Lew Rockwell Institute

Thanks, David Martin.

In other words, he is saying that he has proof that it was a Fedsurrection.

The post J6 Political Prisoner Says He Has Evidence Proving Pelosi Was Behind J6 appeared first on LewRockwell.

Writes Rick Rozoff:

Bishop Strickland criticizes Cardinal Dolan for not using the name of Jesus in Trump inauguration prayer

During his prayer, Dolan mentioned several people by name, including Trump, former President Joe Biden, George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, and Martin Luther King. However, Jesus’ name was not used once.

Instead, Dolan addressed the prayer to “God, Supreme among the Nations, Supreme on the earth.”

In fact, Dolan was outdone by Protestant Franklin Graham, who ended his prayer “in the name of the King of kings, the Lord of Lords, Your Son, my Savior, and our Redeemer, Jesus Christ. Amen.”

The post Who’s he? appeared first on LewRockwell.

Murray Sabrin writes:

Lew:

One of the best articles about insurance and risk.

The post The World Is Getting Riskier. Americans Don’t Want to Pay for It. appeared first on LewRockwell.

Ginny Garner writes:

Lew,

After years of litigation, the Informed Consent Action Network (ICAN), founded by Del Bigtree who also hosts the High Wire program, has acquired critical FDA safety reports concerning Covid shots. From ICAN: 

During the pandemic, FDA conducted analyses of COVID-19 vaccine adverse events and tried to hide the results from the public. After two years of FOIA requests and lawsuits, FDA finally produced a portion of its “Empirical Bayesian (EB) data mining” reports. This type of analysis was designed to detect COVID-19 vaccine safety signals using VAERS reports. The data should be very revealing as far as what issues FDA was seeing during the vaccine rollout—especially given the agency has kept this data secret for years. This is the first time this critical data has been released to the public.

An initial review of the records produced has revealed a long list of adverse events that far surpassed FDA’s “standard alert threshold”—meaning, there is (or should have been) great concern on the part of federal health authorities who were privy to this data. As just one example, ICAN discovered that “heavy menstrual bleeding” and “menstruation irregular” began showing up on the reports as early as April 2021!

The EB analyses are one type of report that FDA and CDC were supposed to be producing as part of the safety monitoring of the COVID-19 vaccines. If you recall, CDC planned to detect safety signals using a method called Proportional Reporting Ratio, or PRR. After denying that any PRR records existed, ICAN was forced to sue in order to obtain CDC’s PRR data. Once we received it, it became exceedingly clear why CDC tried to keep it buried: numerous concerning conditions far exceeded CDC’s threshold for safety detection! We expect to see much of the same with the EB data.

ICAN is working on an in-depth analysis of this sought-after EB data and will update you with its findings. We encourage other independent analysts to do the same.

The post More Evidence the FDA Knew the Covid Shots Weren’t Safe appeared first on LewRockwell.

Thanks, David Martin:

NY Post

Perhaps Putin should pay attention.  See what Trump did to Vince McMahon.

The post Trump Gives Putin Ukraine-War Ultimatum appeared first on LewRockwell.

Writes a friend:

Have just re-read The New Book of Martyrs by French novelist Georges Duhamel. Duhamel was an army surgeon throughout the four years of World War I; this volume was published in the third year of that war. The author later became one of the preeminent novelists of the last century but, as is not infrequently the case, one not valued at his true worth. The New Book of Martyrs, linked below, was based on his direct experience treating war wounded on the Western Front. It is written with great gentleness and compassion, but I cannot imagine anyone reading the book, especially the chapter titled Sacrifice, who reading or hearing the word war isn’t overcome with horror and revulsion.

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Thanks John Smith:

Boston Review

The post Instruments of Dehuman­ization appeared first on LewRockwell.

Andy Thomas writes:

“If it’s not Vitamin C or Vitamin D, don’t put it in your body unless you absolutely have to.”

See here.

The post Gender Discrepancy in Cancer appeared first on LewRockwell.

Writes Gail Appel:

Where is PETA?

The post 13 Terrifying & True Torture Devices Used In Taxpayer-Funded Animal Labs appeared first on LewRockwell.

The post Mad Blitz! Trump Hits The Ground RUNNING! appeared first on LewRockwell.

Click Here:

Zero Hedge

The post All Federal DEI Offices To Be Closed By Wednesday EOD, Workers Placed On Paid Leave: White House appeared first on LewRockwell.

Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò congratulated Donald Trump’s victory in the U.S. elections, deeming it a divine intervention against the ‘criminal’ New World Order and calling on Christians to pray for Trump’s success in dismantling ‘deep state’ influence.

