healey, the Secretary of Defense in Britain so despised and distrusted LBJ that he wrote in his memoirs:

Lyndon Johnson was a monster….

[He was] one of the few politicians with whom I found it uncomfortable to be in the same room. Johnson exuded a brutal lust for power which I found most disagreeable. When he said, “I never trust a man unless I have his pecker in my pocket,” he really meant it. He boasted about acting on the principle, “Give me a man’s balls, and his heart and mind will follow.”… Source: Operation Cyanide

That LBJ was mad is validated by his numerous actions that fueled his personal ambitions over the decades and in the summer of 1967. LBJ was obsessed with one thing and one thing only: reelection. He was in grave danger of losing the presidency and his power. That he would do anything to maintain that power is 100% consistent with the depth of his evil.

But LBJ was also an extraordinarily clever master politician who profoundly understood how a raucous game of geopolitics could be played and manipulated to his own advantage, especially when it came to courting the approval of the American people. Vietnam was already a whopper of a failure and LBJ’s war was growing more unpopular by the second.

The Middle East has always been a disaster (some things never change), at least since oil came into play and the modern nation state of Israel was created by the United Nations in 1948. The rise of Arab nationalism was also heating up as Egyptian President Gamal Nasser and the Marxist styled Baathist movements were flourishing. Syria and Iraq had shed western imposed monarchs and were raising their own brand of dictators. Israel was becoming America’s unofficial 51st state as the Evangelical movement was rising in anticipation of fulfilling Biblical prophecy now that Israel existed for the first time since Biblical times.

Read the Whole Article

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One must grant the man this: he possesses an unerring instinct for the vulgar moment. The setting was presumptively solemn—the Knesset, a chamber that has known its share of bombast and crisis. The occasion was ostensibly historic—the ratification of a ceasefire that has, for the moment, halted the slaughter in Gaza. And the principal actor was, of course, the 45th and 47th President of the United States, a man who believes that history is a trophy to be won and then brandished at the nearest camera.

He came not to mourn the Palestinian dead, whose numbers are so vast they have become a macabre abstraction, but to preside over a victory lap for the Israeli right. He came to receive the adulation he believes is his contractual due. And he came, inevitably, to talk. Oh how he talked. To listen to Donald Trump address the Israeli parliament is to experience a peculiar form of auditory waterboarding: a torrent of self-congratulation, bizarre digressions about gas stations in the sky and generals named “Raisin,” and a level of sycophantic praise for his host, Benjamin Netanyahu, that would make a North Korean newsreader blush.

The core of the performance, beneath the bluster and the off-the-cuff suggestion that his counterpart be pardoned for his various legal embarrassments, was a claim of world-historic triumph. The “age of terror and death” was over, he announced. The “new Middle East” was dawning. One half expected the walls of Jerusalem to part to reveal a choir of angels singing “Hail to the Chief.”

Let us, for a moment, apply the cold compress of reason to this febrile rhetoric. This “peace” was achieved not through diplomacy in the sense that grown-ups understand it, but through the application of overwhelming and indiscriminate force, bankrolled and armed by the United States. The Gaza Strip is now a leveled, toxic ruin, its population traumatized, starved, and displaced. To call this a victory for peace is like calling the bombing of Dresden a triumph of urban renewal. It is a peace of the cemetery, a peace that resembles nothing so much as a successful pest extermination.

And what of the vaunted “deal”? It is, in essence, the product of a simple and brutal equation: when one side possesses a modern military arsenal and the unconditional support of a global superpower, and the other side possesses little more than desperation and primitive rockets, the outcome is not a negotiation. It is a decree. The terms are not discussed; they are imposed. Hamas, suitably pummeled into a state of momentary incapacity, has been forced to swallow them. To call Trump a peacemaker for overseeing this process is like crediting a bulldozer with architectural innovation.

…when one side possesses a modern military arsenal and the unconditional support of a global superpower, and the other side possesses little more than desperation and primitive rockets, the outcome is not a negotiation. It is a decree.

The most nauseating spectacle, however, was the sight of a nation that styles itself the Middle East’s only democracy feting a man who has expressed open admiration for the world’s strongmen and a visceral contempt for the norms of liberal democracy. Netanyahu, a man clinging to power like a limpet to a rusting hull, lauded Trump as a “colossus” who will be “enshrined in the pantheon of history.” One can only assume this pantheon includes such other luminaries as Caligula and the Emperor Nero.

They thanked him for moving the embassy to Jerusalem, a cynical provocation that solidified apartheid-like realities. They thanked him for recognizing the stolen Golan Heights. They thanked him for withdrawing from the Iran nuclear deal, an act of such profound geopolitical stupidity that it gifted the mullahs a perfect pretext to accelerate their nuclear program, necessitating the very bombing campaign Trump now boasts about. They are thanking the arsonist for showing up with a single bucket of water after he spent years dousing the house in gasoline.

And then, with a staggering lack of self-awareness, Trump extended a hand to the Iranian regime he had just finished bombing. “We are ready when you are,” he cooed, as if addressing a spurned lover rather than a nation whose facilities he had just obliterated. It was a moment of pure, unadulterated performance, utterly divorced from statecraft, history, or basic logic. The message was clear: I can smash your capital to dust one day and offer you “friendship” the next, because it is all about *my* narrative, *my* deal-making prowess.

The whole tawdry affair—the groveling, the grotesque self-praise, the willful blindness to the mountains of corpses upon which this “peace” is built—was a perfect epitaph for our era. It was not the signing of a peace treaty. It was the celebration of a successful mob hit. The don flew in, collected his tribute, assured his capo he was the greatest, and promised everyone a bright future in his new racket. The only thing missing was the cigar.

History will record this speech, but not in the way its participants hope. It will be remembered not as the dawn of a new age, but as a gaudy, ill-mannered party thrown atop a mass grave. The guns are silent for now. But the hatred, the injustice, the utter humiliation—those have been poured into the foundation of this “new Middle East.” And that is a foundation that cannot hold.

The entire grotesque charade can be viewed here. But a fair warning: make sure it’s been a few hours since your last meal.

This article was originally published on The Goins Report.

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Donald Trump garnered some major political optics yesterday as he signed his Gaza Peace Plan, with a raft of European, Asian and Arab leaders sitting in the cheap seats watching the spectacle. But who has a signing of a peace agreement when neither of the two parties to the conflict are present? This is more than a bad joke… this is a scam. I can understand holding a funeral for the dearly departed even if the corpse ain’t present, but what took place Monday in Sharm El-Sheik was more like a royal wedding without a bride or groom present… Hell, neither chose to attend even via video conference.

I can guess why Bibi didn’t show… The majority of those attending had recently granted official recognition to Palestine as a state and Bibi did not want any photos of him shaking hands with the lot. Israeli officials, speaking to the Hebrew press, continue to insist that there will never be a Palestinian state.

Hamas, for its part, is the largest of the 14 Palestinian resistance groups. Even if Hamas agreed to disarm — which it will not do in my judgment — that still leaves 13 other groups, such as Palestinian Islamic Jihad, Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine, and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine.

Phase I, i.e. the exchange of hostages for jailed Palestinians, will conclude this week. I suspect that Hamas will not be able to return all of the remains because some of the Israeli hostages are buried under rubble as a result of attacks by the Israeli Air Force. I don’t discount the possibility that Bibi will use that as justification to return to the bombing campaign in hopes of forcing the Palestinians to vacate Gaza.

The wild card is Donald Trump. Many of the staunchest pro-Israel supporters in the West wrongly interpret today’s showing of the various Arab, Muslim, West Asian and European leaders as proof that there is a consensus on disarming Hamas. Yet, as I noted above, the majority of leaders present are on the record insisting that there will be a Palestinian state. I am pretty sure that Donald Trump told them what they wanted to hear, i.e. that he will push Israel to accept a Palestinian state, and I am also certain that he told his Zionist pals the exact opposite. So, regardless of what Trump does, one of those groups will be angry and disappointed.

Then there is Iran… I think there is a deal that could be made, e.g., Iran recognizes Israel in exchange for the creation of an independent Palestinian state. The Zionists would reject that, but the majority of the world would enthusiastically embrace that solution, especially if the US agrees to lead the charge. Don’t get your hopes up.

