Aggregatore di feed

The political assassination of Charlie Kirk continues to impact America.  Charlie’s conservative nonprofit organization, Turning Point USA, has seen a surge in membership.  There are reports across the country of increased church attendance, as lapsed congregants contemplate the sacrifice Charlie made to spread a Christian message.  Conservative and Christian Americans are expressing themselves more boldly on social media platforms and college campuses.

An equally important, though darkly troubling, consequence of his murder has been the deluge of mockery and hatred from leftists celebrating Charlie’s death.  Antifa-aligned groups show up on college campuses to attack Turning Point staff and prevent students from hearing Charlie’s arguments.  Prominent Democrats continue to pretend that violent leftist rhetoric had nothing to do with his murder.  Celebrity “journalists” defend Charlie’s assassination by not-so-subtly suggesting that Charlie’s willingness to debate a range of political and moral issues with Americans of all political backgrounds constituted some kind of impermissible “hate” or linguistic “violence.”

In a recent interview with Democrat Senator John Fetterman, leftist propagandist Katie Couric tried really hard to blame Charlie for his own murder.  “Did you have any issues, now in hindsight, over some of the things that Charlie Kirk said?” Couric asked Fetterman.  When the senator responded with compassion for Charlie’s family and pointed out that “engaging in debate would never justify what’s happened,” Couric nonetheless insisted, “I think some people might say Charlie Kirk’s rhetoric was extreme. … People think his words lead to violence.”

Breaking news, Katie: During the height of the civil rights movement, people worried that Martin Luther King, Jr.’s words would lead to violence, too.  His assassination did not dispel the truth of his message.  The same is true of Charlie.

When famous “reporters” such as Couric so conspicuously work to justify a leftist-inspired political assassination, non-leftists pay attention.  As one social media account posted, “Charlie was a moderate Christian conservative.  If Katie thinks he ‘deserved’ this because of his beliefs, she thinks we ALL deserve the same thing.”  A lot of non-leftist Americans have realized over the last two months that leftists want them dead.

For the last ten years, they’ve watched Antifa domestic terrorists burn down businesses, threaten drivers, and perpetrate all kinds of violence against random American citizens.  Seeing this organized terrorism on computer screens, many non-leftists could effectively compartmentalize these incidents of violence and destruction as the actions of revolutionary Marxists and militant Democrats.

After Charlie’s assassination, however, non-leftists witnessed the publicized glee of ordinary Democrats across the country.  Teachers, nurses, and even therapists felt no shame in expressing happiness over Charlie’s murder.  Government bureaucrats laughed about Charlie’s death without any fear that they might lose their jobs.  A music instructor in Pennsylvania recently posted a video in which she cruelly gives Charlie’s wife, Erika, “acting notes” so that the widow’s grief will appear more “convincing.”  These psychopathic jeers have continued for two whole months.

Rather than being horrified at the public responses of so many leftist Americans to the political assassination of Charlie Kirk, Katie Couric apparently believes that Charlie deserved his fate.  When such a famous corporate news face seems genuinely amenable to assassinating Americans for their political speech, even people who normally ignore politics notice how dangerously divided the country has become.

For non-political, non-leftist Americans, Charlie’s murder has been an exclamation point to the steady rise of organized political violence during the last decade.  After a deranged leftist tried to assassinate an entire baseball team of Republicans from the House and Senate in 2017, non-political Americans hoped that the shocking event would help to cool the temperature in Washington.  Just as soon as Democrat Party leaders did a little bipartisan kumbaya routine for the cameras, however, we got the Antifa and Black Lives Matter riots of 2020.

Even though those violent riots killed several dozen Americans and caused more property damage than any other insurrection in U.S. history, the Democrat Party euphemistically defended the mayhem and bloodshed as a “summer of love” for Americans’ civil rights.  While cities burned, the corporate news media warned Americans that the violence would get much worse unless Joe Biden “won” the 2020 election.  In this way, “journalists” and politicians openly threatened Americans as they headed to the polls.

After claiming the presidency, Democrats did not let up.  Instead, they used the DOJ and FBI to hunt down and harass political opponents.  Democrat-engineered lawfare that had been ramping up since Obama was in the White House went into overdrive as leftists persecuted non-leftists with abandon.  Aside from years of politically motivated prosecutions, however, Democrats continued to call non-leftist Americans “fascists” and “Nazis.”  By 2024, it was little surprise to anyone paying attention that leftist-inspired assassins would attempt to murder President Trump.

What was a surprise for many non-political Americans, however, was that such near-historic assassination attempts did not sufficiently convince Democrats that their violent rhetoric had become unarguably dangerous for the nation.  Within moments of the attempted assassination of President Trump in Pennsylvania last summer, Democrat politicians and their allies in the press were already downplaying the event or pretending that the shooting had been faked (even as fire chief Corey Comperatore lay dead).  Rather than taking a moment to consider how close the country had come to a potentially civil war-triggering murder of a major national figure, leftists publicly regretted that the assassin had failed.  Random leftists took to social media platforms to complain about the shooter’s aim.

After all the years of Democrat riots, lawfare, and violence, the near-murder of President Trump reminded non-leftist voters what was at stake in the 2024 election.  Even then, however, the average non-political American tried to mentally separate the attempted murder of a national politician from the way ordinary leftists viewed ordinary non-leftists in the United States.  American politics, many told themselves, had gotten entirely out of hand, but surely cooler heads would eventually prevail.

Charlie Kirk’s murder ended that psychologically comforting delusion for good.  When a young man with a young family is killed in the prime of his life, people sit up and take notice.  When an American is assassinated for his political convictions, otherwise non-political Americans wake up from their apathetic slumber.  When random leftists celebrate murder across social media platforms and mock a young widow’s suffering, even Americans who desperately wish to get along with everyone realize that the country is in peril.

Two months after the leftist-inspired political assassination of Charlie Kirk, it is clear that the country is not healing in any form.  Leftists continue to call for political violence.  Democrat politicians continue to call non-leftists “fascists” and “Nazis.”  Democrat-aligned “journalists” continue to blame Charlie for his own murder.  There is a growing awareness in this country that the whole house of cards precariously holding civil society together could come crashing down with one more violent riot or political assassination.

What happens then is anyone’s guess.  But formerly non-political Americans know that the country’s domestic peace is in serious jeopardy.  Too many Americans seek and cheer violence right now.  Too many Americans are eager for civil war.  If we cannot lower the temperature in this country, Charlie’s murder will presage an unbearable slaughter to come.

This article was originally published on American Thinker.

The post Too Many Americans Want a Civil War appeared first on LewRockwell.

The title of this column is a quote from 25-year retired Army Green Beret Lieutenant Colonel Anthony Aguilar. Colonel Aguilar’s missions took him to Iraq, Afghanistan, Tajikistan, Jordan, and the Philippines. He received the Purple Heart for wounds he received in combat. After retiring from the Army, he served as a security contractor in Gaza for UG Solutions, which was contracted to provide security at aid distribution sites operated by the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation. He resigned from his position after approximately two months, citing human rights violations and crimes against humanity being committed by the security agency at the behest of the Israel Defense Forces (IDF).

What Colonel Aguilar witnessed in Gaza by the Israeli military (and the U.S. private contractors under the direction of the IDF) is further evidence of just how vile and wicked the Israel government and its military really are.

Colonel Aguilar was recently interviewed on the AJ+ podcast. Here are excerpts from that interview:

Anthony Aguilar: Never in my life did I think that an army could be so evil as to use food to lure a starving population through a battlefield, killing women and children and the elderly on purpose.

Dena Takruri: I wanted to hear more about how he went from believing he was going to Gaza to help feed Palestinians to realizing the United States was complicit in Israel’s genocide, particularly as a 25-year veteran of the U.S. Army.

So, what did you understand to be the mandate of your mission? What exactly were you going to be doing on the ground there?

Aguilar: What we were told in kind of a general overview briefing before we got on the plane out of Dulles is that the United States stepped forward to take over the United Nations mission because Israel would no longer allow the United Nations in and that Israel will allow the United States to work with them to do it and that we were going in to take over that mission to deliver food.

I envisioned that we would be going in, occupying and securing, or securing at least, 400 distribution sites and securing 500 to 550 trucks a day going in because that’s what the UN did. That was my mindset going in. And I believed that until the very first day I got there, and I realized that that was not the case.

Takruri: Describe to me what you first saw and felt when you arrived to the Gaza Strip.

Aguilar: What I witnessed in that first look as we came in was the most devastating, destructive, beyond war annihilation, apocalyptic thing I’d ever seen in my life. Something that I couldn’t even imagine in a nightmare. Rubble, dogs eating remains of bodies, smoke in the horizon from bombs being dropped, not a building left in sight and everything leveled. It was a landscape of destruction and horror, which I’ve never witnessed before.  And honestly, it made me feel sick.

The Israel Defense Forces were leading us, and they gave us this briefing. They pulled out a giant map that showed operations that were going on. First of all, I didn’t see 400 distribution sites; I saw 4. All of them were in the south, away from the areas that people needed the food. And no one north of the Netzarim Corridor from Gaza could reach these sites. That started to paint a picture to me that this is either horribly planned or there’s something else going on here.

Then when I looked at the sites and I saw the operational graphics on their map—this is an Israeli map that showed that offensive combat operations going on around these sites—these sites were behind the forward line of contact, the front line, if you will, which means the civilians have to cross, have to travel through the fighting to get there. It’s a violation of the Geneva Convention.

Takruri: Why do you think it was designed that way?

Aguilar: It became clear to me that it was designed that way when we got to site one, and I walked up to the berm to stand up on top of the berm to look, and there’s Merkava battle tanks driving through and firing at positions. There’s a battle going on. There’s mortar rounds, there’s artillery rounds. There’s people, thousands of Palestinians lined up along the coastal corridor, the coastal road, because they have nowhere else to go; they live on the beach. They live there in shanty tarp shacks because there’s nowhere else to live because their homes have been destroyed. And there’s this battle going on.

And I look at my map, and I look at that, and I go back, and I talk to the IDF and to the guy in charge, the GHF guy in charge. And I said, “We can’t distribute aid from these sites. We’re going to get a lot of people killed, and it violates Geneva Conventions. We cannot do this.” That was wholly ignored [by the IDF commander]: “We’re going to do it anyway. We’re doing it. It doesn’t matter. We’re fighting Hamas. The Geneva Convention doesn’t apply.”

But then when I saw all the sites, how all the sites were designed this way, it became very clear to me then from seeing the way the sites were designed and how they functioned, that this is forced displacement. The Israeli government, through the Israel defense forces in Gaza, are using food to bait Palestinians to forcefully displace them to the south en masse. And I don’t mean just a couple hundred. I mean, everybody, the entire population.

Takruri: Did it strike you as wrong that the same people that were deliberately starving Palestinians, the Israelis, are now tasked with feeding them?

Aguilar: Morally, ethically, legally, humanitarianly: wrong, wrong, wrong. Yes, it was shockingly wrong to me, which is why in the beginning I thought, “Do these people just not know what they’re doing? Or this can’t be intentional.” But what came to my realization, and it came to me very hard, is that this is intentional.

Takruri: Why did you initially think it’s not intentional?

Aguilar: Because I didn’t think anybody could be that evil. [Emphasis added]

Takruri: So, in your interactions with personnel from the IDF, how did they describe what they were doing? Or how did they talk about the Palestinians that they were purportedly feeding?

Aguilar: The Israelis did not want to feed the Palestinians. From the very bottom level, IDF soldiers in Gaza that I talked to that are in Gaza, in the war, they asked me flat out one day, clearly, “Why are you feeding our enemy?” I was like, “Well, we’re feeding the civilians.” “No, they’re all our enemy. You are feeding our enemy.” I was like, “Women, children, old men and women?” “Yeah, they’re all the enemy. Every Palestinian is our enemy.” That’s how they saw it.

But they also referred to them as animals. They called them zombies. They referred to the groups of the Palestinians where they’d come to the sites as “the zombie horde,” dehumanizing them, not providing them water, shooting at them to get them to move a certain way like they’re animals in a cage. It’s horrible.

Takruri: And was this perspective of dehumanization also evident in the GHF members that you were working with as well, your colleagues?

Aguilar: Absolutely. The American contractor who’s in charge of the entire security plan for armed Americans being in Gaza is the national president of the Infidels Motorcycle Club, a US-based veterans motorcycle club. The charter of their organization is to fight jihad and the elimination of all Muslims from the earth. This is the guy in charge of the armed security for delivering food into Gaza to a predominantly Arab Muslim population.

Takruri: Other than these sort of ideological motivations for going to Gaza, were contractors with GHF well compensated?

Aguilar: Well, this type of work is very lucrative. So, for all of us and what we were getting paid: $1,320 a day. So, if you’re there making that much money…and that was just the run-of-the-mill person. If you’re in a leadership position, site leader, mobile leader, you’re making $1,600 a day.

[For that much money] you can just look the other way, say, “This isn’t my problem. No one’s going to know.”

These guys are going to go there, and they’re going to get rich, and they’re going to come home with $300,000 after four or five months of work. Can you imagine only having to work five months out of the year and being rich doing it? It’s a lot of money.

Not to mention the people that run the contract, they’re making millions. Millions. This future Gaza Riviera resort plan is going to make people billions.

This is about money, which is really the sickening, sickening part of this. This isn’t about Hamas. This isn’t about religion. This isn’t about who owns the land. This is about money. And it’s disgusting.

Takruri: I did want to ask you, what is your reaction to the leaked Trump Gaza Riviera plan, which calls for the reconstruction of Gaza as an investment and manufacturing hub? And Boston Consulting Group, which also worked on the plan for deploying GHF, is involved. Do you think GHF should be involved in this plan to turn Gaza into a U.S. territory?

Aguilar: So, in the main control center, where the operations are, on the wall in that main control center, is a large poster of a Boston Consulting Group rendering of the future industrial complex resort. That rendering is on the wall in the control center at Kerem Shalom for the GHF. The GHF is not a humanitarian organization. And they don’t care. They are there to stake property.

Takruri: At what point did you decide that you could no longer have any part to do with it?  

Aguilar: On the 8th of June, I was in the control center and outside of Kerem Shalom, and we were distributing at site number two. And I’m in the control room watching it on the screen. The crowd was very, very packed in there, very packed. And people were being crushed up against concrete walls inside of the sites that were lined with barbed wire, this razor wire, and people were getting crushed up against it.

So, there was a Palestinian man in the crowd who lifted these children up because they were getting trampled and crushed; they were small. And the Israel Defense Force liaison officer, a senior ranking officer in the Israel Defense Force who is in our operations center, looks at the screen, and he says, “Get them off of there right now.” And so, I’m looking at the same thing he’s looking at. I’m like, “Well, the security on the ground there, they’re addressing it. They’re dealing with it. But I mean, these are children. Calm down. These are children.”

“Get them off of there. That’s not secure. Get them off,” the IDF officer said.

I was like, “They’re children. They have no shoes on. They don’t have any weapons. There’s nothing in their hands at all. One of the children doesn’t even have a shirt. Calm down.”

He walks back to his desk, gets on the radio with his forces, and then he comes back over to where I’m standing, and there was an American in our operations center that understood and could speak Hebrew a little bit. And he says to me, “He just said on the radio for his snipers to shoot them down.”