Editor’s note: The following story is taken from a brief post on X (formerly Twitter) by Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò following the election of Donald Trump as 47th President of the United States of America.

(LifeSiteNews) — Donald J. Trump’s victory in the electoral competition for the presidency of the United States of America constitutes a historic moment in the dramatic events of the present and marks a formidable setback for the criminal plan of the New World Order.

“I express my warmest congratulations to President Trump, while I thank Our Lord for having prevented the United States and the Western world from definitively falling into the tentacles of the deep state and globalist tyranny.

“The battle against the subversive elite of psychopathic criminals who hold the West hostage is not over; it now begins.

“I urge American Catholics and all Christians to pray for President Trump, so that the Lord may protect him in this transition phase towards taking office in the White House, guiding him in the unavoidable eradication of the lobby of corrupt and perverted people subservient to the deep state. His determined action against the traitors of the nation will also weaken the work of the deep church, which today holds the Catholic Church hostage.”

The post Archbishop Viganò: Trump’s Victory is a Formidable Setback for the New World Order appeared first on LewRockwell.

Thanks David Martin.

Mike Whitney

The post Bibi Promises Resumed Genocide after 42 Days appeared first on LewRockwell.

Writes Ginny Garner:

Catholic Vote

The post 10 Day One Trump Executive Orders of Interest to Catholics appeared first on LewRockwell.

The fires in Los Angeles have been the most devastating in the city’s history. A full account of the causes of the conflagration can’t be attempted here, but in this week’s column, I’d like to talk about the responsibility of environmentalism for what happened.

By “environmentalism,” I mean a movement that is hostile to human beings, their private homes, and to industrial growth. Some of its advocates want to do away with people altogether. Instead, environmentalists want to preserve the natural world in its pristine purity.

In Los Angeles and its surrounding communities, there is an abundance of lush vegetation.  Further, there is usually very little rain during the fall and winter seasons. LA does get some rain in the spring, but as Coim Toibin remarks, “In the spring, the rain makes the scrub and the brush grow stronger so when they get dry later in the year they are liable to burn more strongly.”  This problem is exacerbated by fierce Santa Ana winds that can rapidly spread any fire that has started.

In order to cope with these difficult circumstances, it is necessary to follow a policy of controlled burning. According to David Stockman, “The failure to do just such controlled burns is exactly what is behind the LA wildfire today. That is, a dramatically larger human footprint in the fire-prone shrub-lands and chaparral (dwarf trees) areas along the coasts has increased the risk residents will start fires, accidentally or otherwise. California’s population doubled from 1970 to 2020, from about 20 million people to nearly 40 million people, and nearly all of the gain was in the coastal areas.

Under those conditions, California’s strong, naturally-occurring winds, which crest periodically, as is occurring at the moment, are the main culprit which fuels and spreads the human-set blazes in the shrub-lands. The Diablo winds in the north of the state and the Santa Ana winds in the south can actually reach hurricane force, as has also been the case this week. As the winds move West over California mountains and down toward the coast, they compress, warm and intensify.

These winds, in turn, blow flames and carry embers, spreading the fires quickly before they can be contained. And on top of that, the Santa Ana winds also function as Mother Nature’s blow-dryer. As they come down the mountains toward the sea, the hot winds dry the surface vegetation and deadwood rapidly and powerfully, paving the way for the blowing embers to fuel the spread of wildfires down the slopes.”

A policy of controlled burning is needed to deal with this, but the environmentalists oppose this, because they want to keep as much of the lush vegetation in place as possible.  “We live with a deathly backlog. In February 2020, Nature Sustainability published this terrifying conclusion: California would need to burn 20 million acres — an area about the size of Maine — to restabilize in terms of fire.

In short, if you don’t clear and burn-out the deadwood, you build-up nature-defying tinder-boxes that then require only a lightening strike, a spark from an un-repaired power line or human carelessness to ignite into a raging inferno. As one 40-year conservationist and expert summarized,

There’s only one solution, the one we know yet still avoid. “We need to get good fire on the ground and whittle down some of that fuel load.”

It is also necessary to supply vast amounts of water to the area, but again the environmentalists oppose this. The water might disturb the habitats of a few fish and snails. This is in their insane view, a bar to what is necessary to protect the lives and property of millions of people. David Stockman explains: “In this case, state and Federal politicians have simultaneously curtailed the supply of water available to Los Angeles firefighters in order to protect so-called endangered species. Specifically, southern California is being held hostage by sharp curtailment of the water pumping rates from the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta in order to protect the Delta Smelt and Chinook Salmon.”

