Lew Rockwell Institute

I continue to believe that it is more important to watch what Donald Trump does rather than focus on what he says. However, his remarks during the meeting of his cabinet earlier this week regarding negotiations to end the war in Ukraine are alarming and merit attention. When asked about Sergei Lavrov’s comment that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky is not legitimate, Donald Trump dismissed the statement, saying:

It doesn’t matter what they say. Everybody’s posturing. It’s all bullshit, okay. Everybody’s posturing.

He characterized Lavrov’s remarks—and the broader Kremlin rhetoric on Zelensky’s legitimacy—as meaningless showmanship, emphasizing that such claims should not obstruct peace efforts. Trump did not directly defend Zelensky, but instead focused on downplaying the significance of Russia’s statements and suggested that “everyone is just putting on a show” in ongoing negotiations.

I believe that Trump genuinely believes this, and he is dangerously mistaken. President Putin and Foreign Minister Lavrov are not posturing when they try to explain to clueless westerners that they do not believe that Zelensky is the legitimate President of Ukraine. While Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy did not explicitly “cancel” the presidential election, as Ukrainian law prohibits holding elections during martial law, which has been in effect since Russia’s full-scale invasion on February 24, 2022, the reality from the Russian perspective is that a negotiated agreement with Zelensky could easily be overturned or rejected once Ukraine holds the required election.

The scheduled presidential election, expected in March or April 2024, was automatically postponed due to this legal restriction under Article 19 of Ukraine’s “On the Legal Regime of Martial Law,” which bans presidential, parliamentary, and local elections during martial law. Martial law has been extended in 90-day intervals by the Verkhovna Rada (Ukraine’s parliament), with the latest extension as of July 2025 lasting until November 5, 2025.

Based on Zelensky’s multiple public remarks since his last meeting with Trump at the White House, it is clear that he is completely disinterested in reaching a peace agreement with Russia.

Stephen Bryen has just published a new piece on his Substack, and it provides an explanation for Zelensky’s recalcitrance… NATO is going to attack Russia. Steve writes:

While Putin has flown off to meet with his two buddies, Xi Jinping and Kim Jong Un, in China on an unprecedented four day jaunt, NATO, with full US backing, is stepping up its effort to hand the Russian army a major defeat and, following that, introducing NATO troops to “stabilize” Ukraine.

What is the evidence? First and very noticeable is the US decision to ship 3,350 missiles to Ukraine, ostensibly to be paid for (someday?) by the Europeans (which ones is not defined). These are known as Extended Range Attack Munitions (ERAM), a type of air launched cruise missile missile. The Aviationist reports that “Ukrainian Air Force’s F-16s, Mirage 2000s and its fleet of Russian-origin MiG-29s, Su-25s and Su-27s would be able to operate it. This new weapon would be an addition to the AASM Hammer and GBU-39 SDB already employed by Ukrainian fighters.”

According to open source intelligence, ERAMs have a range of 250 miles. However, that is the range once launched by an aircraft. Washington says it opposes Ukrainian missile attacks on Russian territory, and while it is restricting the use of long range HIMARS, it is not restricting the use of ERAM. Reportedly ERAM carried a 500 lb. warhead, far larger than any Ukrainian UAV and more than double any of the different HIMARS missiles (M31 Utility Warhead, ATACMS warhead). It may be that ERAMs can be fielded with cluster munitions, although much about the ERAM is uncertain.

Ignore what Trump says, watch what he does. Deploying ERAMs is not a gesture of peace or de-escalation. While it is possible that this action was taken without Trump’s knowledge, now that the information is public he has not countermanded the order.

Steve goes on in his article (I encourage you to read it in its entirety) to highlight the faulty assumptions that NATO planners and leaders are making:

NATO has understood Russia’s use of North Korean troops as an admission that Russia faces manpower shortages and instability in the Russian army, and that Russia is taking heavy casualties in the Ukraine war. NATO may be reading Putin’s statements that he has no intention of attacking Europe now or in future as an admission that he cannot attack Europe with an army that is too small and one that has been broken by the Ukraine war. Part of the pushback can be found in the Saratoga Foundation report, “A Systems View of Russia’s Early Failure in Ukraine.”

Now Russian sources are reporting two developments that indicate that a new offensive will soon materialize, heavily supported by NATO, and aimed at Crimea.

Those sources say that the US and its NATO partners have significantly increased overhead intelligence gathering preparing for the coming attack.

Once again we have Western leaders — both military and political — wrongly interpreting Russia’s execution of a special military operation as a sign of weakness. The belief that Russia is suffering “manpower shortages and instability” is beyond ridiculous. During the course of the last 42 months, Russia has doubled the size of its army and is now conducting multiple offensive operations in Zaporhyzhia, Dniepropetrovsk, Donetsk, Kharkiv and Sumy. Even if we accept as true the false Western claims about Russia suffering massive casualties, the fact remains that even with such losse Russia has 1.3 million men in uniform and carrying arms. Instead of being “broken,” the Russian army has enhanced its capabilities and developed new techniques, especially with the use of drones, that far exceed anything NATO is capable of doing.

Besides conducting the ground war, Russia continues to enjoy a lopsided advantage in the use of missiles and drones. It has carried out massive strikes on missile production facilities and other key logistic nodes in the past week, and shows no sign of weakness on that front.

A NATO-backed attack on Crimea will put increased pressure on President Putin to shift from the Special Military Operation to full war footing. NATO’s inability to supply Ukraine with something as simple as artillery shells is just one indicator of NATO’s impotence if it decides to up the ante with Russia.

This article was originally published on Sonar21.

The post Donald Trump Still Does Not Understand the Russia’s Position Regarding Ukraine appeared first on LewRockwell.

Ever since I first encountered the medical field, something struck me as off about their relentless focus on blood pressure. Before long, I began to notice that the blood pressures the same acquaintances (e.g., relatives or friends) shared with me varied immensely. As I was pondering this, a long-time spiritual teacher shared with me their belief that the relentless focus on blood pressure was due to it being much easier to measure than blood perfusion (healthy blood flow).

Then, as I became more acquainted with the medical field, I began to notice a consistent pattern—whenever a drug existed that could treat a number or statistic, as the years went by, the acceptable number kept on being narrowed, making more and more people eligible to take the drugs that treated the number.

For example, as I discussed recently, once the statins drugs entered the market (which unlike their predecessors, could effectively lower cholesterol), the acceptable blood cholesterol levels kept on being lowered, and before long almost everyone was told they would die from a heart attack unless they started a statin—despite statins have an almost non-existing mortality benefit (e.g., taking them for 5 years at best makes you live 3-4 days longer) and causing (often severe) side effects for roughly 20% of users. Broadly recommending these drugs hence appears unconscionable, but as I showed in that article, these unjustifiable guidelines were a product of clever pharmaceutical marketing and targeted bribery of public officials.

In this article, I will attempt to show how something similar happened in the field of blood pressure. As this is an immensely controversial position to take (e.g., measuring and documenting blood pressure is one of the most routine procedures during a medical visit), I’ve done my best to clearly present the evidence for this perspective so you can make your own determination.

Conventional Blood Pressure Perspectives

Since blood vessels are elastic structures filled with fluid, that fluid holds them under pressure. Blood pressure, in turn, is typically measured by determining how much external force is needed to exceed the artery’s pressure and compress it so that blood no longer flows through it. Low blood pressure (hypotension) is a problem because it prevents blood from reaching the areas where it’s needed (e.g., orthostatic hypotension or POTS describes a common situation where people become lightheaded as they stand up due to insufficient blood being pushed into the brain), but in most cases, medicine instead focuses on the consequences of high blood pressure. Within the existing model, those consequences are:

•Weakened blood vessels become more likely to break open and leak as higher blood pressure pushes against them. This for instance is why Emergency Rooms aggressively lower the blood pressure of patients who show up with symptoms of “hypertensive emergency” such as a severe headache and a significantly elevated blood pressure. Likewise, whenever a critical blood vessel ruptures (e.g., the aorta or one in the brain), once the bleed has been confirmed, the first step in managing it is to lower the patient’s blood pressure (so less blood leaks out) after which they are sent to surgery.