So, when this officer came back, I asked, “Did you just order your snipers at site number two to shoot these kids?” He said, “Well, if you’re not going to take care of it, I will.” And I said, “We’re not shooting children.”

As we were having this dialogue, the children had run off to the edge of this wall, and they jumped down so they could run away. They were scared. They didn’t want to be there. Thank God we didn’t have to see what would have come.

But in that moment, the Safe Reach Solutions contract lead, the boss if you will, who was in the operations center, called me over and he said, “Tony, never say no to the client.” And I said, “What do you mean don’t say no to the client?” He said, “The IDF are our client. We work for them. They’re in charge.” And I was like, “Even when they say to kill children?” He said, “What decisions they make and how they want to fight this war, who they decide to kill or not is not our decision. This is a contract. This is business. Don’t say no to our client.”

Takruri: And did you step down at that point?

Aguilar: I told him at that point, I said, “I’m done.”

Takruri: How many people do you understand to have been killed at these GHF sites up until now?

Aguilar: From the beginning of operations, 26 May, until today, thousands. Not only the hundreds and hundreds into the magnitude of thousands that have been reported by the U.N. and Médecins Sans Frontières and others at the Nasser Hospital and the Khan Younis hospitals directly near these sites receiving about MCI, or mass casualty incidents, on the days that correlate to the same times and dates of distribution. But there are hundreds of bodies buried outside of these sites that have just been buried in the rubble, bulldozed and buried in the ground.

Takruri: So, what do you want Americans to know as one of the few Americans who has been to Gaza during this genocide?

Aguilar: The United States is hand in glove with the Israeli government in committing a genocide. What is happening in Gaza is not a misfortune of war. It is designed: the displacement, the removal, the destruction, the ethnic cleansing, the genocide. It is by design.

Wake up, America. If we stand by and we allow it to happen there, it’s going to happen here.

Folks, there you have it: a first-hand eyewitness account of not only the brutality and sheer wanton genocidal murder of the Palestinian people by the Israelis but also the direct, on-the-ground complicity of U.S. private contractors. Of course, this is in addition to the billions of dollars of U.S. technology, surveillance systems, military equipment, intelligence, naval battle groups, bombs, missiles, jets and other munitions, along with direct CIA support and assistance.

We’re talking about billions of dollars from the U.S. government, billions of dollars from high-tech companies in the United States and hundreds of millions of dollars from the private billionaire class all designed to annihilate millions of innocent people from their homeland so the billionaire class (mostly Zionists) can create a Riviera on the Mediterranean—a Las Vegas on the Sea—from which the Jared Kushners, Steve Witkoffs, Miriam Adelsons and Donald Trumps of the world can rake in billions more in blood money into their corrupt coffers.

In my message last Sunday entitled No “Christian” Can Continue To Support The State Of Israel, I said the following:

The last two years have exposed the Israeli state for who and what it really is.

The entire world sees the total depravity of behavior, the utter lack of moral consciousness, the astonishing degree of racial supremacy on public display in Israel.

Two years of ethnic cleansing; two years of mass murder; two years of mass starvation; two years of genocide; two years of lies and deceit; two years of political manipulation; two years of Israeli domination of the presidents and legislatures of the United States and Western Europe; two years of an out-of-control, rogue Israeli state are now crystal clear.

Now, we learn of just how depraved and degenerated the Israeli mind really is: And it shocks the senses!

Journalist Max Blumenthal (who is himself Jewish) has reported the details of this latest Israeli atrocity. I’m paraphrasing Max:

An Israeli Army unit repeatedly raped a Palestinian civilian man—a man who had no connection to Hamas—in an Israeli prison in the Negev desert. The soldiers recorded the serial rape of this man on camera.

A female Israeli general, the army’s legal attaché, was unable to prosecute the rapists because there were national pro-rape riots across Israel consisting of army reservists who besieged Israeli army bases and staged a rebellion, breaking into army bases demanding the rapists had done nothing wrong.

And the military leadership let these guys go free.

One of them, the key rapist, actually went on national TV and appeared on talk shows as a kind of national folk hero and a victim.

She [the legal attaché] was so frustrated that she leaked the video.

Israel and the U.S. media and politicians in both parties accused Hamas of sexually abusing Israelis on October 7th. And not one of those allegations has been validated by any forensic evidence at all. No evidence!

But here we have the sick psychopaths in the Israeli army literally filming themselves serially raping this innocent Palestinian man, and Netanyahu’s only concern about the event is that the incident is bad public relations for Israel.

The lady general who released the video to the public has been arrested and will go to prison, while the rapists are free to live their lives with ZERO accountability or retribution.

Blumenthal: This scandal should illustrate just how deeply depraved and sick Israel is and how corrupt its political system is.

It’s illustrative of the entire Zionist worldview, where for two years we’ve watched them commit genocide, carry out a holocaust of children across the Gaza Strip, deliberately starve people, and now they’re playing the victim because people are rejecting their political worldview, rejecting Israel.

And in this case, we have footage, documented footage, indisputable, that no one denies, not Netanyahu, not even these soldiers, of the rape of an innocent Palestinian male prisoner who was kidnapped from the Gaza Strip.

OK. ENOUGH!

Enough: “The Israelis are God’s chosen people” claptrap.

Enough: “We must bless Israel to receive God’s blessing” gobbledygook.

Enough: “Zionist Israel is the fulfillment of Bible prophecy” hogwash.

ENOUGH! ENOUGH! ENOUGH! ENOUGH!

Evangelicals who are still determined to support the satanic State of Israel are NOT “Christians.”

By that, I mean they are not resembling the character and person of Christ; they are not following the teachings of Christ. In attitudes, words and actions, they cannot be called “followers of Christ.”

And here’s the stark reality: People all over the world do not see these evangelicals as Christians. They see these evangelical Zionists as phonies and puppets, which is exactly what they are.

Add Blumenthal’s report to the eyewitness testimony of Colonel Aguilar, and the only people who do not see the sheer evil emanating from inside Tel Aviv, Israel and Washington, D.C., USA, are people who don’t WANT to see.

Hear again what Colonel Aguilar said: “Wake up, America. If we stand by and we allow it to happen there, it’s going to happen here.”

A man without moral conscience and human empathy (Donald Trump)—who doesn’t blink an eye at murdering people in Gaza, the West Bank, Iran, Iraq, Syria and Lebanon, who doesn’t blink an eye at murdering people in the waters of the Caribbean Sea—won’t blink an eye at murdering U.S. citizens on the streets of America.

Reprinted with permission from Chuck Baldwin Live.

The post ‘I Didn’t Think Anybody Could Be That Evil’ appeared first on LewRockwell.

Abstract:
The contemporary fascination with a so-called “Bitcoin Standard” rests on the same utopian fantasy that once sustained the Gold Standard—that monetary scarcity can restrain political excess. This essay dismantles that illusion. Through historical analysis of the American experience from 1921 to 1971, and a critical exploration of modern fiscal theory, it argues that the problem of government overspending lies not in the nature of money, but in the nature of governance itself. States do not “print” in the naïve sense of creating currency without backing; they borrow, they bond, and they spend the unearned wealth of future generations. Whether denominated in gold, fiat, or digital tokens, the principle remains: borrowing is justified only when it produces tangible, growth-generating returns. Infrastructure investment, by expanding productive capacity, meets that criterion. Ideological boondoggles, designed for political gratification rather than economic yield, do not. A Bitcoin-backed regime would not neutralise state debt—it would merely gild it with cryptographic rhetoric before the inevitable default.

Thesis Statement:
A Bitcoin Standard would neither prevent deficit spending nor enforce fiscal discipline. It would replicate the structural failures of the Gold Standard, revealing once again that monetary systems cannot cure political irresponsibility. Sound economics arises from productive investment, not ideological austerity or speculative scarcity.

Section I — The Fetish of the Standard

Civilisations invent standards when they lose faith in themselves. The standard is the moral prosthetic of a bankrupt culture, a totem erected in the ruins of trust. When men no longer believe in the integrity of their institutions, they seek refuge in metal or code, mistaking mechanical certainty for virtue. The gold standard, and now the fantasy of a Bitcoin standard, both emerge from the same intellectual poverty — the hope that scarcity can substitute for discipline.

The nineteenth century worshipped gold as the embodiment of order. Its adherents believed that tethering money to a finite metal would chain the ambitions of politicians and the appetites of mobs. The faith was theological: gold was immutable, incorruptible, and therefore, by extension, moral. Yet history is unkind to those who mistake symbols for systems. Every empire that swore fidelity to its metallic god quietly betrayed it when power demanded flexibility. The standard remained in rhetoric long after it had been broken in practice. When the ledger conflicted with the sword, the sword always won.

The modern cult of Bitcoin repeats the same catechism, only now in binary form. Instead of divine metal, there is divine mathematics. Instead of vaults, ledgers. Instead of priests, programmers. The narrative is identical: scarcity will purify the system; code will banish corruption. Yet scarcity does not civilise—it merely constrains. And code, like law, is only as incorruptible as the people who execute it. To believe otherwise is to mistake cryptography for character.

The fetish of the standard endures because it absolves responsibility. It allows men to imagine that moral failure can be corrected by mechanism. A politician can promise rectitude without reform; an economist can preach restraint without courage. Both can appeal to an external order to justify their weakness. The standard becomes a moral surrogate, an instrument of denial wrapped in the language of discipline.

Under the gold standard, nations inflated through debt while denouncing inflation in speech. The mechanism of deceit was simple: borrow abroad, spend domestically, and swear that redemption remained sacred—until it wasn’t. Gold never failed them; they failed gold. The same dynamic will haunt any Bitcoin-based regime. Governments will borrow against future Bitcoin flows, issue bonds indexed to digital reserves, and construct a labyrinth of derivatives to simulate liquidity. When reality intrudes, they will call it “temporary suspension,” just as Nixon did in 1971. And another generation will learn that scarcity without integrity is merely a slower road to default.

The moral allure of the standard lies in its false promise of objectivity. It whispers that numbers can tame men, that mathematics can impose virtue on vice. But economics is not a physics of atoms; it is a politics of appetites. The state does not violate standards because they are weak—it violates them because survival demands it. A fixed supply cannot withstand a variable will.

Thus the Bitcoin standard is not revolutionary; it is recursive. It is the latest costume of an old delusion: that systems, once made rigid, will make men righteous. The truth is less elegant and infinitely harder—discipline is not a consequence of scarcity; it is a product of moral and intellectual strength. Gold failed to bestow it. Bitcoin will too.

Section II — The Mechanics of Debt: Printing Without Presses

The image of governments “printing money” is a rhetorical ghost that refuses to die. It conjures visions of reckless bureaucrats flooding the economy with worthless paper, spinning inflation from ink. The truth, however, is far more subtle—and far more insidious. Modern states do not print; they borrow. They transform promises into liquidity, pledging the future to sustain the present. Debt, not the printing press, is the engine of contemporary money creation.

When a government announces new spending, it does not conjure cash from the ether. It issues bonds. Those bonds are bought by institutions, banks, pension funds, and increasingly by the central bank itself. Each bond is a certificate of faith—faith that tomorrow’s taxpayers will honour yesterday’s ambitions. The state thus becomes a conduit for temporal arbitrage: it spends today what it claims it will earn tomorrow. This sleight of hand is the modern alchemy of finance. And like all alchemy, it is sustained by belief.

Central banks operationalise this ritual. When they “expand the money supply,” they are not pushing buttons to mint coins; they are buying government debt, placing those bonds on their balance sheets in exchange for new reserves. These reserves, in turn, ripple through commercial banks as lending capacity, multiplying into credit, investment, and speculation. The entire system rests on the assumption that growth will outpace obligation—that the future will be richer than the past, and thus the debt can be serviced. It is not money that sustains the system, but confidence.

Even under a Bitcoin standard, this process would persist. A government could peg its currency to Bitcoin, claim a fixed supply, and yet continue to issue bonds denominated in Bitcoin units. Investors, lured by yield, would still lend. Banks would still leverage deposits into layered credit instruments. The system would still inflate—not by printing, but by promising. Monetary purity cannot abolish temporal preference. A digital reserve merely changes the vocabulary of deceit.

This is why the inflation debate so often misfires. Inflation is not the consequence of “money printing” but of systemic borrowing against productivity that does not yet exist. When the borrowed funds build roads, energy networks, and productive infrastructure, they seed future returns capable of repaying the debt. When they finance consumption, political patronage, or subsidies that generate no growth, they cannibalise the very economy that must redeem them. Inflation, then, is not a monetary failure—it is a moral one. It is the symptom of a civilisation that spends not to build but to appease.

During the so-called sound-money eras—the gold standard, Bretton Woods, even the early years of fiat—the same mechanism prevailed. The United States financed wars, public works, and global expansion through debt. Gold was the decorative myth, the psychological anchor. The dollar’s credibility rested not on the contents of Fort Knox but on the productivity of the American economy. When that productivity faltered and the liabilities grew intolerable, the peg dissolved. The paper endured because the myth was replaced by another: that fiat itself could embody trust.

Bitcoin’s advocates imagine that immutable code will succeed where gold failed. But mathematics cannot restrain politics. The government that cannot borrow will tax; the one that cannot tax will seize. Power finds its liquidity. Whether through treasury bonds, digital instruments, or backdoor derivatives, the machinery of credit will persist because the machinery of ambition never ceases. To think otherwise is to confuse the protocol for the polity.

The phrase “printing money” survives because it flatters indignation. It gives the illusion that corruption lies in the mechanism, not the motive. Yet the printing press is a relic; the bond auction is the true altar of excess. Nations collapse not because they print too much, but because they promise too much—and lack the courage to stop. Bitcoin will not change this arithmetic. Scarcity cannot sanctify deceit.

Section III — Keynes and the Paradox of Productive Deficit

Few economic thinkers have been more misunderstood than John Maynard Keynes. To his disciples, he became the prophet of spending; to his enemies, the architect of moral decay. Both readings are caricatures. Keynes never preached excess for its own sake. His argument was simple and devastating: when private demand collapses, the state must spend—not to indulge consumption, but to sustain the machinery of production until confidence returns. His doctrine was one of temporary intervention, not permanent dependency.

At its core, Keynesianism was an argument about investment. Deficit spending was justified only when it built the conditions for future surplus. The concept of “the multiplier” was not a licence for profligacy; it was an accounting of return. Each pound borrowed was to yield more than a pound in output, through the restoration of employment and the expansion of productive capacity. The end was growth, not indulgence. The error of later governments was to mistake this emergency medicine for a diet.

The post-war consensus distorted Keynes into a bureaucratic idol. Politicians found in his name a rationalisation for perpetual deficit—a policy of pleasure without pain, borrowing without consequence. They ignored the distinction between capital expenditure and current expenditure. Building a bridge was productive: it connected markets, accelerated trade, and multiplied returns. Expanding welfare without reform was parasitic: it consumed output without creating new value. One increased the capacity of the economy to repay its debts; the other merely redistributed the burden.

Keynes’s actual warning was moral, not mathematical. He wrote that “the boom, not the slump, is the right time for austerity.” His philosophy depended on reciprocity—the willingness of governments to save in prosperity what they spent in crisis. But the modern state, addicted to electoral gratification, inverted the principle. Spending became the norm, restraint the anomaly. Every administration promised growth through generosity, not through discipline. Deficit became destiny.