Judging from history, there is no chance that this agreement produces the peace that Donald Trump envisions. Since the 1967 Six-Day War, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has seen numerous ceasefires (also called truces, hudnas, or armistices), primarily involving Israel and Palestinian groups like the PLO, Fatah, Hamas, and Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ). These are often mediated by the UN, Egypt, Qatar, or the US and tend to follow escalations such as wars, intifadas, or Gaza operations. “Declaration” typically refers to formal agreements between the parties, though some are unilateral or UN-imposed.

Counting them precisely is challenging due to varying definitions—e.g., short humanitarian pauses vs. longer truces—and overlaps (e.g., the 1973 Yom Kippur War ceasefire applied to Egypt/Syria but had direct Palestinian implications). Based on comprehensive timelines from sources like CFR, Al Jazeera, Wikipedia, and IMEU, there have been at least 12 major ceasefires declared between Israelis and Palestinians since 1967. This excludes minor local pauses or non-Palestinian-specific Arab-Israeli truces (e.g., 1982 Lebanon). Many lasted days to months before violations or breakdowns, often due to rocket fire, airstrikes, or failed negotiations.

Key Insights:

Total Count: 12 major instances, but some sources (e.g., IMEU fact sheets) list 20+ if including shorter Gaza operations (e.g., 2019, 2022 PIJ clashes) or intra-Palestinian truces with Israeli involvement.

Average Duration: ~2–3 years for pre-2008 truces; <1 year post-2008, reflecting Gaza’s volatility.

Common Patterns: Most fail due to mutual accusations of violations (e.g., rockets vs. incursions). Gaza-focused ones (post-2007) are shorter, tied to Hamas rule and blockades. Broader ones (e.g., Oslo) lasted longer but didn’t resolve core issues like borders/settlements.

In light of this history, the chances that this peace deal will endure is slim.

This article was originally published on Sonar21.

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For many years, there have been those who have been prognosticating an economic crisis – not just a recession lasting a year or two, but a full-blown Greater Depression that would eclipse any major event we’ve seen in our lifetimes.

That may appear to be an overstatement, but historically, it’s the norm for a time of major upheaval to occur every eighty years or so. And although some of us began analysing and commenting on the Greater Depression many years ago, it’s clear to all of us that we’ve now entered the leading edge of the crisis.

All of the traditional warning signs are present, and although technology has changed considerably over the millennia, human behaviour has not. We are witnessing the same symptoms that were present in major collapses of the past, going back at least as far as the Roman Empire.

We are therefore seeing not only the initial stages of an economic collapse but the concurrent events, such as an almost total corruption of the political structure, a move toward totalitarian rule, the destruction of currencies, and a loss of faith in leadership across the board. Along the way, we’re also experiencing a decline in logic and morality and an eroding sense of humanity.

That’s quite a lot to take in, yet, sorry to say; we’re only in the first stages of collapse. It will get quite a bit worse before it gets better.

As the economy begins its collapse in earnest, what we shall witness will be a population that will be unable to adapt quickly to the symptoms of the crisis as they increase in frequency and magnitude. The reaction to each will be, first, shock (an inability to comprehend that the impossible has occurred), then fear (a state of confusion and inability to adjust to rapidly-changing conditions), and finally, anger.

This last development should give pause to us all, as it’s the stage when those who have been most strongly impacted realise that there’s precious little that they can do to regain normalcy. When they find that they can’t get their hands around the necks of those who actually are to blame, they’ll take out their anger on whomever is in their proximity – each other.

So, the questions arise: Where will these problems be most prevalent? Where will the situations exist that should be avoided as much as possible, in order to minimize the likelihood that we’ll become collateral damage of the crisis?

Having studied previous similar historical periods, I can attest that this is a question that, unfortunately, requires an extensive and complex answer. However, as a rough guide, there are three considerations that will be overarching.

Regardless of any other concerns that may affect the reader individually, all persons would do well to stay clear (as much as possible) from the following:

First World Countries

Since 1945, the First World countries (the US, UK, EU, Japan, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand) have led the world in both prosperity and power. Under the driving force of the US, they’ve created not only the advances of the last eighty years but also the rot that has led to the current crisis. As such, these countries are not only the countries where we’re seeing the most dramatic oppression of people; they will also experience the most precipitous fall economically, politically, and sociologically.

Although these countries have, until recently, seemed to be the most attractive locations in which to live, that condition has now begun a reversal, and in the coming years, they’ll represent the very nexus of decline. As such, they’ll become the most unpredictable and even the most dangerous places to be.

Conversely, the choicest countries in which to live will be those countries where change will be minimal. Those countries where the populations and governments have been relatively unambitious over the last half century or more, will be the locations that are the least likely to change dramatically during the crisis. That one fact speaks loudly to the reader’s economic, political, and social well-being in this period.

Cold Climates

The colder a location is, the less hospitable it will be in a crisis. When governments collapse economically and seemingly basic amenities can no longer be paid for, politicians will look after their own needs before those of the people they are meant to represent. Simple services such as snow ploughing may be dropped from city budgets that must experience cutbacks. More importantly, during an energy crunch, you’re likely to experience periods in which heat cannot be attained. This doesn’t mean that you will necessarily freeze to death, but it does mean that life will be much harder. In addition, produce cannot be grown in colder climates, which eliminates even the possibility of a kitchen garden in colder months.

Cities

By far, this is the riskiest of the three concerns. The more concentrated the population is the greater the risk. The larger your building, the less control you have over utilities. If the water, electricity, or heat is shut off due to energy shortages, you will have little or no recourse.

But, by far, the greatest risk in a city will be the inherent depersonalisation that exists even in the best of times. Even if you live in a very nice apartment building in a nice neighbourhood, you’re likely to be socially isolated from others. (You may not even know the people in the apartment across the hall.) People in cities tend not to help each other much at the best of times, but in a crisis, those around you can become a threat to your very existence.

Most importantly, food supplies are likely to be interrupted for indeterminate periods and, as Isaac Azimov stated, “After nine missed meals, a man will kill for food.” Even if you’re able to obtain a loaf of bread at a neighbourhood store, you may not be able to walk home with it without being waylaid. Even brief periods of interruption of food delivery to a population centre may result in a simple loaf of bread being worth killing for.

And even for those who live in prosperous neighbourhoods where the neighbours tend to be civil, poorer neighbourhoods are not so far away that their residents, if desperate, will not make the short trip to where they think others have the essentials.

Such breakdowns, as described above, tend to occur slowly, then suddenly. Those of us who have lived through city riots understand that tension builds as people attempt to maintain normal decorum, then some small event sparks off rioting. A citywide riot can go off like popcorn spontaneously. In good times, police can quell a riot in a few days or weeks, but when rioting is citywide, and the cause cannot be quickly remedied, riots can last for extended periods, potentially turning formerly-safe city streets into the equivalent of a war zone.

Of course, there’s the tendency to say, “Don’t be ridiculous – it can’t get that bad.” However, history tells us that whenever a major crisis period occurs, the above conditions almost always occur.

The reader may wish to assess his exposure to the three conditions above. Ideally, he’ll find a location to sit out the crisis – a country that’s likely to be less affected by the events that are now unfolding. He may choose a location that’s warm year-round, where food is plentiful even in harder times. And he may try to locate himself in a community of lower population density, where neighbours habitually help each other.

But regardless of what the reader chooses to do, he should be aware that the future of his well-being and that of his family may hinge on the choices he makes in the very near future.

Reprinted with permission from International Man.

The post Where Not to Be in a Crisis appeared first on LewRockwell.

Brilliant Eurasian cultures converged, interacted and spread their wings on the Ancient Silk Roads.

DUNHUANG – Across History, the Silk Road – actually a network of roads – is the supreme Highway Star: the most important connectivity corridor ever, rolling across Ancient Eurasia, linking what Chinese scholars consensually define as the main civilization systems in the world: China, India, Persia, Babylon, Egypt, Greece and Rome, as well as showcasing several historical stages of economic and cultural exchanges between East and West.

Prof. Ji Xianlin, a top scholar of Dunhuang Studies, came up with a formulation certified to drive Western supremacists crazy for all eternity:

“There are only four, rather than five, influential cultural systems in the world: Chinese, Indian, Greek and Islam. They all met only on China’s Dunhuang and Xinjiang”.

Dunhuang’s prime geo-strategic position across History was inevitably bound to generate spectacular artistic achievements.

After years since my previous journeys, then the Covid shock, then China’s subsequent recovery, I have been privileged to finally embark on a renewed Journey to the West to retrace the original Ancient Silk Road, starting in Xian – the former imperial capital Chang’an – all the way through the Gansu corridor to Dunhuang.