Also, fire hydrants must be kept up-to-date and equipped to handle large scale blazes. Enough fire fighters must be hired to cope with potential emergencies. In a free society, hydrants and fire fighters would be supplied by the market, but we unfortunately do not live in a free society, and it is up to the government to take care of these matters.

But Los Angeles mayor Karen Bass is not interested in such matters. She was out of the city, on one of her perpetual junkets abroad, when the fires started, even though it was a matter of public knowledge that Los Angeles was in a dangerous period. The Los Angeles Times reported: “As the Palisades fire exploded in Los Angeles on Jan. 7, Mayor Karen Bass was posing for photos at an embassy cocktail party in Ghana, pictures posted on social media show.” She is, by the way, a revolutionary Communist: “Back in the 1970s, community activist Karen Bass went on at least 15 trips to Cuba, many with a group known as the Venceremos Brigade, a Marxist group started by the Castro regime to subvert American interests, weaken democracies, and spread communism around the world.”

As you would expect from such a person, Bass doe not care about public safety: “But Bass was accused of deploying sleight of hand to minimize the many very real dramas surrounding water that hindered efforts to douse the flames.

While the tanks were indeed full before the fire broke out, by Wednesday fire hydrants in Palisades had run out of water, as they are not designed for such mass-scale wildfires.

All of the three water tanks in Palisades and several fire hydrants temporarily lost water because of the high demand, as experts have explained the system is not built to fight major blazes.

The water system used to fight the Palisades fire buckled under the demands of what turned out to be the most destructive fire in city history, with some hydrants running dry as they were overstressed without assistance from firefighting aircraft for hours early Wednesday.”

California Governor Gavin Newsom is no better. As Mises Institute President Tom DiLorenzo says: “For the past two years, under the guidance/dictates of Nancy Pelosi’s nephew (aka governor of California), LA County has been sending firefighting equipment, including fire trucks, to Ukraine. Is it constitutional for a state to have its own foreign policy?  Is there really a line in the LA County budget for fire trucks for Ukraine?  Which LA County politicians ran on a platform of:  ‘Vote for me and I’ll give our firefighting equipment away to the dictator of Ukraine”?  Did anyone vote for this, or is the Newsom dictatorship really no different from the ones in Ukraine or North Korea?”

Let’s do everything we can to reverse the policies of these anti-human environmentalists!

The post Environmentalism and the Los Angeles Fires appeared first on LewRockwell.

Is a so-called Presidential “preemptive pardon” consistent with the intent and language of the Constitution? All that the Constitution says about the matter is this:

”…he (the President)  shall have the power to grant Reprieves and Pardons for Offenses against the United States, except in Cases of Impeachment.” {Article 2, Section 2} In the first important case to deal with these issues  ( Ex Parte Garland 71 U.S. 333, 1866) the Supreme Court (in the context of someone pardoned but still  excluded from the (state) practice of law) said the following:

“The power of pardon conferred by the Constitution upon the President is unlimited except in cases of impeachment. It extends to every offence known to the law, and may be exercised at any time after its commission, either before legal proceedings are taken or during their pendency, or after conviction and judgment. The power is not subject to legislative control.”

And it is THIS interpretation of the pardoning power that was (still) used, for instance, in the “preemptive” pardoning of Richard Nixon who, although disgraced, had not been charged with any criminal offense against the federal government. Ditto for the Biden preemptive pardons.

My comments:

a. The original language in the Constitution never explicitly mentions any “preemptive” pardoning power. Moreover, the use of the term “offenses” in the Constitution appears to imply that something legal (some process; some finding; some  determination) has ALREADY begun or occured and that the presidential pardon applies to that offense or set of offenses. If this is correct, that would rule out any preemptive pardoning power.

b. Now the language from the 1866 case cited above (and the legal foundation for the notion that a preemptive pardon is Constitutional) clearly broadens the pardoning power beyond what the Founders wrote or likely reasonably intended. After all, an “offense” PRIOR to some legal proceeding,  is NOT an offense in any legal sense but only an “alleged (legal) offense.” Nowhere, however, does the pardoning power in the Constitution even hint that the President  could pardon someone  for some ALLEGED offense against the Government; or that THAT  power could somehow be “unlimited” and beyond all legislative review. It appears, then,  that the SC majority in 1866 pulled that far broader interpretation of the pardoning power right out of thin air or, more accurately, right out of a very different theory of post Civil War Presidential prerogatives.

The post Preemptive Pardons appeared first on LewRockwell.

The ‘strange defeat’ is that of Europe’s ‘curious’ inability to understand Ukraine or its military mechanics.

The essayist and military strategist, Aurelien, has written a paper entitled: The Strange Defeat (original in French). The ‘strange defeat’ being that of Europe’s ‘curious’ inability to understand Ukraine or its military mechanics.