•Excessive pressure on the arteries strains and damages them, causing the lining of the vessels to become damaged and gradually develop atherosclerosis.

•Excessive blood pressure damages the internal organs (termed end-organ damage), leading to premature failure and early death (e.g., from a heart attack or kidney failure).

Because of this, high blood pressure is viewed as one of the greatest preventable causes of cardiovascular disease and thus a chief focus of all medical visits is ensuring a patient achieves a sufficiently lowered blood pressure.

Unfortunately—that chain of logic has quite a few gaps in it.

Variable Blood Pressure

Blood pressure (BP) is immensely variable. For example, pressures at the periphery (where BP is typically measured), which when studied is found to vary by around 14 points. This thus frequently leads to individuals being erroneously diagnosed with hypertension and put on blood pressure lowering medications despite having normal blood pressures (leading to those medications making them hypotensive).

This phenomenon in fact is so common (constituting 15-30% of hypertension diagnoses) that it is often referred to as “White Coat Hypertension,” a name derived from the fact stress is one of the things that commonly elevates blood pressure, and since visiting a doctor is a stressful experience, many patients hence have temporarily elevated blood pressures there. Because of this, the guidelines suggest having patients who are diagnosed with hypertension have multiple measurements to confirm it (e.g., with home blood pressure monitoring), but unfortunately, this often does not happen.

Note: one common source of error when measuring blood pressure is the wrong sized cuff being used for the patient. Another is that patients frequently have significantly different blood pressures in each arm. This helps to explain why it is commonly estimated that 25% of those diagnosed with hypertension do not have it.

Likewise, there is a surprisingly poor correlation between peripheral blood pressure and the central blood pressure inside the aorta. For example, one large study found a significant difference between the blood pressure within the aorta and the arm, and that the aorta pressure had a much stronger correlation to the likelihood of cardiovascular disease.
Note: different classes of blood pressure medications have very different effects on central versus peripheral blood pressure.

What Affects Blood Pressure?

If fluid at a set pressure tries to move through a tube, as the tube shrinks, the pressure it creates (e.g., on the walls of the tube) will increase, while if the tube enlarges, the pressure it exerts will decrease. The body in turn continually controls where blood in the body goes by changing the heart rate and fully or partially constricting the arteries, allowing it to shunt blood to where it is most needed (e.g., by dilating arteries in that area).

Blood pressure is thus a product of two factors: the amount of blood in the arteries and the constriction or relaxation of the arteries containing it.

Note: since arterial BP is greater than venous BP, it’s what’s measured externally (as veins compress long before arteries do and only arterial blood has a signature pulsatile wave created by the heartbeat).

Since each beat of the heart pushes blood into the arteries and hence increases the pressure within them, two different blood pressure values exist—the baseline pressure (known as the diastolic pressure) and the pressure when the heart contracts (known as systolic pressure). The blood pressure values you see (e.g., 140/90), represent that maximum and minimum.

Note: one reason why this stretching is important is because when the vessels contract back to their normal size once the systolic pressure fades, that recoil pushes blood further along into the circulation.

Blood pressures lowering medications hence work by loosening the arterial walls, reducing the total blood in circulation, or weakening the contraction of the heart (or through some combination of those effects).

What Causes High Blood Pressure?

Most cases of high blood pressure (90-95% of them) are what is known as “essential hypertension” or “primary hypertension” which is a fancy (and rarely questioned) way of saying “elevated blood pressure without a known cause.” More importantly, the fact there is no known cause for most cases of elevated blood pressure has been a widespread belief in medicine for decades. Typically, the only cause we hear about is “eating salt,” despite the fact that the most detailed review of this subject found that drastic salt reduction typically results in less than a 1% reduction in blood pressure.

For the remaining 5-10% (known as secondary hypertension), recognized causes include reduced blood flow to the kidneys (which sets off a signal to raise the blood pressure because the kidney believes there isn’t enough blood perfusion), sleep apnea, or having a rare tumor which dumps large amounts of adrenaline into the blood (which constricts blood vessels and increases the heart rate).

Note: a kidney (especially the left) being in the wrong position (which is quite common) can functionally compress the renal artery. However, until an actual stenosis (narrowing) of the artery, this can be quite difficult to identify with conventional measurements. Additionally, as I showed in a recent article on the importance of sleep, poor sleep is immensely damaging to cardiovascular health and those effects extended to blood pressure (e.g., one study found a single night of partial sleep deprivation raised SBP [systolic blood pressure] by 6, another found SBP raised by 6 and DBP by 3 while a third study found it raised SBP 4.5 and DBP by 2.6 alongside using fMRI imaging to show it also impaired the brain’s control of blood vessel function).

Since the cause of hypertension isn’t known, medicine thus focuses on specific risk factors that are known to be associated with it such as being over 65, having diabetes, eating too much salt, insomnia, obesity, not exercising, stress, being an alcoholic or other people in your family having high blood pressure. Keep these risk factors in mind as you read the next section.

Note: of these causes, I and many of my colleagues believe one of the most under-appreciated ones is anxiety, as frequently, effectively treating anxiety (which is discussed further here) can resolve a case of high blood pressure, which would otherwise receive (often indefinite) pharmacologic treatment.

Read the Whole Article

The post Unmasking The Great Blood Pressure Scam appeared first on LewRockwell.

Three recent peer-reviewed studies, including two published this week, provide “IRREFUTABLE Grounds for Immediate Market Withdrawal of COVID-19 mRNA Injections,” according to a leading expert on the dangers of mRNA vaccines.

“Two MAJOR papers were just published in the past 48 hours, building directly on our recent landmark study,” wrote Nicolas Hulscher, an epidemiologist and administrator at the McCullough Foundation.

“Together, the international evidence has converged: mRNA injections are unsafe, ineffective, contaminated, and in violation of international law,” Hulscher said.

One study published this week, “COVID-19 Injections: Harms and Damages, a Non-Exhaustive Conclusion,” found that the injections contain engineered elements in violation of the Biological Weapons Convention. The study found that the COVID-19 jabs had damaging effects on recipients’ cardiovascular, reproductive, and immune systems:

• Cardiovascular system: strong links to myocarditis, heart attacks, strokes, and arrhythmias
• Reproductive system: high rates of pregnancy loss, stillbirths, and neonatal deaths
• Immune system: collapse marked by viral reactivation, autoimmune disease, and cancer acceleration

The second study published this week, “Regulatory and Safety Assessment of COVID-19 mRNA-LNP Genetic Vaccines in Japan: Evidence for Revocation of Approval and Market Withdrawal,” noted that 103 million people in that country were injected without any nationwide safety investigation or long-term monitoring.

Researchers concluded that the COVID-19 shots were “misclassified as ‘vaccines’  rather than gene therapy products, allowing the product to bypass stricter regulatory standards.

“Critical studies (were) never conducted,” according to the study authors, who documented legal and ethical breaches, including concealment of harms, suppression of mortality data, and approvals granted without clinical trials. 

The two new studies confirm a report earlier this year produced by Hulscher, Dr. Mary Talley Bowden, and Dr. Peter McCullough, published in the journal Science, Public Health Policy and the Law, that claimed risks from COVID-19 vaccines “far outweigh theoretical benefits.”

“COVID-19 vaccination campaigns around the globe have failed to meet fundamental standards of safety and efficacy, leading to mounting evidence of significant harm,” the researchers explained.

More than 81,000 physicians, scientists, researchers, and concerned citizens, 240 elected government officials, 17 professional public health and physician organizations have demanded withdrawal of the COVID-19 vaccines from the market.

The total number of COVID-19 vaccine deaths reported to VAERS-adjusted deaths exceeds 589,000 in the U.S. and 17 million around the globe.