Brilliant Eurasian cultures converged, interacted and spread their wings on the Ancient Silk Roads. Dunhuang – on the western end of the Hexi corridor in Gansu province – was the most vital hub in the eastern section of the Chinese Silk Road, framed by mountains to the north and south, the central plains to the east, and Xinjiang to the west.

Dunhuang, the “Blazing Beacon”, held a supremely strategic position controlling two passes – Yangguan and Yumenguan. Han Emperor Wu Di clearly understood that Dunhuang was the last major water source before the fear-inducing Taklamakan desert to the west, as well as sitting astride the three main Silk Road routes heading west.

Yumenguan was the all-important Jade Gate pass – set by the Han empire in the 2nd century B.C.: placed in the south Gobi and the western end of the Qilian mountains, actually marking the western limit of classic China.

The Jade Gate Pass. Photo: Pepe Escobar

I spent a whole blinding beautiful blue-sky day in the pass and its surroundings after striking a deal with a taxi driver in Dunhuang. It’s a thrill to admire how the Han dynasty organized their traffic management system, the beacon fire system, and the Great Wall defense system (remains of the Han Wall are still there) – guaranteeing the safety of the long-distance Silk Road connectivity corridor.

The remains of the Great Han Wall. Photo: P.E.

Talk to the caravan: the secret of “people to people’s exchanges”

At the impeccably organized Dunhuang Book Center, historical records refer to it as “a metropolis where the Han people and non-Han peoples meet”. Quite the antecessor to Xi Jinping’s “people to people’s exchanges.” The spirit remains, especially at the fabulous Night Market, a gastronomic feast with pride of place for Uyghur recipes.

Uyghur businesswomen at the fabulous Dunhuang Night Market. Photo: P.E. 

Silk and porcelain from the central plains, jewelry and perfume from “the western regions”, camels and horses from north China, grains from Hexi, everything was traded in Dunhuang. Merchant deals, migrations, military games, cultural exchanges, a profusion of literati, scholars, artists, officials, diplomats, religious pilgrims, military brought classic Chinese culture into an effervescent mix – Sogdian, Tibet, Uyghur, Tangut, Mongolia – all absorbed into what eventually became Dunhuang art.

Itinerant Buddhism, Nestorianism, Zoroastrianism, Islam – the sophisticated aesthetic feel of Dunhuang was progressively influenced by architecture, sculpture, paintings, music, dance, weaving, dyeing techniques all the way from Central Asia and West Asia.

“Silk Road” terminology in Xi’s “moderately prosperous” modernized China is an extremely nuanced business. For instance, already in Xian, at the Small White Goose pagoda, we see it described as “Silk Roads: The Routes Network of Chang’an-Tian Shan corridor”.

That’s a geographically correct interpretation, stressing the Tian Shan mountains instead of the politically correct Xinjiang (which was essentially part of the “western regions”, not necessarily Chinese territory, for centuries).

As for how the Silk Road began, that now follows a single, scholarly accepted version: Han Emperor Wu Di, in 140 B.C. sent Zhang Qian as an envoy to the “western regions” on two business missions. The “Records of the Grand Historian” show that Zhang Qian, as the first official diplomat in Chinese history, de facto opened channels of communications with the “western regions” and then all the states in the northwest started trading with the Han, especially silk.

From Xian’s Shaanxi History Museum to the Dunhuang Academy, and including the Gansu museum in Lanzhou, in interactions with scholars and museum curators as well as in complement to formidable Silk Road exhibits, it’s fascinating to retrace the now established official narrative on the Silk Roads, according to which “the civilization of ancient China represented by silk started to impact the states in the western regions, Central Asia and West Asia.”

It was way more complex than that – as spices, metals, chemicals, saddles, leather products, glass, paper (invented in the 2nd century B.C.), everything was on the market, but the general drift applies: merchants from the central plains defying deserts and mountain peaks in caravans laden with silk, bronze mirrors and lacquerware from China, seeking to exchange them for commodities, while merchants from the western regions brought furs, jade, felts to the central plains.

Talk about multi-ethnic “people to people’s exchanges”. And by the way, no one ever used the term “Silk Road”; it was “the road to Samarkand” or just the “northern” or “southern” routes around the ominous Taklamakan desert.

About the Tang dynasty monetary system…

By the 3rd century, Dunhuang was already at the apex of Silk Road connectivity; and that’s when merchants and pilgrims started to sponsor the construction of the nearby Buddhist Mogao caves.

The main pavilion at the Mogao caves. Photo: P.E.

The Mogao Caves are part of what is known in Gansu province as the five Dunhuang grottoes. It’s the same system of caves – 813 surviving, with 735 in Mogao. To approach Mogao is a major thrill in itself: we need to be in an official park bus, crammed with zillions of Chinese tourists, rolling through the desert, and suddenly we are in the eastern foot of the Mingsha mountains, with the Dangquan river running right in front of us, facing the Qilian mountains to the east, with the caves set back against and cut into the cliff face, connected by a series of ramps and walkways.

The caves started to be built as early as in the 4th century – all the way to the 14th century (the earliest wall paintings are from the 5th); it’s a group of caves in four levels, 1,6 km from north to south along a cliff as much as 30 meters high. The 492 caves in the southern area house more than 45 km of wall paintings, over 2,000 painted statues, and five wooden eaves. They were originally used for worshipping Buddhas.

At the Dunhuang Academy museum: where the artists came from. Photo: P.E.

What we are still able to see takes our breath away. Highlights include a wrestling scene from Buddha’s life on cave 290; a girl apsara – mythic dancer – on cave 296; the Deer King on cave 257; a hunting scene on cave 249; a Garuda – defined in Chinese as “the Scarlet Bird” – on cave 285; parables of the Magic City from the Lotus Sutra, a masterpiece of High Tang dynasty, on cave 217; a sitting Boddhisattva on cave 196; impeccably preserved worshipping bodhisattvas on cave 285.

One of the Buddha highlights of the Mogao caves. Photo: P.E.

Rules are extremely strict: visit only to selected caves, with an official guide, no photos, only the guide’s torchlight to illuminate the grottoes. I was privileged to visit guided by Helen, who studied in Dunhuang University and is now doing her PhD in Archeology. After the visit she explained in detail the ground-breaking conservation work of the Dunhuang Academy.

The construction of the caves was a spectacular undertaking in terms of division of labor. Just imagine: chiselers to dig and excavate a cave out of the cliff; stonecutters, who also dug caves; bricklayers to build wooden or earthen structures; carpenters, who also repaired wooden tools; sculptors to create the statues; and painters to paint the caves and statues.

Mogao, as an aesthetic experience, is unequaled in its striking collection of Buddhist wall painting criss-crossing China, Persia, India and Central Asian art.

And then there’s what we cannot see: more than 40,000 scrolls found in the library cave, the largest deposit of documents and artifacts discovered anywhere along the Silk Road, with texts on Buddhism, Manicheism, Zoroastrianism and the Eastern Christian Church (from Syria) showing how cosmopolitan Dunhuang was. That’s part of the European scholarly – and otherwise – plunder of the Dunhuang wealth starting in the late 19th century, a completely different, complex, and long, story.

In geoeconomic terms, for nearly ten centuries Dunhuang was extremely wealthy, especially during the Tang dynasty (6th to 9th century). The Tang had a fascinating monetary system – with three different currencies: textiles (silk and hemp), grain and coins.

The central government, in the imperial capital Chang’an, used a single aggregate unit to represent all trade. The Dunhuang garrison was a key strategic post: payments came in no less than six different types of woven silk. Well, each place paid their taxes with their locally produced cloth. What the Tang did was to transfer all these textiles to Dunhuang. The garrison’s officers then converted the tax cloth into coins and into grain, to pay local merchants and to feed the soldiers.

So in a nutshell the Tang dynasty was all the time injecting a lot of money – via woven cloth – into the Dunhuang economy. Talk about a public-private state development model – which certainly did not escape Beijing planners when they came up, in 2013, with the concept of the New Silk Roads.

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

The post Art, Trade and State Power at the Heart of the Silk Road appeared first on LewRockwell.

A federal court in Virginia recently ruled that the name of Confederate General Stonewall Jackson, who is regarded as a great hero by many Americans, violates the free speech rights of black students. As summarized by the judge,

The complaint alleged that the name [Stonewall Jackson] created “an unlawful and discriminatory educational environment for Black students,” and accused the school board of violating the First and 14th Amendments of the U.S. Constitution, Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and the Equal Education Opportunities Act.