Aurelien highlights the strange lack of realism by which the West has approached the crisis —

“ …and the almost pathological dissociation from the real world that it displays in its words and actions. Yet, even as the situation deteriorates, and the Russian forces advance everywhere, there is no sign that the West is becoming more reality-based in its understanding – and it is very likely that it will continue to live in its alternative construction of reality until it is forcibly expelled”.

The writer continues in some detail (omitted here) to explain why NATO has no strategy for Ukraine and no real operational plan:

“It has only a series of ad hoc initiatives, linked together by vague aspirations that have no connection with real life plus the hope that ‘something [beneficial] will occur’. Our current Western political leaders have never had to develop such skills. Yet it is actually worse than that: not having developed these skills, not having advisers who have developed them, they cannot really understand what the Russians are doing, how and why they are doing it. Western leaders are like spectators who do not know the rules of chess or Go – and are trying to figure out who is winning”.

“What exactly was their goal? Now, responses such as ‘to send a message to Putin’, ‘complicate Russian logistics’, or ‘improve morale at home’ are no longer allowed. What I want to know is what is expected in concrete terms? What are the tangible results of their ‘messaging’? Can they guarantee that it will be understood? Have you anticipated the possible reactions of the Russians – and what will you do then?”

The essential problem, Aurelien bluntly concludes, is that:

“our political classes and their parasites have no idea how to deal with such crises, or even how to understand them. The war in Ukraine involves forces that are orders of magnitude larger than any Western nation has deployed on operations since 1945 … Instead of real strategic objectives, they have only slogans and fanciful proposals”.

Coldly put, the author explains that for complex reasons connected with the nature of western modernity, the liberal élites simply are not competent or professional in matters of security. And they do not understand its nature.

U.S. cultural critic Walter Kirn makes rather similar claims in a very different, yet related, context: California Fires and America’s Competency Crisis –

“Los Angeles is in flames, yet California’s leaders seem helpless, unmasking a generation of public investment in non-essential services [that leaves the Authorities floundering amidst the predicted occurrence of the fires]”.

On a Joe Rogan podcast earlier this month, a firefighter goes: “It’s just going to be the right wind and fire’s going to start in the right place and it’s going to burn through LA all the way to the ocean, and there’s not a f***ing thing we can do about it”.

Kirn observes:

“This isn’t the first fire or set of fires in Malibu. Just a few years ago, there were big fires. There always are. They’re inevitable. But having built this giant city in this place with this vulnerability, there are measures that can be taken to contain and to fend off the worst”.

“To fob it off on climate change, as I say, is a wonderful thing to tell yourself, but none of this started yesterday. My only point is this, has it done everything it can to prepare for an inevitable, unavoidable situation that perhaps in scale differs from the past, but certainly not in kind? Are its leaders up to the job? There’s not a lot of sign that they are. They haven’t been able to deal with things like homelessness without fires. So the question of whether all those things have been done, whether they’ve been done well, whether there was adequate water in fire hydrants, whether they were working at all, things like that, and whether the fire department was properly trained or properly staffed, all those questions are going to arise”.

“And as far as the competency crisis goes, I think that there will be ample material to portray this as aggravated by incompetence. California’s a state that’s become notorious for spending a lot of money on things that don’t work, on high-speed rail lines that never are constructed, on all sorts of construction projects and infrastructure projects that never come to pass. And in that context, I think this will be devastating to the power structure of California”.

“In a larger sense though, it’s going to remind people that a politics that has been for years now about language and philosophical constructs such as equity and so on, is going to be seen as having failed in the most essential way, to protect people. And that these people are powerful and influential and privileged is going to make that happen faster and in a more prominent fashion”.

To which his colleague, journalist Matt Taibbi, responds:

“But pulling back in a broader sense, we do have a crisis of competency in this country. It has had a huge impact on American politics”. Kirn: “[Americans] They’re going to want less concern for the philosophical and/or even long-term political questions of equity and so on, I predict, and they’re going to want to lay in a minimum expectation of competence in natural disasters. In other words, this is a time when the priorities shift and I think that big change is coming, big, big change, because we look like we’ve been dealing with luxury problems, and we’ve certainly been dealing with other countries’ problems, Ukraine or whoever it might be, with massive funding. There are people in North Carolina right now still recovering from a flood and having a very difficult time as winter comes, which it doesn’t in LA in the same way, or as winter consolidates itself, I guess”;

“So looking forward, it’s not a question of blame, it’s what are people going to want? What are people going to value? What are they going to prize? Are their priorities going to shift? I think they will shift big time. Los Angeles will be a touchstone and it will be a touchstone for a new approach to government”.

