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Eugyppius

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The concept of the Establishment was first used in England referring to the established (or official) state church, the Anglican Church or Church of England, created by the usurper and schismatic Henry Tudor during the Protestant Reformation.

As two later disparate sources document (Leornard and Mark Silk, The American Establishment, and Samuel Blumenfeld, Is Public Education Necessary?) the origins of the American Establishment began during the presidency of Thomas Jefferson in 1803 during the Massachusetts conflict for control of the Congregationalist State religious establishment and Harvard College, between the liberal Unitarians versus the conservative Trinitarian Calvinists. The Unitarians won and Harvard became the seat of liberalism and the Establishment.

Nineteenth-century writer William Cobbett later expanded the concept to include those networks of financial institutions related to the Bank of England, elite public schools and clubs, and publishing entities (such as “the bloody old Times”) the ruling aristocracy used to train and sustain its oligarchic bureaucracy who manned the British empire. Cobbett labeled this power elite as “the Thing.”

As Leonard and Mark Silk also observed in their masterful book, The American Establishment, twentieth century British historian A. J. P. Taylor later adapted Cobbett’s “the Thing” into “the Establishment” in a 1953 article in The New Statesman, followed by journalist Henry Fairlie’s usage of the term in The Spectator in 1955.

The broad concept was soon adopted by wide-ranging American analysts of the powers-that-be, such as Richard H. Rovere, C. Wright Mills, Dan Smoot, Phyllis Schlafly, Carroll Quigley, John Kenneth Galbraith, and G. William Domhoff.

“The American Establishment,” by Richard H. Rovere

http://archive.wilsonquarterly.com/sites/default/files/articles/WQ_VOL2_SU_1978_Article_05.pdf

The Power Elite, by C. Wright Mills

https://ia601701.us.archive.org/29/items/dli.ernet.507694/507694-The%20Power%20Elite%20%281959%29.pdf

The Invisible Government, by Dan Smoot

https://ia801809.us.archive.org/35/items/B-001-014-093/B-001-014-093.pdf

Tragedy and Hope: A History of the World in Our Time, by Carroll Quigley

http://www.carrollquigley.net/pdf/Tragedy_and_Hope.pdf

These various authors recognized that while the First Amendment to the United States Constitution prohibits an establishment of religion, our nation does indeed have, like its British cousins across the pond, an Establishment, complete with its own theological canon and doxology of statecraft and spy craft. Its “Vatican” is the Council on Foreign Relations. Its primary source of treasure and alms has been the Morgan and Rockefeller financial empires, which created the Fed, the great enabler of the Welfare-Warfare State. Many of its elite seminarians have studied at Ivy League institutions such as Harvard, Princeton, or Columbia; some in particular, at Yale where they were initiated into Skull and Bones.

The immediate post-World War II period of history, tracing the Establishment’s bipartisan “foreign policy consensus” on the Cold War, is the crucial gestation period, a time implementing “the American Century” of Henry Luce, of the Truman administration’s creation of the National Security State and its doctrine of Containment as a public rationale for global intervention and the military-industrial complex (and George F. Kennan’s, Robert A. Lovett’s, and the Dulles Brothers’ clandestine policy of Rollback or Liberation through covert operations of the OPC and CIA).

But the Establishment’s rules and credo were sketched on papyrus long before 1947. They were put forth by visionary prophets of pelf, plunder and empire fifty years earlier, during the Spanish-American War and the Philippine Insurrection.

A central figure was the sinister Elihu Root, later founding chairman of the Council on Foreign Relations, who like his fellow interventionists and war criminals Theodore Roosevelt and Barack Obama, was recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize. He was the archetype of the Establishment’s much-abused “Wise Man” category, the mainstream media’s designation of select servitors of power stretching from Root to persons such as John J. McCloy to Richard Holbrooke – Special Representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan, Bilderberg group, Trilateral Commission, Council on Foreign Relations, former managing director of Lehman Brothers, and board director of AIG to July 2008 (just before the bailouts).

Before the acclaimed “Wise Men” of the Truman regime came the “Four Evangelists” of an earlier era. Led by Elihu Root, his protégé “Colonel” Henry L. Stimpson, along with “Colonel” Edward M. House and Raymond B. Fosdick, these little-known four were the real architects of the American Establishment and its interventionist gospel of the Welfare-Warfare State. It is they who wrote its rules and drafted its credo which has transformed the American republic into a squalid and overstretched empire.

We must continue our role as non-interventionist heretics to the CFR’s church, working for its disestablishment and demise. And while the usurper Biden was upheld by the craven courts and subterfuge in the Electoral College, his illegitimate reign was subject to daily ongoing intense scrutiny and derision by tens of millions.

What we have been seeing in 2020-2024 played out on the streets of America, particularly in large Blue State metropolitan areas and dense urban cities is classic planned chaos and the “Strategy of Tension.” Unable to dislodge Donald Trump by the Russiagate hoax or the malicious soft coup impeachment process, his sworn enemies, using COVID-19 as their pretext, have turned to the destruction of the economy by repressive lockdowns, creating mass unemployment and annihilation of small businesses, thus fracturing civil society. The Democrats, elements of the deep state, Big Tech, and their complacent, compliant regime media pawns, have turned to an age-old psy/war strategy to be wielded as an ax against the president, insidiously using the weaponized corpse of the slain George Floyd as the new rationale for these riots and insurrections. These dark seditious forces then engaged in the largest, most treasonous act in American history, by attempting to subvert the integrity of the 2020 presidential election by subterfuge, fraud, and duplicity, by manufacturing widespread disruptive anomalies and naked corruption.

Historically there has been a symbiotic correlation relationship between agent provocateur groups, infiltration by police informers, and the counter-terrorism forces of the deep state. The repressive security state has molded and used such witting (or unwitting) terrorist pawns or drones in covert activities to create a “strategy of tension” to instill fear and consolidate repressive power and control which would enhance strident calls for more intense police repression and clandestine surveillance of its subject general population. With countless decades of real-world experience and clinical research, masters of psychological warfare and mind control, expert manipulators and programmers of cult-like behavior, recruit those alienated arrested development post-adolescents and anti-social disillusioned vicarious thrill seekers who fit a susceptible psychological profile matrix and who relish vandalism, violence and destruction as a means of striking out at a world beyond the control of their misshapened lives. An ideological construct of direct action “anarchism” or “propaganda by the deed” is put forth as a purported justification for their aberrant thug-like terrorist behavior.

The willfully ignorant nihilistic mobs and savage looters are simply acting as pawns, the unwitting tools of the deep state “strategy of tension” 2020 in creating the pretext for the elite’s technocratic New World Order of digital, Social Credit Scoring economy and centralized political total control in a totalitarian corporatist entity, with all pervasive mass surveillance by facial recognition databases and coercive regimentation. These actions are running parallel with the transition to a cashless society with all financial transactions via a CBDC or “electronic purse” monitored through biometric identification using such technologies as fingerprints, hand geometry and retina scanning. This is the Great Reset.

In this time of unprecedented, planned chaos, each of us must steel ourselves to understand, discuss and analyze the crucial global dimensions of what the Elites have scheduled to take place and how it plays into the technocrats’ plan to control the world’s resources and implement genocidal eugenics-based austerity.

The father of the US Constitution, James Madison, in Federalist Paper #47, observed, ”the accumulation of all powers, legislative, executive, and judiciary, in the same hands, whether of one, a few, or many, and whether hereditary, self-appointed, or elective, may justly be pronounced the very definition of tyranny.”

The deep state is beyond the Constitution. It is separate from the legislative, executive, and judicial branches of government that we all learned about in grade school.

The deep state has no restrictions on its extra-constitutional actions, no separation of powers, no checks and balances, no transparency or open accounting for its egregious and invasive behavior.

We are no longer governed by Congress or the President or the Courts, but by a corporate, financial, and military Elite that write the laws to suit themselves. It is the cloistered class of professional managerial credentialed elites of the administrative regulatory captured bureaucracy and covert intelligence agencies who rule us all.

Donald Trump, J. D. Vance, RFK Jr., Elon Musk, and Tulsi Gabbard will jointly forcefully challenge the despotic tyranny and regimentation of the governing elites composing the regulatory captured bureaucratic administrative state and its corrupt crony enablers, particularly in Big Pharma, the warmongers of the military industrial complex, and the invasive surveillance/intelligence deep state at the core of this infamy.

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Reclaim the Net

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Republican Senators are being lame. So, are both shilling for the Poison Injection Industrial Complex?

No Letters of Endorsement for RFKJr during the hearings?

https://tomkudla.substack.com/p/where-are-the-letters-of-endorsement-for-rfkjr-during-the-hearings

Senators take aim at RFK, Jr.

https://mailchi.mp/tomwoods/rfkhearing

PR coup that needs happen at Kennedy Confirmation Hearing

https://tomkudla.substack.com/p/pr-coup-that-needs-to-happen-at-kennedy-confirmation-hearing

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Bernie Sanders—Senate HELP Committee ranking minority member—just convened a roundtable of Vaccine High Priests, including Pontifex Maximus Paul Offit. The obvious objective of this roundtable discussion is to spread fear among the American people that Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. will take away their vaccines and send their children back to 19th and early 20th century conditions of childhood mortality.

It’s ironic that Senator Sanders has drunk the Kool-Aid of vaccine ideology, given his general posture of being suspicious of industrial and financial interests with well-funded lobbies on Capitol Hill. It seems likely he is aware that that Big Pharma has by far the biggest lobby on the Hill, but he apparently has a blind spot where vaccines are concerned.

Reviewing the literature on pediatric diseases in the 19th century, I see the major causes of death in children were:

1). tuberculosis,

2). diarrhea of infancy

3). bacillary dysentery

4). typhoid fever

5). scarlet fever.

6). diphtheria

7). lobar pneumonia.

Note that all of the above are caused by bacterial infections that have been almost entirely eradicated by advances in public sanitation and antibiotics.