The judge’s reasoning was that where a school is named after a Confederate hero, families who consider Confederate history offensive have a cause of action against the school board for the violation of their First Amendment right to free speech because school names and symbols are “compelled speech.” Although the first amendment protects the right of anyone—including, in this case, a school in the Shenandoah Valley—to express freely their respect for their Confederate heritage, black people also have a free speech right not to be subjected to “compelled speech” and can get such symbols struck down. By what form of convoluted reasoning did the courts manage to turn the right to free speech into a power vested in civil rights activists to silence the expression of Confederate heritage?

This is where the Fourteenth Amendment comes in. Most people would not immediately associate the Fourteenth Amendment with free speech, which is better known as a First Amendment right. In this case, the judge relied on the case of Stromberg v. California, 283 U.S. 359, 368 (1931), which, according to the judge, held that “Plaintiffs have a cause of action for the violation of their federal rights, including those under the First Amendment as incorporated through the Fourteenth Amendment, under 42 U.S.C. § 1983” (emphasis added). The judge explained that the Fourteenth Amendment equal protection clause protects the right to free speech, and Confederate names, in his view, amount to compelled speech because students who attend the school cannot avoid “expressing” the school name and showcasing the school’s mascots. Hence, the judge ruled that,

By reinstating the name “Stonewall Jackson High School” and thereby compelling students to advance the School Board’s chosen message favoring “Stonewall Jackson” through the conduct of extracurricular activities rendered expressive by that name, the School Board has violated plaintiffs’ First Amendment rights, as incorporated by the Fourteenth Amendment, against compelled speech.

In this way, the Fourteenth Amendment bypasses the First Amendment, in cases involving complaints that the free speech rights of some (expressing Confederate heritage) violate the protection from compelled speech “as incorporated through the Fourteenth Amendment” for civil rights groups demanding the equal protection of the law. This is by no means an accidental outcome—thwarting the First Amendment is the hallmark strategy of those who believe that free speech does not include “hate speech,” meaning any speech they hate. The roots of this strategy lie in legislation from the Reconstruction era, when the aim of the Radical Republican government was to give the newly-enfranchised freedmen, who were the guarantors of Republican power and control in the post-war South, legislative tools to challenge hostile state authorities for violating federal law.

The belief, at the time, was that state authorities in the South were “white supremacist” and the only way freedmen could enjoy the equal protection of the law would be through federal law enforcement. Based on this belief, the power of the federal government was enhanced to give it greater oversight over what were seen as “racist” state governments. Civil rights activists still view this as a major tool in their endless war against “white supremacy”:

The tool is known as Section 1983 of Title 42 of the U.S. Code. It originally was Section 1 of the Civil Rights Act of 1871, better known as the Ku Klux Klan Act, one of the most important civil rights laws in U.S. history. That act was intended to protect Black Americans from white supremacist violence in the post-Civil War South.

Section 1983 allows an individual to sue a state or local government official [in this case a public school board] who has violated his or her constitutional rights. A violation could involve freedom of speech, freedom of religion, due process, and more.

Readers will be familiar with Murray Rothbard’s argument that civil rights—which he pointedly referred to as “phony civil rights”—violate the rights of self-ownership and private property. There could be no clearer example of this than people claiming a “civil right” to destroy anything which, in their opinion, is an emblem of “white supremacy.” In the Virginia case, the complainants relied on a long list of previous cases in which schools had been held to have the right to ban Confederate-themed apparel on grounds that it would provoke racial conflict among the students. While that may, arguably, fall within the discretion of the school authorities, it is a long way from saying the school authorities have discretion over what is necessary to keep order in the school to saying that students have a veto power over the school name if they consider the name offensive. The self-defined “victims” of civil rights violations argue that under the “equal protection” clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, they are entitled to be protected from psychological “harm.” In this case they complained that Confederate names are “discriminatory and harmful.”

When Black students are compelled to attend schools that glorify the leaders and ideals of the Confederacy, they are subject to a racially discriminatory educational environment, which has significant psychological, academic, and social effects.

When students are required to identify as members of student bodies or teams named to honor Confederate leaders in order to participate in school activities, they are required against their will to endorse the violent defense of slavery pursued by the Confederacy and the symbolism that these images have in the modern White supremacist movement.

Leaving aside the partisan view of history exhibited by the complaint, and the fact that psychological “harm” could easily be avoided by going to a different school whose name is more pleasing to the complainants, the result of courts upholding these complaints is that the civil rights regime effectively gives its protected groups a veto over the liberties of others. This is yet another reason why there are good grounds to argue that the Fourteenth Amendment should be abolished:

The Fourteenth Amendment has had precisely the effect that its nineteenth-century Republican party supporters intended it to have: it has greatly centralized power in Washington, DC, and has subjected Americans to the kind of judicial tyranny that Thomas Jefferson warned about when he described federal judges as those who would be “constantly working underground to undermine the foundations of our confederated fabric.”

The post How Civil Rights Activists use the Fourteenth Amendment to Bypass the First Amendment appeared first on LewRockwell.

These days the Wall Street Journal probably ranks as America’s most influential and credible print outlet, so Friday morning’s front-page story describing a sudden new escalation in our episodic trade war with China caught my attention.

As emphasized in the first several paragraphs, the Chinese had suddenly imposed an unprecedented new wave of licensing requirements on the import and use of the rare earths that they mine and refine, as well as the vital small magnets produced from those compounds. These extremely severe restrictions would now apply to any companies around the world whose goods contained as little as 0.1% of their value in that category, apparently encompassing an enormous range of major industries including cars, solar panels, and chip-making equipment. The entire supply-claim for phones, computers, data-centers, and AI systems would be covered, requiring individual permissions from the Chinese authorities for their use to continue on a case-by-case basis.

China’s newest restrictions on rare-earth materials would mark a nearly unprecedented export control that stands to disrupt the global economy, giving Beijing more leverage in trade negotiations and ratcheting up pressure on the Trump administration to respond.

The rule, put out Thursday by China’s Commerce Ministry, is viewed as an escalation in the U.S.-China trade fight because it threatens the supply chain for semiconductors. Chips are the lifeblood of the economy, powering phones, computers and data centers needed to train artificial-intelligence models. The rule also would affect cars, solar panels and the equipment for making chips and other products, limiting the ability of other countries to support their own industries. China produces roughly 90% of the world’s rare-earth materials.

Global companies that sell goods with certain rare-earth materials sourced from China accounting for 0.1% or more of the product’s value would need permission from Beijing, under the new rule. Tech companies will probably find it extremely difficult to show that their chips, the equipment needed to make them and other components fall below the 0.1% threshold, industry experts said.

The article emphasized that China has control over 90% of the refining and production of these small but vital technological components, with no obvious substitutes available. One quoted source described it as the “economic equivalent of nuclear war” and something that could “destroy the American AI industry.”

These new Chinese economic sanctions even extended to all the technologies and equipment related to the mining, refining, and fabrication of rare earth products. Such steps were obviously aimed at preventing any foreign competitors from developing alternate future supply chains able to weaken China’s current stranglehold. The total extraterritorial scope of China’s new restrictions was also dramatic.

As the MoA blogger brought to my attention, these issues were set forth most forcefully by Arnaud Bertrand, a longtime China observer based in that country:

This is actually big, potentially huge, notably because China’s new rare earth export controls include a provision (point 4 here: https://mofcom.gov.cn/zwgk/zcfb/art/2025/art_7fc9bff0fb4546ecb02f66ee77d0e5f6.html) whereby anyone using rare earths to develop advanced semiconductors (defined as 14nm-and-below) will require case-by-case approval.

Which effectively gives China de-facto veto power over the entire advanced semi-conductor supply chain as rare earths are used at critical steps throughout – from ASML (who use rare earths for magnets in their lithography machines: https://asml.com/en/news/stories/2023/6-ingredients-robust-supply-chain) to TSMC.

The export controls are also extra-territorial: foreign entities must obtain Chinese export licenses before re-exporting products manufactured abroad if they contain Chinese rare earth materials comprising 0.1% or more of the product’s value.

So China is effectively mirroring the US semiconductor export controls that were used against them, with its own comprehensive extraterritorial control regime, except with rare earths.

Naturally, the response of President Donald Trump was volcanic, and he quickly declared:

“It is impossible to believe that China would have taken such an action, but they have, and the rest is History.”

