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When the FBI first released its 2022 crime data back in September 2023, they proudly reported a 2.1% drop in violent crime. It was a neat, tidy statistic that quickly became a key talking point for the Democratic Party, eager to counter Donald Trump’s claims of soaring crime. But fast forward, and the narrative has quietly changed. The FBI has revised those numbers, and now, instead of a decrease, we see a 4.5% increase in violent crime for 2022. No press release, no headline, just a stealth update—thousands more murders, rapes, robberies, and assaults added to the books without much fanfare.

This revision isn’t just a minor correction; it fundamentally shifts the story the FBI and media were telling us. But if you look at mainstream coverage, like USA Today’s recent headline from late September, you wouldn’t know it: “Violent crime dropped for third straight year in 2023, including murder and rape.” That headline dropped three weeks after the FBI revised their 2022 data. The revised data hasn’t made its way into the narrative—and that seems just fine to the FBI.

Take a look at the updated figures:

• 1,699 more murders
• 7,780 more rapes
• 33,459 more robberies
• 37,091 more aggravated assaults

These are not small tweaks—they’re significant. Experts like Carl Moody and Dr. Thomas Marvell have raised concerns about this abrupt adjustment. As Moody pointed out, making such large-scale revisions without providing any explanation erodes trust in the FBI’s data.

The chart above shows how drastically violent crime increased according to the “new” 2022 numbers. Without these revisions, the reported decrease in 2023 would have been less than half—just a 1.6% drop instead of the initially claimed 3.5%. And yet, the media continues to cite the older, incorrect figures, leaving the public none the wiser.

These revisions are a big deal. They don’t just tweak some numbers—they completely change the narrative. And it’s not just the FBI. The Bureau of Labor Statistics recently had to adjust its job creation figures, admitting they overestimated by 818,000 jobs. The FBI’s crime data is similarly impacted by guesswork and estimates—extrapolations from incomplete data reported by local police departments that can end up wildly inaccurate.

What Do These Revised Numbers Mean for Us?

The issue here is that the FBI isn’t always counting actual, reported crimes. Instead, they’re estimating unreported data, adding a hefty dose of guesswork to the mix. These processes have been described as a “black box,” even by other agencies within the Department of Justice. And now, with the revised numbers, the National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS) tells a vastly different story: while the FBI reports a 3.5% decrease in violent crime for 2023, the NCVS indicates a 4.1% increase. Over Biden’s presidency, the FBI data shows violent crime declining, whereas the NCVS reports a jaw-dropping 55.4% increase since 2020.

These discrepancies are troubling. When one dataset tells us crime is falling, while another shows a surge in violence, it’s clear we’re not getting an accurate picture. The American public deserves transparency, but right now, it’s not happening.

Read the Whole Article

The post FBI’s Stealth Revisions: The 2022 Crime Numbers They Don’t Want You to Notice appeared first on LewRockwell.

The rescue operation was an unpaid entrepreneurial mission, Operation Airdrop, by private helicopter pilots using their own equipment. Here is an interview with one participant:
Helicopter Pilot Undertakes Rescue Mission: Untitled 102

FEMA, federal agencies and state resources were late to the event and mostly an impediment when they did arrive. Generally, local officials were welcoming and appreciative of the private rescue operation. However, some pilots were threatened with arrest and ordered out of the area. I spoke to one pilot who faced arrest on two occasions because having to land in limited spaces “endangered nearby people.” It seems some authorities misinterpreted rescue as endangerment.

In another incident, a nursing home with 20 patients, 2 of whom were critical, needed an emergency evacuation. An air national guard Blackhawk helicopter was asked to perform the mission but the pilot refused, stating “rescuing people is not our mission.” A National Guard Colonel who just happened to be on site for other reasons, overheard the conversation and intervened with his own orders. The rescue mission was accomplished.

An explanation a pilot gave me is that government is bureaucracy and the bureaucratic mind is afraid to make a decision, yet still wants to exercise control over the situation. One consequence was the Starlink systems, sent in by Elon Musk to be delivered to local fire departments in order to be able to establish communication in the impacted area, were confiscated by FEMA and carried off. So were donated supplies.