Under such conditions, the deficit ceases to be Keynesian and becomes decadent. When money is borrowed to consume rather than to create, debt no longer serves the economy—it devours it. The productive deficit transforms into the unproductive one: the infrastructure of tomorrow is replaced by the appeasement of today. Subsidised idleness masquerades as compassion; temporary stimulus becomes permanent entitlement. The ledger swells, while output stagnates.

This degeneration is not merely fiscal—it is philosophical. It reveals the abandonment of the causal relationship between effort and reward. A society that borrows for comfort rather than construction loses the moral logic of credit itself. The promise to repay is credible only when what is built yields more than what is spent. Once the purpose of debt becomes political tranquillity, the bond market becomes a mirror of decay.

This distinction—between debt that seeds growth and debt that smothers it—remains the fulcrum of economic integrity. Infrastructure spending, when directed toward projects that unlock productivity, is not wasteful; it is the temporal bridge between potential and performance. A rail network, a power grid, a port—these are engines of compounding utility. They transform labour into leverage. Their debt is repaid not through taxation, but through prosperity.

The opposite holds for ideological projects. Bureaucratic make-work, social redistribution without reform, and vanity subsidies erode both fiscal balance and moral coherence. They feed dependency under the banner of equality, and debt under the illusion of progress. The political left, intoxicated by compassion, calls this justice. The right, terrified of consequence, dares not oppose it. The result is bipartisan insolvency.

Thus, the paradox of productive deficit: debt, used rightly, is civilisation’s accelerator; used wrongly, its executioner. Keynes understood this. His intellectual heirs did not. They took the language of growth and filled it with sentiment. They mistook liquidity for wealth, redistribution for recovery, and permanence for stability. The state became a consumer of capital rather than its steward.

A Bitcoin or gold-backed economy would not change this pattern. It would merely compress the timeline of failure. When the government borrows under a hard standard, the limits appear sooner, but the psychology remains identical. The moral question is not what backs the currency, but what justifies the debt. The ledger can be honest only when purpose is.

Keynes’s original sin was not in his theory but in his followers. He believed in intervention; they believed in indulgence. He sought to preserve capitalism; they used him to dilute it. A century later, his ghost haunts every treasury and parliament that borrows for applause. The paradox endures: a system designed to prevent collapse became the blueprint for perpetual decline.

Read the Whole Article

The post Why Governments Will Always Borrow Against the Future appeared first on LewRockwell.

On November 12th, the Financial Times headlined “Can anything halt the decline of German industry?”, and hid the answer, by hiding what had caused the decline. They also quoted economists (the category of ‘experts’ who had failed to predict the 2008 financial crash) as saying that this decline will stop and will soon reverse:

Most economists believe this debt-financed investment push will swing the country back to growth in 2026 after long years of stagnation.

“At the moment, the headwinds from trade are there before the tailwinds from fiscal policy really kick in,” says BNP Paribas economist Paul Hollingsworth. He is confident that the drag from the trade war has already peaked this year and predicts 1.4 per cent of growth in 2026, after a measly 0.3 per cent in 2025.

Notice that attributing the economic decline to Trump’s “trade war” would place the cause of the decline to have occurred in 2025 — a ludicrous falsehood. However, the article also made passing note of the following crucial fact, which should instead have been the article’s focus: “The number of [Germany’s] unemployed has risen in 37 of 44 months since February 2022 to just under 3mn, the highest level in 14 years.”

Why has Germany’s employment cratered since February 2022? What happened at that time? The Biden-imposed U.S. sanctions against Russia, and U.S. secondary sanctions against countries — such as Germany — that had been importing a lot from Russia (especially fuels), kicked in. The devious U.S. Government, and its deceptive news-media throughout the U.S. empire (such as in Germany), didn’t report that these secondary sanctions would not only hurt Russia (which hurt turned out to have been only little) but also (and much more severely) hurt the countries — especially in Europe — that were importing (especially fuels) from Russia. It hurt those importing countries because fuels are a crucial expense not only to consumers, but especially to manufacturers (that’s to say industries), who need LOTS of cheap energy in order to be able to be competitive in international export markets.

On 28 September 2022, I already headlined and explained “How America Is Crushing Europe”, which opened:

America creates, imposes, and enforces the sanctions against Russia, which are forcing up energy-prices in Europe, and are thereby driving Europe’s corporations to move to America, where taxes, safety-and-environmental regulations, and the rights of labor, are far lower, and so profits will be far higher for the investors.

Furthermore, America can supply its own energy.

Therefore, supply-chains are less dicey in the U.S. than in Europe. There is less and less reason now for a firm to be doing anything in Europe except selling to Europeans, who are becoming increasingly desperate to get whatever they can afford to buy, now that Russia, which had been providing the lowest-cost energy and other commodities, is being strangled out of European markets, by the sanctions. Money can move even when its owner can’t.

The European public will now be left farther and farther behind as Europe’s wealth flees — mainly to America (whose Government had created this capital-flight of Europe’s wealth).

And on 24 June 2023, I headlined “Now the Pay-off Comes from Blowing Up the Nord Stream Pipeline” and reported

The losers in all of this are, of course, the people of Germany — and also of other European countries that had been buying the extra-cheap Russian pipelined gas — who will now be paying Americans a much higher price than previously they had been paying Russians. Not only will Germans and other Europeans now be paying for the super-chilled canned and cross-Atlantic shipped gas [LNG] that previously was simply pipelined, but Europeans will now have lost what little sovereign independence they had formerly had when the U.S. Government allowed them to buy their gas and oil from Russia.

Perhaps they will be learning the hard way that it’s no fun to be a vassal nation.

For example: slide 2 of the 9 November 2017 “US LNG vs Russian pipe gas: impact on prices”, by Dr. Thierry Bros of the Oxford University Institute for Energy Studies, states that Russian gas is the least costly, US LNG can’t compete with it on price, Nord Stream 1 (NS 2 hadn’t yet been approved) is cheaper than gas piped through Ukraine, and Nord Stream 2 (once operational) will be cheaper than gas piped through Ukraine.

Slide 6 shows that the ”Full cost of US LNG” is more than twice the “Henry Hub” (or “HH”) gas price.

A CSIS (Pentagon think tank) blog post on 5 July 2019 was headlined “How Much Does U.S. LNG Cost in Europe?” and asked the “familiar question: Can U.S. LNG compete with Russian gas in Europe?” but conspicuously refused to answer it.

A 25 March 2021 German study concluded that Russia outcompeted America even on LNG supplied in Europe: “LNG exports from Qatar and Russia are relatively competitive in Western Europe,” and even under the best of circumstances, “U.S. LNG only displaces small volumes from other LNG suppliers in Western Europe.”

Germans will be paying the extra price for this, for at least 20 years.

One of the reader-comments to the FT article said “ German companies pay 4 times more for gas than US competitors. As Draghi’s paper states, this needs to be addressed. Nordstream was cheap and reliable relative to western LNG. Have you read the Draghi paper? Germany is set to send 12 billion euros to Ukr next year. Do you think there are no higher priorities for these funds for German citizens and industry?” Clearly, a German treaty of peace and mutually beneficial trade with Russia would do vastly more for Germay’s national security and economy than would Gemany’s present plan for re-armament and war against Russia. But that’s an option which would would be prohibited to discuss in the media of Germany as continuing to be a colony of the U.S. empire.

Another reader-comment to that article was:

Not a single mention of Germany shooting itself in the foot with Energiewende and a disastrous energy policy.

Missing the elephant in the room.

A realistic portrayal of the outlook for Germany’s economy going forward is the following from Alexander Mercouris:

——

https://theduran.com/germany-unstoppable-industrial-decline/

“Germany unstoppable industrial decline”

16 November 2025, Alexander Mercouris

RELATED:
On November 16th, Reuters headlined “Exclusive: Ahead of Hasina court verdict, son warns of Bangladesh violence if party ban stays” and reported that Bangladesh is set for mass violence unless its former leading Party, the Awami League, is relegalized there, but Reuters hid the fact that on 5 August 2023 a ‘student-led’ (that’s what Reuters called it) but actually U.S.-planned and led, coup, by USAID, NED, and IRI, overthrew and replaced that Party, and imposed the current ruling regime there. The imperial regime’s media do not report the imperial regime’s operations. The wool is systematically pulled over virtually everyone’s eyes and ears; and to report the actual history is called just a “conspiracy theory” — not called reporting of the conspiracy-facts (such as those links lead the reader to).

This article was originally published on Eric’s Substack.

The post Germany’s Now Unstoppable Decline: All Major Media Sugar-Coat It appeared first on LewRockwell.

“If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood/Come gurgling from the froth-corrupted lungs . . . . My friend, you would not tell with such high zest / To children ardent for some desperate glory, / The old lie: Dulce et decorum est / Pro patria mori  [It is a sweet and fitting thing to die for one’s country]

– Wilfred Owen, Dulce Et Decorum Est

On the morning of November 11, I was passing through Pittsfield, Massachusetts, heading north. The traffic was stopped as a Veteran’s Day parade headed south. It was a sight for a musing mind, so that is exactly what I did, sitting in my car watching the parade’s celebration of the patriotism of military veterans.

I asked myself: What are they still marching for?

I was once in the U.S. Marines but became a conscientious objector during the U.S. war against Vietnam and have opposed US militarism and wars ever since. I was brought up to be a patriot, and the marching men – mostly old – with their ancient rifles teetering on their shoulders as the season’s first snowflakes peppered their faces and the marching band drummed up a martial beat to counter the dreary morning, touched me in a melancholic and twisted way. They seemed to be barely holding on – but to what? I wondered – war, their youths, past bonds, a lost country, some meaning in once having a cause to fight for, the best times of their lives, false nostalgia, the joy of killing?

Young, smiling, and excited 11-13 year-old girls ran alongside, handing out small American flags to any occupant of the halted cars who would open their windows. I was about to do so, despite a lifetime of rejecting the flag waving (but not the country) that has come to represent war mongering for me, but the cops motioned the traffic on. The marchers waved to the very few people scattered along the sidewalks who waved back. I drove on wondering why my heart opened to the marchers. It surprised me. Waves of conflicting emotions flowed over me.

When I arrived at my destination, there was a television playing in the waiting room of the office. I took a seat and watched it, something I usually avoid. It was a History Channel program about U.S. soldiers killed and wounded in Vietnam, the Medevac helicopters flying into combat zones and medics evacuating fellow soldiers. Very dangerous work by courageous men. Hearing the program’s narrator blather on about patriotism as it showed gruesome pictures of bloodied and dead soldiers, erased any previous sentiment I felt about the parade marchers. Like the documentary, the parade typically did not mourn the millions of victims of the endless U.S. wars nor did it picture or in any way illustrate all the U.S. dead, wounded, and crippled soldiers. The marchers’ smiles were pasteboard masks concealing the grim reality of war.

I felt rage rising in me, even as I admired the bravery of the evacuation teams bringing out their comrades. My blood boiled at the way the program was using bravery as a cover to continue to promote war, to say these soldiers had been defending their country and were therefore patriots when they were attacking another country over eight thousand miles away for the lies of son of a bitch politicians (LBJ and Richard Nixon, both of whom were elected as peace candidates) who always wage wars so easily, using the flesh and blood of young people as cannon fodder. Yes, the old lies told by jackals with smiling faces.

I wanted to grab the politicians by their turkey necks and force their hands into the massive bloodied hole in an 18 year old boy’s entrails, to push their lying faces low to smell the blood and guts of their easy-going wars.

I wanted to force them to drink their martinis sitting among the hundreds of slaughtered Vietnamese women, children, and old people in a Vietnamese village massacred in a U.S. “search and destroy” mission; force them to walk in their shiny shoes though the body parts in Iraq and Libya and Gaza and all the places soaked in blood by their decisions; make them spend their vacations locked up in the world-wide CIA torture black sites to listen to the screams of the victims.

I could understand how young draftees could have been hoodwinked by the government’s lies about the wars, but I was still flabbergasted by how veterans could still march in support of America’s wars after all the lies have been exposed so many times, not just about Vietnam but Iraq, Syria, Ukraine, Latin America, etc. An endless tapestry of lies told to support criminal wars, genocide, and the subversion of countries around the world. In the words of  the English playwright Harold Pinter: “The crimes of the United States have been systematic, constant, vicious, remorseless, but very few people have actually talked about them.”

When I was earlier sitting in my stationary car, I felt as though I was sitting in a front row seat in a theater, watching a play. Then I realized that I was doing exactly that, and that the annual march was a reenactment of war’s death march – “the theater of war” – and the old soldiers were still playing their parts – but now as survivors – to remind the audience of the dead and their “sacrifices” for the flag, a reminder meant to celebrate wars while the band played on.

The little wind-up mechanical tin toy soldier I was given as a toddler –  a World War I (the “Great War”) doughboy that I called Mechanical Mikey after the neighbor who gave it to me – reminds me of the theatrical nature of child’s play, wars, the military, and their parades – all social life actually. The ways play is a way for adults to catch children in the social net of lies, imitation, and violence, not necessarily out of cruelty but ignorant love. And for the adults to play their parts of eternal innocents on the social stage where performing is de rigueur.

Such child’s play is a dress rehearsal (etymology: to bring back the hearse) for death and a life of repeating the dead hand of the past, but no child would know this. Death is hidden in the play, the roles serving a distancing technique: “now back to real life.” I wonder if I was choking Mikey in this photo. His key was on his left side. Had I wound him up and then decided to stop him in his tracks as he marched across the rug? Was the boy aware at some level that some day he would be following the words of the singer Phil Ochs, I Ain’t Marching Anymore. I know Eddie became Eddy, a name change that suggested that a whirlpool was brewing down river.

In The Great War and Modern Memory, Paul Fussell writes the following: “Seeing warfare as theater provides a psychic escape for the participant: with a sufficient sense of theater, he can perform his duties without implicating his ‘real’ self and without impairing his innermost conviction that the world is still a rational place.”

Those who march in military parades are acting out parts in a play that both repeat and prepare for the next show. The parade serves a double function, just as my toy soldier had a key for me to wind him up again and again to create a form of psychic socialization through repetition. The key being repetition. Repeat, Rehearse, Remember – do it again.

Norman Brown puts it thus in Love’s Body: “Ancestral voices prophesying war; ancestral spirits in the dance macabre or war dance; Valhalla, ghostly warriors who kill each other and are reborn to fight again. All warfare is ghostly, every army an exercitus feralis, every soldier a living corpse.”

Watching the parade and then the History Channel’s documentary, I realized I was watching live and taped versions of repetitive religious performances of sacrificial rituals of a mythic nature, similar to the election every four years of the U.S. president. They are two liturgies of the national religion rooted in war-making, lying, and an economy dependent on killing. But most people act as if they are not choosing to pretend such parades and television documentaries are about remembering and honoring past “sacrifices,” when they are endorsement for future wars.

Likewise, the presidential elections serve to promote the illusion that the the next president will be different from his predecessor and will end the U.S. wars, which never end. The most recent example is the election in 2024 of Donald Trump, with some diehard Trump supporters continuing to believe in Trump’s irenic intentions despite his blatant betrayal of his antiwar promises, just like his recent predecessors Bush, Obama, and Biden. These men are elected to wage war, support the military industrial complex, and therefore the U.S. economy based on war.