As Stanford T. Shulman—Division of Infectious Diseases, Northwestern University, The Feinberg School of Medicine, The Children’s Memorial Hospital, Chicago—notes in his paper The History of Pediatric Infectious Diseases:

Inadequate sanitation, impure water and unsafe milk supplies all contributed very significantly to the spread of infectious diseases among infants and children, and particularly to those living in the very crowded circumstances that promote transmission.

I suspect it is impossible for the typical American mother today to begin to fathom the sheer horror of poor sanitation during this time in crowded tenement buildings in major American cities such as New York and Chicago, where several large families living on the same floor would share just one hallway water closet. Today, the mere sight of such a water closet would cause a young mother to vomit on her lululemon yoga tights and have nightmares for the rest of her life.

Likewise, at the turn of the century, the American milk supply for crowded cities was appalling. As Dr. Schulman noted:

An exceptionally important advance during the late 19th Century and early 20th Century was the result of efforts by concerned pediatricians and others to secure a safe and sanitary milk supply for infants). Nonbreast-fed infants experienced particularly high mortality rates, because much of the cow milk supply was “swill milk,” which came from cows fed only distiller’s mash, housed in incredibly filthy conditions, without fresh air, exercise or hay, many of which were also infected by bovine tuberculosis.

Job Lewis Smith, who was one of the first to differentiate rubella from rubeola and wrote several papers on neonatal tetanus, served as the second APS President in 1890, 18 years after he had written in his textbook that more than half of New York’s infants who were spoon-fed (i.e. not nursed or wet-nursed) in the summer, died before fall. He strongly urged milk sterilization and wrote and spoke about the dangers of artificial infant feeding.

In a 1675 letter, Isaac Newton famously wrote: “If I have seen further [than others], it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.”

Nowadays our society gives all the credit for public health to vaccines developers, but all of them stood on the shoulders of hygiene pioneers such as Ignaz Semmelweis, John Snow, Job Lewis Smith, and above all, the civil engineers and builders who brought proper sewage channelization and clean water to our cities.

This originally appeared on Courageous Discourse.

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With the global economy hanging on by one rusty and wobbling wheel to the triple loop roller-coaster rails we are on; paper money is no longer a wise investment. For those who see the writing on the wall and even the less pessimistic, holding precious metals in the form of Gold and Silver are a time-tested hedge against inflation, currency manipulation and bank defaults. You can’t help but hear the advice of financial professionals who are saying you should buy gold at the very least as part of a diversification strategy. There are numerous opinions about this and I for one am convinced that at some point in our future, the dollars in my bank will either be worthless or unobtainable for a variety of reasons. If the economy finally does go off the rails, precious metals are what we in the prepping community are looking to as our monetary bumper guard.

When this happens, people who have prepared by purchasing Gold and Silver for their financial security will be all set, right? That is what we all think about but it got me to thinking. Let’s take the hypothetical scenario that you have purchased 10,000 silver American Eagles and they are hidden safely away somewhere that only you and your spouse know about. You wake up tomorrow morning and we are hit with a Weimar Republic type of scenario. Banks are closed for weeks and thousands of dollars won’t buy a loaf of bread. The way of life we once knew is completely gone and now you have one of the only forms of money that will buy anything. You figure you can go down to the local market and buy or barter for anything you want with some of your shiny American Eagles. There may be a few problems though.

How do you know if the metals you are trading for are real?

One of the first issues I can foresee with a new economy based upon precious metals is the risk of forgery. I assume this has been the case throughout time since money was invented and began to be circulated as a suitable method for payment. Do you know how to test a gold coin to make sure it isn’t fake? What if a total stranger offers you a gold coin for two of your best shotguns you were keeping for barter. Will you know if the yellowish coins he is giving you are real? What if a woman offers you two old-looking silver coins with some woman on the face and tells you that they have been in her family for years. Will you know if they are real or forgeries from China? These could be more risks with bartering that you need to consider.

Testing precious metals is fairly easy if you have the knowledge and supplies. There are several methods for each and I will go into a couple for Gold and Silver. If you think you may encounter a situation where you might be faced with trading large or even small amounts of precious metals, it may be wise to invest in a digital scale to verify the weight. A silver (troy) ounce coin should weigh 31.10 grams and simply being able to verify that the coin someone is trying to trade you for weighs close to what it should weigh could give you a quick indication as to the authenticity.

To quickly test gold you can purchase a Gold testing kit which comes with a variety of acids. These acids are in marked bottles and each reacts differently to different types of metals. With one of these relatively cheap kits you can test Gold, Silver and Platinum and even know the quality of the metal from 10K to 22K.

To test the gold you simply drop a small drop of the acid onto the coin or bar and the acid reacts when the gold is real and the correct acid will react to the correct Karat or purity of gold.

You can test Silver with the same kit mentioned above or there are some other less sophisticated methods that are supposed to work also. I found a nice article that describes 3 quick ways to help tell real  Silver from Fake Silver.

The Ring Test

Silver has a nice ringing sound when it is tapped. If it is a coin, you can flick it into the air. Alternatively, you can gently tap it with another coin. In both instances, you should hear a high-pitched bell-type ring that lasts about 1-2 seconds. A fun way to try this is with a U.S. quarter from the years 1932-1964, which is 90% silver, and with a modern U.S. quarter (post 1965), which is 91.67% copper and 8.33% nickel. The silver quarter ring will be much higher-pitched compared to the dull ring of the copper quarter. Be careful when doing this with whatever coin you are testing so as not to ding or damage it.

The Ice Test

In addition to having the highest electrical conductivity of any element, silver also has the highest thermal conductivity of any metal. If you place an ice cube on a silver coin or bar, the ice will begin to melt immediately. Obviously, ice will melt if placed on anything at room temperature, for example, but if placed on silver it will melt much more quickly and impressively. Try it!

The Magnet Test

Silver is not magnetic. If you place a strong, rare-earth magnet called a Neodymium magnet on a silver coin or bar, it should not easily stick to it. If you are testing bars, you can angle one at 45 degrees and let the magnet slide down. It should slide down very slowly. If it sticks or it slides very quickly, it is not silver. However, keep in mind that just because the magnet does not stick does not necessarily mean that it is silver.

How will you carry your Gold and Silver?

OK, now you know how to verify if gold or silver is fake but in a post collapse world there will still be risks that you might want to consider. You will be your own ATM because there won’t be a strong building to store your precious metals in until you need them. You will be responsible for storing, hiding most likely and keeping your wealth safe from people who want to take it. There will no longer be the illusion of safety that the FDIC provides to your deposits. If someone steals your gold and silver, it’s gone. There isn’t any getting it back unless you find the person who stole your money and take it back.

There are a lot of strategies for hiding your money but probably the most important concept would be to make sure you do not hide everything in one place. If you are going to hide your silver, make sure there are several locations. I would recommend a minimum of 3 locations with varying sizes in there.

For example if you were bugging out on foot and had to take all of your money with you the risk that you might be confronted on the road is higher after the SHTF. Do you want to have all of your silver in one pack? Probably not. If you aren’t alone, you could have different caches of your money so that if the bad guys ask for your money you could give up one bag but the other two would be OK. I might recommend having three so when you give them the first bag and they inevitably ask for the second you still have your third in reserves. Who knows if this will work but it does give you options. You could do the same with weapons, food or any other survival cache you have planned.

Hopefully this gives you something to think about as you prepare for whatever is in our future. If you are considering stocking up on precious metals, the points above may help you out one day.

This originally appeared on Preppgroup.

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It was entirely predictable and at times almost humorous to see the sour, partisan reaction by Joe Biden, Kamala Harris, Hillary Clinton, and some in the national media to President Trump’s inaugural address last week.

It was obvious that Biden, Harris and Mrs. Clinton are still bitter over Trump’s two victories and it seemed very painful for them to have to listen to him advocate so many things that are so popular with the majority of the American people.

Rep. Seth Moulton (D-Mass.) said the speech was “the darkest inaugural address ever” but to most people, there was nothing dark about Trump saying his administration would be “colorblind and merit-based.”

Chris Hayes of MSNBC said the speech showed that Trump is like a “cult leader predicting different dates for the end of the world.”

But the overwhelming majority of the people want a leader who will enforce our immigration laws and stop the flood of millions coming across our border illegally.

Jen Psaki, President Biden’s former press secretary, said unlike previous inaugural addresses, Trump’s was very “politicized.”

But the overwhelming majority of the American people, I believe, were happy to hear how Trump will end the electric vehicle mandate and not force everyone to buy expensive, unreliable electric cars and trucks like Democrat politicians wanted.

And while Biden and Harris wanted to keep pouring billions of dollars down the rat hole in Ukraine, most Americans agreed with Trump when he said the government cannot manage even a simple domestic crisis “while at the same time stumbling into a continuing catalogue of catastrophic events abroad.”

And the great majority especially agreed with Trump when he added: “We have a government that has given unlimited funding to the defense of foreign borders but refuses to defend American borders, or more importantly, its own people.”

When Trump criticized former House members Adam Kinzinger (R-IL) and Liz Cheney (R-WY) in a second speech at the Capitol, Kinzinger said the president was “childish.” All that did was show that Kinzinger can dish out criticism (as he often has toward Trump), but he can’t take any in return.

Kinzinger is still bitter because the Republican Party in his congressional district condemned him for joining Nancy Pelosi’s kangaroo court Jan.  6th Committee, and he blames Trump.

Almost every former Republican official who appears regularly on CNN or MSNBC is doing it for money and/or is mad at the Party because of some slight or for being turned down for some position.

Trump followed his speeches by signing many executive orders on his first day back in the White House. Executive orders, through most of our history, were mostly done to handle non-controversial, administrative matters. They were not supposed to be used to bypass Congress.

However, President Biden, or the power-mad people around him, used them on his first day to do all sorts of controversial and left-wing actions. So, many of Trump’s new executive orders were to undo things Biden had done.

The executive order that I was most pleased about was Trump issuing pardons to over 1,500 J6 defendants, as they are called, and commute the sentences of about 14 others to time served.

