Lew Rockwell Institute

Donald Trump and Kamala Harris differ on many issues.  But their belief in authoritarian entitlement to control the lives of us peons?  Eh…not so much.

Trump has recently touted his belief in protective tariffs as an important component of his “economic plan for America”; predictably, many clueless “conservatives” like Sean Hannity gushed about Trump’s supposed brilliance.  This week Trump was interviewed by Bloomberg News on economic issues.  Two notable excerpts from that interview:

Excerpt 1: Tariffs [see here]:

Interviewer: “Tariffs also have another side…You could be plunging America into the biggest trade war since Smoot-Hawley.”

Trump: “But there are no tariffs.”

Interviewer: “There are tariffs already.”

Trump:  “No, there are no tariffs; all you have to do is build your plant in the United States and you don’t have any tariffs.”

(Trump’s last comment refers to his recent threat to add a 200 percent tariff to John Deere tractors if they move their production to Mexico.)

Excerpt 2: The Fed and Interest Rates [see here]:

Trump: “As a very good businessman…I think I have the right to say, ‘I think you should go up or down a little bit.  I don’t think I should be allowed to order it, but I think I have the right to put in comments as to whether or not interest rates should go up or down.”

Well then!  Here are a few questions for Trump that no doubt spring to the minds of anyone who has not recently been hit on the head with a shovel:

1. Can you please provide proof that you have the moral right and capability of “put[ting] in comments” on what the price of borrowing money should be? Do you also think you have the right to influence the prices of hammers or sour cream or toe socks?
2. For that matter, given the dreadful record of the Fed (Motto: “We’re close to FEMA in the dictionary and in efficiency!”), what makes you think that any government agency should influence the cost of anything?
3. Are you aware that the Constitution allows only Congress to impose tariffs? And only for the purpose of providing for “the common Defence and general Welfare of the United States”?  And if so, do you plan to blatantly violate that law?  Or can you at least point to the constitutional clause that says, “Tariffs may be added to a single private company if it does something the President dislikes”?  Finally, what other powers reserved for Congress do you think the President can grab whenever he wants?
4. Had you ever heard of the Smoot-Hawley Tariff before that interview? Did you know that it was a disastrous economic policy that added tariffs to more than 20,000 items and plunged America more deeply into the Great Depression?  One can visualize the conversation between then-President Herbert Hoover and a top advisor:

Advisor: This depression is terrible; the people are suffering; what should we do?

Hoover:  Let’s make thousands of goods more expensive for them.

Advisor: Great idea!

On the other hand, to his credit, Trump does give many indications of being a relatively decent guy.  He also appears to really love America, and he did some admirable things during his first term, such as standing up to some of the demented one-world-government ghouls who want to crush humanity.  (Too bad he didn’t see the obvious COVID con game for what it was, though; he still apparently doesn’t.)

But his arrogant authoritarian bent falls somewhere between troublesome and disturbing.  And of course, it’s the kind of repellent personality trait Democrat-fascists and his other enemies love to jump on, pretending to take the moral high ground, while gushing crocodile tears of anxiety that Trump will “weaponize the government” and “politicize the judicial system” (as they cheer when the DOJ does the same to him).  But why give these true enemies of goodness any ammo…unless you truly believe in your own ability/moral right to run the economy?  Speaking of this autocratic mentality, in The Wealth of Nations, Adam Smith notes this:

The statesman who should attempt to direct private people in what manner they ought to employ their capitals [what they should buy, sell, and invest in], would…assume an authority which could safely be trusted, not only to no single person, but to no council or senate whatever, and which would nowhere be so dangerous as in the hands of a man who had folly and presumption enough to fancy himself fit to exercise it.

That is, Smith notes that any bureaucrat who believes that he’s smart enough to decide for millions of individuals or business owners how they should act economically is actually borderline crazy and therefore would be the absolute last person anybody should trust to try to “run the economy.”

Does Trump really believe that he has the right to punish the John Deere company for doing something it believes is in its best interest?  Can’t he see that it’s very likely that burdensome regulations and excessive taxes played a crucial role in the company’s plans to move to Mexico?

If Trump were such a brilliant leader and businessman, why wouldn’t he instead push for getting rid of the types of regulations that infuriate and thwart business owners?  Is “Just do what I say, or I’ll [unconstitutionally, despotically] punish you” the best Trump can come up with?  What are his principles?  And if Kamala Harris unconstitutionally orders Business X to do this or that, is that wrong?  Then why isn’t it wrong to some Trump supporters if he does the same thing?

Here’s an idea, instead, for an announcement Trump could make on the day he wins the election:

My Fellow Americans:

On Day 1 as President, I will pardon every single person convicted of violating any unconstitutional laws [here direct listeners to a website list of those laws]. These laws are not powers granted to the U. S. government and are therefore illegal. I will also pardon everybody in the future who is charged with violating any of these laws.

For too long, the competitiveness of great American industries like John Deere has been hamstrung with draconian, unconstitutional alphabet-soup-agency dictates.  No more!  We Americans have a tradition of innovation, individuality, and production, and without these burdens, we will compete with any nation on earth.

Millions of other companies and individuals would also benefit from this.  And the time might be ripe: the great Alex Newman recently detailed how many state governments are pushing back against oppressive edicts that the U. S. government and its globalist minions have subjugated the people with.

In his 1849 essay The Law, Frederic Bastiat shows that it’s nearly impossible to use the law to fight socialism.  Why?  Because it’s the law itself that sets up that same system of socialism and protects it!  In the same way, it’s a real head-scratcher to hear someone like Trump say he’s going to rid the nation of the baneful effects of unconstitutional government oppression…by using unconstitutional government oppression.

The post Trump, Tariffs, and Tyranny appeared first on LewRockwell.

Something remarkable happened last Sunday night. In a dispatch from Pokrovsk, the BBC reported on the terrible conditions faced by Ukrainian soldiers as Russia advanced on this mining city, about 37 miles north-west of the regional capital, Donetsk. It reported that medics are treating increasing numbers of wounded soldiers, being brought in after dusk to avoid attacks by Russian drones.

What particularly caught my attention was the BBC’s admission that the Russians are gaining territory rapidly. “Since Russia captured the city of Avdiivka in February, the speed of its advance in the Donestk region has been swift. At the start of October, it captured the key city of Vuhledar”.

This is information which close followers of Russia’s incursion are fully aware of, but mainstream media, presumably under pressure from government defence and intelligence sources has withheld this truth from the general public until now. This was followed by an article on Monday morning in the Daily Telegraph about military recruiters launching targeted raids on restaurants, shopping centres, and a rock concert detaining men and press-ganging them into the army. Again, we know that this has been happening for some time, but it is notable that the Telegraph which faithfully reports the defence ministry’s line appeared to be going off-message.

It was only a little more than a month ago that Bill Burns, Director of the CIA shared a platform with Richard Moore, head of MI6 in an interview arranged by the Financial Times. With respect to the Kursk offensive, Moore said:

“The Ukrainians by going in and taking Kursk really brought the war home to ordinary Russians. Since he has gone into this War 2 1/2 years ago not only has he seen things like NATO get two more members, he’s now lost a part of his own territory.”

Burns followed this up by saying,

“What you see first as Richard said is the Kursk offence is a significant tactical achievement. It’s not only been a boost in Ukrainian morale, it has exposed some of the vulnerabilities of Putin’s Russia and of his military.”

 Admittedly, Burns and Moore are not military strategists. But it was surely obvious that to remove much needed troops from the Eastern front to invade sparsely populated Kursk which contained little more than farmland was a tactical blunder. The fact that there was no air cover and supply lines were stretched compounded the error. The Russians were able to cut off the invaders and have been picking them off, including any covert NATO advisors and military on the ground.

The FT’s interview was about a month after Kursk was invaded by Ukraine, and that it was a grievous tactical error is already becoming obvious: Messrs Burns and Moore would have or should have known it at the time of the interview. The fate of the Kursk offensive has since been generally unreported in western media, presumably because it is a disaster. But the Washington-based The Institute for War’s map shows the position last Sunday.

Since then, the Russians have confrmed that they have reclaimed 46% of the Kursk territory invaded, indicating that the map above is already out of date. But clearly, western intelligence is reporting these failures to their political masters, despite MI6 and CIA spin. And hopefully, they have advised their political masters to back off rather than risk escalation towards a third world war

It explains why Biden hastily retreated from earlier sanctioning the sending cruise missiles, telling Kier Starmer on his visit to Washington to do so as well. The message hasn’t yet been widely understood in EU political circles, though both Hungary and more recently Slovakia refuse to support the EU’s hard line. But with the impending US presidential election, the failure of US-led NATO policies against Russia is an acute embarrassment for the Biden administration and its potential Harris-led successor.

The threat to US global hegemony

One wonders whether the US deep state ever stops wading in where angels fear to tread. We are considering an establishment entrenched in a post-WW2 paradigm that saw off communism by remaining resolute, and still does to this day. Having failed to establish a bridgehead against Russian influence on her close allies’ southern borders in Afghanistan, it is now demonstrably failing to do so more directly on Russia’s south-western flank through Ukraine. The only achievement has been to unite Russia more closely with both China and Iran, and trigger soaring consumer price inflation and bankrupting dollar interest rates.

While US foreign policy is in tatters, her enemies have had a credible military and economic strategy all along. Militarily, the Asian powers’ weapons technology is in many respects more advanced than that of America. Economically, there is a long-term plan through the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation and rapidly expanding BRICS for a new industrial revolution for emerging economies, ultimately making the Eurasian continent completely independent from American influence. Meanwhile, America would rather keep the emerging world under its firm control, for the benefit of its banks and businesses.

On Tuesday, former UK diplomat Alastair Crooke wrote an alarming article published by Strategic Culture Foundation* citing evidence from Professor Michael Hudson of the Hudson Institute in the mid-seventies that far from Israel’s Netanyahu being independent from the US deep state, the elimination of Gaza’s Palestinians and other Arabs in the region was planned many years ago in Washington. The following is extracted from Crooke’s article:

“The strategy of using Israel as the regional battering ram to achieve U.S. (imperial) objectives was worked out essentially in the 1960s by Senator Henry “Scoop” Jackson. Jackson was nicknamed ‘the Senator from Boeing’ for his support for the military-industrial complex. And the military-industrial complex backed him to become chair of the Democratic National Committee. He was too twice an unsuccessful candidate for the Democratic nomination for the 1972 and 1976 Presidential elections.