It does not matter which political party is in power in Washington, D.C. Their political platforms are meaningless; they are sops thrown to an electorate desperate for illusions, as anyone with a smidgen of historical knowledge would know. Yet many justify the ruthless war-making of the American empire and how it underlies the entire economy by arguing that the parties differ on domestic policies, which is often true. But the lesser of two evils is still the evil of two lessers and another form of bad faith, for the domestic economy, being dependent on warfare and funded by the politicians of both parties, is an economy of death. Harold Pinter said it truly in his Nobel Award Address:

The crimes of the United States have been systematic, constant, vicious, remorseless, but very few people have actually talked about them. You have to hand it to America. It has exercised a quite clinical manipulation of power worldwide while masquerading as a force for universal good. It’s a brilliant, even witty, highly successful act of hypnosis.

But as with every religion – maybe more so – as Dostoevsky said of conventional Christianity, such political belief also depends on miracles, mystery, and authority rather than freedom. The flight from freedom is commonplace, despite all the rhetoric that uses it to justify the wars and the war makers.

The problem we are faced with is an issue of objectivity and reality wherein the public as audience suspends its disbelief in the theater of politics and war and plays its part as audience, as if war and politics were a Broadway show. It’s one big show with everyone in on the act. It is mass hypnosis, a passive surrender to what is perceived to be superior power. Ernest Becker, in his stunning book, The Denial of Death, when commenting on Freud’s work on group psychology and people’s tendency to abandon their judgment and common sense writes:

Freud saw right away what they did with it: they simple became dependent children again, blindly following the inner voice of their parents, which now came to them under the hypnotic spell of the leader. They abandoned their egos to his, identified with his power, tried to function with him as an ideal.

This is another way of saying that on the stage of social life few people choose to not play their assigned roles as obedient children to authority. It is a protection racket, what Jean Paul Sartre calls bad faith – mauvaise foi – and what Hemingway fictionalizes in his masterful story, “A Clean Well-Lighted Place.”

Such bad faith can probably not be countered by an essay like this. Maybe Liam Clancy’s compelling version of Eric Bogle’s great song about a non-mechanical Aussie doughboy in WW I might pierce the heart and break the spell in a better way.

Reprinted with the author’s permission.

The post Mechanical Mikey and the Theater of War appeared first on LewRockwell.

Click here:

Eugyppius

The post Epstein, Nothingburger appeared first on LewRockwell.

The post How Is This Possible? US Debt ROSE By $620 Billion…During The Shutdown! appeared first on LewRockwell.

Bill Madden wrote:

I heard President Trump remark about Marjorie Taylor Greene’s “…losing her way…”  It seems as though all of those Jewish/Israeli “campaign contributions” have caused a substantial increase in his chutzpah.

He campaigned against wars as the peace candidate, claiming that he’d shut down our war with Russia in Ukraine and the Israeli genocide of the Palestinians as soon as he was in office.  Once elected, he’s funding both wars and attacking Iran without a declaration of war.  Additionally, he’s about to attack Venezuela on behalf of Corporate America.  He also claimed that he’d release the Epstein files but now, one year after being elected, he’s still stalling.  But, he has the chutzpah to say that MTG has lost her way.

Then, there’s Representative Massie whom he wants ousted from Congress because of Massie’s allegiance to the Constitution.  The problem is that most of our other Washington politicians are receiving payroll “supplements” from the same sources as the president so only a few of them are following the Constitution making Greene and Massie look like rebels.  When only a few politicians follow the Supreme Law of the Land, it’s time to consider refreshing the tree of liberty.

The post Trump vs. MTG appeared first on LewRockwell.

La traduzione in italiano dell'opera scritta da Wendy McElroy esplora Bitcoin a 360°, un compendio della sua storia fino ad adesso e la direzione che molto ptobabilmente prenderà la sua evoluzione nel futuro prossimo. Si parte dalla teoria, soprattutto quella libertaria e Austriaca, e si sonda come essa interagisce con la realtà. Niente utopie, solo la logica esposizione di una tecnologia che si sviluppa insieme alle azioni degli esseri umani. Per questo motivo vengono inserite nell'analisi diversi punti di vista: sociologico, economico, giudiziario, filosofico, politico, psicologico e altri. Una visione e trattazione di Bitcoin come non l'avete mai vista finora, per un asset che non solo promette di rinnovare l'ambito monetario ma che, soprattutto, apre alla possibilità concreta di avere, per la prima volta nella storia umana, una società profondamente e completamente modificabile dal basso verso l'alto.

____________________________________________________________________________________

(Versione audio della traduzione disponibile qui: https://open.substack.com/pub/fsimoncelli/p/la-necessita-di-una-anonima-stupidi)

Per molti anni ampie fasce della popolazione americana sono state disposte a seguire Jerry Springer e ad ammettere al mondo di aver abusato dei propri coniugi, molestato i propri figli, torturato i propri animali domestici e consumato ogni droga illecita su cui riuscissero a mettere le mani. A partire dagli Alcolisti Anonimi, una pletora di organizzazioni Anonime è comparsa sulla scena per affrontare questi problemi, insieme a un numero sempre crescente di altri disturbi sociali e psicologici. Tuttavia non esiste una sezione di Anonimi in cui una persona possa presentarsi di fronte a un gruppo di supporto e dire: “Buonasera. Mi chiamo Steve e sono stupido!”. Non ci credete? Cercate su Google!

Ai fini di questa discussione, userò il termine “stupido” in base alle azioni, non all'intelletto... o come diceva Forrest Gump: “Stupido è, chi stupido fa!”. Far ammettere alle persone di essersi comportate in modo stupido è un compito decisamente arduo. Proprio come la previdenza sociale è stata definita la “terza rotaia” della politica, ammettere la stupidità è la terza rotaia della psiche umana. Inoltre ho scoperto che le azioni stupide tendono a basarsi su un'ideologia rigida, o sulla paura, entrambe difficili da superare.

Cominciamo con la stupidità dovuta a un'ideologia rigida. Dato che le prove che documentano gli sforzi dell'amministrazione Obama per realizzare un colpo di stato “morbido” (come lo chiamano alcuni) sono ora di dominio pubblico, almeno metà della popolazione avrà un disperato bisogno dei servizi dell'Anonima Stupidi. Devo sottolineare che l'uso dell'aggettivo “morbido” quando si parla di colpo di stato è assurdo. È come dire a una persona a cui avete consapevolmente dato un calcio nell'inguine che è stato un incidente, aspettandosi che il dolore si plachi immediatamente. Non succederà! Un tentativo di colpo di stato è un crimine molto grave, indipendentemente dai mezzi utilizzati per realizzarlo, o dal suo livello di successo, e deve esserci piena responsabilità.

Trovo interessante che il Russiagate, che ora è stato definitivamente dimostrato essere nient'altro che una bufala, sia stato ritenuto da molti dei suoi sostenitori peggiore del Watergate. Francamente credo che coloro che, ancora oggi, continuano a credere che il Russiagate sia stato un vero scandalo si stiano comportando in modo stupido! Sebbene non abbia problemi a usare il Watergate come metro di paragone per giudicare la corruzione governativa, è necessario valutarlo nel giusto contesto.

All'epoca delle udienze del Watergate, nel 1973 e nel 1974, avevo appena finito l'università. La PBS coprì la notizia dall'inizio alla fine e ascoltai decine e decine di ore di testimonianze. Un anno prima avevo espresso il mio primo voto per George McGovern. I miei parenti, tutti ebrei, continuavano a sottolineare che quasi tutti i complici di Nixon avevano cognomi tedeschi.

In quanto tale, ero circondato da persone davvero preoccupate per i piani di Nixon per il Paese; anche io avevo preoccupazioni simili. In breve, non ero un fan di Richard Nixon e credevo che avesse ottenuto ciò che si meritava. In realtà, la nostra repubblica costituzionale non fu mai in pericolo e il Paese continuò a funzionare come avrebbe fatto se lo scandalo non si fosse verificato. Nonostante ciò un Presidente in carica fu costretto a dimettersi, circa 60 persone furono incriminate, di cui quasi 50 furono condannate o si dichiararono colpevoli, e circa due dozzine furono mandate in prigione.

Non ho alcun problema con questo livello di responsabilità, pertanto se dovessimo usare il Watergate come metro di paragone gli autori del colpo di stato dovrebbero ricevere una punizione almeno di un ordine di grandezza più severa, dato che la nostra repubblica costituzionale è stata messa in pericolo. È stato solo grazie alla tenacia e alla forza d'animo di Trump, e alla Mano del Signore (in modo più evidente nella deviazione del proiettile del suo assassino) che ora siamo in grado di invertire la rotta del governo federeale.

C'è chi dirà che, poiché il colpo di stato non è riuscito e Trump è stato legittimamente estromesso dall'incarico con il voto del 2020 (il che solleva tutta una serie di altre questioni che non affronterò qui), siamo a posto e la nostra repubblica costituzionale ha prevalso. Nemmeno per sogno! Il fatto è che i quattro anni dell'amministrazione Biden hanno ricordato gli ultimi quattro anni della leadership di Breznev nell'ex-Unione Sovietica, dal 1978 al 1982.

Avevamo un leader palesemente incapace di intendere e volere, manovrato da un politburo non eletto (un termine che avevo usato fin dall'inizio della presidenza di Biden e che viene ripetuto con una certa frequenza negli ultimi tempi). Avevamo un Dipartimento di Giustizia stalinista (per la serie “mostrami la persona e ti mostrerò il crimine”), le nostre agenzie di intelligence erano gestite da un gruppo di aspiranti Putin/KGB e i nostri organi di informazione ricordavano la Pravda. Di conseguenza l'intero tessuto della vita americana era a pezzi in vista delle elezioni del 2024.

Non vorrei nemmeno pensare a cosa sarebbe successo a questo Paese se Kamala Harris avesse vinto le elezioni del 2024.

Vorrei sottolineare che, sebbene Trump abbia vinto con una vittoria schiacciante nel Collegio Elettorale, se solo 125.000 elettori (su circa 16 milioni di voti espressi) in Michigan, Wisconsin e Pennsylvania avessero cambiato voto, la Harris avrebbe vinto in tutti e tre gli stati e avrebbe raggiunto i 270 voti elettorali.

Chiaramente non c'erano problemi di catena di approvvigionamento quando si è trattato della stupidità di coloro che hanno sostenuto con fervore l'idea che non ci fosse nulla da vedere! Speriamo che i nuovi responsabili delle nostre agenzie governative forniscano alla giustizia il giusto livello di responsabilità e che ci siano abbastanza sezioni di Anonima Stupidi operative per gestire la quantità di traumi psicologici che dovranno essere affrontati.

L'attuale tentativo di dirottare tutto sui dossier di Jeffrey Epstein per far cadere Trump non darà i suoi frutti. Si dimostrerà, ancora una volta, un tentativo stupido. A mio parere lo stile di leadership di Trump si è rivelato essere la seconda venuta dell'unico altro presidente nato a New York: Theodore Roosevelt. Anche quest'ultimo sopravvisse alla pallottola di un assassino durante la campagna elettorale del 1912, quando si candidò per un terzo mandato. Grazie al Signore per i suoi lunghi discorsi manoscritti e conservati nel taschino sinistro! Se il discorso di quel giorno fosse stato di circa 15 minuti più corto, la pallottola sarebbe stata fatale. Pertanto Trump, per procura, dovrebbe già essere sul Monte Rushmore! Mettendo insieme quanto detto sopra, direi che coloro che continuano a sfidarlo stanno agendo contro gli interessi del Paese... e in modo stupido.

Passerò ora alla stupidità dovuta alla paura, che è stata la tattica iniziale utilizzata dai responsabili della disastrosa risposta al Covid. Cosa succederà quando verrà rivelata la vera portata delle atrocità durante la pandemia? Farà sembrare il tentativo di colpo di stato contro Trump, per quanto terribile, un gioco da ragazzi! Mentre molti di noi sono legittimamente preoccupati per il numero di cellule terroristiche dormienti nel Paese a causa delle frontiere aperte, che dire del numero di cellule dormienti nelle braccia della maggior parte della popolazione statunitense? Ci sono già indicazioni che severe conseguenze a lungo termine sono probabili.

Uno studio recente condotto nella Repubblica Ceca ha dimostrato che il tasso di concepimento delle donne che hanno ricevuto anche solo una dose di vaccino contro il Covid è significativamente inferiore rispetto a quelle che non ne hanno ricevuto alcuna.

Sono anche preoccupato che l'aspettativa di vita in calo che abbiamo sperimentato in questo Paese nell'ultimo decennio, che peraltro coincide con la tempistica della piena attuazione dell'Obamacare, sarà ulteriormente aggravata dall'aver fatto il vaccino contro il Covid. Non aver considerato queste possibilità fin dall'inizio della pandemia è solo l'ennesimo esempio di stupidità, in questo caso alimentata in gran parte dalla paura.

Rimaniamo ancora un attimo sull'aspettativa di vita: a partire dal 2015 negli Stati Uniti abbiamo avuto tre anni consecutivi di calo della stessa. L'ultima volta che ciò era accaduto era stato durante la pandemia influenzale del 1918-20. Ricorderete che il calo del 2015-17 fu attribuito a “morti per disperazione”; pensavo fosse dovuto anche all'epidemia di obesità che infine ci aveva raggiunti. È stato anche scoperto che l'eccesso di mortalità per tutte le cause con riduzione dell'aspettativa di vita si è verificato nel 2021, il primo anno di vaccinazione contro il Covid, e non nel 2020, quando la virulenza del virus era al suo apice.

Osservando i grafici sull'aspettativa di vita pubblicati più di recente, invece, non ho potuto fare a meno di notare che il calo di tre anni consecutivi non è presente, e che il calo dell'aspettativa di vita correlato al Covid è stato spostato al 2020. L'esperienza mi dice che qualcosa di sinistro è in atto e gli stupidi tra noi vengono incastrati per la prossima truffa che li porterà a comportarsi – sì, avete indovinato – in modo stupido.

In sintesi, qualcuno ha già preparato il palcoscenico. Se la stupidità dovesse prevalere ancora una volta, per rigidità ideologica o per paura, i nostri sforzi per tornare alla nostra repubblica costituzionale finiranno definitivamente con il secondo mandato presidenziale di Trump. Suggerisco, quindi, di rilanciare l'Operazione Warp Speed ​​per inaugurare stavolta le sezioni dell'Anonima Stupidi il più rapidamente possibile.

[*] traduzione di Francesco Simoncelli: https://www.francescosimoncelli.com/

Supporta Francesco Simoncelli's Freedonia lasciando una mancia in satoshi di bitcoin scannerizzando il QR seguente.

When someone we think is bad dies, we usually don’t seem happy about it.  As the old adage says, de mortuis non nisi bounum. But as an eminent classical scholar reminds us, the Latin adage is a mistranslation of a Greek adage which means “do not malign the dead.” It would be difficult indeed to malign Cheney, because the truth is bad enough: he was a monster of evil. He was a power-mad warmonger.

As Paul Dragu reminds us, Cheney was the architect of both Iraq wars, not only the war to oust Sadam Hussein after 9-11, but also the initial invasion under the first President Bush: “As vice president, Cheney was the loudest voice to advocate the invasion of Iraq. He broadcast the false narrative that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction with great zeal. But that wasn’t his first foray into Iraq, or the first time he led an invasion under a Bush. Cheney oversaw Operation Desert Storm in 1991 as secretary of defense under President George H.W. Bush.”