Almost all these defendants were patriotic Americans who simply walked around the Capitol that day after going through doors held open for them by Capitol Police.

The Democratic J6 Committee covered up most of the films taken that day and refused to release them. It was only after Kevin McCarthy became speaker of the House and ordered the release of the films that the true story came out. People could then see how peaceful most of these people were and how the Democrats had so greatly exaggerated the events of that day for partisan political purposes.

The few who destroyed property or actually assaulted police should have been punished. But most were given very excessive sentences solely due to hatred for President Trump, and many were held in jail without trials longer than is usual even for people who have committed far more serious crimes.

Probably my strongest support group throughout my career has been by local law enforcement, and I liked all the Capitol Police. But the truth is that they had about the safest law enforcement jobs there were, and 99% of the time were just very nice, highly-paid tour guides.

President Trump will get strong pushback on everything he wants to do, but almost all items that were mentioned in his address are things the great majority want done.

This originally appeared on Knoxville Focus.

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Megyn Kelly has been en feugo of late and i think she’s shedding light on an interesting angle of the current trans crisis that has perhaps been too widely ignored. you do not see this sort of sudden spike in gender issues with children absent provocation. it was not some nascent trend being suppressed for centuries and suddenly allowed to find expression.

This is being done to them and the machine that does it has become a captured thing that works in ways inimical to care or caring. it’s a monster of circular affirmation structures devoid of all safety or brakes and it’s doing untold, permanent damage to a lot of vulnerable children .

You speak the “magic words” because you are afraid or ill or seek status and attention and the system that has emerged pulls you into a riptide where no one can pull you out or is even allowed to try.

The medical boards require that doctors and psychiatrists “affirm.” you say you’re a boy or a girl or a 20 gendered space dragon and it’s “yes indeed little 10 year old! of course you are! we the medical profession are here to whisk you away to your new life!” those who would say “uh, no, this child was raped and is autistic and has a panoply of other issues that are simply manifesting as what is currently trendy and the issue lies between their ears and not their legs” are barred from discussion. say that and you lose your license and board certification.

And that, my friends, is madness.

Worse, it’s a conveyor belt to child destruction and the sterilization and wreckage of young gay and neurodivergent children, a whirlpool designed to drown any whose swim-strokes falter. in many places, laws will even take kids away from parents who fail to “affirm” and hand them over to doctors and surrogates who are required to. franz kafka would have looked at this story line and said “jeez, that’s a bit much…”

Have a listen.

Megyn Kelly stuns the Bill Maher audience by laying out the facts about transitioning. After they recoil in disgust, Bill Maher corroborates Megyn Kelly ‘We are definitely doing that’:
Megyn Kelly: “What we’re doing to our children with this trans insanity. We are chopping off… pic.twitter.com/3ZIVKPFkim

— Eric Abbenante (@EricAbbenante) October 26, 2024

Sounds overblown and impossible, right?

It’s not.

Cases like this where mentally ill and “neurodivergent” children get railroaded into “affirming care” and no one is allowed to speak against it pervade. stop and really think about this. this 12 year old girl whose family has a history of mental illness was:

• sexually abused
• depressed
• autistic
• seems to have traits of PTSD, bipolarism, and anxiety
• and ultimately exhibited psychosis including audio and visual hallucinations

And somehow “let’s make you a boy!” jumped to the top of the pile and the rest got ignored? how is this not raising immense questions about consent and capacity?

Well, it’s because they are not being asked.

They are often not allowed to be.

but surely such august experts would exercise due care before recommending such radical and irreversible treatment, right? apparently not.

Hormone blockers, testosterone, and gender surgery are not going to help any of what was wrong here. pretty much any actual physician or psychiatrist would tell you so. but if the law says they need not be asked or perhaps could not even counsel against this if they wanted to, you get this kind of railroading.

None of the above was discussed or explained in Clementine’s case. In fact, the opposite occurred. Defendants obscured and concealed important information and failed to disclose the significant health risks associated with a female taking high doses of harmful male hormone drugs and puberty blockers.

Even worse, Defendants made numerous material misrepresentations in order to convince Clementine’s parents to agree to puberty blockers, such as assuring them that puberty blockers are “completely reversible,” and cross-sex hormones, including asserting that Clementine would commit suicide if she did not begin taking testosterone.

This is enabling a group of people whose views are not even nonsense but literal assault to be protected as “the only ones speaking.”

Read the Whole Article

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Much of the debate over so-called “birthright citizenship” is over interpretations of the Fourteenth Amendment to the US constitution. Most of the people currently in power claim that the text means every baby born to every foreign national on American soil is an automatic US citizen. Others—like myself—believe that this interpretation is dubious and has always been a matter of debate.

In commentary on this topic, however, one often encounters assertions to the effect that rulings by the US Supreme Court provide the “definitive” or “final” interpretation. Or, put another way, there is an idea that once SCOTUS makes a ruling on something, then the ruling is “settled law.” Even worse, some people think that once the Supreme Court has ruled on something, there is no point discussing it or challenging the currently popular interpretation of the law.

In truth, there is no such thing as settled law and the US Supreme court’s interpretations are hardly definitive. In politics nothing is ever settled or permanent. No cause is ever won or lost permanently. Beyond the short term, everything is up for grabs.

This is true in the courts as everywhere else. At any given time, the court’s rulings reflect modern ideologies and political realities. As these change, so do the court’s rulings. Indeed, court’s often “discover” that the rulings of past courts were somehow completely wrong, and the court then moves in a nearly opposite direction. The back-and-forth on Roe v. Wade is just one example.

So much for “settled” law.

The Mythology of the Supreme Court

These misconceptions about the Supreme Court’s “definitive” rulings often stem from the idea that the US Supreme Court’s bases its rulings on an apolitical deliberative process independent of political pressures and ideologies.

This has never been true. Like all institutions of the US government, whether we’re talking about Congress, or the Federal Reserve, or the Supreme Court, the SCOTUS is a thoroughly political institution overseen by a group of political appointees who are biased by specific political ideologies.

For more on this mythology of the Supreme Court, see here.

How is it that a new crop of judges can come to entirely new and different conclusions that are virtually the opposite of the rulings that preceded them? The answer is simple. Judges fashion their rulings to reflect modern political sensibilities. Political ideologies and realities change, and thus federal judges will turn past court rulings on their head in order to reflect new views.

There are many such examples, but let’s start with one of the court’s most notorious rulings: Korematsu v. the United States. 

In that ruling, the Supreme Court manufactured an unwritten power contained, they said, in the US Constitution: the power to round up American citizens of a particular race and put them in concentration camps.

The idea that the Federal government possessed such powers would have struck the average nineteenth-century American—including the federal judges—as outlandish. Yet, the nation’s “greatest” legal minds of the Supreme Court in 1944 miraculously discovered a new power that just happened to align exactly with the US’s war effort at the time.

To get an idea of the allegedly deep legal thinking behind the Korematsu decision, we need look no further than Justice Hugo Black who joined the majority vote on the court’s support for the concentration camps. When asked about his ruling years later, Black remained unrepentant and simply stated that “Japs” were scary, so therefore ought to be rounded up: “[p]eople were rightfully fearful of the Japanese in Los Angeles. . . . They all look alike to a person not a Jap.” Of course, Black and his colleagues in the court’s majority covered up this simple-minded thinking with pages and pages of “jurisprudential” writing disguised to make their anti-Japanese edict look like it was born out of principled legal theory. The fact is that Franklin Roosevelt wanted to lock up all the “Japs,” and the Supreme Court was going to do whatever it took to invent a rationale for the plan.

In 2018, the Supreme Court again decided that the “definitive” legal ruling of 1944 was wrong, and the opposite was true. Chief Justice Roberts wrote in Trump v. Hawaii that Korematsu was undefendable and “The forcible relocation of U.S. citizens to concentration camps, solely and explicitly on the basis of race, is objectively unlawful and outside the scope of Presidential authority.”

The Court has never existed independent of the ideological, historical, and political context that surrounds it. How could it? It is not a coincidence that the court almost never hands down rulings that run contrary to virtually everyone else in Washington, and which are therefore likely to be ignored. The court is careful to not sacrifice its prestige, so it only makes rulings that can count on support from at least some important pressure groups and power bases in the country. This is why we shouldn’t be surprised that the Hugo court essentially deferred to the administration in 1944.

To do the opposite is to diminish the power of the court. For an example of what happens when the court does fully go against the zeitgeist we need look no further than the case of Worcester v. Georgia. In that case, the court handed down a decision saying, in effect, that white Georgians and the State of Georgia had no right to move onto Cherokee lands or intervene in their local sovereignty. It was a court ruling that went overwhelmingly against public opinion and neither Congress nor the White House were willing to intervene and rein in the Georgians against the hated Indians.

Many Americans know this as the case which prompted Andrew Jackson to say—probably apocryphally—”[Justice] John Marshall has made his decision; now let him enforce it!” What Jackson did say was this: “the decision of the Supreme Court has fell still born, and they find that they cannot coerce Georgia to yield to its mandate.” Jackson was right. The ruling was stillborn, and the court made itself irrelevant on the matter.

Modern judges don’t like to be irrelevant or be ignored by presidents. Most of these judges have enormous egos. So, we find that the Court just happens to make rulings that are likely to garner public support and be enforced. The court knows what the political landscape is, and is careful to rule in ways that protect the court’s power and keep the court “respectable.”

But, political ideologies and realities change, and therefore the courts will change.

There are many examples, one of which, of course, is the Korematsu ruling. Another is how SCOTUS has ruled on abortion over the decades. In 1973, it was totally uncontroversial to regard abortion as a state and local matter, regardless of one’s position on the morality of it. Then, in 1973, the Warren Court decided that SCOTUS had been reading the Constitution wrong for more than 180 years, and it turns out the abortion is a “right” guaranteed by the constitution. Then, fifty years after that the SCOTUS re-read the Constitution and suddenly realized that abortion is not a federally-protected right after all.