“Well, he was backed by Herman Kahn too, who became the key strategist for U.S. hegemony in the Hudson Institute.

“Initially, Israel didn’t really play a role in the U.S. plan; Jackson (of Norwegian descent) simply hated communism, he hated the Russians, and had a lot of support within the Democratic Party. But when all of this strategy was being put together, Herman Khan’s great achievement was to convince the U.S. Empire builders that the key to achieving their control in the Middle East was to rely on Israel as its foreign legion.

“And that arms-length arrangement enabled the U.S. to play the role, Hudson says, of the ‘good cop’, whilst designating Israel to play its role as ruthless proxy. And that’s why the State Department turned over management of U.S. diplomacy to Zionists – to separate and distinguish Israeli behaviour from the claimed probity of U.S. imperialism.”

The Democrats seem to have been the party most identified with this policy. And while it is unlikely that policies originating in the 1960s are unaltered to this day, it seems that while Netanyahu may have gone rogue, American involvement in this new conflict in Palestine is far deeper than generally realised. It suggests that the current Democratic Party will back Israel not just in killing Arabs in Gaza, Lebanon, Syria, and Yemen but Iranians as well. Of course, the Iranians will know this, that they are not just fighting Israel but through Israel America as well.

Given that this is the intended outcome, we have to ask ourselves how the failure of the long-planned Ukraine conflict and the impending presidential election will affect the timing of a broadening Middle East conflict. It also explains the radio silence of the Saudis, who don’t want to be drawn in: this is interpreted as continuing Saudi support for the US/Israel, almost certainly too simplistic an analysis. Could Ukraine actually be abandoned to its fate, while US/NATO/Israel lead to a distracting new world war, and with Harris losing ground in the polls, could this judgement day be before 5 November to support her bid for the presidency against an unpredictable Trump? And could this rolling boil of events deter anything too provocative coming out of the BRICS summit agenda on 22-24 of this month? Could the summit even be postponed?

There are enough black swans floating around, seemingly calm on the surface but paddling like hell beneath the surface to make everything from markets to war extremely uncertain.

*Israel does what it does; it was always planned this way

Reprinted with permission from MacleodFinance Substack.

The post Ukraine — The Shifting Narrative appeared first on LewRockwell.

Last week, Peter appeared on Soar Financially, where he was interviewed by host Kai Hoffmann. The two dive into gold’s upward trajectory and its historical precedents, the market’s misguided optimism when it comes to the American economy, and recent events in domestic politics and international banking.

Peter starts with his perennial reminder: public sector jobs do not boost the economy, and recent jobs numbers are intended to support a false narrative.

“Government jobs are not a sign of a strong economy. In fact, they weaken an economy because we have to pay for those jobs. They’re non-productive jobs. They result in bigger deficits, higher inflation. That’s really all we have– we have inflation that masquerades as growth.”

One factor distinguishing today’s economy from the past is that no monetary policymakers intend to hike rates in the long-term:

“Gold is on pace to have its biggest gains since 1979. And it’s not a coincidence that gold is moving this much, especially when the Fed is starting to cut rates and just beginning this new easing cycle. In 1979, the Fed was still tightening. In fact, in 1980, that’s when the Fed got rates to 20%. That’s what really stopped the gold bull market. But this gold bull market is just getting started, because the Fed isn’t anywhere near hiking rates. In fact, they’re cutting rates.”

Despite decades of artificially low interest rates and their resulting inflation, the market is too optimistic. The longer this goes on, the less plausible it is that the Fed can stay close to its inflation target:

“Every year, no matter how bad inflation was the prior year, the bond market is just assuming that it’s going to be 2% for the next 30 years. At some point, the bond market is going to have to come to terms with reality that this 2% target is all fantasy land—the Fed isn’t going to even come close to achieving that.”

Likewise, the American public mistakenly believes that politics can fix the economy without a painful and drastic correction period:

“It’s hard to get elected telling the truth that things can only get better if they get worse first. But Trump is promising immediate results—positive, no pain, just gain. And so nobody is prepared for what’s actually going to happen. That’s a problem. But the question is, can you get elected promising short-term pain for long-term gain? ‘Yes, I’m going to fix the problems, but in doing that, things are going to get worse before they get better. We have to spend less. We have to save more.’”

Turning to the havoc caused by hurricanes in recent weeks, Peter explains why it’s foolish to have bureaucrats in Washington, D.C. try to manage every disaster in the country:

“It’s a huge moral hazard, and so on the local levels, we’re not prepared. But it’s much better for North Carolina to take care of its own problems, as opposed to Washington, D.C., taking care of its problems. And California takes care of its problems instead of outsourcing it to Washington, D.C. You have Washington, D.C., trying to take care of wildfires in California, hurricanes in the Carolinas—whatever happens. But there’s so much corruption at the federal level, so much graft; it’s a very inefficient way to do it.”

In Europe, the move away from the dollar continues, with Poland significantly expanding its gold reserves. Central banks are the driving force behind gold’s rise this year, and Peter expects both central banks and the public to increase gold purchases:

“Right now, it’s foreign central banks, but they’re going to step it up. They have a lot more gold to buy—they’ve barely scratched the surface. Look now, Poland just announced that they’ve got more gold than the UK. This is a race. These central banks need to replace their dollars with gold because they can read the writing on the wall—they wrote it.”

This originally appeared on SchiffGold,com.

The post 2% Inflation is Fantasy Land appeared first on LewRockwell.

Glenn Greenwald — It’s Tuesday, October 15.

Tonight: Donald Trump gave a speech last week in which he denounced the warmongering of George Bush, Dick Cheney and Barack Obama as achieving nothing other than what he said was, quote, “leaving a bunch of dead people.” Meanwhile, Kamala Harris’s campaign apparently unsatisfied with continuing to drag around Dick and Liz Cheney, released a new ad featuring the wise words of John Bolton, the person who is almost certainly the most psychotic and unhinged warmonger to reach national office in the last several decades. Perhaps only John McCain and Lindsey Graham compete with him for that title. The Harris campaign continues to be shaped and driven by reliance on the support of some of the worst sociopaths of the D.C. swamp and the military-industrial complex. When one views the ideology and policies of the Democratic Party that all makes sense and we’ll examine all of that.

Then: Both public polls and campaign internal polls continue to show the worst nightmare possible for the Democratic Party and the Harris campaign, namely the ongoing migration of both Latino voters and even Black voters, primarily Black men away from the Democratic Party and toward Donald Trump. We’ve actually seen this trend for several years now, even as the national media spends every day calling Donald Trump a white supremacist, but it has intensified over the last year with more and more nonwhite voters, signifying that they don’t want to vote for the Democratic Party. While the Harris campaign reacts with desperate pandering or hectoring accusations of misogyny from Barack Obama, liberal media outlets like The New York Times do what they always do when they see nonwhite voters or other, quote-unquote, “marginalized groups” they believe they own failing to vote and think as they’re told to do, namely, they unleash deeply racist screeds, arguing that these nonwhite voters are not coming to their own conclusions because of their own faculties, but instead are being manipulated and hypnotized by much smarter and more conniving influencers. We’ll take a look at The New York Times latest attack, basically on the intelligence of nonwhite voters who refuse to do as they’re told.

And finally: Nick Cruse of the Revolutionary Black Out Network is one of the most vocal and incisive critics of the Democratic Party and its condescending tactics to deceive various groups of voters to believe that they’re on their side. He is a friend of the show, he’s been on before because of how great his commentary is, and he has a lot to say about Kamala’s latest, desperate last-minute pandering, including her brand new agenda for the Black man and the blatantly false gestures she and her campaign and followers are now making on Israel and Gaza. He’ll talk with us tonight about all of that and more.

For now, welcome to a new episode of System Update, starting right now.

Glenn Greenwald covers the waterfront.  It is worth the time:

The post Elect Kamala and Install a Sociopath Regime appeared first on LewRockwell.

The current leader of Ukraine, its former president Vladimir Zelenski, urgently needs more troops. Recent changes in the mobilization laws did not really change the intake of new recruits. The few people caught under it and sent to the front where often medical or socially impaired or elderly people unfit for holding the front line. Many desert as soon as they can (edited machine translation):

As stated in the response of the Prosecutor General’s Office to the request of the “Public Integrity Council”, for eight months of this year, 29,984 proceedings were opened for unauthorized abandonment of a unit and 15,559 for desertion. In the first year of the war, there were 6,641 and 3,442 such cases, respectively. That is, the growth in both indicators is about five times.
…
“Since deserters will be considered in the service (however, without receiving a monetary allowance), this way the illusion of staffing combat military units will be created on paper. As for the consequences of this madness, they are obvious: in October-November, several tens of thousands more soldiers will desert from the front, and the next fortress city will be Pavlograd,” Boyko says.

The recent raids in Kiev venues and concerts also do not help. They are mostly theater designed to show that even well off Ukrainians fall under the law.

But most of the people caught during such raids do have the means to pay off the recruiters (edited machine translation):

Raids are carried out in almost all regions and, most notably, in the largest cities, such as Lviv, Odessa and Kiev.

There were practically no such mass demonstrative actions during this war. And judging by the comments of government officials, this campaign was sanctioned at the very top.
…
Kharkiv blogger Yevgeny Zub published, as stated, messages from people about how they bought off the shopping center, where they were taken after the last raids.

So, one Kharkiv resident writes that he was released from the shopping center for $5,000, subject to payment of $1,000 monthly to the military commissar. Another Kharkiv citizen was released for $2,500. “Imagine how much money will be deposited during the days of the raid? It is difficult,” Evgeny Zubov commented on this information.
…
Why did the enlistment office raids become more active? On this topic, Strana talked to sources in military enlistment offices and the Ministry of Defense.

They say that you need to distinguish between two processes.

The first is “demonstration performances” of the Shopping center at concerts, night clubs and restaurants. They, as we have already written, are mainly informational and PR in nature. And they are designed to show the army and society that “there are no untouchables.” In reality, as the sources of the “Country” say, the effect on the replenishment of the army from such events is scanty – mostly men who are “busied” in this way buy off. Moreover, military commissars, thanks to such raids, remove the “double cash register” – they “heal” both detainees and institutions. There have always been fees to ensure that recruitment offices do not disturb customers of restaurants and night clubs. But now the former “pay-offs” on command from above were ordered to be forgotten. But this does not mean that there will be no new agreements. They will. Only more expensive.