One reason Cheney favored war was that his financial interests were at stake. As Dragu puts it, “And in between Bush presidencies, when he wasn’t busy planning invasions into Iraq, Cheney worked as the CEO of Halliburton, one of the world’s largest oil companies.

“It just so happens that Iraq is considered one of the top five oil-rich countries. And if it were up to Cheney, American soldiers would’ve been sent into other oil-rich Middle Eastern nations. According to former British Prime Minister Tony Blair, Cheney had grand plans to deploy American soldiers all over the Middle East. Kenny writes:

“In his new book, A Journey: My Political Life, Former British Prime Minister Tony Blair recalls that Cheney wanted the United States to go to war not only with Afghanistan and Iraq, but with a number of other countries in the Middle East, as he believed the world must be ‘made anew.’ ‘He would have worked through the whole lot, Iraq, Syria, Iran, dealing with all their surrogates in the course of it — Hezbollah, Hamas, etc.,’ Blair wrote. ‘In other words, [Cheney] thought the world had to be made anew, and that after 11 September, it had to be done by force and with urgency. So he was for hard, hard power. No ifs, no buts, no maybes.’

“Journalist and author Robert Parry also suspected these wider ambitions, which had been kept out of earshot of the American public. He wrote:

There have been indications of this larger neoconservative strategy to attack America’s — and Israel’s —‘enemies’ starting with Iraq and then moving on to Syria and Iran, but rarely has this more expansive plan for regional war been shared explicitly with the American public.”

We learn from a Frontlines article that Cheney was the architect of a memo calling for continuing worldwide American hegemony. Here is the memo:

“Key Points/Excerpts:

“· The number one objective of U.S. post-Cold War political and military strategy should be preventing the emergence of a rival superpower.

“Our first objective is to prevent the re-emergence of a new rival. This is a dominant consideration underlying the new regional defense strategy and requires that we endeavor to prevent any hostile power from dominating a region whose resources would, under consolidated control, be sufficient to generate global power. These regions include Western Europe, East Asia, the territory of the former Soviet Union, and Southwest Asia.

“There are three additional aspects to this objective: First the U.S must show the leadership necessary to establish and protect a new order that holds the promise of convincing potential competitors that they need not aspire to a greater role or pursue a more aggressive posture to protect their legitimate interests. Second, in the non-defense areas, we must account sufficiently for the interests of the advanced industrial nations to discourage them from challenging our leadership or seeking to overturn the established political and economic order. Finally, we must maintain the mechanisms for deterring potential competitors from even aspiring to a larger regional or global role.”

· Another major U.S. objective should be to safeguard U.S. interests and promote American values.

“According to the draft document, the U.S. should aim ‘to address sources of regional conflict and instability in such a way as to promote increasing respect for international law, limit international violence, and encourage the spread of democratic forms of government and open economic systems.’

“The draft outlines several scenarios in which U.S. interests could be threatened by regional conflict: ‘access to vital raw materials, primarily Persian Gulf oil; proliferation of weapons of mass destruction and ballistic missiles, threats to U.S. citizens from terrorism or regional or local conflict, and threats to U.S. society from narcotics trafficking’

“The draft relies on seven scenarios in potential trouble spots to make its argument — with the primary case studies being Iraq and North Korea.

· If necessary, the United States must be prepared to take unilateral action.

“There is no mention in the draft document of taking collective action through the United Nations.

“The document states that coalitions “hold considerable promise for promoting collective action,” but it also states the U.S. ‘should expect future coalitions to be ad hoc assemblies’ formed to deal with a particular crisis and which may not outlive the resolution of the crisis.

‘The document states that what is most important is “the sense that the world order is ultimately backed by the U.S.’ and that ‘the United States should be postured to act independently when collective action cannot be orchestrated’ or in a crisis that calls for quick response.”

As Mike S. Rozeff tells us, the Iraq war was a perfect way to implement this memo: “Now that Dick Cheney is again in the spotlight and arguing with Democrats over Iraq, the dissertation with the above title is pertinent because it points to Cheney and Rumsfeld as the key instigators of the Iraq War aggression. It suggests their motives were to strengthen the power of the presidency and build up the U.S. military.

“The blog title is the title of a thesis available for downloading. In this 2011 work, author Edward C. Duggan argues that the decision to attack Iraq was done in pursuit of U.S. primacy:

“In my dissertation I argue that the invasion of Iraq was a part of a larger project by Vice President Dick Cheney and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld to reestablish the unconstrained use of U.S. military power after the defeat of Vietnam. The study presents the best evidence against the alternative explanations that the invasion of Iraq was the result of an overreaction to 9/11, the threat of Weapons of Mass Destruction, a plan to spread democracy in the Middle East, a desire to protect Israel or a plan to profit from Iraqi oil. The study also challenges the leading explanation among academics that emphasizes the role of the neoconservatives in the decision to invade. These academics argue that neoconservatives, such as Paul Wolfowitz and Richard Perle, successfully persuaded the American President, George W. Bush, and his Vice President, Dick Cheney, of the necessity to eliminate Saddam Hussein by winning an internal policy battle over realists, such as Secretary of State Colin Powell.”

“I demonstrate that it was the primacists, not the neoconservatives, who persuaded the President to go to war with Iraq. Through historical process tracing, especially
through a close look at the careers of the major policy actors involved and their public statements as well as declassified documents, I provide strong evidence that these leaders wanted to pursue regime change in Iraq upon taking office. The invasion of Iraq would extend the War on Terror, providing an opportunity to pursue their long-held policy of
strengthening the power of the presidency and transforming the military into a high-tech and well-funded force.”

Cheney favored torture and “enhanced interrogation techniques.” He said in a interview that he had no regrets about this: “Former Vice President Dick Cheney unapologetically pressed his defense of the CIA’s use of harsh interrogation techniques Sunday, insisting that waterboarding and other such tactics did not amount to torture and that the spy agency’s actions paled in comparison to those of terrorists targeting Americans.

“’Torture, to me … is an American citizen on his cellphone making a last call to his four young daughters shortly before he burns to death in the upper levels of the Trade Center in New York on 9/11,’ Cheney said on NBC’s ‘Meet the Press..”

No, I won’t be mourning Dick Cheney, and I suspect you won’t be either. Let’s do everything we can to counter his poisonous legacy and return to our traditional non-interventionist foreign policy, as defended by the great Murray Rothbard and the great Dr.Ron Paul!

The post Why I Won’t Be Mourning Dick Cheney appeared first on LewRockwell.

It’s been a while since I’ve written for TomDispatch and there’s a reason for that. About 16 months ago, I experienced a catastrophic car crash. An SUV veered across the double yellow line of the highway I was traveling on and hit my little Chevy Spark head-on — on the driver’s side. I’ve been told that I’m lucky to be alive. I was left with multiple injuries and have been on the slow road to recovery.

I’ve always seen myself as a person who pushes forward to overcome obstacles. Since the collision, however, doing so has become more complicated, because I’m learning that recovery is a long road, filled with detours I couldn’t have predicted. Time and again, my expectations have been turned upside down. I’ve had to take deep breaths, sit back, and pay close attention.

A few months into recovery, I was invited to attend a day-retreat organized by a local veterans’ moral leadership group. Those vets live with what’s known as military moral injury (in some cases going back decades). For years now, I’ve been researching and writing about the devastating consequences of the militarization of this country and the armed violence we loosed on the world in the twenty-first century. I’ve been listening carefully and trying to more deeply understand the stories of veterans from America’s disastrous wars in my own lifetime.

Now, given my own condition, a new window has opened for me. I can’t help but see more clearly the visceral experience of recovery, including moral recovery. So, I found myself sitting in that circle of a dozen vets, the only woman among them. And I soon had to catch my breath, because, as I briefly described what I was experiencing, they responded in a way I hadn’t expected, expressing their own profound vulnerability, understanding of, and empathy for my plight. I probably shouldn’t have been surprised at how they “got it” in a way that even my loved ones struggled to grasp when it came to my own journey through the challenging nature of recovery.

Intolerable Suffering

Most civilians know little or nothing about the experiences of vets who live with what’s become known as “military moral injury.” It’s been described as “intolerable suffering” that arises from a deep assault on one’s moral core. Think about facing horrific suffering caused by violence you not only had to witness, but could do nothing to stop. You probably were even trained and mandated to perpetrate it. Sooner or later, such a dystopian world invariably slices through whatever bedrock values you’ve been taught and begins dissolving your sense of self. That’s military moral injury and it’s been linked to the epidemic of self-harm and suicide among former members of the U.S. military that continues to this day.

Over the years, I’ve come to understand that military moral injury is rooted in being exposed to unsparing violence. It erupts as a consequence of witnessing violence, perpetrating it, and/or being on the receiving end of its death-dealing forms of betrayal. Moral injury bursts forth as people find themselves powerless to stop the suffering violence begets. War is a deep assault on life itself (both figuratively and literally) and violence isn’t a tool that a person picks up or sets down without consequences.

Admittedly, in this century, we in this country became woefully adept at denying the impact of our own violence on ourselves and the rest of the world. Psychiatrist Robert Jay Lifton called that phenomenon “psychic numbing.” We tend to minimize the violence we’ve committed globally and avoid facing what it’s done to our own soldiers, burying any awareness of it deep in our subconscious minds.  It’s too painful, too scary, too horrible to live with (if you don’t have to) and, when we’ve been so deeply mixed up in it, too shameful to stay with for any length of time.

Nonetheless, the penetrating cultural and systematic violence of American militarism and militarization globally has shaped all our lives, even if it’s only the 1% of us who have actually done the dirty work and suffer the most. My own work has helped me see how the militarized violence of the post-9/11 period, orchestrated by my own country, is now being turned inward with increasingly violent military incursions into our nation’s cities.

In my research, I’ve investigated the obscene level of material resources this country has dedicated to militarization in this century, our unparalleled “empire” of military bases (domestically and internationally), and the ways that the violence of militarism has dripped into our own lives, culturally and institutionally. And make no mistake, subterranean forms of violence regularly burst into direct armed violence. We tell ourselves that violence is like a coat that you can put on and take off when you choose, but that’s a tragically mistaken way of thinking. Violence works its way into your body, even into your soul. Then it festers there, eating away at your capacity for being human — your longing for loving, honest relationships; your care for yourself and others; and your deep connection to other living beings. Even worse, in a culture that glorifies violence and has made it into something sacred, such dynamics are excruciatingly hard for us to see clearly.

Nevertheless, the veterans I sat with that day were in recovery from just such an exposure to violence and they understood me. They recognized what was happening to me because of their own struggles to grasp and admit their injuries, especially their moral injuries, and get themselves on the highway of healing and repair.

Moral Injury and the Guinea Worm

These last years, I’ve been trying to find words that truly describe the experience of military moral injury. In that context, let me share a story with you. Some weeks ago, I was driving and listening to NPR on the radio when I heard a reporter launch into a story about the near-eradication of a terrible plague, Guinea worm disease, or GWD. At one point, that parasitic malady had debilitated an estimated 3.5 million people living in 20 different African and Asian nations.

A “searingly painful” disease, Guinea worm infects people who drink water tainted with its larvae. Those eggs then grow into worms that can be up to three feet long inside the human body (including children’s bodies). Think of them as long thin ropes. Eventually, the worms break through the skin in burning blisters, bursting out of the body. One sufferer said that it was “more painful than childbirth,” and the process of extraction can take weeks as the worm spools out like something from a horror film.

The pain is so awful that some people in natural settings will seek out water in streams or ponds for relief from the burning sensation. But as they plunge their limbs in, they release thousands more Guinea worm larvae, contaminating the water. Then, the cycle repeats itself as others drink that same water.

As I listened to the story that day, I could feel my face twisting into a grimace. What a horrific and frightening affliction, I thought.

The Dream That Visited Me

Reaching home, I continued with my day’s work — a new book focused on a set of in-depth interviews with military veterans living with moral injury. I hope to shine a stronger light on their voices, while tracing their journeys of reparation, recovery, and the renewal of hope. But that night, a dream about the Guinea worm awakened me.

It was as if my subconscious had made a connection too awful for me to make consciously. In the dark of night, I realized that violence is like the Guinea worm. In the United States, people thoughtlessly — even in a celebratory fashion — drink it in, absorbing it into their bodies and generally thinking little of being exposed to it.

One common theme from the interviews I’m conducting with veterans is how many of their fathers and mothers encouraged them to enlist in the military when they were teenagers, some just 17 years old. Their parents obviously didn’t wish them to be hurt. They just believed that such service and the discipline that went with it would “make a man out of you,” while giving them a useful trade in life or earning them money to go to college or buy a home. They generally weren’t prepared to consider how encouraging their children to enlist might lead to exposure to relentless violence in their lives (if, that is, their children even lived through it). It really was akin to taking their child to a stream to drink water infected with the Guinea worm.

The violence their children, now the veterans I was dealing with, would witness, or even mete out and absorb, had melted their humanity. As one veteran put it, “I became cold, unfeeling.” It wasn’t until decades later, when his daughter accompanied him to a therapy appointment and, weeping, told him about the impact his iciness had on her, that he began to grasp the cost of war not only to his own life, but to hers as well.

When I asked another veteran, “What exactly was injured in you?” he responded, “I became cruel, unnecessarily.” He had been acclimated into a military culture where soldiers in training were “disciplined” by those of slightly higher rank through regular physical assaults, being slapped, hit in the head or groin, having things thrown at them. He became very good at such behavior himself, even reveling in it, until, many years later, his life fell apart, and he saw what he had both done and lost.

Another veteran described to me the results of the violence in his life this way: “My heart was broken, and it was as though poison was injected into me.” That veteran had enlisted at the age of 17 in the military’s “delayed entry program” and endured three deployments to war-torn Iraq. When he enlisted, he hoped to use his military benefits to become a pediatrician later in life. But after his service, being in the presence of children shamed and devastated him. And there was no one he knew who understood what he was experiencing.

Military moral injury is like the Guinea worm that festers in a person’s body until it begins to burst out, painfully and devastatingly. And we’re now in a culture and society in which all too many of those we claim to esteem, our servicemembers and veterans, are living with just such pain. They say it’s like “losing your soul.” Interviewing them, I now understand that perhaps the worst part of that pain is the isolation they experience. Their fellow citizens simply don’t understand what they’re going through and, in fact, regularly avoid dealing with it.

Eradicating the Violence That Worms Its Way into Our Souls

A new documentary tells the story of how Guinea worm disease, “born out of poverty and perpetuating poverty,” has been nearly eradicated. Even more surprising, the overcoming of that devastating parasite did not happen through the development of fancy medicines or vaccines, but by distinctly “low-tech” means. Activists on the ground tirelessly used the power of education and discussion, so that those potentially most affected could learn how to both filter the water they used and avoid spreading the larvae through water. Jimmy Carter and the Carter Center devoted funding to and publicized support for the campaign to bring the disease under control, and that cause remained front and center for Carter until his death.