Which ruling is the “definitive” ruling that establishes “settled law”? The answer is: none of the above.

Another such case is Lochner v. New York (1905). In Lochner, SCOTUS made a very good ruling in which it decided that private contracts between private parties are to be respected, and the federal government ought not to interfere in contracts with interventions such as minimum wage laws. That was the allegedly definitive ruling for several decades before the rulings of the Lochner era were essentially thrown in the dumpster by the SCOTUS in the 1930s.

But, public ideologies had changed. To stay “relevant” and “current” the SCOTUS changed with the times.

So, if the US Supreme Court soon hands down a new ruling on the Fourteenth Amendment and birthright citizenship, it will reflect only modern political realities, and whatever the court’s majority thinks it can get away with considering the political context of today. No matter how the court rules, it certainly won’t be the “last word” on the matter, and nothing is decided beyond the short term.

Note: The views expressed on Mises.org are not necessarily those of the Mises Institute.

The post There Is No Such Thing as ‘Settled Law’ appeared first on LewRockwell.

International Man: In 2011, Ross Ulbricht founded the website Silk Road.

It was a cleverly designed online marketplace that leveraged decentralized technologies like Tor and Bitcoin to establish an anonymous and completely free market without government interference.

Much to the chagrin of politicians like Chuck Schumer, the Silk Road operated openly and successfully for about two and a half years.

Eventually, the government managed to identify Ross, arrest him, and shut down the Silk Road.

What’s your perspective on the concept of the Silk Road and the government’s response to it?

Doug Casey: This is a question that touches a lot of bases. It has roots in the drug war.

My view is that drugs should generally be avoided because they typically cloud your mind and obscure your understanding of reality. But it’s entirely up to the individual, a matter of personal responsibility and personal preference. It’s certainly not the business of the notoriously corrupt DEA, which should be abolished.

The government and its employees have learned absolutely nothing from their prohibition of alcohol from 1919 to 1933. Prohibition turned drinking from a social custom where some individuals overindulged into a “crime” that destroyed tens of thousands of businesses and millions of lives and tore a hole in the fabric of society. It fostered wholesale violence and serious police corruption while supplying the Mafia and other criminal organizations with a huge and consistent source of funds.

Today’s illegal drugs are exactly analogous to the Prohibition of alcohol 100 years ago. Making drugs illegal causes vastly more damage than any possible good.

In a free society, you should be able to buy and sell whatever you’d like freely. That includes not just drugs but weapons, literature, plants, animals, or what-have-you. We all understand that some things are dangerous, including matches and kitchen knives. If you damage another person or his property, you’re liable. That’s the only practical and moral way to encourage people to be competent and responsible—end of story. We can talk about the myriads of straw man arguments against that view another time.

I was all for Silk Road when it existed. It was an Amazon for things that were illegal or that various busybodies considered socially objectionable. Silk Road was a good thing, enabling peaceful commerce between consenting adults. Violence—which is always an element when the DEA or similar government agencies are involved—was never an issue with Silk Road.

International Man: The government charged Ross with participating in a continuing criminal enterprise, a narcotics conspiracy, and a conspiracy to commit money laundering, among other offenses.

Despite being a non-violent, first-time offender, Ross was convicted and handed a double life sentence without the possibility of parole.

Judge Katherine Forrest implied that Ross’ alleged “privilege” influenced her decision to impose a much harsher sentence than she might have given to a “drug dealer from the Bronx.”

What are your thoughts on Ross’ sentence?

Doug Casey: First, we ought to define the word “crime”. A crime is best defined as the use of force or fraud against another person or his property. By that definition, Ross was in no way guilty of a crime.

He was only guilty of violating an arbitrary political law. As Harvey Silverglate pointed out in his excellent 2011 book “Three Felonies a Day,” it’s almost impossible to live in the US today without violating lots of laws, unknowingly.

It’s said—stupidly—that ignorance is no excuse for breaking the law. That was once true when laws were largely modest extrapolations of Maybury’s two great laws: “Do all that you say you’ll do” and “Don’t infringe on another’s person or property.” But we increasingly live in a world like that of Lavrenti Beria, head of the Soviet secret police, who once assured Comrade Stalin: “Show me the man, and I’ll show you the crime.”

Silk Road epitomized the paradoxical term “victimless crime.” Nobody was hurt by what they were doing. In a free society, victimless crimes would not exist. And the sentence for committing real crimes, such as murder or theft, would start with making the victim whole—not arbitrarily punishing the offender. Offenders should first restore (to the greatest degree possible) the damage they did, with interest and the cost of his capture. Prison sentences would largely be for the ultra-violent. For a full explication of this line of thought, I urge you to download a superb short book, “The Market for Liberty” (link). It crystallized my thinking, as well as that of Javier Milei, who’s transforming Argentina.

The whole criminal system today is corrupt and inept. In a just free market society, things would be quite different for someone accused of a crime. Instead of being tried by some judge under arbitrary laws, both sides would mutually agree on an arbitration panel. Arbitrators necessarily have to compete on their fairness and low cost, unlike politically installed judges, including the vicious woman who sentenced Ross.

International Man: After exhausting every avenue of appeal, Ross’ only chance of leaving prison alive was a presidential pardon.

During a speech last year at the Libertarian National Convention, Trump promised to pardon Ross if he became president.

What do you make of Trump courting libertarians?

Doug Casey: As I’ve said many times before, Trump has no philosophical center, no real personal philosophy. He flies by the seat of his pants. But many of his instincts are quite good, especially now, after he’s suffered at the hands of the Jacobin State. He’s light on principles, but he’s a cultural conservative who wants to keep most of what made America unique. I think he’s righteously angry, and intends to clean house. And he won’t take any prisoners.

This episode with Ross brought him into contact with lots of libertarians. I think it’s had an effect on him and made him aware of libertarian values because he, too, was unjustly convicted. I suspect he’s become libertarian-adjacent in a number of ways. Not just because libertarians and Austrians gave him moral and practical arguments for low taxes, deregulation, and free speech. But because Argentina’s Javier Milei, an avowed anarcho-capitalist, has become a close ally. It’s bound to influence his thinking and those around him.

Trump is far from a libertarian, but the horrible injustice that Ross suffered may yet prove to be a cloud with a silver lining.

International Man: After Trump was elected and sworn in as President, he fulfilled his promise by granting Ross a full and unconditional pardon.

Trump issued the following statement after granting the pardon:

What are your thoughts on Trump following through on his promise and this statement?

Doug Casey: This is a fantastic and wonderful statement on Trump’s part. I would specially draw the reader’s attention to the words “scum,” “lunatics,” and “ridiculous.” These are keywords. It shows that Trump truly hates the Jacobins who’ve controlled the government for so long, and he hates them on a visceral level.

One of Trump’s virtues is that he’s loyal and likes to support people who support him. The other side of that coin is that he will definitely seek retribution against his enemies.

Now, in the case of the Jacobins, who have committed so many crimes, like incarcerating Ross, I feel reasonably confident he’s going to try to root them out. That’s excellent. Sometimes imposing justice can also be retribution. We see it all the time in Western movies, and it’s one reason we love them.

But there’s a serious problem. He’ll essentially be ruling by executive order because, as concrete-bound and dysfunctional as Congress is, it’s about the only way he can break the back of Wokism. He’s a man on a mission.

Unfortunately, the Constitution has long been just a chimera and a dead letter. We’re seeing a replay of the collapse of the Roman Republic, followed by the institution of the Principate. After the death of Julius Caesar and a civil war, Augustus kept the trappings and appearances of the old Republic, but the reality was a veritable dictatorship.

And, again, unfortunately, the sword cuts both ways. My view is that after the financial markets and the economy collapse in the next four years, the public will likely blame it on Trump’s reforms. They’re fickle and will look for a savior. That’ll be some leftist who will promise to kiss it all and make it better. Perhaps by offering three hots, a cot, and free internet for the “unhoused.”

My guess is we’ll get a left-wing general since the military is the last government institution that still has some trust from the public. The shoe will then be on the other foot and, courtesy of Trump, ruling by executive order will have become a kind of SOP. Morning in America, as mornings do, will only have lasted 6 hours.

Although many things Trump is doing are excellent and necessary, the way he’s doing it is very dangerous. As ancient Rome devolved from a republic to a dictatorship, it became worse and worse over time. The same thing is happening in the US, with the extensive use of executive orders.

I genuinely hope I’m wrong, though. A real renaissance is always possible. However unlikely.

International Man: What does Ross Ulbricht’s story reveal about the future of freedom in the US?

Doug Casey: I’d like to think that the eviction of the Jacobins means that we’ve turned over a new leaf and that it’s morning in America. But I think it’s more likely that this is just an uptick in a long-established downtrend.

As far as Ross is concerned, I met his mother, Lynn, at a FreedomFest in Las Vegas. She’s genuinely heroic. The calls I made to various political people I knew in Washington, DC, were, predictably, completely futile. All anybody could do was sign a petition. The bright side is that 600,000 people did.

The dark side is that it is only two-tenths of one percent of Americans. Proof of how degraded what’s left of the Republic has become.

Ross’s case appeared hopeless. It shows that if you’re seriously caught up in “the system,” you might as well repeat the words inscribed at the entrance to hell in Dante’s Inferno: “Relinquish all hope ye who enter here.”

The fact that Ross is a decent person and that the laws were unjust meant absolutely nothing. We’re just lucky the criminal Jacobin Party lost and Trump was actually inaugurated. But it ain’t over till it’s over… It will likely evolve like one of those horror movies with Freddie Kruger or Jason.

The Babylon Bee was right when they joked that although Ross has been released from prison, he’s been sentenced to doing hundreds of podcasts for the next 20 years. I expect he’ll be on the one Matt Smith and I do soon.

Reprinted with permission from International Man,

The post Ross Ulbricht: Implications for the Future of Freedom in America appeared first on LewRockwell.