“Together, these three studies converge on the same conclusion: Immediate global withdrawal of COVID-19 mRNA injections is essential to prevent further loss of life,” Hulscher declared on X.

“Now is the time to stand on the right side of history — or be remembered by future generations as complicit in one of the greatest tragedies of our time,” he added.

This article was originally published on Lifesite News.

The post New Studies Provide ‘Irrefutable’ Grounds for Immediate Withdrawal of COVID-19 mRNA Shots appeared first on LewRockwell.

A 23 year old transgender freak fired into a church killing two children and wounding many. The concern expressed by Jacob Frey, mayor of Minneapolis?  “The shooting should not be an excuse for people to direct hate at our trans community.”

The unexamined question is why did random shootings of strangers appear for the first time in 1966? There was no such thing in the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s. At Georgia Tech students had guns in their dorm rooms and fraternity houses. At UVa students had guns and whiskey in their dorm rooms. No one was shot. Today guns are prohibited on campuses, and there are constant shootings that have spread to work places, shopping malls, and churches.

Clearly, something has changed to cause behavior, which my generation never would have considered, to become increasingly common. What is the cause?

Is it the endless number of vaccinations? The antidepressants needed? My generation did not have the vaccinations and antidepressants and did not need them. Is it the distancing from God caused by endless liberal attacks on Christianity? Is it the milieu of hatred created by endless denunciations? Is it the lack of restraint and self-control that modern child raising produces?

It doesn’t help to understand what has happened to blame guns. Karl Marx would scoff at the reification of inanimate objects by liberals. As long as causes, such as gun control, use the shootings for their agenda, we will not obtain insight into what has produced a 23 year old person who can fire away at children in a church.

The replacement of moral and responsible behavior with irrational murder for no visible purpose desperately needs explanation. Has Satan taken over, thereby removing morality as a constraint on imperfect humans?

This is an interesting question. Is it a question of pills, vaccinations, broken homes, the 2nd Amendment, or any other stock explanation, or are we, weakened as we are by the decline in religious belief, faced with the triumph of evil over good?

Watching the world’s indifference to the Israeli extermination of the Palestinian people, has Satan decided that now is his time?

Has Satan made a good decision? Is there any moral strength anywhere in the world capable of resisting Evil?

Where is the effort to abolish nuclear weapons which can abolish Earth?

Is the traditional alliance of Israel with Satan taking us into The End Times?

The post Are the End Times Upon Us? appeared first on LewRockwell.

“Today, many people use psychology as a new form of mysticism: as a substitute for reason, cognition and objectivity, as an escape from the responsibility of moral judgment, both in the role of judge and judged. Psychologizing is condemning or excusing specific individuals on the grounds of their psychological problems, real or invented, in the absence of, or contrary to, factual evidence.” – Ayn Rand, The Psychology of Psychologizing, 1971.

The professional cognoscenti class can’t seem to figure out Donald Trump’s “personality”, as if every world and domestic conflict is implausibly a consequence of Trump’s psychological dynamics, bombastic speech outbursts on “X” and his frequent use of the working-class word for horse dung. Even the highly educated commentariat at libertarian Judge Andrew Napolitano’s “Judging Freedom”online forum have joined the fashionable trend of attributing their perception of Trump’s moral failings to his personality. What follows is an attempt at understanding Trump, not a defense of Trump. (Disclosure: I did not vote for Trump in 2024).

Trump’s Knowledge Class Psychologizing Critics

One of the most recent attempts to explain Trump comes from former British intelligence officer and diplomat, Alastair Crooke who asserts Trump is not a self-made man but has a magnetic “Jungian” personality. By “Jungian” (from psychologist Carl Jung) Crooke means motivated by mythical archetypes, but not in the same authoritarian mold of Hitler or bombastic Mussolini. But no one is self-made, least of all presidents. The most un-self-made US president was the mentally normal university president Woodrow Wilson who gained office by an election rigged by the Bank of London, proceeded to abolish constitutional government by the people, established the Federal Reserve and forced isolationist America into the unnecessary WW1, entirely fought to keep the Germans from aligning with Russia against Britain (see Gerry Docherty, Hidden History: The Secret Origins of the First World War, 2014 and John Maxwell Hamilton, Manipulating the Masses: Woodrow Wilson and the Birth of American Propaganda, 2024).

Brazilian journalist Pepe Escobar, apparently echoing his BRIC’s sentiments, says Trump is an ‘incendiary’ self-absorbed all-powerful god-like Roman emperor who is a moral failure (BRICS, Brazil, Russia, India, China new world order).

Eminent former US Army officer and conservative Douglas MacGregor asserts Trump is impulsive and is not the person we voted for and is controlled by the oligarchs he surrounded himself with as well as London and New York banks. MacGregor asserts that what Trump promised during the 2024 election is all myth. Moreover, MacGregor says Trump is deluded to think that he must sell 1,000 US cruise missiles to Ukraine to attack civilian targets in cities in Russia to bring an end to the war (i.e., war crimes). But Trump can only go so far in gainsaying powerful senator Lindsey Graham, Congress and the Military Industrial Complex.  MacGregor says Trump is coerced by Britain’s delusions of grandeur that they can exert the same power they had as a Neo-Colonial Empire pre-1945.  But Trump rudely left Europe’s top leaders standing in a hallway for 45 minutes outside his office before he held court over the future of NATO with them. Was it theater?

Nuclear weapons inspector Scott Ritter says Trump is a pretend tough-guy bluffer and a narcissistic Neocon war hawk who continues to indirectly fund the Ukraine War despite his campaign promises to end it.  Ritter sees Trump as Netanyahu’s lackey, but Netanyahu secretly takes orders from the Bank of London. Israel is not a self-made sovereign nation but was formed by London banks to control and plunder oil-producing states in the Middle East. Ritter says Trump doesn’t understand Russia, but does Ritter understand Israel is synthetic and weaponized?  Israel is like the scapegoat child in a dysfunctional family who must do the “acting out” (behave badly) for European family elites and banks. Ritter is aware, but doesn’t mention, that should Trump refuse to countenance Britain he may end up like the other US presidents removed by British banks: Lincoln, Garfield, McKinley and JFK (witness the US Civil War, see Xavient Haze, The Suppressed History of American Banking: How Big Banks Fought Jackson, Killed Lincoln and Caused the Civil War, 2016).

Obama Pentagon advisor Col. Larry Wilkerson says Israel is “our tool but we make it look like we are their tool”.  He says this deceptive role reversal is insanity. According to Wilkerson, Trump is poorly informed and has no independent advisors outside the Deep State (like himself) and follows junk advice. But Wilkerson acknowledges Trump’s instincts are to force Britain to fight its own wars. Wilkerson says Britain is living out its imperial dreams through the US as if it were still an empire.

Ayn Rand’s Psychology of Psychologizing and Trump’s Role Conflicts

One might think Trump must have a split or multiple personality disorder to garner all these critical psychological caricatures. To get a more accurate Polaroid-like real time picture of Trump we must abandon the American-Freudian tendency to describe politicians using psychoanalytic cliches.  This is why libertarian Ayn Rand opposed evaluating politicians by psychologizing and mythologizing, preferring  ‘objectivism’ instead in her novels The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged.

A conflicting social role framework is better than pop psychology from which to understand Trump in the circumstances he finds himself in circa 2025. The Big Picture circumstances involve the weaning of America off its alliances with the former European Colonial World Order (Britain, Netherlands, France, Germany) who are faced with bankruptcy and have instigated wars to capture the spoils of Russia, Ukraine and Gaza to rescue themselves.

One need not embrace the notions that Trump “trumps” his opponents with superior 4-D Chess skills, is a religious messiah, or has an ingrained pathological personality.  Rather, Trump’s self, like our own selves, is not solid or fixed and moves from one expected situation and audience to another, called role alternation. If one wants to clearly understand Trump, they must enumerate the situations in which there is role conflict between all the roles he must play. But this isn’t done in modern journalism. Instead, short-hand psychological cliches often prevail (see Anton Zijderveld, On Cliches: The Supersedure of Meaning by Function in Modernity (1979).