However, according to sources, these “demonstration performances”, although they attract everyone’s attention, are nevertheless auxiliary in nature. Their task is to provide PR cover for the second and main process-a sharp increase in street mobilization and raids on all crowded places: markets, shopping centers, any mass events.

The reason for such activation is the total (up to 70%) failure of plans for mobilization.

A second way to get new troops while the current ones are dying is to ask foreign powers to send their men. Zelenski’s ‘victory plan‘ includes that step. But his attempts to get it accepted have failed.

He has since come up with an idea to justify the entry of foreign troops on his side of the war.

Zelenski and his media people have for days now claimed that North Korean troops will soon fight on the side of Russia. This, he hopes, will incite western forces to send their own troops to Ukraine if only to counter the North Koreans.

The first take of this media campaign appeared on October 4:

Missile Strike Near Donetsk Eliminates 6 North Korean Officers – Intel – Kyiv Post
Six officers from North Korea were among the 20 soldiers killed in a Ukrainian missile strike on Russian-occupied territory near Donetsk, intelligence sources say.

More than 20 soldiers were killed as a result of an Oct. 3 missile strike on Russian-occupied territory near Donetsk, including six officers from North Korea, who came to confer with their Russian counterparts, Kyiv Post’s intelligence sources said. Three more North Korean servicemen were wounded.

According to reports from Russian social media, prior to the missile strike, the Russians were demonstrating to North Korean representatives the training of personnel for assault actions and defense.

After his failed ‘Victory Plan’ campaign the former president picked up the theme:

Russia plans to involve North Korea in war in Ukraine this fall, Zelensky says – Kyiv Independent

Russia plans to involve North Korea directly in the full-scale war against Ukraine this fall and winter, President Volodymyr Zelensky said on Oct. 14, citing intelligence data.

The announcement comes a day after Zelensky warned of an “increasing alliance” between Moscow and Pyongyang.

According to Ukraine’s military intelligence, Russia’s plans for the fall and winter include “the actual involvement of North Korea in the war,” Zelensky said.
…
Zelensky warned on Oct. 13 that Russia and North Korea were deepening their alliance, saying that the partnership had escalated to the point where North Korea was sending personnel to Ukraine’s front lines along with weapons.
…
The warning followed reports from South Korean Defense Minister Kim Yong-Hyun that North Korea is likely to deploy regular troops to Ukraine to aid Russia at the front.

Reports have also emerged in recent days that North Korean officers were killed in a Ukrainian missile strike in Russian-occupied territory. The Kyiv Independent has not been able to verify these reports, which have not been confirmed beyond a single intelligence source.

Since then Ukrainian media have added this or bit to the story all based on the same ‘intelligence sources’.

Russia forms “Buryat battalion” staffed by North Koreans: 18 soldiers already fled positions – Pravda.ua

The Russians assembled a “special Buryat battalion” recruited from among citizens of Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, while 18 North Korean personnel have already escaped from positions located along the border of Russia’s Bryansk and Kursk oblasts.

Source: Ukrainska Pravda sources in Ukraine’s special services

Details: According to Ukrainska Pravda, this occurred 7 kilometres from the state border with Ukraine.
…
Previously, reports circulated concerning the assembling of a “special Buryat battalion” in the Russian army.

The estimated number of personnel in the unit is up to 3,000.

The battalion is expected to be involved in combat activities around the settlements of Sudzha and Kursk.

Some 3,000 men would constitute 6 full fledged infantry battalions, not one.

To have North Koreans fighting in Russia against the Ukrainian incursion in Kursk would make little sense. That incursion is for one already mostly defeated.

Besides that the language and cultural problems would make the integration of such forces into Russian military operations nearly impossible. I am sure that the Russian military would be strongly against it.

Zelenski’s claims were amplified through various proxies and media appearances (edited machine translation):

The Russian Army wants to achieve maximum results before winter and is not preparing for frosts. This was stated by the speaker of the group “Lugansk” Anastasia Bobovnikova on the air of the telethon.
…
Also, Suspilne, citing an intelligence source , reports that Russia wants to send North Korean military personnel to the Kursk region.

It is reported that now the Russian army is forming a special battalion of up to 3,000 people, staffed by North Korean citizens, on the basis of 11 ODSHBRS.

The process of providing the battalion with small arms and ammunition is already underway.

I regard the whole claim of North Korean troops in Russia as a fake news story and I am sure that most experts will follow me in that judgment.

However, today U.S. media manage to play up the nonsense:

Why North Korea is sending soldiers to the Russian front lines – Washington Post
Sending solders to help Russia’s war effort against Ukraine could earn valuable foreign currency for Kim Jong Un’s regime and bolster their strengthening ties.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky this week confirmed reports of North Korean troops supporting Russians inside Ukraine, warning that the alliance between Moscow and Pyongyang is growing stronger and evolving beyond transferring weapons.

A Ukrainian military intelligence official, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss a sensitive security matter, told The Washington Post last week that “several thousand” North Korean infantry soldiers are undergoing training in Russia now and could be deployed to the front line in Ukraine by the end of this year.

South Korea’s defense minister Kim Yong-hyun last week called the reports of North Korean military personnel helping Russia “highly likely.” The Kremlin has dismissed the assertion as a “hoax.”

I do not believe that any politician or military in the west will believe that nonsense which is again solely sourced to Ukrainian military intelligence claims. But there is clear campaign by the Ukrainian government to make the issue stick. What is its hope? To induce South Korea to send its forces to fight North Koreans on the Ukrainian border with Russia?

Another way to get foreign forces to fight on the Ukrainian side is to make them swap their current uniforms for Ukrainian ones. A new Ukrainian law recently made that easier:

Foreign citizens and stateless persons were allowed to take officer roles within the Armed Forces of Ukraine, the State Special Transport Service of Ukraine, and the National Guard of Ukraine. The Verkhovna Rada has adopted the law on the matter drafted by the Ministry of Defence of Ukraine.

Before this, foreigners and stateless persons were limited to roles at the enlisted personnel and NCO levels.
…

The news of that change came at the same time as the UK mulles about sending military instructors to Ukraine. Swapping the instructors uniforms could make such an effort less dangerous.

Reprinted with permission from Moon of Alabama.

The post Ukraine Seeks Allied Help Against Hyped Threat of North Koreans appeared first on LewRockwell.

I went to bed on Thursday night the 29th of September shrugging off the approaching hurricane Helene. I live in the mountains of North Carolina, and I know hurricanes generally peter out by the time they get to the hills. My neighbor and I did think the night before that maybe one of us should go get some extra gas, just in case. We didn’t.

I was not the only one who wildly miscalculated the storm. To situate the story a bit, we are in Polk County, which is where the Lake Lure dam was now famously near failure. That’s up the hill from me, more into the mountains; and, as you have likely seen, up from there the devastation is still something being revealed daily. Where I am, in the lower land, the trouble was mostly with an amazing number of trees and power lines down. We got power back about a week after the storm, which seems like a marvel.

Naturally, when all normalcy breaks down, one reflects on things. The most normal thing that was gone was our connection to “the world” via the internet and cell phones, since the towers were down or very spotty; and, for some time, even smartphones could not get through to the internet. At one point, we got a text that 911 was no longer working. Saying it “went dark” is an understatement. Such things we take for granted, like the background programs running on this computer as I type. But they aren’t neutral, and they are doing something to us all the time simply because they are there all the time.

Some people shrug off the weirdos who think that the broadening world of global-techno-whatever is a benign act of progress, but I think they are wrong. And the disaster of Helene was revelatory. Paul Kingsnorth has done a good job, I think, of showing how our so-called order today is the very “spirit of a machine,” which he puts thus:

The ultimate project of modernity, I have come to believe, is to replace nature with technology, and to rebuild the world in purely human shape, the better to fulfill the most ancient human dream: to become gods. What I call the Machine is the nexus of power, wealth, ideology and technology that has emerged to make this happen.

In the Book of Revelation, the Antichrist seems to be a sort of machine, a power that isolates us away from God, man, and nature all while making us think we are served well by it—we know from Scripture that it gains considerable strength by controlling economic activity and draining man of relational contact. Last week, nature refused to be replaced and showed her power. There is great suffering happening right now and more to come, but something is unquestionably revealed when the lights go off—or, put differently, when the real lights come on.

The spirit of the machine keeps us away from one another. It was amazing how quickly people started being together when it went dark. Before you knew it, we had neighbors over and relied not on the phantoms of things via streaming but were forced to live only from real things—we were playing music (on instruments), cooking meals together (on fire), and communicating (on a porch). Real things ruled the day. The recently tumultuous sky turned to a stunning sunset. My most proximate neighbor is someone I almost never see thanks to video games, but I couldn’t keep him away once the power was off.

That the spirit of the machine keeps us apart is an unmistakable reality. Of course, it does this by solving the problem of connection with “media,” and its artificiality is its lifeblood. Our revelry on the porch wasn’t without knowledge of suffering around us (however, you readers probably knew more than we did, since we had very little cell service and no other media); and when the time came, everyone was ready to serve and help. People often note that disaster brings out a spirit of service in many people, but we’re wrong to picture this merely as practical and necessary functions executed in the light of clear need. In such times, people also enjoy their time with other people, they become better at learning to know and be known by one another. Throttles of chainsaws open up, yes, but hearts open up too.

Being able to help one another practically is a welcome change of pace. In the Gospel, Our Lord challenges us to love our neighbor. At that time, the question seemed to be, “Who’s my neighbor? Jew or Gentile?” Today when we hear “love your neighbor,” the question is “How?” Whether it’s welfare or direct deposit paychecks, our resources and services flow in and out of the wires and signals around us, and we’re left with little moments of waving or, at best, chitchatting over the fence.