On the table, a geopolitical banquet – served by some of the best independent analytical minds from Bursa to Diyarbakir.

ISTANBUL – The scene is a Circassian restaurant off fabled Istiklal street in historic Beyoglu. On the table, a geopolitical banquet – served by some of the best independent analytical minds from Bursa to Diyarbakir. The menu, apart from a meze feast, is simple: only two broad questions about Sultan Erdogan’s approach to BRICS and to Syria.

Here’s a concise synopsis of our dinner – more relevant than a torrent of Western-manufactured word salads. Enjoy it with a hefty dose of the best arak. And let the table have the first – and last – word.

On BRICS: “Türkiye feels itself as part of the West. If we look at our political party leaderships and Turkish elites, right-wing or left-wing, there’s no difference. Maybe a little bit part of the East… Ankara is using its membership in BRICS as a bargaining chip against the West.”

Türkiye simultaneously could be a member of BRICS and NATO?

“Erdogan has no clear future plans. After Erdogan there’s no clear answer for the future of the AKP party. They could not establish a normal, permanent system. We have a governmental system just for Erdogan. We are receiving gas from Russia. We buy materials from China, assembling them in Turkish factories and selling them to Europe and the U.S. We have advantages in foreign trade compared to the EU, according to statistics published by the Turkish government. The biggest trade deficit is against Russia – and then China. This is our special position – and explains why Ankara does not want to lose the Eastern option. And at the same time we depend on the West to defend ourselves. All that explains our unique foreign policy behavior.”

So there’s no guarantee Ankara will agree to become a BRICS partner?

“No. But Ankara will not completely close the door to BRICS. Türkiye knows the West is losing its power. There are new dynamics, rising powers, but at the same time we are not a completely independent power.”

On the three pillars of Turkish society: “You can’t think about geopolitics without ideology. Erdogan and the AKP decided that it’s only possible to integrate Türkiye with a liberal-Islamist project. Almost two generations have grown with them – and they don’t know what happened before. They are neo-Ottomans, Islamists, pro-Arabization guys. In Türkiye, if someone openly supports Islamism, he is Arabized, ideologically. Here we have three pillars. The first one is a nationalist view – we have right Kemalism and left Kemalism. The other one is a Western perspective. And the third one is Islamist, also divided in two factions; one is nationalist and the other is liberal Islamist, integrated with Western institutions, NGOs and capital. That’s why we can say that wokeism and Islamism are different sides of the same coin. These guys are using the Turkish state to maneuver in the broader Middle Eastern geography – but in fact they are focused on Western-minded neoliberal economy, politics, society.”

Neo-Ottomanism, revived: “The West planned Syria together with them – the neo-Ottomans. During the Gaza war they kept sending oil to Israel, it was a P.R. thing for Erdogan, he needs to give this message to the grassroots anti-imperialist, Islamist part of Turkish society. The problem for Erdogan is that Türkiye is different from Arab countries, while Turkish capital is connected to the West, some of it connected with Russia, and Türkiye is dependent as much as 40% on Russian energy. Ankara needs to act in a balanced way, but that does not change the whole picture: Capital that supports Erdogan, and benefits from Erdogan, including 40% of the Turkish exports going to Europe. When it comes to BRICS, they can try to manage the relationship but they will never agree to join the BRICS directly.”

The Sultan never sleeps: “Erdogan is a pragmatist. Ideological. He can sell out the Palestinians – easily. He may be very powerful, and grasp how the state system works, but he does not enjoy total obedience from society to rule. That’s why he’s always aiming for some sort of balance.”

Can we say that with Greater Idlibistan under the control of Türkiye’s MIT – with Jolani as one of their main assets, if not the top asset – the MIT knew about the capabilities of HTS, and they knew this would stop in Aleppo?

“Not all the way to Damascus. That was the original plan. The aim of the operation was attacking the regime, The aim was not the conquest of Damascus. This was the best unexpected result of the attack. The military leadership of HTS said, “we lost our best warriors in the first moments of the operation”. But then came the collapse of the Syrian Army.”

So what does Erdogan really want? Rule over Aleppo or over the whole of Western Syria?

“Syria was part of the Ottoman empire. In his dreams, this is still the Ottoman empire. But he knows Türkiye’s limits in trying to rule over Syria – and the Arab world, enraged, could align against Türkiye. It’s possible – partly – to have a proxy government in Damascus. This is what Erdogan wanted from the Assad government only six months ago. Erdogan was begging to Assad, ‘please come to the table’. It turned out that he was actually sincere. Jolani said “we were really anxious that Assad would accept the offer by Erdogan’. This was the Assad government’s big mistake. Assad had already lost the ability to rule the country. Ankara never wanted the sudden collapse of the Assad government. To rule this chaos is not easy. And Türkiye does not have the military capacity to do it. HTS also does not. And without Türkiye HTS cannot survive.”

So Syria as a province of neo-Ottomanism is not gonna happen?

“This is not just Türkiye’s strategy. This is American and Israeli strategy – to cantonize Syria. So they achieved something, but it’s not finished. We don’t know what’s gonna happen. Remember before October 7, geopolitically no one could foresee what happened in Gaza. In Turkey’s case, this was a joint project. It began in 2011. The main goal was so obvious, to integrate Syria into the Western world. That failed, but the Americans stayed there, because they created a brand called ‘ISIS’, American investment in the Kurds, and in the end Türkiye, what they got was Idlib; it was necessary at the time, because Syria, Russia, Iran, they are not like the Americans or American-connected Islamists, they are not a destructive power. Step by step they wanted to “earn” Türkiye, with the Astana process. Türkiye in the end stuck with the American policy, they waited and waited and waited, and now they have something other than what they wanted. And that’s an alarming situation for Türkiye – because they don’t want Syria to be partitioned. It’s not even certain that the Americans will let Türkiye train the new Syrian army. The West now has total economic leverage.”

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

The post What Sultan Erdogan Is Really Up To appeared first on LewRockwell.

As the geopolitical order is being rapidly reshaped to better serve Elite interests, most analysts writing on the subject are being suckered into perceiving the BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa recently expanded to include Egypt, Ethiopia, Indonesia, Iran and the United Arab Emirates) as some sort of ‘alternative’.

See, for example:

Ben Norton’s claim that ‘BRICS… will change the world’ in ‘BRICS expands with 9 new partner countries. Now it’s half of world population, 41% of global economy’.

Professor Jeffrey D. Sachs’ claim that ‘BRICS is… a potential opening for a far more peaceful and secure world order…. [and] can be a boon for all countries’ in ‘The BRICS Summit Should Mark the End of Neocon Delusions’.

And Abayomi Azikiwe’s claim that ‘BRICS represents a historical pattern of efforts to build alternatives to the existing world capitalist system…. BRICS Plus Summit is a manifestation of the international movement towards ending the domination of the world’s peoples by international finance capital.’ in ‘BRICS Declaration Reinforces Call for Multipolarity: Kazan summit rejects unilateralism advanced by the West’.

Of course, more astute analysts are clearly seeing through the facade and exposing how the BRICS countries are simply implementing the same technocratic program as countries outside the BRICS. See, for example, Riley Waggaman’s ‘Would you like to know what BRICS just declared?’

The point is simple: Beneath any superficial differences between what BRICS countries (sometimes now referred to as BRICS+ given the recent accession of another five members) might be doing that appears to be reshaping planetary geopolitics into a multipolar world order that will somehow supersede the US-led unipolar world order, lies a deeper and darker truth.

This truth is that the Global Elite is rapidly and progressively transforming the entire world into a planetary technocracy populated by transhuman slaves. This means that perceptions that are limited to longstanding worldviews that see the world as statist and/or capitalist/socialist, for example, miss or misperceive the profound changes that are taking place.

No government, including those of the BRICS countries, is resisting these profound changes. No government, including those of the BRICS countries, will resist these profound changes.

The geopolitical world does not revolve around sovereign nation-states because no nation is sovereign. That is, no government of a nation-state is able to exercise independent and ultimate authority over all of its (internal and external) affairs.

Of course, this has long been the case as explained by preeminent historian Professor Carroll Quigley in his classic work published in 1966. See Tragedy and Hope: A History of the World in Our Time. pp.5-6.

‘[T]he powers of financial capitalism had another far-reaching aim, nothing less than to create a world system of financial control in private hands able to dominate the political system of each country and the economy of the world as a whole. This system was to be controlled in a feudalist fashion by the central banks of the world acting in concert by secret agreements arrived at in frequent private meetings and conferences. The apex of the system was to be the Bank for International Settlements in Basle, Switzerland, a private bank owned and controlled by the world’s central banks which were themselves private corporations…

‘It must not be felt that these heads of the world’s chief central banks were themselves substantive powers in world finance. They were not. Rather, they were the technicians and agents of the dominant investment bankers of their own countries, who had raised them up and were perfectly capable of throwing them down. The substantive financial powers of the world were in the hands of these investment bankers (also called ‘international’ or ‘merchant’ bankers) who remained largely behind the scenes in their own unincorporated private banks. These formed a system of international cooperation and national dominance which was more private, more powerful, and more secret than that of their agents in the central banks.’

Apart from Quigley’s extensive and invaluable book, you can read a reasonable summary of how Elite power – politically, economically, socially and militarily – was gained and is being exercised in Historical Analysis of the Global Elite: Ransacking the World Economy Until ‘You’ll Own Nothing.’

Of course, in the case of ‘democratic’ countries at least, you are meant to believe that ‘your’ government is, indeed, free to make decisions governing your security and well-being and that you have certain rights, including voting rights, to have a say in determining the government of the country in which you live.

To conceal the reality that no nation is sovereign, governments have long been empowered to make decisions about minor matters (which may still have critical impact on some populations) that have no bearing on the fundamental Elite program while any significant ‘decisions’ made by governments are confined to endorsing Elite directives and mobilizing the relevant agents in government, bureaucracies, the media, the military and elsewhere to implement the latest components of the Elite program.