Unlike the roles most people must fulfill, the role of president is chock full of political opponents, vested interest groups, the deep state and murderous enemies that result in seemingly inconsistent and confusing role behaviors to outsiders and critics. The irreconcilable moral conflicts of the presidency does not necessarily mean that Trump lacks “character”, necessarily has a split personality, or is a psychopath (see sociologist Peter L. Berger on the inconsistency between social roles in his Invitation to Sociology: A Humanistic Perspective, 1963). It means he is all too human. But he is in the proverbial situation of having to serve two-or-more masters at any one time.

This is why even the master teacher of how one sometimes must do evil, Niccolo Machiavelli, asserted that rulers must do religious penance for their evil actions in necessary emergency situations. But rulers should also avoid gratuitous public confessions or dramatic displays of their moral guilt. Nonetheless Machiavelli held that penance does not annul ultimate moral culpability for doing evil for which one may lose their soul.  Machiavelli said that evil cannot be wished away or denied, because one can never get away with doing evil under cover of doing good (Niccolo Machiavelli, An Exhortation to Penitence, 1523 and Discourses I:6). However, I rather doubt anyone, outside devout Christians or Muslims, do private penance or confession with respect to the Gaza-Ukraine Wars. Trump may not be a psychopath with no conscience, but he has made it clear he wants to be the “winner”, which opens the door to moral dilemmas.  However, Trump’s ridiculous proposal to develop Gaza as a resort is interpreted to be a nonserious political diversion to assuage Israel. Same with his pretend bombing of Iran. Ayn Rand’s ethic of “objectivity” offers clarity in such situations but no resolution to the moral dilemma involved.

Trump’s Situation Box and Split Speech

Moreover, Trump is subtly re-aligning the US with the new economic order of BRICS by condemning Russia and China in public while otherwise ingratiating himself with Putin and Jinping. Does speaking tough to appease the military and industrial complex while speaking backstage with Russia and China reflect a “multiple personality disorder”, impulsivity, idiocy or realpolitik? I tend to believe Trump’s contradicting speech is pragmatic but often uses bombastic diversion from his real behind the scenes dealings. Trump’s speech for domestic consumption is not the same as his emissarial discussions.

The charges of Trump being a psychological sock puppet oddly comes at a time when:

• Trump successfully pulled off an ice-breaking summit with Vladimir Putin in Alaska.
• Has temporarily mobilized the National Guard to cut off any repeat of the staged race riots and arson in Blue Cities financed by 25 high tech corporations centered in San Francisco in 2020-2022.
• Has requested the DOJ to pursue RICO anti-racketeering charges against George Soros who used US AID funds to weaponize city prosecutors against the safety of the citizenry.
• Has taken moves to capture control of the Federal Reserve Bank.
• Has exercised his power to rescind $4.9 billion in foreign aid under the USAID program for “woke, weaponized and wasteful” spending authorized by Congress on the grounds it contradicts US interests.
• Trump’s HHS Director Robert Kennedy Jr. fired the new CDC director after which the CDC staff spilled into the street to protest under the rationale of a threat to public health. No AI replacement at CDC.

No, the Ukraine War is not solely about NATO incursions and threats to Russia’s safety. Rather, the war is an attempt by bankrupt Monopoly Capitalist Globalists centered in London to steal and plunder the resources and oil of East Asia and the Southern hemisphere with threats of proxy wars fought by the US and Israel, while threatening nuclear war (see Alex Krainer, The Coming Collapse of Britain, August 2024). Nor is the US-Israel proxy war with Russia in Ukraine a war against “Communism”, as the British manufactured Russian Gulags never happened (see Solzhenit-SPIN: Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag was a Deep State British Lie, Aug. 19) and the Cold War was a hoax (Richard Poe, How the British Invented Communism (and Blamed It on the Jews, 2024). And after 1991, Russia abandoned Soviet style Communism, only to have their markets plundered by Wall Street.

Facetiously, at least Trump has plenty of experience with bankruptcies and turning around money losing casinos!  I’m not a Trump promoter, but psychologizing and mythologizing indicates to me such writers don’t know whether the binds that Trump finds himself in would stand the test of morality or not; they can only psychologize or mythologize it.

Even former advisor to President Reagan, Paul Craig Roberts, in his article “Can Trump Find a Way Out of the Box He is In?” wrongly believes NATO incursions on Russia are the sole blame for the wars when it is more likely they are wars of extraction, piracy and kleptocracy between two systems of world governance: the fast-declining globalist European former colonialist British (American) empire and the emerging BRICs New World Order of cooperation, sovereignty, sound money, and the prospect of peace. Trump apparently wants to eventually transition the US to the BRIC’s bandwagon. My guess is that Rand would find that objectively more virtuous than psychologizing about Trump’s personality.

Is Trump His Own Court Jester?

Ancient Greece and Rome institutionalized the role of the court jesters, satirists and poets such as Juvenal, Horace, Homer and Aesop who had the freedom to talk and mock princes candidly, albeit comically, without punishment. In medieval Britain, there were street jesters such as Punch and Judy that used puppetry and comedy to exercise their license to free speech. The Roman emperor Commodus was his own jester, which may explain the so-called insanity of other Roman rulers such as Caligula and Nero who attempted to transcend the invisible chains that bind rulers from telling the truth. But the French Revolution ended the institutionalized role of the court jester. And Jeffrey Epstein was no court jester!

In his book The History of Court Fools by Dr. John Doran (1858), stories are told of princes who have had to play the role of fool or their own jester.  One such ruler was Nassir of the Netherlands who took delight in puppet shows. At one such puppet show, the king encroached close to the stage and using a pair of scissors cut the strings to the puppets, adding some comedy to the presentation.  Perhaps Trump’s sometimes “unpredictable” actions, bullyism, and crude speech should be understood in the same context of cutting the puppet strings with its “Perfidious Albion” of parasitical and war mongering Great Britain and Western Europe rather than some nebulous clichés of psychological moral failures.

Psychologizing Trump is Useless: Or is Trump His Own Court Jester? Judge Andrew Napolitano, Alastair Crooke, Scott Ritter, Pepe Escobar, Col. Douglas MacGregor, Col. Larry Wilkerson, Ayn Rand The Psychology of Psychologizing, Paul Craig Roberts, Wayne Lusvardi

The post Psychologizing Trump Is Useless: Or Is Trump His Own Court Jester? appeared first on LewRockwell.

Thanks, Tim McGraw.

BuzzFeed

The post 22 Things that are Fading from Society appeared first on LewRockwell.

Click Here:

Eric Zuesse

The post How U.S. Governments Are Imprisoning Opponents of Israel’s Gaza Genocide appeared first on LewRockwell.

Thanks, Tim McGraw.

See here.

The post Just Plain Floats appeared first on LewRockwell.

Thanks, Saleh Abdullah.

MintPress News

The post Epstein, Mossad, and the CIA: Inside the Maxwell Family’s Secret Web appeared first on LewRockwell.

Writes Patrick Foy:

Here’s an especially important and informative update by Professor Mearsheimer on the two outstanding Washington-generated and enabled conflicts, the war over Palestine and the war in Ukraine. Many facts and insights. Both wars I regard as evidence of U.S. foreign policy failure. American neocons and neoliberals, on the other hand, regard them as successes because they demonstrate Washington’s world leadership. As usual, I ask, to what end? The so-called leadership is clearly misguided.

The clips [starting at 17:20 on the video] of Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich addressing his domestic audience about the true nature of Israel’s actions in Gaza support what Mearsheimer and a handful of others have been saying all along. Mearsheimer notes that Smotrich’s, “honest description…stands in marked contrast to what Prime Minister Netanyahu and Israel’s supporters in the United States are saying about Israeli policy. Smotrich’s remarks are both sickening and illuminating.”