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“Conflict is not unavoidable. However, it is nonsensical to consider the institution of a state as a solution to the problem of possible conflict, because it is precisely the institution of a state which first makes conflict unavoidable and permanent.”
―Hans-Hermann Hoppe

Over the last years, we have encountered an abundance of alarmist and hysterical “warnings” and admonitions, foretelling the impending doom of the world as we know it. Market corrections have served as an excuse for scaremongers to cultivate panic over a total systemic collapse. Surprising political shifts, like unexpected electoral results, have been coopted to support extreme scenarios, predicting the fall of the current world order. Especially in turbulent times like the ones we are currently living in, anything and everything can be presented as an existential threat by those who wish to exploit and to profit from the base instincts and the beastly fears of the general public.

Ask yourself: when was the last time our national and international order was not in a state of emergency? When was the last time we were not threatened by some kind of existential danger and when was the last time we were not living under the fear of some imminent and catastrophic crisis?

We seem to oscillate between military, geopolitical crises and economic and financial ones, a pattern that was only recently interrupted by a global public health “emergency” in the form of the covid pandemic. But even after that, the threats of war and economic turmoil resumed their primary roles as the crises du jour.

Indeed, if you really think about it, we have been in a constant state of emergency for as long as most of us can remember. We are consistently being told we are under siege and we are perpetually being warned of an imminent danger. We are incessantly being reminded that we are unsafe, vulnerable and inherently defenseless and that the only way to protect ourselves and those we care about is through pledging our allegiance and submitting to a higher authority. In other words, we are being urged to exchange our liberty for safety.

And this is the most dangerous trap of all. As Aldous Huxley put it, in his magnum opus “Brave New World”:

“But liberty, as we all know, cannot flourish in a country that is permanently on a war footing, or even a near-war footing. Permanent crisis justifies permanent control of everybody and everything by the agencies of the central government.”

In this state of “permacrisis”, there can be no true democracy (of course, even what is called “true democracy” these days is basically glorified socialism). A terrified citizen cannot possibly be expected to make rational decisions, and even if they manage to do so, the public will can still be easily subverted and wholly overridden through the use of “emergency” measures, like we saw during the pandemic and during the Ukraine war. Laws can be circumvented, bent, or even directly broken, and the government can assume “special powers” that contradict even the most fundamental principles of the so-called social contract.

So, knowing all this, what is a rational citizen to do? Clearly, it is not easy to simply block out the fearmongering messaging and the overwhelming intimidation campaigns. But even if one could totally evade and ignore the establishment-dictated and mainstream-media-propagated narrative of impending doom, there are still risks that are actually worth paying attention to. Many bad actors do and always will try to use any excuse to scare the public into submission and to misrepresent tall kinds of threats and dangers, but this doesn’t change the fact that there are still some risks that are much more serious and legitimate than others.

For instance, the inflation crisis that started after the spending and printing recklessness of the pandemic and that is still ongoing to this day, is something that every responsible saver and investor should earnestly worry about – as opposed to the threat that was posed by pandemic itself and the fears that central authorities so vehemently tried to spread.

The same goes for the monetary risks we have been facing for a very long time. The intentional and relentless destruction of value, the punishment of savers and the encouragement of debt that is supported by inflationary policies is certainly something we must all take very seriously and protect ourselves against.

In times of widespread fear and panic, it can be challenging for the average citizen to tell apart real dangers from manufactured distractions. This is why having confidence in one’s own critical thought and judgment is essential. And the way to acquire this confidence is through perpetually educating oneself, openly debating ideas and keeping an open mind. A good place to start this all-important work of self-enlightenment are reliable and liberty-oriented sources of accurate information and fundamental ideas and principles, like the Mises Institute, which offers solid research and analyses grounded in the Austrian School of Economics, promoting individual freedom, Reason and international peace.

For further information, please visit: www.claudiograss.ch

The post The Permacrisis Strategy: The Mortal Dangers of Our “New Normal” appeared first on LewRockwell.

Since the 2016 election, prominent Democrats such as Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden, Kamala Harris, and John Kerry have increasingly lamented what they characterize as a dangerous proliferation of “misinformation” and “disinformation” in the public forum.

The word “misinformation” is usually defined as erroneous or partly erroneous information resulting from unintentional human error.

The Online Etymology Dictionary defines “disinformation” as follows:

The dissemination of deliberately false information, esp. when supplied by a government or its agent to a foreign power or to the media, with the intention of influencing the policies or opinions of those who receive it” [OED], 1955, from Russian dezinformatsiya (1949), which is said to be from French désinformation, but the French word is not as old as the Russian one.

Defector Ion Mihai Pacepa—a former senior official in the Romanian secret police—claimed that Joseph Stalin coined the term, giving it a French-sounding name to claim it had a Western origin.

Following Trump’s victory in the 2016 presidential election, Hillary Clinton and the DNC launched what may have been the largest disinformation campaign in American history with their claim that Donald Trump had colluded with Russian President Vladimir Putin to manipulate the American electorate into voting for Trump.

Though Clinton, the DNC, the law firm Perkins Coie, and the “opposition research” firm Fusion GPS never produced any evidence of this purported collusion, they succeeded in sowing widespread fear, division, distraction, for almost four years.

Another notable disinformation campaign that we meticulously document in our book The Courage to Face COVID-19: Preventing Hospitalization and Death While Battling the Bio-Pharmaceutical Complex was the campaign to suppress early treatment modalities for COVID-19 such as hydroxychloroquine, ivermectin, corticosteroids, anticoagulants, and nasal rinses.

The suppression of early treatment—which probably resulted in the needless deaths of hundreds of thousands—was performed in order to promote the monolithic vaccine solution to the pandemic.

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International Man: In the 2020 Presidential elections, there were allegations of cheating, voter fraud, and all sorts of shenanigans.

What do you expect to happen in the 2024 election in this regard? Do you think the outcome will be disputed?

Doug Casey: Election disputes are not unique to the current era. In the 1960 election, Chicago’s Mayor Daley stuffed ballot boxes, allowing Kennedy to win over Nixon in an extremely close election.

It happened again when the baby Bush ran against Al Gore in 2000. The Hanging Chad issue was decided by Bush’s brother Jeb, who was the governor of Florida. Since his brother was critical to Bush’s victory, the election resembled the type of thing that happens in Latin America.

And you’ll recall how Hillary whined and complained about Trump stealing the election from her in 2016. It was supposed to be “her turn.” You may recall that I handicapped Trump to win in 2016, against huge odds. I even made and won a gentleman’s bet of 100 ounces of silver with my friend Marin Katusa.

Trump’s complaints about fraud in 2020 are nothing new. But, despite the widespread denials of the mainstream media, I think Trump is right. I handicapped the Dems to win then, strictly on the basis of fraud (link).

So what do I expect to happen this year? Let’s assume a less than 100% chance the election proceeds more-or-less as usual. I certainly hope we don’t have some type of emergency that delays or cancels the election but don’t plan your life around it. Anyway, I’m confident enough to have bet 100 ounces of Ag with a hedge fund manager friend.

As I said before, we’re on the cusp of a civil war. No matter which side wins, the other side will be bitterly and perhaps violently unhappy. The election will be contested by the loser in any number of ways. It’s likely to be a chaotic and ugly situation. I know that seems like an outrageous thing to say.

But the Blues and the Reds really despise each other and seem incapable of polite discourse. It’s completely unique in living memory. And the mutual antagonism is getting worse, not better.

International Man: What is your top cultural prediction for post-election America?

Doug Casey: The best analogy for the United States today might be China in the late 1960s.

The US is experiencing a cultural revolution to eliminate anything that’s traditional. The Chinese Cultural Revolution was about getting rid of the Four Olds—old customs, old culture, old habits, and old ideas. I wrote an article five years ago discussing that revolution and why Trump would lose in 2020. I urge you to read it.

The Woke Revolution going on today is similar in lots of aspects to the Chinese Cultural Revolution. Not least is the intense radicalism in the universities, and its promotion by the government and the media.

My guess is that even though some people are reacting against the Woke cultural revolution, it may be too little and too late. The problem is that they don’t have a sound alternative philosophy to rally around. They’re simply against things they don’t like, but they lack any coherent beliefs to actively promote. Worse, they accept many of the Wokesters basic moral principles. They just think they’re too outrageous, and going too far, too fast. They fail to see them as evil and outright destructive. Worse, some of them want to impose their own brand of authoritarianism.

Let me re-emphasize that I hope Trump wins not because he’s a solution. He’s not. He has no core philosophical, economic, or political beliefs. But he’s at least a cultural conservative who doesn’t want to overturn the essence of what’s left of America.

What’s going on is a psychological war, and the lack of a well-defined philosophy and moral tenets is exactly how you lose a psy-op war.

International Man: What is your top geopolitical prediction for post-election America?

Doug Casey: The US military is the one thing—about the only thing—the US government has that still works relatively well and has the respect of the population. Although it’s working less well all the time. The rank-and-file are being indoctrinated with all manner of crazy woke notions, while white males with traditional values are being actively discouraged. Flag officers are now largely self-promoting political operatives.

The US military resembles a giant hammer. It consumes around a trillion dollars of the government’s spending annually. And as everyone knows, if all you’ve got is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.

Those 11 very expensive carrier battle groups the US government has floating around foreign waters have nothing to do with “defense.” At best, they’re an attractive nuisance, looking for trouble and provoking the natives. If they’re used to actively solve some problem, there’s an excellent chance some will be sunk.

My prediction is that we’re heading for World War 3, although nobody can pinpoint the exact time or place. Gaza and the Ukraine are obvious candidates for US involvement to spin out of control. But with several hundred US military bases around the world, there’s plenty of room for some black swans the size of Pteranodons to land.

International Man: What is your top financial prediction for post-election America?

Doug Casey: Interest rates, the price of money, are the most important market. And, perversely, they’re the market that’s most manipulated by the Fed.

Interest rates are still much lower than they “should” be, considering the amount of dollars being created by our central bank, the Fed, and the commercial banking system.

Higher interest rates are inevitable after going down for approximately 40 years, from 1982 to 2022. They last peaked in the 15-20% area in the early 1980’s. They bottomed in 2022. They’ll likely go up for many years from here, regardless of what the Fed or the US Government wants. Higher real rates are necessary to discourage consumption and speculation, and encourage savings to rebuild the country’s capital.

Higher interest rates make things tougher for the economy (in the short run) and work against the stock market. I don’t know when a bear market will get seriously underway, but in terms of gold—real money—we’re already in a bear market.