So until you recognize that governments at all levels – and the international institutions with which you are most familiar, starting with the United Nations and the World Health Organization – are merely window-dressing or ‘shadow puppets’ that are designed to distract you from the real bases of power in the world system, then you will continue to misunderstand what is happening, who is driving it and how it is being done. And any effort you make to resist the rampant violence and injustice inherent in what is happening, will fail.

And that is precisely what the Elite intends.

After all, the most effective way to thwart opposition to any program is to make sure that any potential opponents do not understand the rules of the game (including, in this case, who exercises effective power in the world system) while making sure that these potential opponents are given a lot of noisy and colorful distractions (such as regular elections and other party-political processes, not to mention art and sport in various forms) to keep the bulk of them occupied at the same time.

The recent US presidential election has been a perfect example of this distraction, with a vast range of commentary on a wide range of superficial changes and only the rarest analyst even noting the number and range of wealthy technocrats appointed by Donald Trump to play key roles in his new administration let alone explaining the significance of this.

In essence, it is better for the Elite to have you putting all your passion and energy into fighting on a field of battle that is utterly irrelevant and to keep you unaware of where the real battlefield lies.

What better way to neutralize all opposition than to have it focused on the wrong ‘game’?

The Rapidly Advancing Planetary Technocracy

While many authors have been discussing the rapid advance of the planetary technocracy in recent years, and specialists such as Patrick Wood have been warning us for much longer – see ‘Technocracy News & Trends’ – there is no doubt it remains a topic that is incredibly poorly understood.

Possible scenario of smart and sustainable mobility (Licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0)

This means that the threat posed by the changes being imposed on us go largely unrecognized. These invasive technologies include digital identity (to which will be attached your ‘social credit score’), Central Bank Digital Currencies (CBDCs), geofenced imprisonment in a ‘smart city’, 24-hour surveillance using three-dimensional facial recognition cameras (which capture your unique ‘face print’), spying on us through a vast network of ‘smart’ devices (computers, televisions, refrigerators… as well as social media platforms, smart street poles and lights) connected via 5G/6G and the Internet of Things, and controlling our movements through a parallel range of technologies including geofencing, driverless cars, vehicle kill switches, drones (used as aerial police), robots (including as a ‘deadly force option’) as well as autonomous and electromagnetic weapons. Beyond these threats, ‘vaccines’, artificial intelligence, synthetic biology, geoengineering and other technologies are being used to reshape planetary life profoundly, to your detriment.

But if you do not already have a clear grasp of the historical origin and development of the technocratic dangers that are now rapidly undermining human life, identity, privacy, freedom and security you can get an excellent understanding from Patrick Wood’s most recent book on the subject The Evil Twins of Technocracy and Transhumanism or fine overviews in this recent article by Joshua Stylman ‘The Technocratic Blueprint: A Century in the Making’ or this two-part series by Jesse Smith:

‘Technocracy Ascending – Part 1: Why It’s Crucial to Understand the End Game’ and

‘Technocracy Ascending – Part 2: Trust Me, I’m a Technocrat’.

And if you still do not believe that BRICS and all other countries are implementing the Elite’s technocratic program, you can read more in articles such as these, starting with the recent BRICS summit declaration in October 2024:

BRICS Summit 2024 ‘Kazan Declaration: Strengthening Multilateralism for Just Global Development and Security’.

If you cannot immediately perceive the commitment of BRICS countries to the Elite’s technocracy, Riley Waggaman spells it out. See ‘Would you like to know what BRICS just declared?’

But Waggaman has also previously explained in some detail how the Russian government is busy imposing the Elite’s technocracy on Russians. See ‘Is Putin in cahoots with the globalists?’

As for China, in the words of Iain Davis, China is the world’s ‘first technate’. In fact, this has been systematically facilitated by the West following the rise to power of Deng Xiaoping after Mao’s death in 1976. China was effectively infiltrated by US members of the Trilateral Commission (known as ‘Trilateralists’) to influence the development path in China and, for example, since 1979 ‘The Israeli government and Israeli defence contractors have consistently acted as facilitators for the transfer of the most sensitive Western defence and surveillance technology to China.’ See ‘China: The World’s First Technate – Part 2’.

So if Russia and China are already advanced technocratic states, what about other BRICS countries?

Well, even if we consider just three of the most critical foundational components necessary to build a technocratic state – deployment of 5G, digital identity and Central Bank Digital Currencies (CBDCs) – it turns out that the other BRICS countries are all well advanced.

Despite the well-documented electromagnetic dangers of 5G, the technology has already been extensively rolled out in these countries: ‘5G Progress Report: Brazil’, ‘5G rollout in India fastest in the world, officials say’ and ‘5G rocking in South Africa’.

Digital identity is also well advanced: ‘Digital version of Brazil’s new national identity card now available in some states’, ‘On biometric IDs, India is a “laboratory for the rest of the world”’ and ‘New digital ID system for South Africans – here’s what to expect’.

In relation to CBDCs, Brazil, India and South Africa all have advanced pilot programs or are in the process of implementation. See ‘Central Bank of Brazil Confirms It Will Run a Pilot Test for Its CBDC This Year’, ‘Government announces Digital Rupee: What is it and more’ and ‘South Africa Reserve Bank Commences Retail CBDC Feasibility Study’.

If you wonder about the most recent members of the BRICS, a quick search will confirm their heavy involvement in imposing the Elite’s technocracy, starting with the three foundational components nominated above. In relation to Iran, for example, deployment of 5G, digital identity and CBDCs is well advanced. See ‘4,000 sites to provide 5G internet in Iran by March 2025’, ‘Smart Government National Portal’ and ‘Iran central bank to launch digital currency on pilot basis’.

In summary, all national governments along with their relevant corporate allies are involved in the process of building the technocratic infrastructure that will, one day soon, enslave those of us left alive in a ‘smart city’ prison.

If you want further evidence, just do an internet search specifying a country and a technology (5G, digital ID, CBDCs, facial recognition, geofencing…) and/or check out the progress of your nearest city in its transformation into a ‘smart city’.

Defending Ourselves Against the Advancing Technocracy

It is going to take enormous effort to defend ourselves against the political, economic, social, technological and other changes which are now being rapidly imposed upon us.

This is because ‘The Global Elite is Insane Revisited’, and virtually all humans are utterly submissive as an outcome of the violence they each suffered during childhood.

See ‘Why Violence?’ and ‘Fearless Psychology and Fearful Psychology: Principles and Practice’.

And whether or not you act in response to other Elite projects being carried out in other parts of the world, resisting the advancing technocracy is crucial for your own future:

‘Fighting for Our Humanity, Fighting for Our Future’.

‘We Are Human We Are Free’ identifies the strategic action necessary to defend yourself from this technocracy (with critical actions explained,

most simply, on the ‘We Are Human We Are Free’ one-page flyer, available in 23 languages).

Conclusion

No government is free of Elite control. Governments are simply Elite agents doing what they are told by various Elite agents in banking, foreign policy, technology and other contexts.

Fundamentally, the Elite program is killing off the bulk of the human population and using a range of technologies to technocratically enslave those transhumans left alive in a ‘smart city’ prison.

This program advances rapidly while our ignorance and fear means that most people fail to perceive the true nature of the threats, who is driving them and what is necessary to resist them effectively.

This means that even those people who claim to be aware are usually trapped taking some powerless action (such as signing a petition to a government, changing their vote at the next election, demonstrating in the street) rather than acting powerfully to defend themselves against the Elite by resisting its imperatives.

The reality is that you can defend yourself quite effectively by taking the actions nominated in ‘We Are Human We Are Free’ but we need enough people taking these actions to defeat the entire program or the Elite will simply use its transhuman and robot agents to hunt us down once those who readily complied are already dead or imprisoned.

Our fight is with the Global Elite. Not your government, an international organization or anyone else.

The original source of this article is Global Research.

The post The Geopolitics of Elite Insanity appeared first on LewRockwell.

Who would have thought the perfect answer to a question that has long eluded the experts and thought leaders among us would come from so unlikely a source as the newly-inaugurated 47th President of the United States? Or that of all the applause lines in a speech that garnered so many, his answer would prove to be the loudest and longest of all?

And yet, there you have it—Donald J. Trump, pronouncing definitively on the subject before an audience of millions. Was the world held spellbound, I wonder, when he told them that, really, there are only two genders? Did they exclaim, “Oh, what a concept you’ve given us, Mr. President! How positively revolutionary!”

All this, of course, was followed the very next day with an Executive Order officially putting an end to the toxic idiocy that there can be no limit placed on the number of genders people choose. End of story.

How wonderfully biblical our new president has become! What a lot of nerve he has shown, too, in returning the question to the Book of Genesis where it rightly belongs. Informing us that not only are we made in God’s image but that, in the clearest and most binary way, God chose to create us either male or female.

So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them. (Genesis 1:27)

There is no third way. The forced march in that direction has ended, triumphantly it would appear, in a ditch on the side of a road that goes nowhere. Thus has the door definitively closed on the idea of an ever-expanding field of gender fluidity. The illusion, so comforting to the dysphoric few, that gender is somehow a performative act, a mere social construct we build on our own dime, without reference to the sheer givenness of a reality that comes ready-made from the hand of God, has at last been shown the door. The conceit, so utterly absurd on the face of it, that gender is simply what we do and not what we are, has finally been put to rest.

There is a reality, in other words, and it exists even before we are moved to recognize and give it a name. We may not be reducible to our bodies, but we are surely rooted in them. And they remain, quite ineluctably, either male or female.

Thus, the whole meaning of being on which we depend, the very ground on which we stand—because it comes from God, even as it is mediated by and through the physical union of one man and one woman—is always a gift we receive. Indeed, it is a gift so precious and rare that we can never give it to ourselves.

We are not self-generated, in other words, and our contingent status under God cannot be co-opted by gender theorists, whose hatred of what they call “essentialism” has so consumed them that they are determined to supplant God Himself and the entire order of the universe He inscribed in our bodies. We cannot do as we please with our bodies, trading in one sex for another simply because we happen to prefer a different model. That way lies madness; and now, thanks to its repudiation from the highest elected official in the land, we can relax a bit, knowing the arrangement put in place by God has once again been upheld.