So we have this ‘divorce from reality’ and consequent ‘Competency Crisis’ – whether in California; Ukraine or Europe. Where lie the roots to this malaise? U.S. writer David Samuels believes this to be the answer:

“In his last days in office … President Barack Obama made the decision to set the country on a new course. On Dec. 23, 2016, he signed into law the Countering Foreign Propaganda and Disinformation Act, which used the language of defending the homeland to launch an open-ended, offensive information war, a war that fused the security infrastructure with the social media platforms – where the war supposedly was being fought”.

However, collapse of the 20th-century media pyramid and its rapid replacement by monopoly social media platforms, had made it possible for the Obama White House to sell policy – and reconfigure social attitudes and prejudices – in entirely new ways.

During the Trump years, Obama used these tools of the digital age to craft an entirely new type of power centre for himself – one that revolved around his unique position as the titular, though pointedly never-named, head of a Democratic Party which he succeeded in refashioning in his own image, Samuels writes.

The ‘permission structure’ machine that Barack Obama and David Axelrod (a highly successful Chicago political consultant), built to replace the Democratic Party was in its essence a device for getting people to act against their beliefs by substituting new and ‘better’ beliefs through the top-down controlled and leveraged application of social pressure – effectively turning Axelrod’s construct into ‘an omnipotent thought-machine’, Samuels suggests:

“The term ‘echo chambers’ describes the process by which the White House and its wider penumbra of think tanks and NGOs deliberately created an entirely new class of experts who mutually credentialed each other on social media in order to advance assertions that would formerly have been seen as marginal or not credible”.

The aim was for a platoon of aides, armed with laptops or smart phones, to ‘run’ with the latest inspired Party meme and to immediately repeat, and repeat it, across platforms, giving the appearance of an overwhelming tide of consensus filling the country. And thus giving people the ‘permission structure’ of apparent wide public assent to believe propositions that formerly they would never have supported.

“Where this analysis went wrong is the same place that the Obama team’s analysis of Trump went wrong: The wizards of the permission structure machine had become captives of the machinery that they built. The result was a fast-moving mirror world that could generate the velocity required to change the appearance of “what people believe” overnight. The newly minted digital variant of “public opinion” was rooted in the algorithms that determine how fads spread on social media, in which mass multiplied by speed equals momentum—speed being the key variable”.

“At every turn over the next four years, it was like a fever was spreading, and no one was immune. Spouses, children, colleagues, and supervisors at work began reciting, with the force of true believers, slogans they had only learned last week. It was the entirety of this apparatus, not just the ability to fashion clever or impactful tweets, that constituted the party’s new form of power”.

“In the end, however, the fever broke”. The credibility of Élites imploded.

Samuels account amounts to a stark warning of the danger associated with distance opening up between an underlying reality and an invented reality that could be successfully messaged, and managed, from the White House. “This possibility opened the door to a new potential for a large-scale disaster – like the war in Iraq”, Samuels suggests. (Samuels does not specifically mention Ukraine, although this is implied throughout the argument).

This – both the Obama tale, as told by David Samuels, and Walter Kirn’s story of California – augment Aurelien’s point about Ukraine and European military incompetence and lack of professionalism on the field: It is one of allowing a schism to open up between contrived narrative and reality – “which”, Samuels warns “is to say that, with enough money, operatives could create and operationalize mutually reinforcing networks of activists and experts to validate a messaging arc that would short-circuit traditional methods of validation and analysis, and lead unwary actors and audience members alike to believe that things that they had never believed; or even heard of before: Were in fact not only plausible, but already widely accepted within their specific peer groups”.

It constitutes the path to disaster – even risking nuclear disaster in the case of the Ukraine conflict. Will the ‘Competency Crisis’ reaching across such varied terrain trigger a re-think as Walter Kirn – a writer on cultural change – insists?

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

The post The Competency Crisis Proliferating the West appeared first on LewRockwell.

Buckle up and hold on tight, because things are about to get really wild.  Immediately after taking the oath of office, Donald Trump is going to be faced with incredibly difficult decisions which could have enormous implications for every man, woman and child in this country.  There will be all sorts of people giving him all sorts of advice, and it won’t always be easy to distinguish the good advice from the bad advice.  So let us pray that he makes his choices wisely.  The following are 5 historic emergencies that Trump will be confronted with immediately as he enters  the White House…

#1 A Major War

Iran has gotten extremely close to being able to build nuclear weapons, and once they are able to do that it is inevitable that the Iranians will distribute such weapons to Hezbollah and other terrorist proxies.  Joe Biden had been considering a pre-emptive strike on Iran’s nuclear program, but he ultimately decided not to pull the trigger.  Now it is Donald Trump’s turn.  According to the Wall Street Journal, a military strike on Iran’s nuclear facilities has been under “serious review by some members of his transition team”…

President-elect Donald Trump is weighing options for stopping Iran from being able to build a nuclear weapon, including the possibility of preventive airstrikes, a move that would break with the longstanding policy of containing Tehran with diplomacy and sanctions.