My recommendation is: generally avoid bonds and stocks. And for that matter, real estate’s very dangerous too, especially as interest rates go up. You can’t buy or sell most real estate without mortgage money, and that’s going to stay expensive and get more expensive. Taxes on property will rise, reflecting the near-bankrupt condition of most state and local governments.

International Man: Given everything we’ve discussed today, what steps can people take for prudence and profit?

Doug Casey: Get liquid. Be a prepper and set aside a few months’ worth of essentials in case the going gets tough.

Build your savings not necessarily in dollars, but in gold, silver, and Bitcoin. Try to hone your skills as a speculator, because I expect that the markets will become chaotic. At some point, the markets will start going up and down like an elevator with a lunatic at the controls, which is actually a very good analogy in today’s world.

Bullish as I’ve been on gold, and most other commodities, I continue to think that resource stocks are going to catch the public’s attention. Junior producers and developers could head up 10 to 1 as a group, as they’ve done about five times in the last 50 years.

I think we’re up for the sixth bull market in these problematical little stocks, even while most markets will do poorly.

All things considered, we’re in for what the Chinese would call “interesting times.”

Reprinted with permission from International Man.

The post Top 3 Predictions for Post-Election America appeared first on LewRockwell.

The “appeasement” argument is entirely appropriate regarding Israel and genocide in Gaza and Lebanon.

It’s almost hilarious if it wasn’t so damnable. The Israeli regime is attacking United Nations peacekeepers and all the pathetic European governments can muster is a mealy-mouthed plea “that these attacks must stop immediately.”

Some 15 members of the UN’s Interim Force in Lebanon (UNIFIL) have been injured so far after the Orwellian-named Israeli Defense Forces attacked their bases. There are credible reports of IDF tanks deliberately crashing into a UNIFIL base, a watchtower being blown up by Israeli artillery, and chemical weapons fired at peacekeepers.

UNIFIL is deployed in Southern Lebanon under a United Nations Security Council resolution to uphold a peace deal brokered after the 2006 war with Israel. Israel’s invasion of Lebanon last month and the ongoing bombardment of the entire country is a gross violation of the UNSC resolution 1701.

Troops from 16 European nations participate in the UNIFIL peacekeeping operation, with France, Italy, and Spain providing the largest contingencies.

The European Union issued a statement: “The EU condemns all attacks against UN missions. It expresses particularly grave concern regarding the attacks by the Israeli Defence Forces (IDF) against the United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon (UNIFIL), which left several peacekeepers wounded. Such attacks against UN peacekeepers constitute a grave violation of international law and are totally unacceptable.”

It added: “We are also deeply concerned by Hezbollah’s continued launch of rockets into Israel that has to stop, and by IDF strikes in densely populated areas of Lebanon, causing a heavy toll on civilians and the displacement of many. We urge all parties to respect International Humanitarian Law, in all circumstances.”

Note how the European governments sneakily hedge and qualify the condemnation of the Israeli regime and insinuate that Hezbollah is also involved in “all attacks against UN missions.”

The European response to Israeli attacks on its UN troops is pathetically craven. The empty bluster about “grave concern” is nothing but a green light for Israel to continue its war crimes.

Ironically, the European NATO armchair generals like to invoke the “appeasement” argument when they talk about how important it is to stand up to Russia over Ukraine. That argument is completely baseless in the case of Russia and Ukraine. However, it is entirely appropriate regarding Israel and genocide in Gaza and Lebanon, where the Europeans are the most contemptible appeasers.

In the same week that the Israeli regime attacked UN peacekeepers in Southern Lebanon, it blew up a UN-run school for refugees in Gaza killing dozens, and it incinerated women and children sheltering in tents outside a UN-supported hospital.

The Israeli genocide in Gaza, now extended to Lebanon, has absolute contempt for the UN and international law. The UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres has even been declared persona non grata by the Israeli regime.

Israel’s psychopathic prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, has the gall to tell the UN to get its peacekeepers out of Southern Lebanon, “out of harm’s way.” With twisted logic, he claims that Hezbollah is using the UNIFIL troops as “human shields.” This is the same perverse logic that Netanyahu’s fascist regime has used to justify the murder of over 42,000 Palestinians who were described as human shields for Hamas.

As a sign of protest, Spanish prime minister Pedro Sanchez has urged the European Union to suspend a free trade agreement with Israel. Sanchez’s call will be ignored. Just like French president Emmanuel Macron’s call to halt weapons exports to Israel was ignored.

Meanwhile, this week, the European Union imposed trade sanctions on Iran over dubious allegations that it has supplied ballistic missiles and drones to Russia for the conflict in Ukraine. Iran and Russia have strenuously denied the allegation. But the EU has no hesitation in imposing the sanctions.

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

The post Pathetic Europeans Green-Light Israel To Continue War Crimes appeared first on LewRockwell.

“What happened here was the gradual habituation of the people, little by little, to being governed by surprise; to receiving decisions deliberated in secret; to believing that the situation was so complicated that the government had to act on information which the people could not understand, or so dangerous that, even if the people could understand it, it could not be released because of national security… And all the crises and reforms (real reforms, too) so occupied the people that they did not see the slow motion underneath, of the whole process of government growing remoter and remoter.”—Historian Milton Mayer, They Thought They Were Free: The Germans, 1933-45

Brace yourself: a tsunami approaches.

While we squabble over which side is winning this losing battle to lead the country, there is something being concocted in the dens of power, far beyond the public eye, and it doesn’t bode well for the future of this country.

Anytime you have an entire nation so mesmerized by the antics of the political ruling class that they are oblivious to all else, you’d better beware.

Anytime you have a government that operates in the shadows, speaks in a language of force, and rules by fiat, you’d better beware.

And anytime you have a government so far removed from its people as to ensure that they are never seen, heard or heeded by those elected to represent them, you’d better beware.

We’ve got to get our priorities straight if we are to ever have any hope of maintaining any sense of freedom in America.

As long as we allow ourselves to be distracted, diverted, occasionally outraged, always polarized and content to view each other—rather than the government—as the enemy, we’ll never manage to present a unified front against tyranny (or government corruption and ineptitude) in any form.

Mind you, by “government,” I’m not referring to the highly partisan, two-party bureaucracy of the Republicans and Democrats. Rather, I’m referring to “government” with a capital “G,” the entrenched Deep State that is unaffected by elections, unaltered by populist movements, and has set itself beyond the reach of the law.

This is the hidden face of a government that has no respect for the freedoms of its citizenry.

So, stop with all of the excuses and the hedging and the finger-pointing and the pissing contests to see which side can out-shout, out-blame and out-spew the other.

Enough already with the short- and long-term amnesia that allows political sycophants to conveniently forget the duplicity, complicity and mendacity of their own party while casting blame on everyone else.

This is how evil wins.

This is how freedom falls and tyranny rises.

This is how good, generally decent people—having allowed themselves to be distracted with manufactured crises, polarizing politics, and fighting that divides the populace into warring us vs. them camps—fail to take note of the looming danger that threatens to wipe freedom from the map and place us all in chains.

The world has been down this road before, as historian Milton Mayer recounts in his seminal book on Hitler’s rise to power, They Thought They Were Free.

We are at our most vulnerable right now.

The gravest threat facing us as a nation is not extremism but despotism, exercised by a ruling class whose only allegiance is to power and money.

We’re in a national state of denial, yet no amount of escapism can shield us from the harsh reality that the danger in our midst is posed by an entrenched government bureaucracy that has no regard for the Constitution, Congress, the courts or the citizenry.

No matter how often the team colors change, the playbook remains the same. The leopard does not change its spots.

Scrape off the surface layers and you will find that nothing has changed.

The police state is still winning. We the people are still losing.

In fact, the American police state has continued to advance at the same costly, intrusive, privacy-sapping, Constitution-defying, heartbreaking, soul-scorching, relentless pace under the current Tyrant-in-Chief as it did under those who occupied the White House before him (Trump, Obama, Bush, Clinton, etc.).

Consider for yourselves:

• Police haven’t stopped disregarding the rights of citizens.
• SWAT teams haven’t stopped crashing through doors and terrorizing families.
• The Pentagon and the Department of Homeland Security haven’t stopped militarizing and federalizing local police.
• Schools haven’t stopped treating young people like hard-core prisoners.
• For-profit private prisons haven’t stopped locking up Americans and immigrants alike at taxpayer expense.
• Censorship hasn’t stopped.
• The courts haven’t stopped marching in lockstep with the police state.
• Government bureaucrats haven’t stopped turning American citizens into criminals.
• The surveillance state hasn’t stopped spying on Americans’ communications, transactions or movements.
• The TSA hasn’t stopped groping or ogling travelers.
• Congress hasn’t stopped enacting draconian laws.
• The Department of Homeland Security hasn’t stopped being a “wasteful, growing, fear-mongering beast.”
• The military industrial complex hasn’t stopped profiting from endless wars abroad.
• The Deep State’s shadow government hasn’t stopped calling the shots behind the scenes.
• And the American people haven’t stopped acting like gullible sheep.

So you can try to persuade yourself that you are free, that you still live in a country that values freedom, and that it is not too late to make America great again, but to anyone who has been paying attention to America’s decline over the past century, it will be just another lie.

The German people chose to ignore the truth and believe the lie.

They were not oblivious to the horrors taking place around them. The warning signs were definitely there, blinking incessantly like large neon signs.

“Still,” historian Robert Gellately writes, “the vast majority voted in favor of Nazism, and in spite of what they could read in the press and hear by word of mouth about the secret police, the concentration camps, official anti-Semitism, and so on.”

The German people backed Hitler because for the majority of them, life was good.

In a nutshell, life was good because their creature comforts remained undiminished, their bank accounts remained flush, and they weren’t being discriminated against, persecuted, starved, beaten, shot, stripped, jailed and turned into slave labor.

Life is good in America, too.

Life is good in America as long as you’re able to keep sleep-walking through life, cocooning yourself in political fantasies that depict a world in which your party is always right and everyone else is wrong, and distracting yourself with bread-and-circus entertainment that bears no resemblance to reality.

Life is good in America as long as you don’t mind being made to pay through the nose for the government’s endless wars, subsidization of foreign nations, bloated workforce, secret agencies, fusion centers, private prisons, biometric databases, invasive technologies, arsenal of weapons, and every other budgetary line item that is contributing to the fast-growing wealth of the corporate elite at the expense of those who are barely making ends meet—that is, we the 99%.