By late Friday the Journal reported that Trump had declared his plans to impose new, 100% tariffs on all Chinese trade goods, above and beyond the tariffs he had previously levied, along with sweeping new software export controls. These huge new tariff rates would amount to reestablishing a near embargo on Chinese imports so the result was a heavy selloff in the S&P 500, the worst since the president’s original tariff announcement in early April.

In recent weeks, trade relations between China and America had seemed to stabilize, so this sudden Chinese announcement might have seemed like a bolt from the blue. Only towards the bottom of the original article did the Journal writers explain that the new Chinese restrictions were in direct retaliation for similarly sweeping American export restrictions against Chinese technology companies imposed a dozen days earlier but given much less attention in our mainstream media outlets.

This merely continued the pattern of the last few years, with American economic sanctions suddenly imposed against China followed by waves of national outrage after the latter country responded with retaliatory measures.

For example, the Journal mentioned:

Vice Premier He Lifeng believed an informal “freeze” on new export controls had been agreed upon following recent talks in Madrid, according to people familiar with the discussions. But that understanding was shattered when the U.S. introduced new controls on foreign-owned companies.

According to the Journal, Chinese President Xi Jinping had grown weary of this endless game, and decided to hit back extremely hard, as indicated by the severity of the new retaliatory sanctions.

The Journal writers noted that earlier this year, American automakers warned that they would be forced to cease production in many of their factories if the supply of Chinese rare earth magnets were halted, stoppages as extreme as those caused by the Covid-19 outbreak, but that the current round of Chinese export restrictions could be even more severe.

Last month I updated the standard international estimates of the economic power of the world’s major countries and blocs to incorporate the latest 2024 financial statistics. These figures merely confirmed that the Real Productive size of China’s economy—sometimes considered the most reliable measure of true international economic strength—was now considerably larger than that of the entire West, even augmented by our Japanese vassal state:

In that same article, I also emphasized how the latest round of Trump’s outrageous international demands and tariff policies had finally driven populous, fast-growing India into the opposing camp, further strengthening the unfavorable correlation of forces arrayed against America and perhaps emboldening China’s new retaliation against the antics of our President Trump and his sycophantic subordinates.

I think that these potentially momentous developments illustrate the extreme recklessness of the Trump Administration and the tremendous risks that a country faces if its economic and trade policies continue to be governed by the autocratic whim of a Mad Emperor rather than carefully hammered out in public legislation. As I wrote soon after Trump’s original April tariff announcements:

Across thousands of years, the world has seen many important countries ruled by absolute monarchs or all-powerful dictators, with some of these leaders even considered deranged. But I can’t recall any past example in which a major nation’s tax, tariff, or tribute policies have undergone such rapid and sudden changes, moving up and down by huge amounts apparently based upon personal whim. Certainly Caligula never did anything so peculiar, nor Louis XIV nor Genghis Khan nor anyone else who comes to mind. Lopping off the heads of a few random government officials was one thing, but drastic changes in national financial policies were generally taken much more seriously. I don’t think that Tamerlane ever suddenly raised the tribute he demanded from his terrified subjects by a factor of ten, then a few days later lowered it back down by a factor of two.

This potentially devastating Chinese economic response would be bad enough but it came just after some new information revealed the extreme fragility of the American economy.

An October 7th article in Fortune described the important economic calculations of Harvard’s James Furman, echoed by other experts. According to his estimates, if we excluded investment in data centers and other information processing technology, American GDP growth during the first half of 2025 was almost nil, only 0.1% on an annualized basis. Consider also that probably almost all of this data investment has been due to the ongoing AI and Crypto booms, and that these have probably provided other major contributions to GDP growth, as the Financial Times argued:

The hundreds of billions of dollars companies are investing in AI now account for an astonishing 40 per cent share of US GDP growth this year. And some analysts believe that estimate doesn’t fully capture the AI spend, so the real share could be even higher.

AI companies have accounted for 80 per cent of the gains in US stocks so far in 2025. That is helping to fund and drive US growth, as the AI-driven stock market draws in money from all over the world, and feeds a boom in consumer spending by the rich.

Since the wealthiest 10 per cent of the population own 85 per cent of US stocks, they enjoy the largest wealth effect when they go up. Little wonder then that the latest data shows America’s consumer economy rests largely on spending by the wealthy. The top 10 per cent of earners account for half of consumer spending, the highest share on record since the data begins.

But without all the excitement around AI, the US economy might be stalling out, given the multiple threats…

Foreigners poured a record $290bn into US stocks in the second quarter and now own about 30 per cent of the market — the highest share in post-second world war history. Europeans and Canadians have been boycotting American goods but continue buying US stocks in bulk — especially the tech giants…

What that suggests is that AI better deliver for the US, or its economy and markets will lose the one leg they are now standing on.

Taken together, these results suggest that except for the torrid pace of AI and Crypto investments, America might have already fallen into recession during the first half of this year, and there are very widespread concerns that our AI/Crypto economy constitutes a classic bubble, only one far larger than the dot-com bubble of a quarter-century ago.

Late last week, a lengthy post on the Naked Capitalism blog cited much of this evidence, quoting a critical analysis by Ed Zitron:

Where we sit today is a time of immense tension. Mark Zuckerberg says we’re in a bubble, Sam Altman says we’re in a bubble, Alibaba Chairman and billionaire Joe Tsai says we’re in a bubble, Apollo says we’re in a bubble, nobody is making money and nobody knows why they’re actually doing this anymore, just that they must do it immediately.

And they have yet to make the case that generative AI warranted any of these expenditures.

Indeed, according to one recent MIT study, 95% of the AI pilot projects at companies are currently failing.

Others have noted that although many past investment bubbles have collapsed, most of the investment value was eventually recovered, with the over-built railways of nineteenth century Britain later getting use and the same also being true for the huge quantities of fiber-optic cable laid in the late 1990s.

However, a large fraction of all the current AI investment is going into cutting-edge AI chips, and within just a few years these tend to be supplanted by newer generations of much more powerful chips, so their value rapidly declines. This suggests that if and when the bubble bursts, a major portion of that invested value will be permanently lost.

The following day another lengthy Naked Capitalism post by an academic argued that the strong Trump endorsement of Crypto-based “Stablecoins” and other related derivatives has probably been fueling the growth of a huge and uninsured new “Shadow Banking” sector whose volatility could easily produce a new crisis along the same lines of the sub prime financial crisis of the 2000s, adding a financial bubble to the one possibly inherent in current stock valuations.

Read the Whole Article

The post Donald Trump as Our Mad Emperor of the Bubble appeared first on LewRockwell.

Ron Unz tells us the consequence of Trump’s Diplomacy by Threat.

The Chinese have “suddenly imposed an unprecedented new wave of licensing requirements on the import and use of the rare earths that they mine and refine, as well as the vital small magnets produced from those compounds. These extremely severe restrictions would now apply to any companies around the world whose goods contained as little as 0.1% of their value in that category, apparently encompassing an enormous range of major industries including cars, solar panels, and chip-making equipment. The entire supply-claim for phones, computers, data-centers, and AI systems would be covered, requiring individual permissions from the Chinese authorities for their use to continue on a case-by-case basis.

“China’s newest restrictions on rare-earth materials would mark a nearly unprecedented export control that stands to disrupt the global economy, giving Beijing more leverage in trade negotiations and ratcheting up pressure on the Trump administration to respond.

“The rule, put out Thursday by China’s Commerce Ministry, is viewed as an escalation in the U.S.-China trade fight because it threatens the supply chain for semiconductors. Chips are the lifeblood of the economy, powering phones, computers and data centers needed to train artificial-intelligence models. The rule also would affect cars, solar panels and the equipment for making chips and other products, limiting the ability of other countries to support their own industries. China produces roughly 90% of the world’s rare-earth materials.

“Global companies that sell goods with certain rare-earth materials sourced from China accounting for 0.1% or more of the product’s value would need permission from Beijing, under the new rule. Tech companies will probably find it extremely difficult to show that their chips, the equipment needed to make them and other components fall below the 0.1% threshold, industry experts said.

“The article emphasized that China has control over 90% of the refining and production of these small but vital technological components, with no obvious substitutes available. One quoted source described it as the “economic equivalent of nuclear war” and something that could ‘destroy the American AI industry.’