The military-strike option against nuclear facilities is now under more serious review by some members of his transition team, who are weighing the fall of the regime of President Bashar al-Assad—Tehran’s ally—in Syria, the future of U.S. troops in the region, and Israel’s decimation of regime proxy militias Hezbollah and Hamas.

Needless to say, if the U.S. and/or Israel takes out Iran’s nuclear facilities, the Iranians will go ballistic and there will be a major war in the region.

#2 A New Pandemic

If you thought the last one was bad, just wait until you see what is coming next.

According to NBC News, the Biden administration and Trump’s team have been working together to formulate a response to the “escalating bird flu outbreak spreading in the United States”…

Amid an escalating bird flu outbreak spreading in the United States, federal health officials have begun to brief members of the incoming Trump administration about how they’ve responded to the crisis so far.

“We sent them all of the information on our work,” said a Biden administration health official familiar with transition briefings within the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

It’s the first indication that the two administrations appear to be working together to prioritize the H5N1 response.

Apparently part of that response is 590 million dollars in additional funding “to push Moderna’s messenger RNA-based pandemic flu vaccine towards approval”…

The federal government has committed an additional $590 million to push Moderna’s messenger RNA-based pandemic flu vaccine towards approval, as the Biden administration, in its waning hours, ramps up preparations for a potential H5N1 avian influenza pandemic.

#3 Economic Trouble

Inflation is starting to really accelerate once again, and this is particularly true for food prices…

There isn’t one factor. Bird flu is killing chickens, cutting egg supplies and sending wholesale prices to a record. Extreme heat and dry weather in the world’s coffee-growing regions have sent the cost of brews surging. Chocolate and cereal makers have raised prices for their products, too.

It is a problem for consumers, who are still acclimating to a stretch of bruising inflation following the Covid-19 pandemic. Shoppers are picking up more store-branded groceries and scouring multiple stores for the best deals. Grocery prices in December were roughly 28% higher than they were five years ago, according to the Labor Department.

No president can magically zap the bird flu out of existence or cause it to rain in areas where it isn’t raining.

The truth is that there is no easy solution on the horizon, and prices on some key staples such as eggs are expected to go much higher in 2025…

During his 2024 campaign, President-elect Donald Trump repeatedly made the promise that “prices will come down,” BBC reports, but according to two experts, that won’t be happening any time soon — at least when it comes to the price of eggs.

While eggs are already “40% more expensive now than they were a year ago,” KTLA notes, according to the Department of Labor, the raging avian flu epidemic means “it’s about to get even worse.”

The epidemic — which “has already led to the death of more than 100 million egg-laying hens” — according to the report, is expected to spike egg prices “as much as 20% more in 2025.”

#4 A Historic Natural Disaster

It is now being projected that the fires in the Los Angeles area will be the costliest natural disaster in U.S. history by a wide margin.

Unfortunately, this is a crisis that is far from over, because extremely high winds are expected to return to southern California this week…

Los Angeles is bracing itself for more catastrophic wildfires this week as weather forecasters predict the return of gusting Santa Ana winds of up to 100 miles per hour.

More than 27 people have died and 22,000 buildings have burned in at least six wildfires since the first fire erupted on January 7.

#5 A Government At War With Itself

Donald Trump says that he wants to “drain the swamp” and make major changes to how the federal government operates.

That is great.

Unfortunately, about half of the people that run our federal agencies intend to resist what Trump will be trying to do…

When asked if they would most likely be supporting or resisting the Trump administration over the next four years, government managers were almost evenly split with 44% saying they would support the administration and 42% saying they would resist.

But the divide between those federal managers who would resist and those who would support the incoming Trump administration grew much sharper when respondents were questioned along party lines.

89% of Republican federal employees said they would either “somewhat support” or “strongly support” the administration, while 73% of Democrat bureaucrats surveyed said they would either “somewhat resist” or “strongly resist.”

Our federal government is literally going to be at war with itself.

If you think that transforming the largest government bureaucracy in the history of the world is going to be easy, you are just kidding yourself.

We are moving into a time of tremendous turmoil, and it won’t be pretty.

The good news is that 2025 is certainly not going to be boring.

The news cycle will be speeding along at a breathtaking pace, and I believe that we will witness one historic event after another during the next 12 months.