FEMA is bragging on having spent some $200 million — a small fraction of US aid to Israel and Ukraine — on the rescue. It seems the money largely went to paying FEMA personnel.

Rep. Jack Kemp had a joke that he used often. The three biggest lies in history: Your check is in the mail. Of course I will respect you in the morning. I am from the government and I am here to help you.

The post The Rescue of Helene Survivors in NC Was a Private Undertaking appeared first on LewRockwell.

 

 

di Francesco Simoncelli

Nei miei ultimi pezzi ho analizzato alcuni fattori che ci permettono di avere un quadro della situazione economica abbastanza chiaro: le due cose principali che fanno crollare una nazione sono la guerra e il debito, le nazioni del mondo stanno alimentando entrambi, il debito della maggior parte di loro supera la soglia critica del 130% del PIL, tutti utilizzano la stessa “carta di credito” per le spese pubbliche e rinviano il debito a qualcun altro, in un altro momento, e in una democrazia moderna chi decide compete per potere e denaro; nessuno ha l'incentivo a smettere di calciare il barattolo lungo la strada. Mettiamo queste intuizioni in prospettiva adesso. Il mercato obbligazionario europeo ha raggiunto il picco (con rendimenti minimi record) a dicembre 2020; il mercato azionario ha raggiunto il picco alla fine del 2000. A tutti gli effetti inversioni nel Trend primario, da allora infatti non è successo nulla che suggerisca il contrario: il picco locale del 2007, ad esempio nell'EuroStoxxx 50, è inferiore a quello precedente, così come l'ascesa attuale non ha ancora superato il massimo relativo del 2007. Molto probabilmente assisteremo a prezzi reali di azioni e obbligazioni più bassi (con tassi d'interesse più elevati) per molti anni a venire.

Abbiamo visto i massimi, ora aspettiamo i minimi. Gli investitori avveduti, quelli di lungo termine soprattutto, dovrebbero essere in modalità “prudenza massima”. Potranno allentare la tensione e vendere oro quando i prezzi delle azioni scenderanno così tanto che si potranno acquistare tutte le azioni nell'indice Dow per cinque monete d'oro da un'oncia. Molto probabilmente anche il governo degli Stati Uniti dovrà toccare un fondo: dovrà entrare nel mezzo di una vera e propria crisi del debito prima di potere rimettere insieme i cocci della nazione. Solo dopo potrà tornare a linee di politica finanziarie sostenibili.

Ma aspettate, c'è sempre qualcosa di più. Javier Milei non sta forse ribaltando le sorti dell'Argentina? Trump non sta suggerendo che farà lo stesso con gli Stati Uniti? La Giamaica, ad esempio, non è forse uscita con successo da una crisi del debito... e anche la Grecia? Sì, sì, sì e forse.

Solo pochi anni fa la Giamaica era sull'orlo di un crollo finanziario. Aveva speso troppo e preso in prestito troppo, i creditori si rifiutavano di concedere altro credito, l'inflazione era alle stelle e la valuta stava perdendo valore. Ma invece di andare in default la Giamaica si è rimboccata le maniche e si è messa al lavoro. Un paio di studi accademici, riportati anche dal Financial Times, ci raccontano cosa è successo:

La Giamaica ha dimezzato il rapporto debito pubblico/PIL dal 144% tra il 2012 e il 2023 [...]. Lo ha fatto attraverso surplus primari sostenuti (eccesso di entrate rispetto alla spesa, esclusi i pagamenti degli interessi) superiori al 7% del PIL per sette anni consecutivi.

Per riferimento, l'Italia attualmente sta operando con un deficit di bilancio di circa il 7% del PIL. Gli autori del lavoro accademico, professori di Stanford e Berkeley insieme a Serkan Arslanalp dell'FMI, hanno concluso che è stata una “dura lotta di costruzione del consenso”. In qualche modo il governo giamaicano è riuscito a convincere quasi tutti a stringere la cinghia mentre comprimeva sempre di più il proprio bilancio.