Life is good in America for the privileged few, but as I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, it’s getting worse by the day for the rest of us.

So, please spare me the media hysterics and the outrage and the hypocritical double standards of those whose moral conscience appears to be largely dictated by their political loyalties.

Anyone who believes that the injustices, cruelties and vicious callousness of the U.S. government are unique to any one particular administration has not been paying attention.

This originally appeared on The Rutherford Institute.

The post Brace Yourselves: A Tsunami Approaches appeared first on LewRockwell.

Two days ago on October 14 I posted my column about a new US Department of Defense Directive, 5240.01, that radically alters the relationship between the US military and American citizens.  In the new directive issued one month prior to the election, the US military is authorized to intervene against American citizens and to use deadly force against Americans. 

I asked why such a drastic reformulation of long established policy unless the Democrats were setting up a coup in place of a lost election.

The dramatic change in policy requires more examination than my speculative question, but does not seem to be getting any attention. 

One would think that those patriots who are convinced that the military will come forward at the last resort and save our freedoms should be alarmed by Department of Defense Directive 5240.01.

Those patriots who see Trump as America’s savior should be alarmed by his response.  In a Fox Business interview on October 13, Trump was asked if he anticipated any chaos following the announcement of the election results.  Trump said not from his supporters, a surprising statement if the Democrats steal the election.  Trump thought that Kamala’s loss could result in disturbances from the woke left-wing, but “it should be very easily handled by, if necessary, by National Guard, or if really necessary, by the military.” So here we have it: Trump has bought into Directive 5240.01.

Having accepted the directive, how can Trump complain if the directive is used against him? 

It is only a few days before the presidential election and Trump seems again to be in the clutches of advisors composed of the ruling elites.  Who are Trump’s advisors?  Do they have any sense?  Why is Trump aligned with Israel’s genocide of Palestine and attacks on Iran?  Is Trump just another warmonger serving the military/security complex and  Greater Israel?

Trump directs American hostility toward China, because of the lopsided trade deficit.  But it was Wall Street that forced the offshoring of US manufacturing.  The trade deficit results when the US corporations bring their offshored production home to America to sell.  How can it be that Trump hasn’t a single advisor able to inform him of the real problem?

We have to be grateful for Trump.  He realizes that America is in dire straits, and he alone has emerged as anyone willing to do anything about it.  But Trump is a real estate developer. He does not know issues and their history.  His first term proved him to be a poor judge of people as he appointed to his government the very people he had declared to overthrow, and they overthrew him.  Judging by his positions on DOD 5240.01, China, Israel, he has learned nothing and has no better advisors.

In my opinion it is essential that Trump be elected, because it will give America four more years.  But the result is unlikely to be renewal of our country.  Simply, the can will be kicked down the road.

It is difficult to rouse the American people to the realities that they face. Americans are the most insouciant of all peoples. They exist surrounded by oceans and friendly countries devoid of military potential.  Americans have ruled the world because World War II destroyed all rivals.  Americans might be beginning an acquaintance with hardship, having lived on credit card and student loan debt, but despite the deceptions their government inflicts on them — 9/11, Muslim Terrorists and weapons of mass destruction, Covid pandemic, Russian invasion of Ukraine, Iranian nukes, Chinese threat, Trump insurrection, Putin’s resurrection of the Soviet Empire, the return of slavery by white supremacists– a large segment of the population still trusts the government that is destroying them.

So, what can be done?

How can an insouciant population deal with a ruling elite when the population doesn’t understand what is happening?  

The post How Do We Get Off the Road to Armageddon? appeared first on LewRockwell.

Or we can let the bubble implode under its own weight and have a plan ready to clean house when the dust settles.

Thanks to recency bias, we tend to think the world has always been more or less as it is today. Tectonic shifts beneath the veneer of everyday life escape us unless we make a concerted effort to peel back the veneer of normalcy.

For example, consider the rise of finance as the dominant force in our socio-economic / political status quo. Statistics give us a rough picture of the dominance:

In 2023, the finance, insurance, real estate, rental, and leasing industry contributed 20.7% to the United States’ gross domestic product (GDP). This is higher than the long-term average of 7.29%. In 1947, the finance industry made up only 10% of non-farm business profits. By 2010, the finance industry made up 50% of non-farm business profits.

The chart below of non-bank financial institutions’ assets as a percentage of GDP (Gross Domestic Product) tells the story: prior to the era of financialization, non-bank financial institutions’ assets trundled along for decades at around 40% of GDP. Recall that “non-bank financial institutions” is shorthand for the mechanisms of financialization, which is the globalized commoditization of everything into a tradable financial instrument.

Labor, capital, risk, currencies, commodities, income streams, real-world assets–everything is converted into a financial doppelganger that can be arbitraged and traded for profit. The actual use-value is no longer the “value” being “created;” the “value” is “created” by generating an entirely abstract financial shadow cast by the collateral of the real world.

This transmogrification of the global economy into a fully financialized shadow-world took off in the early 1980s when financiers were first given access to unlimited credit and the other tools of financialization. Non-bank financial institutions’ assets soon soared from 40% of GDP to 140% of GDP, and in the final blow-off phase of hyper-financialization that we’re experiencing now, these assets are 200% of GDP– five times the pre-financialization era levels that were deemed “widespread prosperity” (the Trente Glorieuses, the 30 glorious years of shared prosperity from 1945 to 1975).

The wealth generated by financialization and hyper-financialization isn’t shared; it’s concentrated in the hands of those with access to credit and and the other tools of financialization, currently epitomized by private equity.

This excerpt from a post on promarket.org illuminates the reality that financialization isn’t cost-free to the economy:

“Epstein and Montecino argue that the total cost of the financial system is comprised of rents, misallocation costs, and the costs of the 2008 crisis. Such costs can be divided into two types: transfers and inefficiencies. When combined together, Epstein and Montecino estimate that they total to $688bn a year, or 4 percent of GDP. Cumulatively, from 1990 to 2023, this number would add up to $22.7 trillion.”

Adjusted for inflation, this sum totals $30.2 trillion in today’s dollars–larger than America’s entire GDP of $27 trillion.

The larger point is that an economy that’s dependent on the distortions of financialization for its “growth” and profits is not a stable system; the gross imbalances generated by the distortions undermine its stability, and the system collapses under its own weight once the imbalances destabilize society and the real-world economy.

Read the Whole Article

The post Can We Rein in the Excesses of Financialization Without Crashing the Economy? appeared first on LewRockwell.

Berlin has spurned two key demands that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky tried to “sell” during his European tour to promote his so-called Victory Plan: getting the green light for deep strikes into Russian territory (which would require German Taurus missiles, among others) and speeding up Ukraine’s accession to NATO, German media reported.

According to Bild, Zelensky had a packed itinerary that included a whirlwind tour of the UK, France, Italy, and Germany in a bid to garner Western support for his “Victory Plan.” However, the outlet emphasised that although German Chancellor Olaf Scholz did not give a categorical “no”, he did not respond positively to the Ukrainian requests.

Moreover, Bild said the chancellor’s talk about the promised “billions in aid for Ukraine” at a press conference with Zelensky was nothing more than a farce. This package does not include any new weapons since the amount and projects mentioned were, in fact, “already approved and financed last year.”

The outlet said Kiev’s hopes of obtaining more Leopard 2 tanks had been dashed despite the Bundeswehr (German Armed Forces) still having around 300 of the main battle tanks in its inventory. The same applies to infantry fighting vehicles and armoured howitzers. The decision comes as the German Defence Ministry does not believe that Kiev will be able to carry out a new counteroffensive in the near future, the sources told the newspaper.

“By the end of the year, with the support of Belgium, Denmark and Norway, we will deliver another package to Ukraine worth €1.4 billion,” Scholz announced on October 11.

According to him, the package includes IRIS-T and Skynex air defence systems, Gepard anti-aircraft guns, self-propelled artillery systems, armoured vehicles, combat drones and radars.

Germany, Ukraine’s second-largest military donor after the US, has so far provided (or planned) military assistance worth approximately €28 billion. However, according to the draft budget, it has halved its military aid to Ukraine for 2025 compared to this year.

Although Zelensky has long insisted that there can be no peace negotiations with the Kremlin and that Russian forces must be driven back to its pre-2014 borders, officials in Kiev reportedly realise this position is unrealistic. The leadership of the current Ukrainian administration is beginning to discuss the handover of territories claimed by Ukraine as part of a peace agreement with Russia, a high-ranking Ukrainian official admitted to a German magazine.

The unnamed source also expressed concern that Washington will cut its previously generous support for Ukraine no matter who wins next month’s US presidential election. The prospects of losing foreign military aid, which has prolonged the conflict so far, coupled with growing discontent in Ukrainian society, may explain Kiev’s shift in position from refusing to negotiate with Russia and its other irreducible demands.

However, the magazine warned that powerful figures in Ukraine still remain staunchly opposed to peace talks.

Kiev’s insistence on joining NATO is a major obstacle to efforts to resolve the Ukrainian conflict through diplomacy. In addition to recognising the Donetsk and Lugansk People’s Republics and the Zaporozhye and Kherson regions, Russia insists that Ukraine must remain neutral, non-nuclear and unaligned with any military bloc. The Kiev regime, which cancelled elections scheduled for this year and remains in power without being re-elected, is losing Western support and has been considering negotiating with Russia because of this.

At the same time as the German reports, government sources in Berlin said US President Joe Biden will visit Germany this week after cancelling a planned trip last week due to Hurricane Milton.

Senior German officials who spoke on condition of anonymity confirmed media reports that Biden would most likely travel to Berlin within the week but declined to provide further details. According to German media, Biden will meet the chancellor, Olaf Scholz, and the president, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, in Berlin on Friday for talks on Ukraine and the Middle East.

The original trip was cancelled, upending plans for a summit of the Ramstein group of countries providing weapons to Ukraine. The meeting at the US airbase of the same name would have discussed possible new aid commitments to Ukraine.

With Biden only after some weeks left in power before handing over the White House to Kamala Harris or Donald Trump, Ukraine has become a less important topic for the outgoing president as he instead aims to ensure that the Democrats remain in power. Coupled with German industry devastated due to anti-Russia sanctions boomeranging, it is easy to see why Ukraine has become a lessened priority for the country’s two largest donors, a projectory that will continue until the war finally concludes.