Yes, that madman Nietzsche was right when he told us that “Something came along and wiped away the horizon.” But it has done quite enough damage for now. The time has come to put away that eraser and begin to restore the horizon to where it belongs. And I, for one, do not mind thanking Trump for helping make it happen.

Read the Whole Article

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“If one company or small group of people manages to develop godlike digital superintelligence, they could take over the world. At least when there’s an evil dictator, that human is going to die. But for an AI, there would be no death. It would live forever. And then you’d have an immortal dictator from which we can never escape.”—Elon Musk (2018)

The Deep State is about to go turbocharged.

While the news media fixates on the extent to which Project 2025 may be the Trump Administration’s playbook for locking down the nation, there is a more subversive power play taking place under cover of Trump’s unique brand of circus politics.

Take a closer look at what’s unfolding, and you will find that all appearances to the contrary, Trump isn’t planning to do away with the Deep State. Rather, he was hired by the Deep State to usher in the golden age of AI.

Get ready for Surveillance State 2.0.

To achieve this turbocharged surveillance state, the government is turning to its most powerful weapon yet: artificial intelligence. AI, with its ability to learn, adapt, and operate at speeds unimaginable to humans, is poised to become the engine of this new world order.

Over the course of 70 years, the technology has developed so rapidly that it has gone from early computers exhibiting a primitive form of artificial intelligence to machine learning (AI systems that learn from historic data) to deep learning (machine learning that mimics the human brain) to generative AI, which can create original content, i.e., it appears able to think for itself.

What we are approaching is the point of no return.

In tech speak, this point of no return is more aptly termed “singularity,” the point at which AI eclipses its human handlers and becomes all-powerful. Elon Musk has predicted that singularity could happen by 2026. AI scientist Ray Kurzweil imagines it happening it closer to 2045.

While the scientific community has a lot to say about the world-altering impact of artificial intelligence on every aspect of our lives, little has been said about its growing role in government and its oppressive effect on our freedoms, especially “the core democratic principles of privacy, autonomy, equality, the political process, and the rule of law.”

According to a report from Accenture, it is estimated that across both the public and private sectors, generative AI has the potential to automate a significant portion of jobs across various sectors.

Here’s a thought: what if Trump’s pledge to cut the federal work force isn’t really about eliminating government bureaucracy but outsourcing it to the AI tech sector?

Certainly, Trump has made no secret of his plans to make AI a priority. Indeed, Trump signed the first-ever Executive Order on AI in 2019. More recently, Trump issued an executive order giving the technology sector a green light to develop and deploy AI without any guardrails in place to limit the risks it might pose to U.S. national security, the economy, public health or safety.

President Biden was no better, mind you. His executive order, which Trump repealed, merely instructed the tech sector to share the results of AI safety tests with the U.S. government.

Yet following much the same pattern that we saw with the rollout of drones, while the government has been quick to avail itself of AI technology, it has done little to nothing to ensure that rights of the American people are protected.

Indeed, we are altogether lacking any guardrails for transparency, accountability and adherence to the rule of law when it comes to the government’s use of AI.

As Karl Manheim and Lyric Kaplan point out in a chilling article in the Yale Journal of Law & Technology about the risks to privacy and democracy posed by AI, “[a]rtificial intelligence is the most disruptive technology of the modern era… Its impact is likely to dwarf even the development of the internet as it enters every corner of our lives… Advances in AI herald not just a new age in computing, but also present new dangers to social values and constitutional rights. The threat to privacy from social media algorithms and the Internet of Things is well known. What is less appreciated is the even greater threat that AI poses to democracy itself.”

Cue the rise of “digital authoritarianism” or “algocracy—rule by algorithm.”

In an algocracy, “Mark Zuckerberg and Sundar Pichai, CEOs of Facebook and Google, have more control over Americans’ lives and futures than do the representatives we elect.”

Digital authoritarianism, as the Center for Strategic and International Studies cautions, involves the use of information technology to surveil, repress, and manipulate the populace, endangering human rights and civil liberties, and co-opting and corrupting the foundational principles of democratic and open societies, “including freedom of movement, the right to speak freely and express political dissent, and the right to personal privacy, online and off.”

How do we protect our privacy against the growing menace of overreach and abuse by a technological sector working with the government?

The ability to do so may already be out of our hands.

In 2024, at least 37 federal government agencies ranging from the Departments of Homeland Security and Veterans Affairs to Health and Human Services reported more than 1700 uses of AI in carrying out their work, double from the year before. That does not even begin to touch on agencies that did not report their usage, or usage at the state and local levels.

Of those 1700 cases at the federal level, 227 were labeled rights- or safety-impacting.

A particularly disturbing example of how AI is being used by government agencies in rights- and safety-impacting scenarios comes from an investigative report by The Washington Post on how law enforcement agencies across the nation are using “artificial intelligence tools in a way they were never intended to be used: as a shortcut to finding and arresting suspects without other evidence.”

This is what is referred to within tech circles as “automation bias,” a tendency to blindly trust decisions made by powerful software, ignorant to its risks and limitations. In one particular case, police used AI-powered facial recognition technology to arrest and jail a 29-year-old man for brutally assaulting a security guard. It would take Christopher Gatlin two years to clear his name.

Gatlin is one of at least eight known cases nationwide in which police reliance on AI facial recognition software has resulted in resulted in wrongful arrests arising from an utter disregard for basic police work (such as checking alibis, collecting evidence, corroborating DNA and fingerprint evidence, ignoring suspects’ physical characteristics) and the need to meet constitutional standards of due process and probable cause. According to The Washington Post, “Asian and Black people were up to 100 times as likely to be misidentified by some software as White men.”

The numbers of cases in which AI is contributed to false arrests and questionable police work is likely much higher, given the extent to which police agencies across the country are adopting the technology and will only rise in the wake of the Trump Administration’s intent to shut down law enforcement oversight and policing reforms.

“How do I beat a machine?” asked one man who was wrongly arrested by police for assaulting a bus driver based on an incorrect AI match.

It is becoming all but impossible to beat the AI machine.

When used by agents of the police state, it leaves “we the people” even more vulnerable.

So where do we go from here?

For the Trump Administration, it appears to be full steam ahead, starting with Stargate, a $500 billion AI infrastructure venture aimed at building massive data centers. Initial reports suggest that the AI data centers could be tied to digital health records and used to develop a cancer vaccine. Of course, massive health data centers for use by AI will mean that one’s health records are fair game for any and all sorts of identification, tracking and flagging.

But that’s just the tip of the iceberg.

The surveillance state, combined with AI, is creating a world in which there’s nowhere to run and nowhere to hide. We’re all presumed guilty until proven innocent now.

Thanks to the 24/7 surveillance being carried out by the government’s sprawling spy network of fusion centers, we are all just sitting ducks, waiting to be tagged, flagged, targeted, monitored, manipulated, investigated, interrogated, heckled and generally harassed by agents of the American police state.

Without having ever knowingly committed a crime or been convicted of one, you and your fellow citizens have likely been assessed for behaviors the government might consider devious, dangerous or concerning; assigned a threat score based on your associations, activities and viewpoints; and catalogued in a government database according to how you should be approached by police and other government agencies based on your particular threat level.

Before long, every household in America will be flagged as a threat and assigned a threat score.

It’s just a matter of time before you find yourself wrongly accused, investigated and confronted by police based on a data-driven algorithm or risk assessment culled together by a computer program run by artificial intelligence.

It’s a setup ripe for abuse.

Writing for the Yale Journal, Manheim and Kaplan conclude that “[h]umans may not be at risk as a species, but we are surely at risk in terms of our democratic institutions and values.”

Privacy­—Manheim and Kaplan succinctly describe it as “the right to make personal decisions for oneself, the right to keep one’s personal information confidential, and the right to be left alone are all ingredients of the fundamental right of privacy”— is especially at risk.

Indeed, with every new AI surveillance technology that is adopted and deployed without any regard for privacy, Fourth Amendment rights and due process, the rights of the citizenry are being marginalized, undermined and eviscerated.

We teeter on the cusp of a cultural, technological and societal revolution the likes of which have never been seen before.

AI surveillance is already re-orienting our world into one in which freedom is almost unrecognizable by doing what the police state lacks the manpower and resources to do efficiently or effectively: be everywhere, watch everyone and everything, monitor, identify, catalogue, cross-check, cross-reference, and collude.

As Eric Schmidt, the former Google CEO remarked, “We know where you are. We know where you’ve been. We can more or less know what you’re thinking about… Your digital identity will live forever… because there’s no delete button.”

The ramifications of any government wielding such unregulated, unaccountable power are chilling, as AI surveillance provides the ultimate means of repression and control for tyrants and benevolent dictators alike.

Indeed, China’s social credit system, where citizens are assigned scores based on their behavior and compliance, offers a glimpse into this dystopian future.

This is not a battle against technology itself, but against its misuse. It’s a fight to retain our humanity, our dignity, and our freedom in the face of unprecedented technological power. It’s a struggle to ensure that AI serves us, not the other way around.

Faced with this looming threat, the time to act is now, before the lines between citizen and subject, between freedom and control, become irrevocably blurred.

The future of freedom depends on it.

So demand transparency. Demand accountability.

Demand an Electronic Bill of Rights that protects “we the people” from the encroaching surveillance state.

We need safeguards in place to ensure the right to data ownership and control (the right to know what data is being collected about them, how it’s being used, who has access to it, and the right to be “forgotten”); the right to algorithmic transparency (to understand how algorithms that affect them make decisions, particularly in areas like loan applications, job hiring, and criminal justice) and due process accountability; the right to privacy and data security, including restrictions on government and corporate use of AI-powered surveillance technologies, particularly facial recognition and predictive policing; the right to digital self-determination (freedom from automated discrimination based on algorithmic profiling) and the ability to manage and control one’s online identity and reputation; and effective mechanisms to seek redress for harms caused by AI systems.