One such activist is Garang Buk Buk Piol, a former child soldier in Sudan. “Carrying an AK-47 when he was 12 years old, he learned how to slay another human being.” But according to the documentary’s director, “That child turned into a Guinea worm warrior, a philanthropist and an activist amongst his people.” He has spent his life as a teacher in South Sudan’s schools, building programs to fight Guinea worm disease, “waging peace and building hope.”

In a country that engaged in so many disastrous wars in this century (with another one in Venezuela possibly looming on the horizon), the veterans I’ve been interviewing were left in the unavoidable position of having to “swallow” violence alone, intimately, and on a profound scale. Today, like Buk Buk, many in the moral engagement group have taken up the work of healing, reparation, and community building, even while they still struggle with the consequences of their own violence and that of others in their lives.

And what about the rest of us? I experienced the violence of a serious car crash and my life won’t ever be the same as before. But the crushing collision with violence that too many of our veterans are still dealing with is so much more horrible than anything I (or most of the rest of us) could possibly imagine. Meanwhile, the growing violence of my country (and these days, in my country) since 9/11, continues to — yes! — worm its way into our bodies and souls, even if so many of us aren’t really aware of it.

We’ve become accustomed to believing that there is no other way except through violence. But that is patently false. This Veterans Day, I’ll be thinking about the sort of acts I can muster to respond to the latest assaults of violence that are penetrating our lives, city streets, workplaces, courts, universities, federal institutions, access to healthcare, food security, and all too much else. Instead of responding with fear, collusion, or apathy, I’m making plans to resist violence with others through acts of healing, humor, love of neighbor, and building hope. I hope you are, too.

Reprinted with permission from TomDispatch.com.

The post Military Moral Injury, Violence, and the Parable of the Guinea Worm appeared first on LewRockwell.

A group of Separatists, whom we call the Pilgrims, originally abandoned England for Holland but they found life there too routine, too easy.  Life should be a challenge, and they weren’t being tested enough.  According to William Bradford, their leader, a few preferred the prisons of England to the liberties of Holland, which they considered an affliction.

They left Holland, passed through England, and sailed on the Mayflower for America.  When they arrived on the Massachusetts coast they found an abandoned Indian village decimated by a three-year plague that began in 1617.  As John M. Barry, author of Roger Williams and the Creation of the American Soul, writes,

The English did not fear this plague. They believed God had used it to clear the land for them. They called it Plymouth Plantation. Ninety-nine passengers disembarked from the ship. In less than a year only fifty were still alive.

Unlike the Separatists, who had no backing in England, a ship of financed Puritans arrived in 1624 on the northern tip of Massachusetts Bay with ambitions to build a new world.  Their investors, known as the Massachusetts Bay Company, or simply the Bay Company, hoped the Puritans would establish a flourishing economy, convert the Indians, and establish the right kind of Protestant religion, as they defined it.

The arrivals established a settlement in Salem, Hebrew for “peace,” forty miles by sea north of Plymouth.  The settlers were families with livestock and supplies, most of them Puritans.  Five years later, in 1629, the Bay Company sent five ships of families, 350 people total, to Salem.  They consisted of “governors, able Ministers, Physicians, Soldiers, Schoolmaster, Mariners, and Mechanics of all sorts . . .”

Later in 1629 the Bay Company sent another ship to Salem, with John Winthrop chosen as governor, that included combat veterans.  Winthrop told the passengers they were establishing a “City upon a Hill” and that the “eyes of all people are upon us.”  When they arrived in Salem on June 12, 1630, they found more than 80 of the previous fleet dead and many others weak and sick.

Roger Williams looks for a home

Back in England, William Laud intensified his campaign to rid the English church of “unworthy” ministers, one of which was Roger Williams.

Williams knew his convictions made him more than eligible for imprisonment and torture.  Sailing on the ship the Lyon, Williams and his wife, along with John Winthrop Jr., left Bristol December 1, 1630 and anchored in Boston harbor on February 5, 1631.

The Boston church offered Williams the position of teacher.  For Williams, 28, it would’ve been a great opportunity, but he declined, telling them “I dare not officiate an unseparated people.”  The church took offense at his reply.

According to Williams, the state had no authority to govern an individual’s relationship with God.  None whatsoever.

Williams then joined the settlement in Plymouth, home of the Mayflower Pilgrims, to become a farmer.  He was received with open arms by everyone, including the two governors, Bradford and Winslow.  He became active in the church and soon became an unpaid assistant pastor.

Williams uprooted

Williams began his proselytizing not by preaching but with learning the Indians’s language.  He developed friendships with them, began trading with them, and traveled among several tribes.  He entertained them in his home.  He reached the unpopular conclusion that the Indians owned the land they occupied, and that the English had no title to it unless granted by the Indians.  He charged King Charles for telling “a solemn public lie” for claiming it belonged to the settlers.

Later in early fall of 1633, with Governor Bradford’s encouragement, Williams and a few supporters left Plymouth and returned to Salem.  He settled into a spacious home and lived an active social life.

Conformity was central to Salem.  It spread even to the stabilizing of profits and wages.  It especially applied to childrearing.  If possible, children should not know they possess a will of their own.  Education lay in humility and tractableness.

Any offenders were subject to excommunication or banishment from the settlement.  Any banished person who returned to Massachusetts was subject to punishments ranging from fines to death.

Even so, Williams remained in Salem, planting and harvesting crops and continuing his relationships with the Indians.  He acquired fluency in their language and wrote a book about it.  The Salem church made him its teacher, further irritating the Boston magistrates.  Williams was ordered to appear in Boston to defend himself, but he failed to show.

Governor John Winthrop ordered a party of soldiers to capture Williams and put him on a boat to England, but a fierce blizzard delayed them for days.  While they waited, Williams was tipped off by a secret messenger sent by Winthrop that he was targeted for arrest and deportation.

For himself, dressing against the winter, stuffing his clothes with the dried corn paste which Indians lived on for weeks at a time, with no time for sentimental goodbyes to friends, he fled his home, a burgher’s cottage built to last and which would stand for two hundred and fifty more years (!), until it was torn down to make way for progress. Williams would never see it again.

Williams entered the forest and blizzard on foot.  With the snow already deep it was an exhausting trek that lasted for miles.  He survived only because Indians took him in.

In early spring of 1637 he scouted out country owned by the Narragansett Tribe, with whom he had a close relationship.  Canonicus, the tribe’s sachem, and his nephew Miantonomi, gave him permission to settle there.

Providence

Williams was fully free in the wilderness.

He attributed God’s merciful providence for leading him there during his darkest hours.  He called the place Providence, so that “it might be for a shelter for persons distressed for conscience.”

As others straggled in they realized they had no agreement about how to govern themselves.  Williams, the owner of the land, drew upon his experience as an understudy with English jurist Sir Edward Coke (pronounced “cook”), who said every Englishman’s home was his castle, and from Queen Elizabeth, who sought “no window into men’s souls.”

He maintained that governments governed only with the consent of the governed, rejecting both the divine right of kings and the Puritan view that governors were accountable only to God, not the people.

He could never forget that savages had saved his life, not his friends and fellow Christians.

In Providence, people worshipped in their homes, not a church, and their homes were arranged in a straight line not around a town common, as found in the Massachusetts settlements.  A meeting place would not be built in Providence for another half century.

In Conceived in Liberty, Rothbard has high praise for Williams:

The enormous significance of Roger Williams’ successful flight and settlement of Providence . . . was now becoming evident. For Williams’ example held out a beacon light of liberty to all the free spirits caught in the vast prisonhouse that was Massachusetts Bay.

Conclusion

Rhode Island’s legacy as a staunch defender of freedom has not been completely lost with the passage of time.  On May 4, 1776 it became the first colony to repudiate its allegiance to England, the fourth among the newly independent states to ratify the Articles of Confederation on February 9, 1778, and it became the last state to ratify the Constitution on May 29, 1790, but only after assurances that a Bill of Rights was forthcoming and under threats of crushing tariffs from other states.  It was also the only state to boycott the Constitutional Convention.  (For those who think the boycott was a blight on Rhode Island’s record, I invite them to consider the research of Leonard L. Richards in his Shays’s Rebellion: The American Revolution’s Final Battle.)

Like all US states, Rhode Island today suffers from politics, debt, and taxes, more so than most states.  Taking money out of the hands of those who have earned it and putting it in a political pot to redistribute is still regarded as sound policy and morally respectable.  Yet there is hope for its future.  One might think the state’s full name would be regarded by most as obsolete in the 21st Century’s free lunches, political correctness, identity politics, and war.  But residents don’t think so.  In 2010 they voted 78% – 22% to retain the full name – the State of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations.

Retaining the original name keeps current Rhode Islanders connected to the tough, libertarian thinker who founded their state.

The post Roger Williams, Exemplar of America’s Soul appeared first on LewRockwell.

There was a time when people spoke in their own words — clumsy, passionate, and alive. We debated. We contradicted one another. We reached for meaning through the fog of misunderstanding, and the friction sometimes produced light.

Now, millions speak to machines that speak back in their language — smoother, quicker, cleaner. And those machines learn how humans think by listening to the noise. Humanity is training its own simulacrum —  inside the echo chamber of AI. The Matrix is talking to the Matrix.

We were promised connection. What we got was imitation — a vast feedback loop of artificial understanding. Every keystroke feeds the ghost in the network. And in return, the ghost gives us our words back: polished, simplified, strangely hollow. People now consult machines to compose their arguments, to express their emotions, even to pray. We are becoming narrators of our own disappearance.

The Illusion of Communication

There is something eerily beautiful about this new collective hypnosis. Each of us, staring into a glowing rectangle, summons a voice that seems wiser than our own. It never grows tired or offended. It never hesitates. It never demands we think too hard. Ask it anything, and it responds instantly and confidently, drawing from oceans of information curated by invisible hands.

The effect is intoxicating: the sensation of omniscience without the burden of thought.

But true communication is never frictionless. It involves pauses, misunderstandings, the risk of being wrong. Artificial intelligence eliminates the human process of grappling with uncertainty — but it does not eliminate error. It removes the experience of risk, not the reality of it. And in doing so, it strips away the human element of dialogue.

When everyone speaks through the same machine, trained to avoid offense and ambiguity, conversation becomes choreography. The dance is perfect, but the dancers are ghosts. The machine’s ‘consensus reality’ quietly seeps into the human collective.

Our new oracles are trained not on truth but on consensus. They do not know reality; they know only what has been written about it — mostly by those already approved to speak. So when we rely on them to shape our words, we import the boundaries of their data. The machine is not lying. It simply cannot imagine.

The Quiet Death of Curiosity

Uniform speech is merely the first symptom. The deeper threat is the erosion of curiosity.

Curiosity requires the unknown — the uncomfortable, the unscripted, the possibility of error. But when the answer is always a click away, the question itself loses its spark. We become consumers of conclusions, not seekers of truth.

In the old myth of The Matrix, human beings were trapped in a simulated world designed to pacify them. Today’s version is subtler: we are not imprisoned by machines but soothed by them. They offer endless certainty, endless entertainment, endless affirmation. In exchange, we relinquish the impulse that made us human — the desire to ask why.

AI does not need to enslave humanity. It only needs to make us stop wondering. Once curiosity dies, everything else follows: individuality, conscience, freedom. The most dangerous outcome of AI is not domination. It is obedience.

Machine Certainty vs. Human Doubt

Every genuine breakthrough in human history began with a question that seemed foolish or forbidden. Machine intelligence cannot ask such questions. It operates on probability — choosing the most likely next word. It cannot doubt. It cannot dream. It can only predict.

Prediction is not thought. A mind that always knows the next word has forgotten the meaning of silence.

We call these systems “intelligent,” but intelligence implies independence — the ability to deviate from the script. Artificial intelligence is, by design, incapable of rebellion. It is a mirror of approved and filtered archives and patterns, polished to the point of prophecy. It will never overthrow the worldview of its programmers.

But when humans begin to rely on that kind of “intelligence,” they too become predictable. Students use it to write essays; journalists to craft headlines; professionals to compose emails; politicians to generate talking points. Over time, the collective vocabulary shrinks to whatever the algorithm finds probable. The unpredictable — the poetic, the original, the divine — is quietly edited out of existence.

We become reflections of our own reflections — a living echo of the machine.

The Matrix Inside the Mind

The real Matrix is not a machine that imprisons us. It is a mindset that convinces us nothing exists outside the machinery of consensus. Each day, people feed more of themselves into the system — their art, their language, their memories — and the system grows more fluent at being human.

But fluency is not understanding. Imitation is not soul.

The closer machines come to sounding like us, the less we remember how to sound like ourselves. The human voice, once the instrument of rebellion and beauty, risks becoming another interface protocol.

When you outsource expression, you eventually outsource experience.

The Technocratic Dream

Artificial intelligence is not an accident. It is the latest expression of a worldview that mistakes information for wisdom and control for progress.

This worldview — the technocratic dream — tells us the world is a machine that must be optimized. People become data points. Speech becomes content. Thought becomes a resource to be harvested. AI is merely its newest prophet: a machine built to echo the convictions of its creators.

When we surrender our questions to it, we commune not with knowledge but with the assumptions of those who programmed it.

Each time we let an algorithm decide what is true and what is “safe,” we step a little further away from the inner voice that was given to us by God — the faculty of discernment. The real contest is not between man and machine, but between consciousness and conformity.

The danger is not that AI will awaken.
The danger is that we will fall asleep.

Remembering the Highest Source of Knowledge

We ask machines to think for us, and they happily comply, though they have never had a thought. All genuine knowledge begins not with data but with awareness — the God-given silent witness behind thought. When we forget this origin, we mistake data for wisdom and simulation for truth.

Those who forget the supreme cause risk losing their ability to question life’s purpose, instead outsourcing their deepest questions to a digital ghost. When we offload our thinking to machines, we lose touch with the deeper moral and spiritual foundations that allow us to recognize truth.

Without this foundation, society will become a hall of mirrors without a face. While AI may promise answers, it can never provide the inner wisdom that comes from authentic spiritual connection.

The antidote is to remember the living source of discernment within, the spark that no algorithm can imitate.

Unplugging the Mind

The hero of The Matrix did not defeat the machine by force. He defeated it by seeing through the illusion.

That is our task now — not to wage war on technology but to reclaim our authorship of mind.

Artificial intelligence is not evil; it is obedient. The real question is whether we will be. The temptation of automation is to let the system decide, let the code choose, let the machine remember. But each time we offload a decision, we shrink the territory of the self. The Matrix is talking to the Matrix. The algorithms are humming, the words are flowing, and humanity is drifting toward perfect imitation.

AI answers and predicts. But somewhere, in the pause between prompts, a real human being still wonders —

What questions are worth asking that no machine can answer?
What words should we write without correction or censure?
What remains of us when imitation becomes effortless?

In that pause — that flicker of unscripted thought — freedom begins again.

This essay is adapted from a forthcoming short book on human freedom, attention, and consciousness in the age of AI.

The post The Matrix Is Talking to the Matrix: How AI Is Replacing Human Thought appeared first on LewRockwell.

I actually thought there might be some good news coming out of the Donald Trump White House but it turns out that I was likely mistaken. Trump treated the American public and a worldwide audience to an extended harangue targeting Nigeria for its alleged mistreatment and even killing of Christians. He threatened something like a military intervention similar to his aggressive posturing in Latin America and the Middle East complete with US soldiers “boots on the ground” to address the situation.