Source: InfoBrics.

The post Germany Dismisses Ukraine’s Demands for Taurus Missiles and NATO Membership appeared first on LewRockwell.

As the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) carries out widely-criticized responses to Hurricanes Helene and Milton, officials say the agency’s Disaster Recovery Fund is incapable of handling a third major storm.

While some are circulating false accusations that disaster funds have been diverted to immigrants or poured into the proxy war in Ukraine, a review of the agency’s 2024 outlays reveals a different, ongoing drain on FEMA’s coffers: Long after the end of the declared Covid-19 emergency, FEMA is still pumping out billions of dollars to pay for pandemic expenses — including, believe it or not, up to $9,000 each for funerals.

As previously detailed at Stark Realities, governments’ response to the Covid-19 pandemic was disastrous on many fronts. While the Pandora’s box of collateral damage included widespread harm to the physical and mental health of individuals, it also dealt a blow to the nation’s fiscal well-being, as the federal government recklessly showered trillions of dollars it didn’t have on people, businesses and state and local governments — with much of that money intended to offset the effects of government’s own tyrannical and counterproductive policies.

While all but the most diehard Branch Covidians have moved on from that dark chapter, the federal government has a distinct version of “long Covid.” Though it’s not clear where all the money is going, FEMA is paying up to $9,000 each to reimburse funeral expenses for those who die from Covid.

That’s an especially odd example of government picking winners and losers. As Stanford University School of Medicine professor and prominent Covid-regime critic Jay Bhattacharya said in a social media post that drew my attention to this giveaway program and its hyper-longevity, “There are apparently more and less worthy ways to die in the US.”

Indeed: Why is the family of someone who dies from Covid more deserving of a government-paid funeral than the family of someone who dies from cancer, cardiac arrest or a car accident? It bears emphasis that this question was every bit as relevant in 2020 as it is today.

The favoring of one cause of death over another isn’t the only winners-and-losers dimension of the funeral program: There’s no reimbursement for those who’d planned ahead via pre-paid funerals. Echoing the grievances of people who saved up to pay for college only to see their neighbor’s student loans forgiven by vote-buying politicians, some families say they feel like they’re being punished for having planned for the future.

This isn’t FEMA’s first funereal foray, but it’s the largest by orders of magnitude. In the 10 years before the pandemic, FEMA received about 6,000 applications for funeral assistance for various natural disasters. As of Jan. 1, 2024, FEMA had approved more than 300,000 for Covid-19, shelling out $3.15 billion to cover an expense that, whether caused by a pandemic or something else, is universally inevitable.

Of course, the magnitude of that inevitable expense isn’t fixed, and the mere presence of a government subsidy reliably results in higher costs. Knowing they can spend up to $9,000 of other people’s money on their Covid-19 funeral, it’s safe to assume many affected families have made more expensive choices than they otherwise would — bolstering the profits of funeral homes, casket producers and other associated businesses.

Unsurprisingly, the National Funeral Directors Association (NFDA), a trade group and principal lobbyist for the industry, hailed the passage of the COVID 19 Relief Package/Consolidated Appropriations Act of 2020. The legislation not only funded Covid funeral reimbursements, NFDA enthused, but also funeral payments “for any subsequent major disaster declared by the President,” an expansion the group had been lobbying for.

To qualify for reimbursement under the funeral assistance program, the death certificate must either indicate the death was caused by Covid-19 — or that it merely may have been caused by Covid-19 or “Covid-19-like symptoms.”

As is increasingly the case with government handouts, there’s no requirement of US citizenship, for either the decedent or the person paying the funeral expenses. A family’s ability to pay for the funeral is likewise irrelevant — there are no income or wealth criteria.

There’s more to the cost of this program than the reimbursements themselves — there’s also significant overhead. Pressed to implement the program as soon as possible, FEMA opted against creating a website to receive applications for reimbursement, choosing to instead require that all claims be submitted via 20-minute phone conversations, necessitating the creation of a huge call center operation staffed by 5,000 phone agents, all of whom would require training and support.

While you might think word-of-mouth would be sufficient to encourage widespread use of a handout program, still more money was spent on advertising. In a 2022 report lamenting that many eligible people hadn’t cashed in yet, NPR’s Blake Farmer — blissfully oblivious to the federal government’s relentless march to insolvency — cheerfully said “FEMA is launching an outreach campaign to promote the program, since there’s plenty of money left.”

Fittingly, NPR found the national leader in funeral reimbursement claims at the time was Washington DC, with applications amounting to 77% of Covid-19 fatalities.

Read the Whole Article

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Leading up to America’s shameful illegal destructive and evil invasion of Iraq on 20 March 2003, all of the U.S. mainstream news-media were uncritically trumpeting the White House’s lies against Iraq and Saddam Hussain, none of these propaganda-organizations were reporting the clearly-established but unpublicized crucial truths. After the falsehood of the White House’s allegations had become no longer credible even to most of the highly deceived American public, the U.S. Government’s excuse became that it had all been due to ‘intelligence failures’ (and U.S.-and-allied ‘historians’ continue to this day to trumpet that lie), but this too was nothing more than a blatant lie. All of this is thoroughly documented HERE. (That’s my article on the Iraq-matter, which links to all of its evidences.) Ever since then, I have known for certain that I live under a dictatorship — even the claim that America is a democracy is no longer true (if it ever was) — and that this Government routinely violates the U.S. Constitution, with total impunity.

Many times since then, I have observed the same thing regarding many other matters. All of these lies have been climaxed by the barbaric U.S.-and-allied Governments’ hoaxes that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine on 24 Febrjuary 2022 was “aggression” and “unprovoked,” instead of having been an invasion that was forced upon Russia by the U.S. and its allies — forced upon Russia, which was doing only what it HAD to do in order to protect its own national security against the (up till then) ever-expanding, indeed cancerous, American empire. All of this is thoroughly documented HERE.

The latest major installment in this anti-Russian hoax is truthfully recounted and described in the following video, a 20-minute discussion that includes Alexander Mercouris, one of the greatest investigative journalists, and whose many videos I have been following for years I have never yet found to have alleged anything to be false — this being an absolutely extraordinary record:

“Woodward ‘WAR,’ Biden stared down Putin nuke threat”

14 October 2024 (also available at youtube but with interrupting ads)

I might also add here that if you might think that Mercouris is reading from a teleprompter because NO ONE can have THIS MUCH of a total-recall memory and have both maps and time-lines, and not only events, at ready-recall and logically interconnected in his head, so as to be able to tell on the very day of a historic event, what has been happening and why, this is the way he is: he doesn’t need to look at notes or at a prepared script in order to be able to do what he does. He is a great historian, and not ONLY a great investigative journalist. He is authentically a phenomenon — which none of the U.S.-and-allied media would ever want to hire (because he is too honest, too competent, and too insightful, for any of them to want to hire).

Also on October 14th, one of the major newspapers in America’s colony of the UK, the Independent, headlined as boringly as they could for a number of supposedly minor news-stories about the Ukraine war, “Ukraine-Russia latest: Kremlin accuses NATO of stoking nuclear tensions as drill with 2,000 troops launched”, including the actually ominous major news report, that Friedrich Merz, who is widely expected to be Germany’s next leader (and Germany is America’s largest colony, with 231 U.S. military bases), had criticized Germany’s current leader Olaf Scholz, for NOT transgressing Russia’s stated red line that if any NATO nation allows Ukraine to use that nation’s donated missiles so as to strike deep enough into Russia to threaten to decapitate Russia’s central command in The Kremlin, then Russia won’t wait but will promptly destroy not only Ukraine but that nation and any (such as America) who have allowed it to allow that permission to Ukraine. Merz said he would “supply [to Ukraine] the Taurus missiles. Then it is up to (Russian President Vladimir) Putin to decide how far he wants to escalate this war”, “according to N-TV” (which is viewed by only 1% of the German public). In other words: just as in America the expected winner of the White House, Kamala Harris, is not known by the American people to want to force Russia to start WW3, so too is this the case in the U.S. regime’s biggest colony.

This time it is not just Iraq etcetera that the U.S. regime wants to conquer, but Russia itself. And Russia has already made clear that they won’t allow this to happen. Russia is not “playing chicken” with America, and it is not playing cat-and-mouse with it either. Unlike the U.S. regime, it has no interest in taking over the entire world, but it DOES have not only an interest but a determination, to remain a sovereign and independent country over its own territory, even if it will have to conquer a colony that the U.S. seized (in 2014), so as to protect itself from the U.S. regime. That’s a fact which almost nobody in the U.S. empire talks about.

PS: If you like this article, please email it to all your friends or otherwise let others know about it. None of the U.S.-and-allied ‘news’-media will likely publish it (nor link to it, since doing that might also hurt them with Google or etc.). I am not asking for money, but I am asking my readers to spread my articles far and wide, because I specialize in documenting what the Deep State is constantly hiding. This is, in fact, today’s samizdat.

Reprinted with the author’s permission.

The post Only Idiots, at This Stage, Still Trust Any Mainstream American News-Media. appeared first on LewRockwell.

Israel’s permanent national security doctrine is basically “We can have peace tomorrow if we just kill a few more people today.”

But it’s always today. Tomorrow never comes.

Israel never succeeds in killing its way to peace, because that’s not actually a thing.

You can’t murder, oppress and tyrannize people into obedience. You can kill off the people who oppose you, but in doing so you just create more people who oppose you. You can scorch the earth killing off every member of Hamas and Hezbollah, but in so doing you just ensure the birth of more Hamases and Hezbollahs.

The only way to murder a population into submission is to kill everyone. To turn the entire middle east into a barren wasteland of death and destruction, so there’s nobody left living to oppose you. That’s the only way “kill today to have peace tomorrow” can work.

And in fairness it did work for other western settler-colonialist projects. In North America and Australia the white man just killed and killed and killed and killed until the opposition was exterminated and the few who remained were broken.

But the indigenous population of historic Palestine is different, in that it doesn’t stand alone. They are surrounded by ancient civilizations who have a longstanding relationship with them, and a kinship of religion and culture. Any move to exterminate the indigenous population like other western settler-colonialist projects have done draws hostilities from surrounding nations, as we are seeing today.