True to form, when it comes to Israel and Ukraine, America is being used by the Washington foreign policy elite to further hidden agendas.

The post Stomachs Explains the Genocide… appeared first on LewRockwell.

Vicki Marzullo wrote:

I always said Trump sucks on foreign affairs.

See here

The post We’re going to war appeared first on LewRockwell.

Chris Sullivan wrote:

Hamas might be a really bad outfit, but what does anybody actually know about it?

If I’m not mistaken, Israel and the US helped it get going and it carried the election when the US was so concerned about “democracy.”

I know that the major “news” organizations never report anything accurately or truthfully, so I have no way to decide what Hamas is. The October 7th account has been shown to be largely false and that’s probably the case with everything we’re told.

The post Unthinkable act by MTG, Tucker Carlson against AIPAC, Netanyahu regime appeared first on LewRockwell.

Writes Christopher Mosley:

May Hayek’s works peck out the eyes of Chinkcock Musk’s LarkinLink. The gays are cool but feudalists are foo foos.

I’m working on a reworking of the Gadsden Flag. I despise Thomas Hobbes more than Ayn Rand despised Kant. I’m thinking maybe a sword with Mason’s compass as the hilt wielded by eagle claws beheading the figure on the cover of Leviathan.

Btw, I’m willing to donate funds to the Mises Institute for purchasing copies of Society Against The State by Pierre Clastres. May campuses far and wide wield the spirit of freedom with strength against Leviathan!

I fear no lesser beast!

The post Hayek appeared first on LewRockwell.

Writes Christopher Mosley:

He’s trying to hijack the Time Machine that is Universe. 

Now you understand his motives. I offer an alternative model that better aligns with anarchocapitalism, free will and true will.

Every event is infinite but not every event is meaningful to every God. Some have compromised with the pessimistic assumption only one universe or timeline exists, i.e, to build a Time Machine one must accept an entire timeline. I say physics allows for being multiple places simultaneously. Skip the songs you choose not to hear. Wills will coexist. 

Robert Anton Wilson’s Irish Bronx accent emphasizing the word THOU might be the greatest Thelemic commentary ever given.

You ready to save the world? Let the adventures begin!

The post Lil Baby Stewart Elon Larkin Ain’t Building a War Machine appeared first on LewRockwell.

Christopher Mosley wrote:

Here’s another thought experiment.

The Federal Hemp Farm Act specifies that no U.S. state, U.S. territory, nor Indian reservation may interfere with the interstate commerce of federally compliant hemp products. Suppose Trump’s golf course sells Alabamians federally compliant hemp products either in Florida or via postal services and Itchy Cooch Ivy is advised by a lower court that HB445 does not interfere with The Commerce Clause. Would this not be a flagrant violation of The Commerce Clause, the constitutional rights of U.S. citizens, and the lasez faire of Mar A Lago?

Tell her to piss on Goat Hill’s burning of Bob Marley vinyls please.

Thank you.

The post The Commerce Clause appeared first on LewRockwell.

Click Here:

John Leake

The post Vaccine-Autism Link Ascertainable By Case Studies appeared first on LewRockwell.

Whenever I get the infrequent opportunity to walk the wild deserted Cape Cod outer Atlantic beach in the early morning, I exult in the sea’s silent roar. It extinguishes the cacophonous dreck that fills the air of everyday life in a society whose depravity accelerates faster than shore birds can fly.

This morning, because there was a little rain and rough surf the beach was deserted except for the usual assortment of birds. So we sauntered the long strand for an hour until we finally encountered a person as the sun flashed from behind the clouds. Inside the cocoon of the crashing waves and the whistling of the wind, with the clouds blowing fast, the seals just voiceless heads bobbing in the shallow water, and the birds hushed by the waves’ wild roar, a strange silence settled over me. I felt cloistered in a place of peace, similar to William Butler Yeats’ sentiment in his poem, The Lake Isle of Innisfree: “And I shall have some peace there, for peace comes dropping slow,/ Dropping from the veils of the morning . . . .”

Silence. Without it, we are bereft of meaningful words and end up talking repetitive gibberish, small talk. There are many people who can’t shut up; their jabbering is a disease. Tranquilized with trivia, they lose their ability to communicate.

Silence is a word gravid with multiple meanings: for many a threat; for others a nostalgic evocation of a time rendered obsolete by technology; for others still a sentence to boredom; and for some, devotees of the ancient arts of reading, writing, and contemplation, a word of profound, even sacred importance. As the ancient Greeks knew so well, musing is the music of the artist’s heart.

Writing is at first, like an imaginary friend, a silent companion. Conceived by its author in silence, it asks to be received in the same spirit. And silence – contrary to the popular notion that it, like nothing, is nothing, a void, a lack of something – is the receptive spirit that encompasses all the meanings words can give. That silence is golden is an aphorism we have all heard but rarely heed. Nevertheless, it is out of that great unknown that words are born; great writing is the child of silence.

So too reading should be a venture into that unknown, an adventure upon which one embarks with eyes and ears wide open and the constant chatter of one’s private “thoughts” silenced.

But silence, like so much else in today’s world, including human beings, is on the endangered-species list . Another rare bird of flamboyant plumage and very like a black swan – “Rara avis in terris nigroque similima cyno” in Juvenal’s words – is slowly disappearing from our midst. The poison of noise is killing it.

And out of this lack of silence comes the silence of lack, the inability to use words to communicate meaningfully. As sung so wonderfully by Simon and Garfunkel in The Sounds of Silence:

And in the naked light, I saw
Ten thousand people, maybe more
People talking without speaking
People hearing without listening
People writing songs that voices never shared
No one dared
Disturb the sound of silence

Ironically, as books have become more plentiful, silence has become scarcer. Most books now arrive with the clatter and bombast of the same advertising hype used to sell laxatives and pain-killing drugs. And they are received in the same spirit, often producing similar results. These loud arrivals often make the so-called best seller lists (as if number seven on that list could be the “best” seller along with number one), a curious place where quality is measured by quantity and the noise of publicity pays off handsomely. Many of these books are what D. H. Lawrence called “printed toys,” loud little devices that spin and spin and always seem to end up where they started – nowhere.

When I speak of noise I am not primarily speaking of the din we associate with city life: cars, trucks, sirens, etc. Such noise, alas, is heard even in small towns where birdsong often disappears behind the grinding of gears. That kind of noise is hard to completely avoid and it is in any case the least disruptive of the silence I have in mind. There is another kind of noise that is self-imposed, and whose purpose, consciously or not, is to make sure one is not “caught” by silence. That, as those who flee from silence know, can be dangerous to one’s reigning assumptions about self and the world. They prefer the comfort of noise because it silences the imagination, and imagination, as William Blake has told us, is the world of eternity, and to the eyes of the person of imagination, nature is imagination itself. It is only through the eyes of imagination that one can slip away and hope to break loose from the mind-forg’d manacles of convention and propaganda that society places on us all from birth.

Just this morning, very early, I read an essay that brought this home to me once again. In “Psychic Treason,” Curtis White begins by telling us that he is living in a world that no longer exists, a sentiment that should ring true for most people in this chaos of everything world. He tells us how his world changed:

I once lived in a vital world whose only limit was no-limit, ‘free frame of reference,’ as the Haight Street Diggers thought. It was a world of beatniks, Buddhists, hippies, free-jazz poets, pacifists, wandering guitar soloists, postmodern fabulists, soulful anarchists, and collaborative maunderers. It was also a world of close readers, deconstructors, and afficionados of the beautiful, all performing in the heady atmosphere of refusal, a general strike of the Imagination.