Reprinted with permission from The Economic Collapse.

The post 5 Historic Emergencies That Trump Will Be Confronted With Immediately as He Returns to the White House appeared first on LewRockwell.

The imminently former Secretary of Health and Human Services, Xavier Becerra, recently told The New York Times that the federal government’s attempt to force practically everyone in the country to submit to being injected with the drugs it pushed on behalf of the legalized drug cartels commonly styled the “pharmaceutical industry” was absolutely warranted. Not only that, he pointed out it was nothing really new in that it was – in principle – something that had already been accepted in law as well  as in practice by most people.

“Should we require people to wear seatbelts?” 

Gotcha!

Becerra is right – in the sense that people are indeed required to wear seat belts and given that, of course they can “absolutely” be required to submit to pretty much anything else the federal government (that is, federal apparatchiks such as Becerra) decree is necessary because “safety” – or “public health,” which amounts to essentially the same thing.

This goes back a long way. At least 60 years, which was how long ago the federal government asserted the authority to be found nowhere in the Constitution to force car makers to force their customers to pay for seat belts in new cars, whether they wanted them (or to pay for them) being an irrelevance. Their “safety” – as defined by the apparatchiks of that long-ago day – became the justification.

Once that principle was established in law – and accepted in practice by an insouciant pubic that sighed and said – No big deal; I don’t have to wear the damned things – the federal government had the power to require that people wear them. This power was asserted not  long thereafter.

It is now, as everyone knows, an actionable offense – meaning, an armed government worker can legally force you to stop and “pull over” and force you to accept a piece of paper that says you owe the government money – for not wearing a seat belt. And if you refuse to wear it, you can be arrested and manacled and placed in a cage. This would have amazed Americans of 70 years ago, for whom such petty authoritarianism would have seemed unimaginable in America.

How long will it be before Americans are forced to wear a bib while eating?

Why not? The federal apparat has already asserted the power to force them to wear a “mask” while breathing. Is it not of a piece?

Does it not follow?

Of course it does. Becerra is right. Haughtily so, as his sneering comment to the Times conveys. How could anyone logically argue against the federal government’s pushing of “masks” and then drugs on people given the acceptance in law and practice of the federal government’s pushing of seatbelts on people?

This is a crucial point lost on many people, who view things – such as the federal government’s forcing of car companies to force car buyers to accept having to pay for seatbelts in cars back in the 1960s – as just a “small thing” without any connection to other things.

That is, without precedent-setting implications.

Lawyers such as Becerra (and Hamilton, 236 years before him) understand the importance of such precedents. They are how you expand upon precedents. They are how you move the ball forward.

This is why it is so important to never give them an inch. Because if you do, they will take a mile. Every. Single. Time.

No doubt it didn’t seem like a big deal, back in the ’60s to have to pay for seat belts you may not have wanted in that new car you just bought. The cost was slight and you could just sit on them rather than wear them. It didn’t seem worth going to war over.

How does it seem now?

Having accepted that seemingly minor thing, all those years ago, we are now afflicted by many more things, including the six air bags (at the least) all new cars now come “standard” with, as well as the car itself – which has become less a car and more a kind of mobile parenting and data-collection device that monitors and controls you at least as much as it conveys you. Cars have become oppressive rather than freeing and it can all be traced back to our accepting that it’s legitimate under the Constitution as well as moral for the federal government – i.e., for ugsome, sneering federal apparatchiks such as Xavier Becerra – to apply the coercive power of the government to force us to buy and then wear seatbelts.

And that is why Becerra is right about the federal government having established it has the power to force us to submit to being injected with “vaccines,” as the drugs pushed on the population by the government were despicably characterized.

Read the Whole Article

The post From Seatbelts to Here We Are appeared first on LewRockwell.

The Ukrainian commander in chief General Syrksi seems to have given up. Recent remarks of his suggest that he no longer sees a way to win the war. He is now simply waiting for the politicians to concede.

The Ukrainian military has recently started to move thousands of air-defense soldiers and logistic personnel into the infantry. People who were taught to detect, analyze and fight aerial targets get pushed into roles for which they did not receive training and are no qualified.

Syrski is justifying this as the only way to keep a sufficient number of men in front line trenches:

The army chief stressed that his order prohibits the transfer of highly qualified personnel who have undergone training and specialize in aircraft maintenance.

“Clearly, these are invested funds, specialists who have experience and are practically irreplaceable, on the one hand,” said Syrskyi.

“On the other hand, we fundamentally need personnel on the front, and we must maintain an adequate number of troops in our mechanized brigades. Unfortunately, mobilization capabilities do not meet this need.”