“These new Chinese economic sanctions even extended to all the technologies and equipment related to the mining, refining, and fabrication of rare earth products. Such steps were obviously aimed at preventing any foreign competitors from developing alternate future supply chains able to weaken China’s current stranglehold. The total extraterritorial scope of China’s new restrictions was also dramatic.  As the MoA blogger brought to my attention, these issues were set forth most forcefully by Arnaud Bertrand, a longtime China observer based in that country:

“This is actually big, potentially huge, notably because China’s new rare earth export controls include a provision (point 4 here) whereby anyone using rare earths to develop advanced semiconductors (defined as 14nm-and-below) will require case-by-case approval.

“Which effectively gives China de-facto veto power over the entire advanced semi-conductor supply chain as rare earths are used at critical steps throughout – from ASML (who use rare earths for magnets in their lithography machines) to TSMC.

“The export controls are also extra-territorial: foreign entities must obtain Chinese export licenses before re-exporting products manufactured abroad if they contain Chinese rare earth materials comprising 0.1% or more of the product’s value.

“So China is effectively mirroring the US semiconductor export controls that were used against them, with its own comprehensive extraterritorial control regime, except with rare earths.

“Naturally, the response of President Donald Trump was volcanic, and he quickly declared: ‘It is impossible to believe that China would have taken such an action, but they have, and the rest is History.’”

The post The White House Fool’s Provocations of China Finally Produces a Response appeared first on LewRockwell.

Our diocese has asked the priests to promote a short survey about the laity to the faithful for a projected USCCB Pastoral Letter on the Laity. I wish that there would have been a survey about what kind of pastoral letters we need from the Bishops’ Conference, for I think the vocation crisis might be a topic of great interest and importance. I suppose the Pastoral Letter on the Laity will address the growing trend of lay pastoral “coordinators” in priest-less parishes, which is having a moment.

In some ways, the coordination by laity is a throwback to the pioneer past of the Church in America. However, the small communities who were building community and church buildings and sacramental practice for their families did not hire someone to be a sort of substitute priest. The itinerant priests, who were like the Protestant circuit preachers, were still leaders and formators of the Catholic community and not just Mass priests or sacramental providers. In the rust belt, pastoral coordinators are tending to ever smaller congregations in some historic (and often, beautiful) churches, and it is hard to escape the suspicion that it is a program of downsizing, part of the managed decline of once densely Catholic dioceses.

“Professional” lay “coordination” of parishes has many loose ends. What kind of training and continuing formation is given to the lay coordinator? The emphasis on pastoral or formation leaderships would be interesting in terms of an evangelization project, but sometimes what is more necessary is management expertise in business-like practices. Parishes are not businesses, but old physical plants require much attention, and thin capital reserves need fiscal acuity and creativity. I think that priests might be able to be pastors of more than one parish if those burdens were taken care of by persons, perhaps retired professional management types, who could coordinate more than one congregation’s issues.

However, the questionnaire for the Pastoral Letter does not seem to address such concerns. It is written in a kind of “corporation” prose that could have been helped by AI. The first question is: “How does your baptismal identity impact your engagement with Church and society.”

Perhaps it is my limited experience that makes me think that most lay people will not have very eloquent answers to this question. Why couldn’t we start with something about Jesus? What is your relationship with Him, how have you felt the call to discipleship? And then from Jesus we could talk about the necessary relationship with the Church that Jesus founded.

“Engagement with society” is quite (dare we say “too”) broad conceptually. What about, “How is your discipleship connected to your everyday life? What are the specifics of your following Jesus and taking up the cross?” The next question could be tightened up, also: “How do you feel co-responsible for the work and mission of the Catholic faith?” Wouldn’t the correct word be “Church,” not “faith”? But are we asking “feeling” questions or data questions? “Feeling” co-responsible and understanding our participation in the Body of Christ might be two different things.

The potential for ambiguity in the survey continues: “Where do you see the Holy Spirit at work in your relationship/engagement with the Church?” I suppose the “relationship/engagement” word combo is supposed to be a fine kind of distinction. Again, something about Jesus might be to the point. Even if you were asking, “How do you understand the Holy Spirit working in your life and what has that to do with your parish/local community of faith?” it might provoke more concrete responses.

“What are your joys, hopes and visions for the role of the laity within the Church and society?” is the next question. I know this echoes Gaudium et Spes, but it reminds me too much of the campaign rhetoric (like “Hope and Change”). We are all members of the Church, although our activity “within” the Church should be of our whole person and not a category of involvement. The laity are the Church, just as the clergy and religious are, but there seems a note of alienation or at least differentiation in “activity within the Church.” It’s a nuance and perhaps a false connotation I am responding to, but it is awkwardly put.

So is the next shot, in my opinion: “How do you primarily interact with lay ecclesiastical ministers, formators and lay apostolate leaders?” This is perhaps the real agenda of the designers of the survey. My first reaction is what is the use of the adverb “primarily”? I think they are looking for something like “generally” here. Can you react “secondarily” to professional lay leaders? Leaders of “lay apostolates” seem to be in another category for these other coordinators, formators, etc. People involved in lay apostolates are usually volunteers with very specific roles.

De-clericalizing pastoral care is a more complicated thing than just filling roles. When Catholics talk about their parishes, don’t they usually ask who the pastor is? Are they now to ask who the lay ministers, formators, etc. are? If deacons sometimes encounter resistance in their ministry (e.g., “I want a priest for my child’s baptism,” or “Why is the priest not preaching?”) are we so sure that the parish can be reimagined with a coordinator who “hires” sacramental provider priests? Wouldn’t people respond better to a deacon as a coordinator. Deacons are usually professionals with other capacities, but couldn’t we hire those who are retired from their original profession?

“What concerns might you have around lay ministry, formation, apostolates or the church workplace?” In terms of this essay, I would say, “see above,” but it is a catchall kind of question, mixing apples and oranges. And why do we say “church workplace” and not “parish”?

Developing lay pastoral ministry as a kind of substitute for ordained ministry is my worry here. Laity should participate in Church life, without a doubt. But isn’t the focus of lay discipleship in the world? Isn’t a quasi-institutional lay ministry a more complicated thing much beyond night school certification as lay ministers? Do lay coordinators have to promise something to the bishop, or do merely contractual requirements take care of pastoral care of a community?

In Catholic schools we have “teacher-ministers” who really aren’t sometimes because scarcity of personnel means low formation of those in the classrooms. Is the vision of the pastoral coordinators wedded to a tacit acceptance of what is really extraordinary in Catholic life: a growing Catholic population and a diminishing clergy in a non-missionary context.

Which is why I would like a Pastoral Letter about the vocation crisis.

This article was originally published on Crisis Magazine.

The post The Joys of Consultation: The Pastoral Letter on the Laity appeared first on LewRockwell.

Benjamin Netanyahu’s coalition government has taken control of TikTok and plans to control the social network X as well. However, the State of Israel’s propaganda has long eluded its citizens. Its purpose has never been publicly discussed. A small group decides its messages alone, without considering what would be useful to Israelis—such as combating anti-Semitism. The state’s resources have been seized solely by “revisionist Zionists,” even though they are an ultra-minority.

Israeli propaganda (הַסְבָּרָה – hasbara ) has rarely been a function of Israeli governments, but rather an operation of associations partially funded by them. These associations, which have their own ideologies, are not accountable for their actions to the Israeli people, but exclusively to their sponsors, including the governments in Tel Aviv. The self-proclaimed “largest democracy in the Middle East” thus funds profoundly anti-democratic operations without the knowledge of its citizens.

Israel’s chronic instability since its founding and the habit of appointing central directors of ministries according to political criteria rather than competence have blurred Israel’s message. Several competing powers deliver different messages  [ 1 ] . Ultimately, an authority was created for “public diplomacy” (propaganda). It has become particularly secretive.

Before the founding of Israel, the term hasbara referred to the act of explaining a position in the Diaspora. But over time, it became synonymous with “propaganda.”

In 1974, following the Yom Kippur War, Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin created a Ministry of Information, which he entrusted to General Aharon Yariv  [ 2 ] . But the latter resigned seven months later and devoted himself to the creation of a prestigious think tank, the Jaffee Center for Strategic Studies. It was not until 2006 that a “Ministry of Strategic Affairs and Hasbara” was again created (now the Ministry of Strategic Affairs and Public Diplomacy; a ministry that does not have a website and does not communicate, but which became famous in 2015 with its campaign against “the phenomena of delegitimization and boycotts against Israel”, that is to say the “Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions” (BDS) movement). This discreet ministry created its own ארגון לא ממשלתי המאורגן על ידי הממשלה (non-governmental organization organized by the government) (sic), Kela Shlomo (Solomon’s Sling) (later Concert, then Voices of Israel) led by Colonel Yossi Kuperwasser, Ambassadors Dore Gold and Ron Prosor and Brigadier Sima Vaknin Gill, former director of military censorship. Various companies (Black Cube, Psy-Group and Cyber ​​Shield  [ 3 ] ) spied on BDS activists on behalf of Kela Shlomo  [ 4 ] .