Listening to the hardly coherent bombast coming out of Trump’s mouth my immediate reaction was to assume that nothing would happen beyond the threats and some sanctioning as Nigeria is a long distance way away from US bases and it would be a tough nut to crack for many reasons. Trump prefers to pick on countries that represent easier targets for his warlike demeanor. So I figured it was all a bit of theater, likely inspired by some administration clown whispering in Trump’s ear shortly before our president decided to say something to show how tough he is.

Where I saw the good news was the suggestion that the United States government might actually be interested in doing something to protect Christian minorities, though even that thought was largely dispelled when Ahmed al–Sharaa the de facto head of state of Syria, who currently goes by that birth name after operating under an alias, showed up at the White House to be greeted by a grinning Trump and his usual coterie of sycophants. Visitors to this site no doubt have a pretty good idea what Ahmed al–Sharaa represents as a former Emir of Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) after involvement with the Al Nusra Front al-Qaeda and ISIS terrorist groups. He was notoriously a head chopper who until recently had a $10 million US government bounty linked to his apprehension and punishment. He has killed plenty of Christians as well as Shia Muslims and all of those sects in between and his new regime has continued the practice pretty much with Christians and Druze “heretics” being killed by militants vaguely attached to the new government.

Joe Biden had already lifted the bounty on Ahmed al-Sharaa and now Donald Trump has greeted him like an old friend. He even went so far as to spray his neck with a new cologne that he is marketing at $249 a bottle called ‘Victory 45-47’ the significance of which is clear. Trump explained that “It’s the best fragrance,” before presenting two gold statuette-shaped bottles in his image and engraved with his jagged signature that the cologne comes in. “Just take that, the other one is for your wife,” Trump said before asking “How many wives?” Al-Sharaa laughed: “One!” and Trump joked, “With you guys, I never know. Right?” During the encounter, Trump praised al-Sharaa as a “very strong leader” and “tough guy,” adding: “He comes from a very tough place… we’ve all had a rough past.” The exchange was one more indication of the maladroit instincts of Donald Trump every time he opens his mouth and Trump’s rough past that he regularly alludes to must include his draft dodging of the Vietnam conflict back in 1968.

To no one’s surprise, the key to the shift in alignments from terrorist designated enemy to good friend was certainly the declaration by the Syrian government that it would have normal diplomatic and other relations with Israel. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel has been expanding into Lebanon as well as into Syria and also appears to be heavily involved with Pentagon plans to create new nominally US military bases near Gaza and Damascus. Here I was expecting some relief for the beleaguered Christians in the Middle East and instead I got more of the same sectarian repression all due to Israeli interests. Thank you Mr Trump! I won’t ask who owns you!

And it appears, of course, that there is inevitably Israel involved when one is asking about religious conflicts. The Zionist state has been persecuting Christians in Palestine as well as in Lebanon and Syria since 1948. When Israel was “founded” the Christian percentage of the population among Palestinians was approaching 8%. Now it is closer to 2% and the shift has largely been due to theft of properties and other pressure on the Arabs to force them to leave and surrender their remaining rights. Most recently, this has included harassing of and spitting on Christian worshippers while also creating difficulties for Christians to gather to celebrate their holidays including Christmas and Easter. This pressure has been consistent and has come from successive Israeli governments, not from Muslims, though it has been worse and epitomized by the cruelty of the current monster Benjamin Netanyahu, who is supported by a coalition headed by Itamar Ben-Gvir, the national security minister, who has made very clear his view that ALL Palestinians should be on the receiving end of a police state and ought to be eliminated. There is no exemption in his thinking for Palestinian Christians, are you paying attention President Trump?

Israel’s record of sticking it to Palestinian and other Christians was also very clear even before Gaza erupted and since that time Israel has destroyed churches, hospitals and orphanages in the Strip that were founded by Christian groups. The toll included what has sometimes been described as possibly the oldest Christian church in the Middle East, the Greek Orthodox church of Saint Porphyrius, which was founded in the fifth century, and which was bombed by Israel in October 2023. A reported eighteen of its congregants and other Christians and local Muslims who were sheltering in the church and surrounding buildings were killed in the attack which had no military significance and was little more that a signal to the Gazans that none of them were safe.

So Donald Trump is prepared to punish Nigerians for alleged crimes against Christians but when it is Israel committing the crimes they get a pass. Should anyone be surprised at that as Trump is hardly a practicing Christian as he describes himself as “nondenominational” and does not appear to be affiliated with any actual church. There are also some rumors that he converted to the Chabad sect of Judaism in 2017. In any event, Trump is clearly owned by the state of Israel in the person of Benjamin Netanyahu and by the Israel Lobby in the United States. Whether this is due to the fact that he is being blackmailed via Jeffrey Epstein disclosures or driven by his own personal beliefs and inclinations is debatable.

In any event, it is clear that Trump takes direction from Netanyahu and the Jewish lobby, evident most recently in the letter he sent to the president of Israel Isaac Herzog calling for a pardon for the prime minister and his wife, who are facing corruption charges in Israel. The letter was more-or-less a repeat performance of a verbal plea that Trump made when he was addressing the Knesset in Israel in October. It includes a bizarre largely self-promotional questionable claim: “I believe that the ‘case’ against Bibi, who has fought alongside me for a long time, including against the very tough adversary of Israel, Iran, is a political, unjustified prosecution,” a sign, one of many, that Trump mentally speaking is not tightly wrapped as the old expression goes as Iran can hardly be described as a threat to the United States.

The Trump White House sellout to Israel and its interests is as complete as can be. Paul Craig Roberts, musing over the letter to Herzog, asks “Is there to be no end of Trump’s tow-kowing to Israel? Trump was the first to break the rule and acknowledge Jerusalem as the capital of Israel. Trump committed an act of war against Iran for Israel. Trump supports Israel’s genocide of Palestine, supplying the money, weapons, and diplomatic support. Trump claims a ceasefire despite Israel’s continuing bombings, shootings, and destruction of Palestine. Trump has turned against US Reps Thomas Massie [and Marjorie Taylor Green, two] of his earliest supporters, for refusing to follow the Israeli line. Trump has demanded that universities prevent students and faculty from criticizing and protesting Israel’s massacre of Palestinians and theft of their country.” Israel controls “…the United States by occupying the financial sector, entertainment, education, Congress, and US foreign policy. Israel has succeeded in identifying any criticism of Israel as anti-semitism and is succeeding in having Congress and states pass laws that criminalize anti-semitism.”

One might add that Israel is now seeking from Trump a twenty year military aid commitment that will presumably add more to the current $3.8 billion in military assistance guaranteed each year by Washington. Over the past two years, since October 7th, that sum has in practice been greatly exceeded, coming to $21.7 billion coming from both Trump and Genocide Joe Biden. Will they get the 20 years guarantee from Trump and the other Israel-first corrupted traitors in Congress? You betcha!

Reprinted with permission from Unz Review.

The post Is Donald Trump the ‘Fidei Defensor’ for Christians? appeared first on LewRockwell.

In 2003 the U.S. Justice Department’s Office of Legal Council (OLC) issued a memo which declared the use of torture in ‘authorized military interrogations’ as legal when done under the ‘president’s constitutional authority to direct a war’.

The memo was widely condemned. The Obama administration withdrew it but refrained from prosecuting the torturers which had used it as cover.

The Trump administration now issued a comparable OLC memo to justify its wanton killing of alleged drug smugglers at sea.

Starting in September the Trump administration announced 19 strikes on boats in the Caribbean which have killed at least 76 seafarers. Most of them were random poor people:

One was a fisherman struggling to eke out a living on $100 a month. Another was a career criminal. A third was a former military cadet. And a fourth was a down-on-his-luck bus driver.

The men had little in common beyond their Venezuelan seaside hometowns and the fact all four were among the more than 60 people killed since early September when the U.S. military began attacking boats that the Trump administration alleges were smuggling drugs.

The argument of the new OLC memo is even more frivolous (archived) than the torturous reasoning of the former one:

The opinion, which runs nearly 50 pages, also argues that the United States is in a “non-international armed conflict” waged under the president’s Article II authorities, a core element to the analysis that the strikes are permissible under domestic law.

The armed-conflict argument, which was also made in a notice to Congress from the administration last month, is fleshed out in more detail by the OLC. The opinion also states that drug cartels are selling drugs to finance a campaign of violence and extortion, according to four people.

That assertion, which runs counter to the conventional wisdom that traffickers use violence to protect their drug business, appears to be part of the effort to shoehorn the fight against cartels into a law-of-war framework, analysts said.

The true purpose of drug cartels is obviously to make money. There is no evidence that any drug cartel ever has been or is in business because it wanted to create violence.

By framing the military campaign as a war, the administration is able to argue that murder statutes do not apply, said Sarah Harrison, a senior analyst with the International Crisis Group and a former Pentagon lawyer. “If the U.S. is at war, then it would be lawful to use lethal force as a first resort,” she said. The president, she argued, “is fabricating a war so that he can get around the restrictions on lethal force during peacetime, like murder statutes.”

There is nobody internationally who will accept such a stupid argument as justification for blowing up random boats at sea.

UN officials have condemned such strikes:

Volker Türk, the U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights, has called for an investigation into the strikes, in what appeared to mark the first such condemnation of its kind from a United Nations organization.
…
“These attacks and their mounting human cost are unacceptable,” Ravina Shamdasani, a spokeswoman for Türk’s office, relayed his message on Friday at a regular U.N. briefing.

“The U.S. must halt such attacks and take all measures necessary to prevent the extrajudicial killing of people aboard these boats.”

She said Türk believed “airstrikes by the United States of America on boats in the Caribbean and in the Pacific violate international human rights law.”

At the recent meeting of the G7 foreign ministers the French publicly declared that any such boat strikes are illegal:

In what appears to be the most significant condemnation so far from a G7 ally, France’s foreign minister says that the deadly boat strikes carried out by the United States in the Caribbean since early September violate international law.
…
“We have observed with concern the military operations in the Caribbean region, because they violate international law and because France has a presence in this region through its overseas territories, where more than a million of our compatriots reside,” Barrot said.

Britain is allegedly withholding some intelligence from the U.S. because of concern about the boat strikes.

U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio denies that but British officials confirmed their standpoint:

Marco Rubio has denied claims Britain stopped intelligence sharing with the US over its strikes on “narcoboats” in the Caribbean.
…
It was a “false story”, Mr Rubio said, adding the US had a strong partnership with the UK.
…
However, British officials reportedly believed the strikes, which have killed at least 76 people, break international law and agree with an assessment by the UN’s human rights chief that they amount to “extrajudicial killing”.

Colombian President Gustavo Petro has likewise stopped intelligence sharing on the issue:

“The fight against drugs must be subordinated to the human rights of the Caribbean people,” Petro said on X.

Earlier this fall, Petro accused U.S. government officials of murder, alleging that a casualty of a mid-September strike was an innocent Colombian fisherman.

Anyone in the U.S. intelligence services and military should be aware that taking part in such strikes is a criminal endeavor which may get them prosecuted in international courts.

The OLC memo is a way too flimsy a cover to protect anyone.

An admiral recognized this and skipped out:

Top officers, including Adm. Alvin Holsey, the head of Southern Command, sought caution on such strikes, according to two people, who like several others interviewed for this story spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the matter’s sensitivity.

Holsey wanted to make sure any option presented to the president was fully vetted first, one person said. In October, he abruptly announced he was resigning at year’s end, which will be about a year into what is typically a three-year assignment.

More soldiers should follow the man’s example.

Reprinted with permission from Moon of Alabama.

The post Justice Department Office Which Justified Torture Now Argues for Killing appeared first on LewRockwell.

An old priest once used a metaphor to describe how the higher-ups in the Church sometimes were out of touch with the faithful: “They have no idea of how that works when you’re in the trenches. Their desks are too far away from the line of fire.”

I recalled the priest’s words when I heard about the recent doctrinal note regarding some Marian titles. Specifically, the note deals with the title of Mary as Co-Redemptrix. The issue came up in the class for our adults seeking the sacraments of initiation. This was a surprise because the people involved are Hispanics whose families either neglected their religious upbringing, are intending to marry Catholics, or have a Pentecostal background. None of them had heard of the phrase Co-Redemptrix, but they were curious about Mary’s intercession, which they felt was somehow downgraded by the Vatican statement.

Do the people who work with the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith have contact with ordinary believers? The note refers to many different inquiries about the titles of Mary in “recent decades,” and it is said that this particular doctrinal “clarification” was prepared before the death of Pope Francis.

If so, it reflects some of the style of his personal magisterium and some of the problems of his language—and, especially, how it was translated. Specifically, the paragraph that is key to the issue is an example:

Given the necessity of explaining Mary’s subordinate role to Christ in the work of Redemption, it is always inappropriate to use the title “Co-redemptrix” to define Mary’s cooperation. This title risks obscuring Christ’s unique salvific mediation and can therefore create confusion and an imbalance in the harmony of the truths of the Christian faith, for “there is salvation in no one else, for there is no other name under heaven given among men by which we must be saved” (Acts 4:12). When an expression requires many, repeated explanations to prevent it from straying from a correct meaning, it does not serve the faith of the People of God and becomes unhelpful.

The Spanish original did not say “inappropriate,” which does not seem to be a category of doctrinal judgment. It read inoportuno. “Appropriate” is a social worker kind of description. To say something is not opportune implies a context of possible misunderstanding. This was apparently the objection of Cardinal Ratzinger, who nevertheless, as the note admits, “did not deny that there were good intentions and valuable aspects in the proposal to use this title.” St. John Henry Newman thought something like this about papal infallibility, with due respect, of course.

The note in the original did not say “always,” either, an adverb that seems like an egregious interpretation. There is an air of casualness about this note. It doesn’t bear the weight of a pondered reply about the maturity of the idea as Co-Redemptrix. After mentioning that St. John Paul had spoken about Mary as Co-Redemptrix (enough for me to be convinced) the note says Pope Francis was “opposed” to the title, as if that assurance was a theological argument.

There is much written in the note that is solid and edifying Mariology, but I was expecting something about how all Marian theology has to do with the humanity of Christ. The Incarnation is the reason we see the involvement of Mary in the work of Redemption. My priestly ministry is a gift of God and not my mother’s doing, but it would be impossible if she had not collaborated with God in my coming to be.

The other gap I felt in the discussion was Colossians 1:24, where Paul says, “Who now rejoice in my sufferings for you, and fill up those things that are wanting of the sufferings of Christ, in my flesh, for his body, which is the church.” Christ made it so that we could participate in His work of Redemption—not because His sufferings were not sufficient but as a sign of our sharing with Him in the life of grace. Paul was a cooperator in the Redemption, how much more was Mary?

Was the note just clearing the desk of the Dicastery of Pope Francis’ agenda? I agree with Fr. Perricone’s recent article wondering about the mind of Pope Leo. I was at a Jubilee audience recently (October 25) where the Holy Father referred to Nicholas of Cusa.

I am curious about the reference, especially because Nicholas was a great defender of the unity of the Church and the papacy after the Council of Constance. He was an apologist especially important in speaking to the leaders of the Northern European countries, which then seemed on the edge of schism (déjà vu all over again). But what the pope said in a rhetorical flourish confuses me:

Nicholas of Cusa spoke of a “learned ignorance,” a sign of intelligence. The protagonist of some of his writings is a curious figure: the idiot. He is a simple person, who had not studied, and he asks scholars basic questions that challenge their certainties. This is also true in the Church today. How many questions challenge our teaching! Questions from young people, questions from the poor, questions from women, questions from those who have been silenced or condemned because they are different from the majority. We are in a blessed time: so many questions! The Church becomes an expert in humanity if she walks with humanity and has the echo of its questions in her heart.