According to him, the Armed Forces of Ukraine are “reasonably” reducing the logistical component and part of the support in the military, as well as those involved in maintenance.

“Therefore, the headquarters know these tasks; they have done the calculations,” Syrskyi stated.

The number of freshly mobilized soldiers is lower than the number of losses. The military thus has to start to ‘eat itself’. The problems being caused by this will not be visible immediately but they will over time destroy the armies core functionality.

People have done all they can to avoid a service at the frontline. Commanders have been bribed to allow for their soldiers to do duty behind the front lines. Others deserted. There are thus plenty of superfluous logistic and headquarter staff that can be moved to put up a more serious resistance.

But in few week those reserves will have emptied too. Logistics will start to slow down and air defenses will fail to defend against even the most primitive drone attacks.

Syrski sees this coming. He knows that defending the country will not win the war (machine translation):

Ukraine will not be able to win the war while on the defensive.

This was stated by the commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces of Ukraine Alexander Syrsky on the air of the telethon.

“You know, no matter how much you defend, you will still retreat. And we are forced to hold the defense and concentrate our forces, in fact, to keep along this front line,” said Syrsky.

Just two months ago Syrski was sounding more optimistic. He was still dreaming of and announced further counterattacks (machine translation):

The APU will not only stand on the defensive, but also counterattack.

This statement was made by the Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces of Ukraine Alexander Syrsky at a recent meeting with military bloggers. Details of the statement were given in his Telegram channel by the participant of the meeting, military Kirill Sazonov.

“Pokrovskoe and Kurakhovskoe directions. The situation is difficult. But it’s better than it was a week ago. Then it was really critical. Some units were retreating, leaving their positions, but there was no one to close them. Indeed, a crisis situation. But the issue is resolved, the reserves are deployed, the enemy’s plans are thwarted. Alexander Syrsky’s position: we must stop the enemy. But victory is impossible if the APU will work only in defense. We must seize the initiative and counterattack. We must and will. Where and who-you will see, ” wrote Sazonov.

Kurakhove has since fallen and Pokrovsk is about to be surrounded. No further Ukrainian initiative has been seen.

One can not counterattack when one lacks the troops to even fill up the front lines.

Syrski may finally come to grips with the ‘winning’ charade the Biden administration has all along played with Ukraine:

When Russia invaded Ukraine nearly three years ago, President Joe Biden set three objectives for the U.S. response. Ukraine’s victory was never among them. The phrase the White House used to describe its mission at the time—supporting Ukraine “for as long as it takes”—was intentionally vague. It also raised the question: As long as it takes to do what?
…
The future that Zelensky and many of his countrymen have in mind is one in which Russia is defeated. But in rallying the world to the fight, the implication Biden embedded in his own goals was that defending Ukraine against Russia is not the same as defeating Russia. So it is not surprising if that goal remains far from Zelensky’s reach.

A victorious Ukraine has never been an aim or priority in the proxy war the Biden administration has waged against Russia. Even its main ‘diplomat’ has never shown interest in peace (archived):

Mr. Blinken was less a peacemaker than a war strategist. Immersed in details of military hardware and battlefield conditions, he often argued against more risk-averse Pentagon officials in favor of sending powerful American weapons to Ukraine.

And when the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Mark A. Milley, suggested in late 2022 that Ukraine should capitalize on battlefield gains by seeking peace talks with Moscow, Mr. Blinken insisted the fight should go on.

There is hope now, though only a slight one, that the incoming Trump administration will disavow the war in Ukraine and shut it down without any delay or escalation. The danger of proceeding otherwise is for Trump to get hooked to the war like Nixon became to Vietnam:

[Trump’s former chief strategist Steve Bannon] advocates ending America’s all-important military aid to Kyiv, but fears his old boss is going to fall into a trap being set by an unlikely alliance of the U.S. defense industry, the Europeans and even some of Bannon’s own friends, whom he argues are now misguided. These include Keith Kellogg, a retired U.S. general who is Trump’s pick to be special envoy to Ukraine and Russia.

“If we aren’t careful, it will turn into Trump’s Vietnam. That’s what happened to Richard Nixon. He ended up owning the war and it went down as his war not Lyndon Johnson’s,” Bannon said.

If it would fully engage the U.S. might be able to delay the outcome of the war in Ukraine. But it will, like in Vietnam, be unable to change the inevitable result.

Trump should concede that Russia has won the war, remove all support from Ukraine, pull back the Europeans and wash his hands over the outcome.

This would give Ukraine a chance to again bind its fate to the east.

Reprinted with permission from Moon of Alabama.

The post Trump and Ukraine Should Concede appeared first on LewRockwell.