This world and its open assumptions about possibility slowly dissipated over a thirty-year period. As the late Sly Stone put it, ‘The possibility of possibility was leaking out.’ It seemed quite dead by the millennium, our collective mind aspirated into glass pipettes by techno-oligarchs and assorted others who bore us no love. We were left with Data World, the Great American Smartphone Society. We have been priced out of cities, so there are no avenues to barricade, no ‘scenes’ where artists and musicians can hang out, and our universities are in ruin, occupied by ‘ indentured students,’ in Elizabeth Tandy Shermer’s telling phrase, studying only what the boss wants. And what the boss wants has nothing to do with poets. Even at Canterbury’s Christ Church University, the destination for Chaucer’s pilgrims in The Canterbury Tales, poetry is ‘no longer viable in the current climate.’

White’s world is not the world everyone once inhabited, as others can attest. Everyone’s world of yesterday is somewhat different, but each contains nostalgic images that not just draw us back but forward – an imaginative nostalgia for a future that sustains the heart, even when the past one remembers never existed in pure form. White writes:

Happily, it will always be possible to create stories that liberate us from the stories of our masters. This is what William Blake called for when he wrote in Jerusalem (1815), ‘I must create a system or be enslaved by another man’s; I will not reason and compare: my business is to create.’

. . . . Blake’s quote is “heavy,” as hippies used to say, because it asks, as Tolstoy put it, “What is to be done?” The answer to that question might simply be “tell better stories.” Live through better stories. Live through stories that will be understood in an as yet unimagined world, just past the next bend in the river, where the Imagination lives in all its inherited riches. So, let us be Nietzschean, all too Nietzschean, without fear or giddiness, and seek liberation for ourselves and others.

We all know people who go from morning till night, day in and day out without ever pausing to enter the sounds of silence. One doesn’t have to look for them; technology has made them the rule. They move like techno-ghosts up and down the lanes and byways, seashells stuck in their ears (“And in her ears the little Seashells, the thimble radios tamped tight, and an electronic ocean of sound, of music and talk and music and talk coming in, coming in on the shore of her unsleeping mind,” Ray Bradbury writes in Fahrenheit 451, published in 1953) or rectangular vibrators sticking out of their back pockets, proud symbols of the manacles that hold them captive to their minds’ bedlam. They drift through their lives in the cocoon of technological noise  They are informed, with it, tuned in – to everything but the life of their own souls. The real world passes them by. Always ready to photograph something that they do not see, they ignore that rare bird of flamboyant plumage that sits on their heads, singing plaintively. They may even read books, those candy-colored non-book books filled with millions of meaningless words, distracting little noises that allow them to avoid the silence that might force then to confront self-knowledge that is the stuff of great books, true art.

For the art of writing implies the art of reading. The writer creates and the reader recreates; both demand silence, the cessation of all noise that serves to prevent true thought. The machines must be turned off. “Our inventions,” Thoreau noted, “are wont to be pretty toys, which distract our attention from serious things.”

It is not hard to turn a switch or pull a plug; the hard part is wanting to. Harder still, but equally necessary, is the quieting of the mind, the silencing of the incessant internal chatterboxes that accompany us everywhere and prevent us from experiencing the world.

For in the end one cannot hear or see the world or the penetrating truths of great writing unless, like the artists who create in silence, we turn off the noise of the social world and enter the silence. Only then, will one’s imaginary silent companion begin to sing.

In her bittersweet memoir A Freewheelin’ Time, Suze Rotolo, Bob Dylan’s girlfriend in Greenwich Village in the early 1960s, echoes Curtis White’s point about how the past is as much about the imagination and the future as the past. Her book is equally about the plight of young women in those days and the vibrancy of the Village’s creative community as about her relationship with Dylan. Writing in the early 2000s before her untimely death, she notes:

Greenwich Village bohemia exists no more. It was the public square of the twentieth century for the outsiders, the mad ones, and the misfits. Today all that remains are the posters, fliers, and signs preserved on the walls as a reminder of that bygone era when rents were cheap and New York replaced Paris as the destination for the creative crowd.

Those who feel they are not part of the mainstream are always somewhere, however. Greenwich Village is a calling. Though it is now priced out of its physical space, as a state of mind, it will never be out of bounds. . . . The creative spirit finds a way.

That way is found whenever and wherever one enters the cocoon of silence to hear the rare bird of flamboyant plumage sing. It is then we can live through better stories as we tell them.

Reprinted with the author’s permission.

The post The Silent Singing Bird of Flamboyant Plumage appeared first on LewRockwell.

Comments open on Brighteon

The post Ron Paul Talks With Mike Adams About Trump Tariffs, Currency Printing, Flag Burning and Wars appeared first on LewRockwell.

The U.S. federal debt has now passed $37 trillion and is growing at the rate of $1 trillion every five months. Interest on the debt exceeds $1 trillion annually, second only to Social Security in the federal budget. The military outlay is also close to $1 trillion, consuming nearly half of the discretionary budget.

As a sovereign nation, the United States could avoid debt altogether by simply paying for the budget deficit with Treasury-issued “Greenbacks,” as Abraham Lincoln’s government did. But I have written on that before (see here and here), so this article will focus on that other elephant in the room, the Department of Defense.

Under the Constitution, the military budget should not be paid at all, because the Pentagon has never passed an audit. Expenditures of public funds without a public accounting violate Article 1, Section 9, Clause 7of the Constitution, which provides:

No Money shall be drawn from the Treasury, but in Consequence of Appropriations made by Law; and a regular Statement and Account of the Receipts and Expenditures of all public Money shall be published from time to time.

The Pentagon failed its seventh financial audit in 2024, with 63% of its $4.1 trillion in assets—approximately $2.58 trillion—untracked. From 1998 to 2015, it failed to account for $21 trillion in spending.

As concerning today as the financial burden is the wielding of secret power. Pres. Dwight Eisenhower warned in his 1961 farewell address, “In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.”

Pres. John F. Kennedy echoed that concern, warning in 1961 that “secret societies” and excessive secrecy are “repugnant in a free and open society,” threatening democracy by withholding truth from the public. He warned that excessive concealment, even for national security, undermines democracy by denying citizens the facts needed to hold power accountable. “No expenditure is questioned, no rumor is printed, no secret is revealed,” he said.  If untracked billions fund classified programs, citizens are left powerless, governed by a shadow entity answerable to no one.

Those concerns persist today. On Aug. 13, 2025, Joe Rogan interviewed U.S. Representative Anna Paulina Luna, who leads a House Oversight Committee focused on government transparency regarding various topics, including UAPs (Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena, formerly UFOs). Luna said the committee had been formed after she and two other congressmen were denied access at Eglin Air Force Base to information on UAPs provided by whistleblowers. The problem, she said, was that Congress was supposed to represent the public and be an investigative body for it, “and you have unelected people operating basically in secrecy. … I think this goes all the way back even to JFK, with how they basically have operated outside of the purview of Congress and basically… have gone rogue ….”

A Behemoth Without Oversight

The Department of Defense’s $885.7 billion budget for 2025, approved by the House of Representatives, dwarfs the military spending of China ($296 billion), Russia ($84 billion), and the next eight nations combined. Managing $4.1 trillion in assets—from aircraft carriers to secret drones—along with $4.3 trillion in liabilities (e.g. personnel costs and pensions), the federal government’s largest agency oversees a military empire spanning over 4,790 sites worldwide. Yet it operates with minimal oversight.

The Chief Financial Officers Act of 1990 mandated audits for all federal agencies, but the National Defense Authorization Act of 2018 delayed the Pentagon’s first department-wide audit to 2018 due to its unwieldy size, its decentralized systems, and its outdated software. The DOD has failed every audit since that time. In 2024, it could not account for its $824 billion FY 2024 budget, with 2,500 new audit issues identified. Of 24 reporting entities, only nine received clean opinions, while 15 received disclaimers due to insufficient data. In fact the Government Accountability Office (GAO) has flagged DoD financial management as high-risk for waste, fraud, and abuse ever since 1995.

As observed in a January 2019 article in Rolling Stone by Matt Taibbi, openly secret budgets were first legalized in 1949 with the passage of the Central Intelligence Agency Act, which exempted that newly created agency from public financial disclosure. The Act stated, “The sums made available to the Agency may be expended without regard to the provisions of law and regulations related to the expenditure of Government funds.”