AI deployed without any safeguards in place to protect against overreach and abuse, especially within government agencies, has the potential to become what Elon Musk described as an “immortal dictator,” one that lives forever and from which there is no escape.

Whatever you choose to call it—the police state, the Deep State, the surveillance state—this “immortal dictator” will be the future face of the government unless we rein it in now.

As I point out in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, next year could be too late.

This originally appeared on The Rutherford Institute.

The post The Rise of the Immortal Dictator: What Will AI Mean for Freedom and Government? appeared first on LewRockwell.

It’s the second of five New Years here on the Far Side, and yet another national holiday. I’ve changed the bed linens, trimmed my hair and nails, put on my new red shirt, stuffed ang pao (red envelopes) full of cash for the youngsters, baked bread and brownies, put up the paper lanterns, and helped with Mrs. FarSide’s spring cleaning (stayed out of the way).

Welcome to the year 4723, or the Year of the Yin Green Wood Snake. If Chinese astrology has anything to say about it, this will be an exciting year. As you will see in a moment, it’s no mistake that China has announced DeepSeek and sustained fusion at this particular moment.

The Lunar New Year is something to behold. I say “lunar,” because it is based on a lunar calendar, and also because it is not limited to China. Most if not all of the Orient celebrate this event in some form or another.

Chinese astrology is a very complex thing. While the West has an annual cycle of 12 signs representing the zodiacal constellations, the East has 12 animal characters (Earthly Stems) each representing one lunar year, or a cycle of 12 years. The animal symbols have unique characteristics based on the 10 Heavenly Stems of Eastern cosmology. It appears the 12-year cycle may be based on the orbit of Jupiter, which is 12 years long.

But that’s not all!

Each 12-year cycle falls under one of the five elements: fire, water, wood, metal, and earth, with each element having a yin and yang polarity (10 Heavenly Stems). We are currently in the wood cycle, representing growth, vitality and renewal. This pattern results in a longer 60-year Ganzhi Cycle, as each element gets its own 12-year cycle. Each element also has its own color, with wood being green, that figures into the mix.

Just to make things more fun, each day is divided into 12 segments ruled by one of the signs, and each month is dominated by one of the signs similar to the Western system.

Furthermore, each year is polarized as either yin (feminine) or yang (masculine). Yin represents the Moon, passivity, darkness, intuition, coolness, rest and inward focus. Yin symbolizes the nurturing, receptive, and yielding aspects of life.

All of these influences are taken into account when scheduling meetings and events, special occasions and even choice of mate. The Chinese are an especially superstitious lot, and I’ve had to amend plans to accommodate the stars when setting meetings, negotiating contracts, and launching projects. Knowing all this can be a useful tool when doing business particularly in China.

How all this affects the individual depends on one’s compatibility with the Snake and Wood. For example, I am a Metal Ox. Metal controls (cuts) Wood, and Wood refines Metal. The Ox and Snake are compatible signs. Thus, this year should be beneficial to me, with balanced energy and focus.

Chinese mundane horoscopes reveal trends, benefits and challenges on a global and societal scale.

On the plus side, the Wood element represents growth, flexibility, and renewal. It encourages creativity, strategic thinking, and opportunities for collective development. However, as a Yin year, this growth is more gradual, introspective, and methodical rather than fast-paced or forceful (Trump take note).

The Snake is associated with intelligence, adaptability, and secrecy. This could mean a year of careful planning, thoughtful actions, and subtle shifts rather than bold moves. People may need to rely on intuition and strategic foresight to navigate challenges.

The color green, tied to Wood, symbolizes harmony, renewal, and healing. It may also bring an environmental focus, encouraging natural practices and nurturing relationships.

On the minus side, the Snake’s shadow nature involves hidden motives and potential manipulations. There may be an atmosphere of intrigue or secrecy, requiring vigilance in personal and professional relationships.

Yin Wood energy is flexible, but can also be overly passive or indecisive. It may take effort to avoid stagnation or missed opportunities.

The Western mundane horoscope highlights technological innovation via the trine of Uranus, Neptune and Pluto; Uranus retrograde in Taurus suggests financial reform; the North Node transit into Pisces highlights a collective move toward spiritual growth and cultural renewal.

Notice that in both systems, the themes of growth and renewal are key aspects for the year. How do two wildly different systems arrive at the same conclusions? Curiouser and curiouser.

So, what we can glean from all this is the Chinese view 2025 as a year for strategic planning and subtlety. Whatever you think of astrology, I guarantee this system is influencing Chinese national and individual actions and decisions. Folks doing business in or with Chinese entities can use this information to guide interactions toward successful outcomes.

Regardless of what you think about all this, and my own views are rather complex, it is embedded in the culture. To some extent, these ancient concepts sit at the core of our collective thinking and behavior.

An interesting line of inquiry in this regard is whether astrology prompts us to see non-existent patterns, or is there actual influence via electro-magnetic forces on individuals and societies? There are compelling arguments either way.

In any case, there is advantage in knowing what guides an opponent.

恭喜发财 (gong xi fa cai)!

This originally appeared on Radio Far Side.

The post Enter the Snake appeared first on LewRockwell.

That’s the sound of a swamp being drained. And much fetid water is still backed up over the 68.3 square miles that comprise the District of Columbia. You might be just realizing that the “Joe Biden” regime was not a government at all, but rather, a colossal racketeering operation. And let’s be clear and precise: racketeering is making money dishonestly. Thus: the grubby Biden Family itself at the top of that putrid food-chain, and their smalltime harvesting of mere table-scraps. Where trillions got creamed off by the big gators, the Bidens risked all for a measly few million, like newts gorging on gnats in a drainage ditch.

Are you so cynical— as the Marxians are in their so-called “critique” of capitalism — that you think all human transactions of making-and-doing are dishonest? That is yet another misreading of reality, which the recent years of nonstop official propaganda and gaslight have catastrophically aggravated to the degree that half of America can no longer think at all.

Capitalism is not a political ideology despite the “ism” incorrectly attached to it, like the tail pinned on a donkey. Capitalism is simply the management of surplus wealth. The catch is, in a hyper-complex society, the management itself becomes complex to an extreme. And that can easily lead to mismanagement, which will deform and pervert the very mechanisms that superintend wealth, sometimes so badly that the wealth disappears altogether.

These are the dynamics faced by the newborn Trump command. Both political parties, per se, have fallen into a dismal habit of racketeering in this sclerotic state-of-empire. But now Mr. Trump has seized control of the Republican apparatus, at least, and the Party’s entrenched ol’ crocs and pythons descry that under DJT the regular feeding frenzy is over. Hence: the hand-wringing over Pete Hegseth setting foot in the Pentagon, as he will sometime this dawning day. The dollars pounded down that rat-hole in this century could have funded start-ups of several empires, but instead the swag just landed in the index funds of countless board members parasitically lodged in a dark cosmos of G.I. procurement circle-jerks. A lot of that can and will be stopped. And the ones who just won’t quit are liable to be found out.

Now, the Democratic Party faces more perplexing quandaries. It, too, is constructed as a gigantic grift machine. But if you subtract the employees of the multitudinous NGOs and non-profit orgs set up in recent years to receive government largess — which have spawned like smelts in the San Joaquin delta — you would eliminate much of the party’s rank-and-file. (The rest are apparently embedded in government itself and the teachers’ union.) A whole lot of activists would lose their platforms for activism in the process.

These crypto-bureaucracies have become the places where the Democratic Party stashes the “elite over-production” of Woked-up Marxian semi-morons from America’s diploma mills — in which orgs they are lavishly paid to conduct the aforementioned propaganda and gaslighting operations that wrecked so many American minds. The funding spigot to many of those is getting shut down. It will result in an employment crunch for a large cohort of professional crybabies. They could possibly adapt to their new circumstances by ceasing to be crybabies, and finding other, more useful things to do. That would portend some very significant cultural shiftings, which might include the death of the Democratic Party as we’ve known it. Or, they could all just join Antifa (if they’re not already in it) and go make trouble in the streets.

The first seven days of Mr. Trump have been sheer razzle-dazzle. He and the people around him have torn through the zeitgeist like front-end-loaders through a homeless encampment. He has yet to meet a crisis. Some of the obvious traps are avoidable. For instance: seeking further injury to Russia as a way of ending the stupid Ukraine war — started by us in 2014, thanks a lot Victoria Nuland & Company — since both the US and Russia are just about unconditionally desirous of stopping the damn thing as soon as possible. It’s had no benefit for anybody but the Raytheon war lobby and the Zelensky regime’s legion of grifters. Mr. Trump’s recent tough talk has been entirely for show, just a mass of rhetorical lube to un-stick the lingering “Joe Biden” stasis in that sad-sack corner of the world.

If crisis awaits, it’s probably lurking in the financial realm, where the operations of debt have put nearly every country on Gawd’s Green Earth behind the eight-ball. There is just too much of it that everybody knows can’t possibly be paid back — or soon even serviced — and the grand managers of these matters are finally out of tricks for pretending things can go on. Nor, here in America, can Mr. Trump cut spending fast enough to rebalance accounts. And if he somehow could, government employment has become such a big piece of the total economy that we would land post-haste in a new great depression That predicament is yet-to-be faced, but hold your breath because it is hard upon us.

Meanwhile, this is the week when the most hardcore of Mr. Trump’s cabinet warriors go ‘splainin’ before committees in the US Senate: Bobby Kennedy, Jr., Tulsi Gabbard, and Kash Patel. Prepare for some heat and light. And then, the deluge.

Reprinted with permission from JamesHowardKunstler.com.

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Thanks, John Smith. 

Child rape gang plunged to depths of human depravity, says judge.

The post “Not Asians, not Muslims, not immigrants “sick people are in every race, religion, national origin.Child rape gang plunged to depths of human depravity, says judge appeared first on LewRockwell.

Thanks, Chris Sullivan. 

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