So in order for Israel to kill its way into peace, it needs to not just kill off the Palestinians but kill everyone in the surrounding region who would oppose its doing so. And the Israelis know this, which is why you hear some far right Zionists talking about the need for a “Greater Israel” whose territory extends far beyond Israel’s current borders.

So Israel will always exist in a continuous state of war until it either (A) ceases to exist in its present tyrannical iteration or (B) kills or breaks all its enemies throughout west Asia. That’s the only way the dust can ever settle on the killing.

And that’s why Israel cannot continue to exist in its present iteration. It was a very, very bad idea, just like all the many other very, very bad ideas throughout history, like slavery.

In order for the killing to end, the murderous settler-colonialist project known as Israel must end. This is a big task, but so was freeing the slaves. The only alternative is to plunge further and further down along this trajectory toward more and more killing, drawing in more and more powerful military forces and exponentially expanding the death toll in the process.

A massive war between Israel’s powerful western allies against Iran and its partners in the region would kill millions upon millions of people and devastate the world economy. But that’s precisely the trajectory that western support for Israel’s killing campaigns has us on.

I find this an untenable prospect. It would be much less devastating to dismantle the apartheid state of Israel and make arrangements for the west to absorb anyone who wishes to flee from a state where everyone would have equal rights. It would be difficult, it would be inconvenient, but it would be much, much easier and more ethical than helping Israel continue enacting its “kill today to have peace tomorrow” doctrine.

Nobody has ever presented an argument for why Israel should continue to exist in its present iteration that is both logically and morally defensible. It’s just a crazy, stupid thing we are doing, the same as all the other crazy, stupid things we’ve done throughout history. One day this will be seen clearly by everyone.

__________________

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The post Israel’s Motto Is ‘We Can Have Peace Tomorrow If We Just Kill A Few More People Today’ appeared first on LewRockwell.

The Parthians feared us; we, in turn, held them in dread, and from the mating of our two fears would come war.

—Memoirs of Hadrian, by Marguerite Yourcenar

Hadrian was the Emperor of Rome in the years 117-138 AD, at the Roman Empire’s zenith. During his reign he constantly contended with the practical problem of how to incorporate people with strong tribal identities into a multiethnic polity. He often found it formidably difficult.

This morning I thought of Hadrian’s troubles when I read an investor newsletter issued by a friend to his clients in which he presents his reflections on the macro social and economic risks of the coming presidential election in November.

As he pointed out, America is now divided into two political tribes. He believes we should be prepared for the possibility that, regardless of the election’s outcome, we will likely experience civil unrest. He did not predict which election outcome will likely produce the more disorderly social outcome. However, it seems to me that if the George Floyd riots of 2020 offer any guidance, we may be in for similar rioting, burning, and looting if Trump wins.

While Democrats often point to the January 6 Capitol “attack,” this riot did not feature incendiary devices, and the rioters did not destroy the building apart from smashing windows, prying open doors, and overturning furniture and file cabinets in Congressional offices. It seems to me that the lack of arson at the Capitol riot sharply distinguishes it from the George Floyd riots in which historic buildings like St. John’s Episcopal Church in Washington were set ablaze.

My friend’s newsletter featured a poignant section in which he reflected on how hard it has become for the two different factions in our society to understand each other. This resonated with me, as I often find myself unable to comprehend or communicate with old friends and even family members who have declared their intention to vote for Kamala Harris.

At moments like these, it’s important to understand that when we disagree about something, we tend to assume we are talking about the same thing. After all, we are both speaking the English language and referring to the same objects. This makes it hard to understand why we view the matter in such opposing ways.

In fact, though we are using the same words and referring to the same objects, we attribute vastly different significance to the same phenomena. A vivid illustration of this lies in the domain of humor. What some people regard as a harmless and funny joke may be viewed as outrageously offensive by others.

While Trump supporters are afraid that Harris will be the puppet of shadowy interests, Harris supporters think it’s a good thing that the chief executive will be constrained by a committee. As they see it, rule by a Harris committee is far preferable to rule by true executive power vested in Donald Trump.

Lately I’ve been wondering if, thousands of years ago, tribal conflict may have served some natural evolutionary function—something like “survival of the fittest tribe.” Rereading Homer’s Iliad a few days ago, I was struck by how much warfare during late Bronze Age Greece was apparently a matter of stealing the other tribe’s young and beautiful women. As distressing as this is for contemporary American sensibilities, I wonder if this was a matter of the stronger warriors get the most attractive females and therefore produce stronger and healthier children.

IF the above conceptualization is plausible, I wonder what it implies for tribal conflict in contemporary America, in which women play such a prominent role. I’d rather face Achilles himself than a legion of female Kamala Harris supporters. The former would give me a quick and painless death, while the latter would vex me to despair.

In an effort to learn more about mankind’s tribal nature, I just ordered The Tribal Mind and the Psychology of Collectivism, edited By Joseph P. Forgas, which appears to be a fascinating book. Dr. Forgas is a Hungarian born Australian who has spent decades researching social perceptions and judgements. I look forward to diving into this book and will post a report as soon as I can.

This originally appeared on Courageous Discourse.

The post Understanding Tribalism appeared first on LewRockwell.

The largest survey of U.S. Catholics ever conducted shows that the faithful want reverent, solemn worship and an end to distributing Holy Communion in the hand and the use of extraordinary ministers of Holy Communion.

On Tuesday, the Real Presence Coalition (RPC) released the results of its massive July 2024 survey seeking to identify causes of a lack of faith in the Eucharist among many self-professed Catholics in the United States. 

The survey, conducted with assistance from the national polling firm Public Opinion Strategies, received nearly 16,000 responses, including from 14,725 U.S. lay Catholics across every Latin diocese in the country. 780 responses were submitted by attendees of the U.S. bishops’ National Eucharistic Congress in Indianapolis.

“This is the single largest survey of Catholics ever undertaken in the United States,” said RPC spokesperson Vicki Yamasaki. “Surveys from organizations such as Pew Research and Center for Applied Research in the Apostolate (CARA) come nowhere close to the number of Catholics participating in this survey.”

Notably, the RPC survey drew heavily upon practicing Catholics, with 97 percent of respondents saying that they attend Mass at least once a week and believe in the Real Presence of Jesus Christ in the Eucharist. Most respondents, 84 percent, identified themselves as Catholics “from infancy.”

Asked what has contributed most to loss of faith in the Eucharist, respondents overwhelmingly cited reception of Holy Communion in the hand while standing, with nearly 58 percent saying it has had the “greatest” level of impact. 

They also pointed to the scandal of offering Holy Communion to public sinners who reject Catholic teaching, lack of reverence in the presence of the Eucharist, casual attitudes toward the Eucharist from clergy, failure to catechize the faithful, and moving the tabernacle away from the center of the sanctuary.

More than 71 percent of respondents ranked “homosexuality in the priesthood” as having a “major” or “greatest” level of impact on the decline of belief in the Eucharist as well.

A majority also said that the use of extraordinary ministers, replacement of sacred music with contemporary music, ending ad orientem worship, removing altar rails, failing to hold Eucharistic events like adoration and processions, the decline of beauty in church architecture and liturgy, loss of silence, and the clerical abuse crisis have had “major” or “greatest” impact.

The Real Presence Coalition, a group of prominent Catholic figures that includes Bishop Joseph Strickland, Bishop Athanasius Schneider, Father Donald Calloway, MIC, and LifeSiteNews CEO and co-founder John-Henry Westen, noted that respondents expressed concern about “a general decline in reverence during Mass, including casual dress, loud talking, and treating the Mass as a social event.” 

Respondents additionally criticized “irreverent conduct” among the clergy, “with reports of priests rushing through liturgical prayers and failing to handle the Eucharist with care,” and “weak leadership among Church leaders, undermining the Church’s moral authority and causing scandal among the faithful.”

“There is a strong perception that Church leaders, including bishops and the Pope, are inconsistent and weak in upholding Canon 915,” which requires Holy Communion to be denied to manifest grave sinners, according to a presentation by Public Opinion Strategies. 

“Many respondents expressed concern over the lack of reverence shown to the tabernacle, such as failing to genuflect or bow when passing it, casual behavior around it, and laypeople accessing it,” the presentation added. 

Survey respondents proposed numerous recommendations to the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) on renewing faith in the Eucharist, with the top recommendation being encouraging reception of the Eucharist on the tongue while kneeling (29 percent). The next was catechizing the faithful, such as on transubstantiation and worthy reception (24 percent). 

Respondents further urged bishops to promote “greater reverence for the Eucharist,” for example, by kneeling and genuflecting, to eliminate extraordinary ministers of Holy Communion, and to deny Communion to public sinners.

Read the Whole Article

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The US Government Believed That About 90% Of The World Population Would Die An Attack With Nuclear Weapons

Hiroshima. Chernobyl. Nagasaki. Fukushima. They’re practically household names at this point. As such, most people know that the consequences of the radioactive fallout spread far beyond the borders of these towns and cities. What you may not realize, however, is just how far.

In some cases, the consequences might seem trivial. Take, for example, the lack of salad greens throughout France for months following the Chernobyl disaster.

Meanwhile, the black rain following the atomic blasts at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, were clearly devastating.

In this regard, radioactive fallout can be elusive—taking a ruinous toll on some, while others are left seemingly untouched.

Either way, the most important point to remember is that fallout is the inevitable result of practically any major nuclear event. It doesn’t matter whether you’re talking about a meltdown at one of the world’s 450 active nuclear facilities, a terrorist attack with a dirty bomb, or full-scale nuclear war: fallout will be a fact of life for anyone in the surrounding area.

The silver lining? Radioactive fallout isn’t nearly as instantaneous, destructive, and unpredictable as a nuclear blast or meltdown. Indeed, it is something that you can prepare for—something you can work around and navigate your way through.

So in this post, we’re going to take a deeper look at the nature of nuclear fallout and delve a bit deep into the chances of surviving a nuclear attack.

This means we’re going to look at the science behind it, the basics of how fallout works, the situations that can arise, and the challenges you may face in the event of a nuclear disaster.

We will also pay close attention to prevailing wind patterns and geography, allowing us to gauge how much radioactive fallout you would potentially be exposed to during a nuclear attack or disaster.

Read the Whole Article

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