The aim of the Chief Financial Officers Act of 1990 was to curb billions of dollars said to be lost each year through fraud, waste, abuse, and mismanagement of public budgets. Despite the mandated audits for all federal agencies, the DoD – the only major agency without a clean audit – has received $3.9 trillion in congressionally approved funding since 2018. “Every year that members of Congress vote to boost Pentagon spending with no strings attached,” observed federal budgeting expert Lindsay Kosgharian, “they choose to spend untold billions on weapons and war with no accountability.”

The Audit the Pentagon Act of 2023, backed by Sens. Bernie Sanders and Chuck Grassley, proposes docking 0.5–1% of budgets for audit failures, but the measure has not received a vote.

The Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), launched with promises to strip waste, fraud, and abuse from federal agencies, has conspicuously sidestepped the Pentagon. A June 2025 article titled “Why DOGE Was Always Doomed: The Pentagon Problem,” points out that the DOGE mission was seriously hampered by the Pentagon’s exemption from auditing:

In FY 2024, total discretionary spending was about $1.6 trillion. Of that, the Pentagon alone received $842 billion. In other words, it got more funding than all other departments combined. You read that right: one (very special) department received more than all the rest put together.

Funds that are not accounted for divert resources from critical needs like troop readiness, healthcare, and infrastructure. Overbilling by contractors enriches corporations while taxpayers foot the bill. And the lack of transparency erodes public confidence, as Americans struggle with domestic priorities.

The Missing $21 Trillion: Fraud, Waste or Something Worse?

The Pentagon’s audit failures mask not just inefficiency and waste but pervasive fraud and corruption. Between 1998 and 2015, Inspector General reports show that the DoD could not account for $21 trillion in spending—65% of federal spending during that period. For perspective, the entire U.S. GDP in 2015 was $18.2 trillion. In 2023, the agency failed to document 63% of its $3.8 trillion in assets, up from 61% the prior year. A 2015 DoD report identifying $125 billion in administrative waste was suppressed to protect budget increases.

There is plenty of verified waste to support the case for mismanagement. Military contractors, who receive over half of the Pentagon’s budget, are a major culprit. The F-35 program, managed by Lockheed Martin, was reported in 2021 to be $165 billion over budget, with $220 billion in spare parts poorly tracked. A 2023 CBS News investigation found that contractors routinely overcharged by 40–50%, with some markups reaching 4,451%. A 2016 report in the Nation highlighted $640 for a toilet seat and $7,600 for a coffee pot.

It is no longer even necessary to cover up fraud and corruption by wildly inflated prices. In 2017, former HUD official Catherine Austin Fitts collaborated with Mark Skidmore, an economics professor at Michigan State University, to document the missing $21 trillion in unsupported journal voucher adjustments at the DoD and HUD. In a June 2025 article published in Fitts’ journal The Solari Report titled “Should We Care about Secrecy in Financial Reporting?,” Dr. Skidmore discussed how the government responded to the publication of his research with Fitts. Its response was to immediately eliminate the paper trail leading to its covert financial operations. In particular, “Pentagon officials turned to the Federal Accounting Standards Advisory Board (FASAB) for advice. Several months later, FASAB posted a new document (FASAB 56), which recommended that the government be allowed to misstate and move funds to conceal expenditures if it is deemed necessary to protect national security interests.”

Fitts remarked, “The White House and Congress just opened a pipeline into the back of the US Treasury, and announced to every private army, mercenary and thug in the world that we are open for business.”

Speculation Run Rampant

In a widely-viewed interview by Tucker Carlson on April 28, 2025, Fitts expressed her belief that the missing trillions had been funneled into classified projects involving advanced technologies, including massive underground bunkers to protect elites from a “near-extinction event;” and that they were using advanced energy systems and hidden transit networks possibly linked to extraterrestrial tech. She discussed “interdimensional intelligence” and a secret space program linked to a “breakaway civilization.” The latter term was coined by UFO researcher Richard Dolan and is defined by Google as “a theoretical, hidden society that operates outside of mainstream civilization with advanced technology, often linked to UFO phenomena and secret space programs.”

In a Danny Jones interview in May 2025, Fitts alluded to Deep Underground Military Bases (“DUMBs”), perhaps used for “advanced technology or off-world operations.” Existence of these bases was confirmed two decades earlier by whistleblower Philip Schneider, a U.S. government geologist and engineer involved in their construction. In his last presentation in 1995, Schneider said there were 131 of these cities connected underground by mag-lev rail, built at a cost of $17-26 billion each. According to his biographer, Schneider was assassinated in 1996 by a U.S. intelligence agency for disclosing the government cover-up of UFOs and aliens.

Too over the top? Perhaps, but the Pentagon is so secretive that the public is left to speculate. Are we dealing with a scenario like that in such Hollywood movies as the 1997 film Men in Black, in which hidden forces—human or alien—control our fate?

The Pentagon’s All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO) contends that no verifiable evidence supports extraterrestrial activity. But other prominent figures support the UFO/UAP narrative. In 2017, the New York Times exposed the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program (AATIP), said to be a $22 million DoD initiative run by Luis Elizondo investigating UAPs from 2007–2012.

According to BBC News, Haim Eshed, former head of Israel’s space security program, claimed in a 2020 interview with the Yediot Aharonot newspaper that the U.S. government has an “agreement” with a “Galactic Federation” of extraterrestrials. He alleged aliens have been in contact with the U.S. and Israel, with secret underground bases where they collaborate on experiments. Eshed claimed the United States was on the verge of disclosing this under President Trump but withheld it to avoid “mass hysteria.” The claims were unverified but provocative.

In recent years, Congress has increased its focus on UAPs, with high-profile hearings in 2022, 2023, and 2024. In 2023, whistleblower David Grusch, a former intelligence officer, testified that the U.S. possesses “non-human origin” craft and “dead pilots,” based on classified briefings. On November 13, 2024, the House Oversight Committee’s hearing, “Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena: Exposing the Truth,” featured testimony from Luis Elizondo, retired Navy Rear Admiral Tim Gallaudet, journalist Michael Shellenberger, and former NASA official Michael Gold, who claimed the U.S. possesses UAP technologies and has harmed personnel in secret retrieval programs. Shellenberger alleged that a covert “Immaculate Constellation” program hides UAP data from Congress.

Some lawmakers, including Rep. Luna and Rep. Tim Burchett, continue to criticize Pentagon secrecy and to push for transparency. In May 2024, Burchett introduced the UAP Transparency Act, requiring the declassification of all UAP-related documents within 270 days. He stated:

This bill isn’t all about finding little green men or flying saucers, it’s about forcing the Pentagon and federal agencies to be transparent with the American people. I’m sick of hearing bureaucrats telling me these things don’t exist while we’ve spent millions of taxpayer dollars on studying them for decades.

Secrecy Undermines Democracy

With $21 trillion unaccounted for historically, $165 billion in F-35 overruns, and $125 billion in buried waste, the DoD’s financial mismanagement needs urgent reform. Congress is primarily responsible for overseeing the DoD budget, exercising its constitutional “power of the purse” under Article 1 of the U.S. Constitution. So why isn’t it enforcing this mandate?

The chief excuse given is the need for secrecy for security reasons, but a congressional committee could be given access to the Pentagon’s financial data in closed session in order to exercise public oversight and enforce accountability. Other factors are obviously at play, including political influence, lobbying, campaign contributions from the defense sector, and a lack of penalties for noncompliance.

To restore accountability, Congress needs to enforce the Audit the Pentagon Act, modernize DoD systems, and investigate contractors profiting from lax oversight. UAP transparency is also critical, whether to debunk myths or uncover truths.