La Grecia è un altro caso di studio. Le finanze pubbliche della Grecia erano gestite in modo assurdo e notoriamente corrotto. Il governo greco era stato in “quasi default” per tutto il XIX secolo e gran parte del XX secolo, ha speso soldi che non aveva e poi ha mentito sui suoi numeri in modo che non si potesse capire cosa stesse realmente succedendo. Nel 2008, ad esempio, la sua spesa militare era il doppio della media dell'UE. Nel 2009, poi, è arrivato il giorno del giudizio, con un debito superiore al 130% del PIL. In circostanze normali le persone non avrebbero prestato tutti quei soldi, ma Goldman Sachs l'aveva aiutata a mascherare la sua situazione finanziaria reale in modo che ottenesse l'adesione all'Unione Europea. Come membro dell'UE è stata in grado di prendere in prestito in una valuta stabile, l'euro, e sembrava avere il sostegno di Germania e Francia. Poi, quando sono iniziati i guai, i tedeschi hanno protestato: non volevano salvare i greci, pigri e dissoluti.

Questi ultimi hanno fatto quello che hanno sempre fatto: sono diventati la prima nazione sviluppata a non pagare un prestito dell'FMI. Ci sono state rivolte, chiusure di banche, caos e tumulti. Le spese sono state tagliate, sono stati negoziati salvataggi, altre crisi, altre negoziazioni. Nel 2012 un bond greco a 20 anni era quasi senza valore, con un rendimento salito quasi del 140%. La Grecia era un “caso disperato”, ma la vita continuava. Gli sportelli bancomat non funzionavano, ma i ristoranti erano aperti. La disoccupazione era salita, ma molti greci erano comunque abituati a non lavorare.

Nel 2011 la Grecia era in depressione, con un PIL in calo del 7%. Più di 100.000 aziende erano fallite e il tasso di disoccupazione aveva raggiunto il 23%. Il rapporto debito/PIL aveva raggiunto il 177% nel 2014 e nel 2016 sembrava aver toccato il fondo, con un greco su tre che si diceva vivesse in povertà. Ma può sempre peggiorare: le crisi economiche spesso diventano anche crisi politiche. Se siete fortunati le persone perdono soldi, perdono il lavoro, le aziende e gli investitori vanno in rovina e questa è la fine; se invece siete sfortunati, volano proiettili e ci sono carri armati nelle strade. Finora la Grecia è stata fortunata.

Avrebbe potuto scappare dall'Europa e dire alla “Troika” (FMI, Banca Mondiale e UE) di andarsene al diavolo; avrebbe potuto tornare alla sua moneta, la dracma, come consigliato da Paul Krugman, e lanciarsi in un baccanale di stampa di denaro e iperinflazione. Invece si è rimboccata le maniche, ha tagliato la spesa, ha aumentato le tasse, licenziato “dipendenti pubblici” fannulloni ed è riuscita a ottenere un surplus di bilancio di circa il 4% del PIL. Il suo rapporto debito/PIL è sceso dal 180% al 160%, ma con l'aiuto della Troika sembra tenere le cose insieme mentre riduce il suo debito.

Cosa possiamo imparare da questi esempi? Probabilmente non molto. Sono piccoli Paesi, dove la democrazia sembra funzionare meglio. E, a differenza degli Stati Uniti ad esempio, non sono mai stati in grado di prendere in prestito grandi quantità in una valuta il cui valore controllavano... quindi non potevano “svalutare” i loro debiti.

L'INCALZANTE STRETTA SULLE PENSIONI

Nel frattempo ci sono anche schemi negli affari politici e a volte è difficile collegare le due cose: finanza e politica (un campo che viene definito Megapolitica). Ma i massimi da record nel mercato obbligazionario e azionario sono stati chiaramente il prodotto di linee di politica governative, due in particolare: debito e guerra. Gli stimoli fiscali/monetari, le guerre e i debiti sono aumentati, così come i prezzi al consumo, e poi l'inflazione ha costretto le banche centrali ad abbandonare il loro sostegno ai mercati azionari e obbligazionari. Le azioni sono scese, così come il valore delle obbligazioni (i rendimenti sono aumentati), anche se nel mercato azionario il danno è stato mascherato dall'inflazione stessa. Ciononostante l'impatto vero sui mercati obbligazionari non è stato ancora avvertito. Fondi pensione, compagnie assicurative e banche commerciali detengono miliardi di euro in obbligazioni sovrane e molti di essi sono stati obbligati ad acquistarle come forme “sicure” di riserve di capitale; poi quando hanno iniziato a perdere valore, i loro proprietari le hanno tenute al valore nominale, impegnandosi a detenerle fino alla scadenza e fingendo che non avrebbero perso denaro.