In recent years, approximately $200 million a year, or four-fifths of the Ministry of Strategic Affairs and Public Diplomacy’s budget, has been given to the Institute for the Study of Global Antisemitism and Policy (ISGAP). Ron Dermer, the current minister since 2022, was an advisor to Natan Sharansky and the author of his book, The Case for Democracy: The Power of Freedom to Overcome Tyranny and Terror. He was entrusted by Benjamin Netanyahu in late 2023 with a plan to minimize the Palestinian population of Gaza  [ 5 ] .

Specifically, Sharansky is the president of ISGAP. He is a Ukrainian revisionist Zionist; a disciple of the other Ukrainian, Vladimir Jabotinsky. He played a central role in the fight against Russia during the USSR era. He was the main reference for Senator Henry M. Jackson’s Straussians, emigrated to the United States, was awarded the Congressional Medal by Ronald Reagan, and became a minister under General Ariel Sharon. In 2001, he founded One Jerusalem, the association that campaigns to have Jerusalem recognized as the capital of the “Jewish state” alone (and not that of the Palestinian state). He now heads ISGAP and, in this capacity, oversees almost all of the hasbara.

Hasbara has won many battles. The latest for ISGAP was the US Congressional hearings of university rectors, which resulted in several resignations and sanctions against pro-Palestinian associations.

However, one cannot help but be surprised by the ineffectiveness of their international campaigns against anti-Semitism. Eighty years after the founding of the State of Israel, not only has the problem not been solved, but it has worsened  [ 6 ] . During this time, machismo, homophobia and racism have considerably declined. It must be considered that anti-Semitism is a means of pressure by the Israeli authorities on their own population. Let us remember that the revisionist Zionists used anti-Semitism to advance their cause in the diaspora.

During his conference at the Israeli Consulate General in New York, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu revealed that his country aims to control people under thirty-five via social networks  [ 7 ] .

According to YNetGlobal , he launched a campaign to take over social media and influence people under 25, “Project 545”  [ 8 ] . It was entrusted to Havas Media Network, the company of Yannick Bolloré (son of Vincent Bolloré and husband of Chloé Bouygues). The latter awarded Clock Tower X LLC a $6 million contract to “provide strategic communications, planning and media services in support of Havas’s commitment by the State of Israel to develop and execute a national campaign in the United States to combat anti-Semitism.” Clock Tower is the company created by Brad Parscale after he left Donald Trump’s campaign team.

According to a poll conducted for Israel in the United States, 47% of the population believes that the IDF is committing genocide.

The Israeli government’s main idea is to influence the responses of artificial intelligence by creating a multitude of social media accounts that will provide the narrative that ChatGPT and its rivals will feed on.

“Project 545” is the code name for this operation, funded to the tune of NIS 545 million, or $145 million, by 2025. It ended Israel’s contract with SKDKnickerbocker, the communications firm linked to the US Democratic Party.

According to Responsible Statecraft , the influencer network that Benjamin Netanyahu referred to during his speech at the Israeli Consulate General in New York was reportedly formed by Bridges Partners, the company owned by Yair Levi and Uri Steinberg. The campaign, titled Esther Project , has already cost $900,000. Fourteen to 18 influencers are believed to have published 75 to 90 posts during this period. The fees are being paid by the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

Three of the influencers have been identified. They are:
 by Lizzy Savetsky, a prominent online defender of Israel since the beginning of the war;
 of businessman Ari Ackerman, grandson of Israeli-American tycoon Meshulam Riklis;
 and digital creator Zach Sage Fox.

Uri Steinberg, meanwhile, is a former senior official in the Israeli Ministry of Tourism. He works at Natan Sharansky’s Institute for the Study of Global Antisemitism and Policy (ISGAP).

A tax document allows Bridge Partners’ overheads to be assessed  [ 9 ] .

Journalist Candace Owens, who relayed Xavier Poussard’s revelations about Brigitte Macron’s real identity, published screenshots of Charlie Kirk showing that his funding had been cut and that he had been threatened two days before being assassinated  [ 10 ] . Charlie Kirk had just taken a stand against the massacres in Gaza.

During his speech in New York, Benjamin Netanyahu said: “The most important purchase that is being made is (…) TikTok. Number one. And I hope it goes through because it can be substantial. And the other one? X. We need to talk to Elon [Musk]. He’s not an enemy, he’s a friend. We should talk to him. Now, if we can achieve those two things, we will achieve a lot. We need to fight the fight, give direction to the Jewish people and give direction to our non-Jewish friends.”

Billionaire Safra Catz became executive vice president of Larry Ellison’s Oracle when it acquired 45% of the social network TikTok on September 25. She said, “We need to integrate love and respect for Israel into American culture.” Oracle will store TikTok’s US user data on its cloud computers.

At the same time, the Israeli Foreign Ministry has just created the company Show Faith by Work, which it has registered as a foreign agent of influence in the United States  [ 11 ] . This time, the aim is to disseminate the official version of the October 7 attack and messages against the existence of a Palestinian state to all American Christian Zionists. A budget of 3.2 million dollars has been planned, including the rental of a caravan which will allow propaganda films to be shown during Christian gatherings.

—

[ 1 ]  “Public diplomacy in army boots: the chronic failure of Israel’s Hasbara”, Gal Hadari & Asaf Turgeman, Hasbara, Israel Affairs , 24:3, 482-499 (2018), DOI: 10.1080/13537121.2018.1455374.

[ 2 ]  Israel’s Public Diplomacy. The Problems of Hasbara, 1966–1975 , Jonathan Cumming, Rowman & Littelfield (2016).

[ 3 ]  “  Spying on Linda Sarsour: Israeli Firm Compiled BDS Dossier for Adelson-funded US Group Battling Her Campus Appearances  ”, Uri Blau, Haaretz , May 28, 2018.

[ 4 ]  “  BDS is a dirty business. Those who battle it on Israel’s behalf must stay clean  ”, David Horovitz, The Times of Israel , June 17, 2018.

[ 5 ]  “  Netanyahu’s Goal for Gaza: “Thin” Population “to a Minimum”  ”, Ryan Grim, The Intercept, December 3, 2023.

[ 6 ]  Acting Propaganda: Viewpoints from Israel , Ron Schleifer & Jessica Snapper, Sussex Academic Press (2015).

[ 7 ]  “  @MiddleEastEye  ”, X , September 27, 2025.

[ 8 ]  “  Report: Israel to spend over half a billion shekels turning ChatGPT into public diplomacy tool  ”, Daniel Edelson & Raphael Kahan, YNetGlobal , October 6, 2025.

[ 9 ]  “  NSD/FARA Registration Unit  ”, September 26, 2025.

[ 10 ]  “  Turning Point USA responds: Yes, The Text Messages Are Real  ” Candace Owens Ep 249, YouTube, October 7, 2025.

[ 11 ]  “  Israel wants to hire Chris Pratt and Steph Curr  ”, Nick Cleveland-Stout, Responsible Statecraft , October 07, 2025.

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This is a a story about a fight between titans in which Europe, due to its leaders stupidity, is the most significant casualty.

Dutch government seizes control of Chinese-owned chipmaker Nexperia – Politico.eu, Oct 13 2025
The move could inflame wider trade tensions between Beijing and the European Union.

The Dutch government has granted itself the power to intervene in company decisions at Dutch-based Chinese-owned chipmaker Nexperia.

The highly unusual step, announced late Sunday, grants the country the power to “halt and reverse” company decisions — meaning Nexperia cannot transfer assets or hire executives without Dutch government approval, according to national media.

The move is a significant escalation in relations between the Netherlands and China and could inflame wider trade tensions between Beijing and the European Union, with Europe caught in the middle of a tit-for-tat chips war between the U.S. and China.

The Dutch have effectively stolen a big Chinese owned company.

The background via Pekingology:

Wingtech Technology is a privately-run, Shanghai-listed Chinese electronics and semiconductor conglomerate headquartered in Jiaxing, Zhejiang Province. It began as an original design manufacturer (ODM) for smartphones and consumer devices and has since grown into one of China’s most prominent integrated technology companies, combining electronics assembly, chip design, and semiconductor manufacturing.