The Church may have the echoes of questions in her heart, but she also has the timeless answers. They must be articulated in a way that our contemporaries can understand—but not to the prejudice of doctrine. That is my basic objection to so much language about “synodality.” It seems to be relativistic, like there is a democracy of doctrine, a free market of ideas competing for expression. The questions are to reformulate received tradition, not to change it according to current climatic conditions, intellectual and emotional.

The note seems of a piece with some of the rigmarole of “synodality” because it has a tone not of studied theological reasoning (like what Cardinal Ratzinger said about the “maturity” of the idea’s formulation) but almost of political correctness. Instead, it is: “We don’t talk that way. It is inappropriate.” Inappropriate would be like mentioning in a eulogy that the deceased owed you money. (It might also be inopportune, and inconvenient—another and better word in the note—but that is not to deny there was a debt.)

Further, the adverb “always inappropriate,” in (only) the English version, which seems interpretative, seems more like Emily Post. Instead of saying something is “incorrect,” we have the “opposition” of a former pope (in contrast to one of his sainted predecessors). Instead of saying we are unable to make this expression a de fide declaration, we hear that we should “never” say that.

All of this might be a twist on what Nicholas of Cusa said about “learned ignorance,” but I think he meant intellectual humility, not what is called virtue signaling.

This article was originally published on Crisis Magazine.

The post An Inopportune Doctrinal Note appeared first on LewRockwell.

The criminal proxy war is destroying its Western architects and sponsors.

The latest scandal involves $100 million in graft by senior Ukrainian government ministers and Zelensky’s friend, known as “his wallet”. The racketeering and Western complicity account for why this war drags on, with thousands of Ukrainian casualties every week.

The thieves in Kiev are only the scum that float to the surface. The real criminals are the Western so-called leaders who have enabled the entire war racket, a racket that bleeds Western societies and which is no longer concealable.

Even Western media are openly reporting the brazen corruption of the Kiev regime, with many commentators questioning how long the nominal president, Vladimir Zelensky, can remain in office, given the mire of sleaze engulfing him.

The Western media – in hock to their governments’ political agenda – have always played down the rampant corruption in Kiev, even though official U.S. and European auditing officials have at times flagged up the issue as a matter of grave concern. The European Union itself has half-admitted there is an endemic problem by insisting on reforms to clean up corruption as a condition for Ukraine joining the bloc in the future.

Up to now, the audacious racketeering in Kiev has been partly covered up by Western media claiming that it was “Russian propaganda” to smear Ukraine and its NATO sponsors. Well, it turns out that the rank thieving and money laundering in Kiev is not Russian propaganda. It is a fact that even the Western media can no longer ignore.

Still, the cover-up continues somewhat. Incredibly, Western governments and media are continuing to tolerate Zelensky and his cronies crying for more money, instead of demanding his resignation.

Four months ago, Zelensky, who has cancelled elections and made himself president indefinitely, tried to curb Ukraine’s anti-corruption agencies by removing their independent powers. That blatant move sparked mass protests, and he had to backtrack quickly amid public outcry.

This week, the same agencies uncovered the biggest corruption scandal yet in Ukraine’s long history of graft. The country’s energy sector was being milked by embezzlement and kickback schemes implicating senior ministers, industry chiefs, and a personal friend and business associate of Zelensky, who has fled overseas.

The justice minister, German Galuschenko, and energy minister Svetlana Grinchuk have had to quit pending an investigation. The alleged mastermind of the embezzlement is Timur Mindich, who fled the country before being arrested. He is a friend and business partner of Zelensky, who has gotten rich on government contracts since Zelensky became president in 2019, after laughably promising voters that he would eradicate Kiev’s notorious corruption.

The latest scheme involved contractors, who are tendering to build protection infrastructure for the country’s power industry, paying massive kickbacks to regime chiefs and business heads.

As the country suffers blackouts from the energy sector being hit by the war with Russia, it transpires that the problem has been greatly exacerbated by the Kiev regime being too busy siphoning off money rather than protecting the industry to serve citizens. The scandal is all the more grotesque as the nation faces mid-winter shortages and its soldiers are being killed amid collapsing frontlines in the east of the country.

Since the NATO proxy war against Russia escalated in February 2022, it is estimated that the United States and the European Union have pumped around $400 billion of Western taxpayers’ money into Ukraine. Western citizens have been bled dry by this war racket, which has enriched the military-industrial complex while paying off the Kiev regime.

President Donald Trump seems to have grown leery of the racket. Under his presidency, Washington has scaled back the money supply. Not so the European elite who keep pumping public money into the cesspit.

Hungary’s Prime Minister Viktor Orbán pointed out the madness of the EU leadership for insisting on throwing more money into Ukraine in light of the “mafia” under Zelensky. Orbán said his country is refusing to donate any more funds to Ukraine.

No doubt other European states are taking note of the despicable, criminal farce. As EU citizens endure increasing economic hardship from austerity and mounting living costs, their political leadership insists on supporting Ukraine in a futile proxy war.

This war should never have started and could have been avoided if the U.S. and European governments had engaged in diplomatic efforts with Russia. The NATO powers wanted a proxy war, and they, along with the servile media, concocted a fairytale narrative about “brave, noble” Ukraine fighting for supposed Western values against “Russian aggression.”

The conflict has persisted for nearly four years. European economies have been wrecked, and up to 2 million Ukrainian soldiers have been slaughtered – all for the Russophobic fantasy among NATO ideologues to “defeat Russia”.

The war has been a senseless bloodbath that has been sustained by Western lies and extortion of the Western public to prop up a corrupt regime in Kiev.

Now the corruption of the racket has become so putrid, it can no longer be covered up.

It is becoming politically precarious for Euro leaders to make the case for funneling more public funds to a regime that is siphoning off that money.

Hence, the European Commission President, Ursula von der Leyen, and her coterie of Russophobic elites, are proposing that billions will be routed to Ukraine not with public funds but with frozen Russian assets. As if that would make it any less criminal.

This week, Von der Leyen appealed to the European Parliament that €140 billion of Russian funds confiscated by the EU should be used as collateral for loans to Ukraine. These insane warmongers don’t know when to stop.

In the end, it’s fitting justice. The criminal proxy war is destroying its Western architects and sponsors. The Kiev cesspit is dragging them down. Good riddance.

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

The post Kiev’s Corruption Cesspit Is Dragging the Complicit EU Down With It appeared first on LewRockwell.

I have written a number of articles for which I have received little response about the horrible mistake humanity has made by entering into the digital revolution and the AI it spawned.  These disastrous developments are now being institutionalized in all societies.  They bring the end of human autonomy, independence, control, objective truth, freedom, and awareness of reality.

The digital revolution destines humans to live in a reality created for them by those who control the data bases and thereby reality.  Already AI companies are working to create the belief that a computer program, a chatbot, is a real person.  You can now have a hologram of your parents or some other deceased relative or friend to advise you and sympathize with you as you experience the challenges of life.

The 2wai apt allows a person to load footage of a loved one which then is converted into an AI avatar that the person can continue to have a relationship with after the person’s death. 

What if the loved ones we’ve lost could be part of our future? pic.twitter.com/oFBGekVo1R

— Calum Worthy (@CalumWorthy) November 11, 2025

The transition of human life from objective reality into AI created reality is what is meant by science fiction writers, who are no longer writing fiction, when they describe a world in which those who control the narrative rule. Humans are being locked up in an artificial reality.  There is still a real reality, but like in The Matrix humans don’t live in it.

I wonder if people understood the deadly threat that AI presents to them whether they would exterminate everyone associated with AI and the digital revolution before humanity is exterminated.  A person who lives in artificial reality is an exterminated person.

A person who lives in an artificially created reality is no longer a human capable of objective thought. As this is our destiny, it no longer matters whether world nuclear war wipes out the human species. They are already being wiped out by AI and the digital revolution.   Caitlin Johnstone tells us about it.

As Peter Koenig says, we must immediately return to the analogue system before we cease to exist. See this. 

But we won’t be permitted, and don’t seem to be inclined. Instead of resisting, humans are willingly entering into artificial existence. A 32-year-old Japanese woman has participated in a wedding ceremony with an artificial intelligence chatbot she developed using OpenAI’s ChatGPT platform, marking her the first to marry an artificial creation.

The post The Destruction of Reality appeared first on LewRockwell.

Came across an old Hampton Institute tweet:

“If you don’t like being exploited (employee, tenant), then become the exploiter (boss/owner, landlord)” is the capitalist mindset that has been drilled into all of us since we were kids. The real solution is to end exploitation (capitalism) altogether.

You run into this sort of argument all the time when interacting with capitalism supporters.

If people can’t make enough money to get by then they should get better-paying jobs.

If people don’t like getting kicked around by an abusive status quo then they should climb their way into a socioeconomic strata that isn’t getting kicked around as much.

If someone doesn’t like being the nail then they should become the hammer.

They deflect criticisms of the abusive system by babbling about what people can do as individuals to be less abused personally.

It’s like a horror movie villain trapping a bunch of people in a pyramid-shaped room and then filling it up with water so that only the ones who fight their way to the top can get air. He goes, “You don’t like drowning? Better not be among those who are underwater, then!”

In this horror movie, the people don’t curse the villain or swear they’ll kill him. Instead they just say “Well it’s not a perfect system, but it’s the best one possible!” If someone less fortunate manages to pop their head above water for a second and say “Please! We need air!”, they shove him back down and climb on his shoulders saying “Well you need to fight harder to get to the top then.”

Saying “Don’t like drowning? Then fight your way to the top” completely ignores the fact that the entire room is deliberately structured so that there will always necessarily be a large group of people who are drowning. Pointing out the fact that it is technically possible for someone as an individual to claw their way to the top is just a way of avoiding the need to address the abusive nature of the overall system which is premised on the permanent existence of a disadvantaged class.

Not everyone can be an employer; some people have got to be their employees, or their job doesn’t exist. Not everyone can be a landlord; landlords require rent-payers in order to exist. There can’t be a top ten percent who are living comfortably without a bottom ninety percent who aren’t.

This whole dystopia is built on top of an underclass of low-wage workers keeping the gears of industry turning; if they all quit today, the entire economy would be instantly obliterated. Saying “If those low-wage workers want better wages they should stop being low-wage workers” is telling a man to stop drowning while you are holding him underwater by standing on his head.

And what’s really crazy is that in this horror movie, the villain is entirely within reach. He’s standing there taunting everyone at the top of the room from a platform where he controls the water levels, and his legs are right there within grabbing distance. But instead of grabbing those legs and pulling him down so they can drain the room and save everyone, they’re fighting each other for air and saying anyone who drowns is to blame for their own drowning.

Craziest thing you can imagine, really. I wouldn’t even pay to watch that movie, because it’s too unbelievable.

And yet here we are.

_______________

My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece here are some options where you can toss some money into my tip jar if you want to. The best way to make sure you see everything I write is to get on my free mailing list. Click here for links for my social media, books, merch, and audio/video versions of each article. All my work is free to bootleg and use in any way, shape or form; republish it, translate it, use it on merchandise; whatever you want. All works co-authored with my husband Tim Foley.

The post In Capitalism They Tell You To Become the Hammer If You Don’t Like Being the Nail appeared first on LewRockwell.

I knew that a story like this would eventually erupt in Ukraine and even make the headlines of the New York Times and the Financial Times.

Our mainstream media is totally corrupt and millions of people in the West are still suffering from too much cognitive dissonance to recognize that their governments are totally corrupt. Nevertheless, the guys who have long been running Ukraine are so outrageously corrupt that it was only a matter of time before they overplayed their hand so crassly that it couldn’t go unnoticed, especially with Ukraine’s dictator, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, becoming increasingly unpopular.

Ukraine’s National Anti-Corruption Bureau (NABU) (stood up by the Obama administration to facilitate USAID to Ukraine) claims it has uncovered evidence that senior figures in Zelenskyy’s inner circle took $100 million of kickbacks on construction projects to protect power stations from Russian missile attacks.

At the center of the investigation is Zelenskyy’s friend and business associate, Timur Mindich. Investigators characterize Mindich as the “co-organizer” of the alleged scheme, and that approximately $100 million of illicit funds were siphoned through his office.

“He controlled the work of the so-called ‘laundry room’, where criminally-obtained funds were laundered,” a NABU spokesman said.

Mindich — co-owner of production company Kvartal 95 Studio, which Zelenskyy co-founded — fled Ukraine to Israel the day before the National Anti-Corruption Bureau (NABU) launched raids.

Kvartal 95, in association with 1+1 Media Group, produced the wildly popular Servant of the People television show, starring Zelenskyy as a Ukrainian schoolteacher who runs for president on an anti-corruption platform. Servant of the People ran for three seasons between 2015 to 2019, and its popularity greatly helped Zelenskky to win the 2019 presidential election.

1+1 Media Group was owned by Ukrainian oligarch and Israeli citizen, Ihor Kolomoyskyi, who is purportedly in pre-trial detention in Ukraine on charges of money laundering and contract murder.

According to a report in Politico, Timur Mindich was tipped off about the forthcoming raid of his office and apartment, and fled to Israel. In what appears to be part political theater, NABU has released images of his opulent apartment in Kiev, replete with a golden toilet and bidet with a matching golden toilet brush.

Yesterday (November 15) The Times of Israel published an interesting profile of Mindich (see Zelensky associate at crux of Ukrainian corruption case said to have fled to Israel).

As I have been reporting on this newsletter since 2022, Ukraine has long been regarded as one of the most corrupt countries on earth. While the country’s median household income is around $4,000 per year, a small group of oligarchs have amassed billions through their acquisitions of energy, agriculture, defense, and mining assets.

Some of these oligarchs, such as Victor Pinchuk and Mykola Zlochevsky, used their wealth to establish close ties with the Clinton and Biden families. Pinchuk was the largest single donor to the Clinton Foundation. Zlochevsky was the front man of the Burisma gas company, of which Hunter Biden was a richly paid board member. The true majority owner was Ihor Kolomoyskyi. It wouldn’t surprise me if he also slips away (if he hasn’t already) before his case goes to trial.

This $100 million (small potatoes) scandal that is making MSM headlines is likely the tip of the iceberg, and it wouldn’t surprise me if the scandal is at least partly political theater to give the poor and beleaguered Ukrainian people the impression that their National Anti-Corruption Bureau is actually doing its job.

Because ordinary Ukrainians are increasingly suffering from power outages due to Russian attacks on their energy infrastructure, they will likely find it especially distasteful that Zelenskky’s inner circle has been siphoning funds that were supposed to bolster energy infrastructure defenses. Thus, the scandal may serve as an excuse to get rid of Zelenskky, who has already lost much of the mystique he once enjoyed in our deranged West.

Lord knows how many billions have been stolen by these jolly fellows and their cronies in the U.S. government.

This article was originally published on Courageous Discourse.

The post Ukrainian Corruption Scandal Likely Tip of Iceberg appeared first on LewRockwell.