Ecco perché si parla tanto di abbassare i tassi d'interesse. Non c'è nulla di intrinsecamente buono in tassi d'interesse più bassi. Le persone li pagano e li ricevono sui loro risparmi, ma sono solo informazioni. I principali player nel nostro sistema finanziario, ovvero banche commerciali e agenzie governative, sono tutti grandi proprietari e venditori di obbligazioni sovrane. Quando i tassi d'interesse salgono, non solo per loro diventa più difficile prendere in prestito denaro, ma diminuisce anche il valore dei titoli obbligazionari in loro possesso.

I fondi pensione, ad esempio, dedicano circa il 56% dei loro portafogli alle obbligazioni sovrane. Man mano che queste ultime perdono valore a causa dell'inflazione, i rendimenti dei fondi pensione vengono schiacciati. I deflussi, i pagamenti ai pensionati, vengono aggiustati all'inflazione, ma i loro titoli di Stato no. Devono quindi raccogliere più denaro per coprire il deficit nelle loro riserve e ciò richiede più prestiti, il che spinge i tassi d'interesse verso l'alto.

Nel frattempo sempre più persone vanno in pensione mettendo ulteriore pressione sulle finanze degli stati. I pensionati diventano a tutti gli effetti dipendenti dalla previdenza sociale.

Questo schema segue i modelli di Trend primario nei mercati. Le linee di politica delle banche centrali, in particolare i tassi d'interesse estremamente bassi, hanno ingannato i mercati azionari e obbligazionari fino a farli raggiungere massimi estremi. Ora, e nei decenni a venire, le politiche fiscali/monetarie, guerra e debito li spingeranno a minimi estremi.

LENTO E PROGRESSIVO IMPOVERIMENTO PER NON FAR SALTARE IL PIATTO

Il succo del benessere, di cui tanti hanno nostalgia, degli ultimi 40+ anni era questo: la ricchezza ha abbandonato l'economia dei consumatori (grazie ai prezzi più bassi dei beni di fabbricazione estera e alla perdita di posti di lavoro nel settore manifatturiero) ed è entrata nell'economia finanziarizzata (grazie ai tassi di interesse ultra bassi). Le azioni sono salite alle stelle, gli stipendi sono rimasti stagnanti. Il periodo successivo sarà l'opposto: il denaro verrà sottratto all'economia del capitale e immesso nell'economia dei consumatori (tramite deficit). Tassi più alti, prezzi delle azioni più bassi.

Quanto è utile questa intuizione? Ci permette di capire come il Trend primario nei mercati (tassi d'interesse più alti, prezzi delle azioni più bassi) si collega ai modelli della politica. Non si può capire come funziona una colonia di formiche diventando una formica, né si può capire la politica moderna diventando un democratico o un repubblicano. Bisogna fare un passo indietro e osservare. Come un antropologo che cerca di studiare una tribù mai contattata prima. Anche nel mondo della finanza, conviene essere invisibili, non partigiani. Imparziali.