As taxpayers footing the bill, we are entitled to know not only where our money is being spent but who is really in charge of our government. The Pentagon’s secrecy and lack of accountability could be shielding anything from contractor fraud to UAP programs and alien alliances. If there is information so secret that even our elected representatives don’t have access to it, who does have access? Is there a secret government above the government we know? Without fiscal transparency and accountability, we can no longer call ourselves a democracy, as JFK warned.

This article was originally published on ScheerPost.com.

The post Unaudited Power: The U.S. Military Budget Nobody Controls appeared first on LewRockwell.

“Why declare that things shall not be done which there is no power to do?” — Alexander Hamilton, Federalist No. 84, writing on his opposition to the inclusion of a Bill of Rights in the Constitution

“The Bill of Rights would never have been necessary . . . if so much power had not been granted to the central government by the constitution of 1787 in the first place.” —  Ryan McMaken

History tells us that a condition for ratifying the Constitution was a section detailing how the proposed document would protect people from government aggression.  Even New York, with a Bill of Rights existing as a statute and not part of its constitution, found their absence unsettling in a federal constitution.  Along with Virginia and Massachusetts, New York’s delegates wanted an explicit statement of rights the newly-expanded government could never trample.

Article 1, Section 8 of the Constitution wherein Congress would have the power “To lay and collect Taxes, Duties, Imposts and Excises, to pay the Debts and provide for the common Defence and general Welfare of the United States” established individual rights as contingent rather than inalienable — contingent on the decisions of government.  Those who supported the Constitution, especially Federalist writers Hamilton and Madison, essentially said that money is needed to run any government effectively and asking for it was unreliable.  Revenue was to be extorted from those who had it, made legitimate by the concurrence of state delegates and made tolerable by “the prudence and firmness of the people,” as Hamilton wrote in Federalist 31.

The government was picking a fight with those under its jurisdiction.  How would these people fight back?

Since taking property from another person without their permission is theft, the victims might start by engaging in verbal or written protests.  If government had the legal power to restrict or forbid such protests, the people could not express their “prudence or firmness” without penalty.  From this caveat and the desire on the part of nationalists to get the Constitution ratified, James Madison proposed a Bill of Rights consisting of 17, then 12, then finally 10 amendments, the first one stating, in part:

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press . . .

The Bill of Rights was ratified on December 15, 1791.

Rock covers paper

Benjamin Franklin had died the previous year in Philadelphia at age 84.  Earlier, the polymath Franklin and his common-law wife, Deborah Read, had two children, one of whom was Sally Franklin, born in 1743, who eventually married Richard Bache (“Beech”).  Bache had a son, Benjamin Franklin Bache, who “followed in the journalistic footsteps of his famous grandfather.”  As a youngster Bache traveled with his grandfather to France, where he learned French and the printing trade.

Upon returning to the United States in 1785, Bache worked as a printer in his grandfather’s shop in Philadelphia. After Franklin’s death in 1790, Bache inherited the printing house. The same year, he established the General Advertiser (later the Aurora), becoming an active participant in the partisan journalism common during the early years of the nation.

Sixty years earlier, in 1731, Franklin, editor of the Pennsylvania Gazette, wrote:  “. . . when Truth and Error have fair Play, the former is always an overmatch for the latter . . . That if all Printers were determin’d not to print anything till they were sure it would offend nobody, there would be very little printed.”

His grandson took those words to heart.  He printed articles saying George Washington wasn’t really the “father of his country.”  Benjamin Franklin was the rightful father, being the only one to have signed the Declaration of Independence (1776), the Treaty of Alliance with France (1778), the Treaty of Paris (1783), and the federal Constitution (1787).  Without France’s aid, Bache claimed, we would still be British colonies.

In continuing to hammer away at the Federalist takeover of government and the president’s near-religious stature, Bache published a long Thomas Paine philippic called “Letter to George Washington” (July 1796).  Paine had been in Paris awaiting execution under Robespierre and had expected the intervention of Ambassador Gouverneur Morris for his release, but after seven months of incarceration he decided his fate was a reflection of Washington’s indifference.

Keep in mind Paine was one of the most recognized and reviled authors in the Western world.  His popularity with commoners was so strong governments feared prosecuting him.  His words, whatever their merit, carried far and wide.:

And as to you, sir, [Paine wrote] treacherous in private friendship (for so you have been to me, and that in the day of danger) and a hypocrite in public life, the world will be puzzled to decide, whether you are an apostate or an impostor; whether you have abandoned good principles, or whether you ever had any.

Federalists took note of Paine’s letter — as if they could avoid it.  The federal government itself was in Philadelphia, with both Congress and the Executive House of the President within walking distance of Bache’s Aurora, along with two Federalist newspapers defending the administration and attacking Bache.  William Corbett, federalist editor of the Porcupine Political Censor, declared: “Your brutal attempt to blacken this character [GW’s] was all that was wanted to crown his honour and your infamy.”

In a letter to his wife Abigail, Vice President John Adams, who regarded Paine as no more than an effective propagandist and who increasingly hated Paine the longer he lived, wrote:

I think, of all Paines Productions it is the weakest and at the Sametime the most malicious.—The Man appears to me to be mad—not drunk—He has the Vanity of the Lunatick who believed himself to be Jupiter the Father of Gods & Men.

The Sedition Act of 1798

Bache applauded the victory of John Adams in the election of 1796, with Adams’s opponent Thomas Jefferson becoming Vice President.  He viewed Washington’s decision not to run for a third term coming from “a consciousness that he would not be re-elected” and “to save himself the mortification and disgrace of being superceded.”  Adams was a “professed aristocrat” only in theory, Bache wrote, while “Washington was one in practice.”

His appraisal did an abrupt one-eighty when Adams condemned the French for raiding American shipping in a special session of Congress, while ignoring British “depredations.”   The three-man commission (the XYZ Affair) Adams sent to France to work out a diplomatic solution was rejected by the corrupt Talleyrand, the French Foreign Minister.

In June 1798, ten days after publishing a letter from Talleyrand, Bache was arrested under the yet-to-be passed Sedition Act of July 14 and was released on bail on 29 June with a trial scheduled for October.  The Aurora editor had been accused of libeling the president and the Executive Government “in a manner tending to excite sedition and opposition to the laws, by sundry publication and re-publications.”   The charge of libel came from Bache’s depiction of Adams as “blind, bald, crippled, toothless, and querulous.”  Bache, though, died from yellow fever at age 29 before his trial began.

Others were prosecuted under the Sedition Act, including Democratic-Republican congressman from Vermont, Mathew Lyon, who wrote an essay in 1800 accusing Adams of “an unbounded thirst for ridiculous pomp, foolish adulation, and selfish avarice.”

Luther Baldwin, national hero

On a sunny day in July of 1798, after passage of the Sedition Act, John and Abigail Adams were returning to Massachusetts when they stopped in Newark, New Jersey for a celebration in his honor that included a 16-gun cannon salute.

Men were drinking at a tavern nearby.  One of them was the pilot of a garbage scow and a former member of the Continental army, Luther Baldwin.  Allegedly drunk, Luther uttered something to the effect that he didn’t care if they fired the cannon up Adams’s “arse.”  The tavern owner heard the remark and reported him.  “Baldwin was indicted and convicted in federal court for speaking ‘seditious words’ that defamed President Adams. He was fined $150, assessed court costs, and jailed until he paid the fine and fees.”

His arrest became a turning point in American politics.  Arresting journalists and politicians was bad enough, but throwing everyday citizens in jail for an offhand remark was intolerable.  His plight became the focus of articles published throughout the country, and the influence on public opinion helped elect Jefferson to the presidency a year and a half later.

The Sedition Act expired on March 3, 1801, the last day of Adams’s term. One of Jefferson’s first acts upon taking office on March 4 was to pardon Luther Baldwin and others imprisoned under the law.  Included with the pardons was an apology and the canceling of any imposed fines.

Conclusion

Parchments are no match for illicit government acts unless people get behind them, as they did for Luther.

The post Rock Paper Scissors, Government-Style appeared first on LewRockwell.