Wingtech in 2019 acquired Nexperia, a Dutch semiconductor firm that was formerly part of Philips’ chip division, NXP. Headquartered in the Netherlands, Nexperia is a global semiconductor company with a rich European history and over 12,500 employees across Europe, Asia, and the United States.

In December 2024, the U.S. Department of Commerce added Wingtech to its Entity List, restricting its access to American components and technology. The U.S. unilateral sanctions threatened heavy losses and forced the Apple supplier to announce, in March 2025, the spin-off of a major part of its operations.

Zhang Xuefeng is the founder of Wingtech and CEO of Nexperia, which closed the 2024 financial year with a total revenue of $2.06 billion.

A successful businessman from China bought the Dutch company. He invested heavily and the company grew with several research and manufacturing sides throughout Europe and the world. The company paid a lot of taxes and the Dutch were happy.

In late 2024 Wingtech was put on the U.S. entity list to block Chinese semiconductor development by cutting it off from U.S. products and technology licenses.

In June 2024 the U.S. planned to extend the entity list. Not only would chip companies in China be prohibited from use of U.S. content but any international company that was 50% or more owned by a Chinese entity would likewise be penalized.

On September 30 2025 the U.S. Commerce Department extended its export restrictions:

A U.S. Commerce Department interim final rule vastly expands the number of entities subject to export control restrictions by extending the Entity List and MEU List restrictions to non-U.S. entities 50% or more owned, directly or indirectly, by listed parties effective as of September 29, 2025.

(The new Chinese export controls on rare earth metals and certain other technologies are a direct response to those new U.S. restrictions.)

The U.S. move cut of Nexperia and other partially Chinese owned companies in Europe from U.S. content.

The Dutch government, which had been forewarned and pressed by the U.S., panicked:

US officials told their Dutch counterparts that the Chinese CEO of Nexperia “will have to be replaced” for the company to be exempt from Washington’s entity list, newly disclosed court documents show.

The disclosure comes after the Dutch government effectively seized control of the semiconductor firm, a subsidiary of the Chinese company Wingtech, forcing a change in management under an obscure law known as the Goods Availability Act.

In doing so, the Dutch authorities removed founding CEO Zhang Xuezheng from his role, sparking fury in Beijing.

Court documents released by the Amsterdam Court of Appeal on Tuesday show that the United States told Dutch officials in June about a forthcoming change in the entity list, which bars American companies from trading with firms on the list.

On Sunday October 12, after the company was seized, Wingtech dropped a bombshell filing with the Shanghai Stock Exchange. It describes how Nexperia’s 2nd level management, under Dutch government pressure, deposed of the Chief Executive Officer and owner of the company:

On 1 October 2025 (Netherlands time), Ruben Lichtenberg, a Dutch national who serves as the statutory director and Chief Legal Officer (CLO) of both Nexperia Holding and Nexperia Semiconductor, filed—with the support of two other executives, Chief Financial Officer (CFO) Stefan Tilger and Chief Operating Officer (COO) Achim Kempe, both German nationals—an urgent petition before the Enterprise Chamber requesting a corporate investigation and immediate provisional measures on behalf of both Nexperia entities.

On the same day, the Enterprise Chamber granted several emergency measures immediately, without a hearing, which took effect at once. These measures included suspending Mr. Zhang Xuezheng from his positions as executive officer of Nexperia Holding and non-executive director of Nexperia Semiconductor; suspending the operation of Article 3 of the Board Rules of Nexperia Semiconductor, which defines the CEO’s duties and authorities; and placing all shares held by Wingtech subsidiary 裕成控股有限公司 Yuching Holding Limited (a Hong Kong-registered company and the sole shareholder of Nexperia Holding) under temporary management by an independent third-party trustee for management purposes, effective until the Enterprise Chamber’s oral hearing scheduled for 6 October 2025 and its subsequent ruling on the request for immediate relief.

Wingtech’s official WeChat blog released a scathing announcement, which was widely distributed in China.

Internal Legal Actions Are a Malicious Extension of External Pressure

Certain foreign executives within Nexperia have attempted to use legal means to forcibly alter the company’s ownership structure.

Their actions are closely aligned with the Dutch government’s administrative directives and, in essence, represent an effort to usurp shareholder rights and subvert lawful corporate governance under the guise of “compliance.”

We strongly condemn such politically motivated attempts to seize control.

We Will Resolutely Defend Our Lawful Rights
…

Today the Chinese government reacted to the Dutch raid of the Chinese owned company by cutting it off from Chinese technologies and products:

Chipmaker Nexperia, a subsidiary of China’s Wingtech Technology and a major supplier of mature chips for the automotive and consumer electronics sectors, announced on Tuesday that it has been banned by the Chinese Ministry of Commerce from exporting products made in China, including those produced by its subcontractors, after the Dutch government took over the company using a Cold-War-era law to secure Europe’s chip supply.

Nexperia said it is seeking an exemption from the export ban, which could affect Dutch access to its chips. The company operates an 80,000-square-meter assembly site in Guangdong province near Hong Kong, as well as fabrication, assembly, and testing facilities in Germany, the Philippines, Malaysia, and Britain.

If the Dutch government does not retract its decision to practically confiscate Nexperia the company will die. Its business is globalized. Parts of its products are made all over the world. Its products and sales in Europe depend on subcontractor products which are made in China.

The company is important to Europe. It produces some 90 billion bread and butter components per year which flow into other higher value European products. Sure, other Chinese companies will be happy to replace those parts. But where is the win for the Netherlands or Europe in that?

In the trade war between U.S. and China Europe should have stayed neutral. It should not have buckled under pressure from either side but rely on its own substantial trade powers to stay out of the fight. It is a fight in which the U.S. has no chance to win.

It was a huge mistake by the Dutch to submit to U.S. demands and to seize Nexperia. It was a huge mistake for Europe to submit to U.S. demands.

The minions leading Europe who have allowed for this deserve to be fired over their utter strategic stupidity.

Reprinted with permission from Moon of Alabama.

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The pool of speculative fervor will be drained, as impossible as that seems in this moment in history.

2025 may go down as The Year When Everything Happened in No Particular Order, tracking William Gibson’s famous line that “The future is already here, it’s just not very evenly distributed.”

Those expecting inflation will find it, those expecting deflation will find it, those expecting a stock rally will get a rally, those expecting a crash will get a crash, and so on.

The forces that drove reliable trends have all weakened or reversed:

1. ever-lower interest rates lowered the cost of credit/capital to near-zero.

2. the deflationary forces of globalization: everything got cheaper and disposable.

3. expanding workforces increased income and consumption.

4. credit/asset bubbles created wealth without productivity improvements or sacrifice.

5. energy supply kept up with rising consumption.

6. the external costs of the “waste is growth” Landfill Economy (pollution, depletion, etc.) were ignored / not priced in.

These titanic forces still have the momentum of recency bias: most people expect the rest of the 2020s to be an extension of the 40+year Bull Market in Everything.

Feedback (doing more of what’s failed) and buffers (print more money and everything will be fixed) are working to maintain the status quo sand castles as the tide rises.

Those castles closest to the sea will dissolve first (the periphery I often refer to). Those with resources will be shoveling sand to build walls around their castles.

But the tide is relentless and so we’re in a period of flux where those benefiting from the status quo are fighting the erosion of all the forces that enabled the status quo to reach such heights.

As they lose ground, they redouble their policy efforts, pushing policies to new extremes–extremes which further destabilize the system.

The global economy is a complex self-organizing adaptive system, and so blunt-force policies intended to protect the status quo stability end up generating unintended consequences which have their own consequences (the second-order effects I often mention).

Those trying to control the system find their control is imperfect.

Long cycles are now in play. Interest rates fell for 40 years–the longest such run in recent history. Now interest rates will rise for some period of time, likely culminating in a financial crisis with no easy resolution, because printing money–the solution for the past 40 years–will be the problem, not the solution.

Demographics are also in play. Workforces are shrinking, retirees living off the earnings of the workforce are soaring.

The world desires ever greater quantities of energy and consumption, but the cheap, easy to exploit materials have already been exploited. Now everything will become more expensive, regardless of technological improvements.

Physical, chemical and cost limits will matter.

Whatever we seek, we can find–but that may prove ephemeral.

Everyone’s on the lookout for Black Swans, but that’s not the way Black Swans work.

Read the Whole Article

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Ron Paul

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Eugyppius

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