L'inflazione è diventata parte integrante del sistema, non è più alimentata principalmente dalla politica monetaria (tassi d'interesse bassissimi) ma dalla politica fiscale (deficit elevatissimi). Ogni anno le banche centrali sottraggono dall'economia finanziaria da uno a due mila miliardi di dollari in più (in deficit). Gli investitori acquistano obbligazioni e i fondi finiscono nei “programmi non discrezionali”, come la previdenza sociale e le pensioni. E anche nei programmi discrezionali, come i miliardi spesi in armi da usare nei vari conflitti nel mondo. Questo denaro alla fine arriva negli stipendi e poi nei prezzi al consumo. Il processo è insidioso: vent'anni fa, ad esempio, si poteva comprare un chilo di pane a circa €1,85; oggi costa €4,2 circa, quasi il 70% di più. Il pane è l'alimento più economico e veloce per la classe operaia quando si tratta di mangiare. Una paga oraria media nei primi anni 2000 era di €8 l'ora circa: ci volevano circa 15 minuti di lavoro per comprare un chilo di pane. Oggi la paga oraria media è di €19 circa, il che equivale a circa 18 minuti per comprare un chilo di pane... tre minuti in più. Non è solo inflazione; è un impoverimento lento e progressivo. Negli ultimi 24 anni i lavoratori sono diventati più poveri.

Jeffrey Tucker ci mostra, poi, come i dati ufficiali sull'inflazione distorcono ulteriormente la percezione della realtà.

La politica degli stati è cambiata. Le banche centrali non possono più dare una spinta all'economia finanziaria tramite tassi d'interesse ultra bassi, la Legge dei rendimenti decrescenti sta decretando erosione di PIL e non creazione aggiuntiva mediante nuove unità di debito immesse nel sistema. Il cambio di rotta da parte della BCE, ad esempio, non sta facendo altro che incentivare la fuga di capitali dal mercato obbligazionario europeo e ciò rende più difficile per gli stati membri prendere in prestito i soldi di cui hanno bisogno. E questo, a sua volta, necessita di misure più stringenti sui sottoposti.

????EU - is planning an all asset database of every citizen’s assets so they know what citizens own!

Citizens would report their individual assets including Bank accounts balances, property, jewellery, cars & art.

In order to create a union wide ‘wealth’ tax. (Also handy for… pic.twitter.com/fZoUaXlAqw

— Bernie (@Artemisfornow) October 7, 2024

Questa “carta di credito”, però, per quanto possa essere profonda, soprattutto in Italia, non è infinita e serve solo a comprare tempo. Perché? Perché con la chiusura dei rubinetti dell'eurodollaro i sogni di scalare gli Stati Uniti sono stati infranti. Questa era la fonte prediletta dei presunti pasti gratis che per molto tempo hanno tenuto in piedi le illusioni burocratiche dell'UE di far marciare in avanti l'idea che l'URSS aveva senso solo che “era gestita male”. Le illusioni socialiste sono sempre le stesse: “Abbiamo imparato dalla storia e non commetteremo gli stessi errori”. Finché i guai economici potevano essere trasferiti a qualcun altro, questo assioma pareva reggere... poi, nel 2017, sono iniziati i lavori per implementare il SOFR negli Stati Uniti e nel 2019 i sogni socialisti dell'UE sono definitivamente tramontati quando i mercati dei pronti contro termine statunitensi sono stati chiusi alle garanzie extra-americane.

Il resto è storia e potete approfondirne i vari aspetti nell'ultimo libro che ho pubblicato di recente, Il Grande Default.

Il succo della storia è che la nave europea sta seguendo la direzione del fallimento e l'unico modo che ha per salvarsi, o almeno per provarci, è quello di accentrare ancora di più il potere. Questo significa la possibilità di tassare direttamente i contribuenti di ogni singolo stato europeo e il trasferimento di tali competenze direttamente a Bruxelles. Non solo, ma anche la possibilità di emettere debito comune, ovvero obbligazioni sovrane comuni. I piani come il Next Generation EU o le obbligazioni SURE sono tutti strumenti che puntano in tale direzione. Chi ha il potere decisionale, infatti, sa benissimo che questa è solo una fase di transizione e affinché rimanga saldamente al comando deve assolutamente condurre il gioco verso suddetto finale di partita. Pensateci, il tessuto industriale è sfilacciato, la capacità innovativa inesistente e la produzione continua a perdere vigore a vista d'occhio; il presunto monopsonio europeo era un'illusione tenuta in piedi dall'accesso al mercato dell'eurodollaro che, a sua volta, permetteva all'UE di accedere a finanziamenti a basso costo. Tale accesso adesso è precluso e lo è in un momento storico in cui le principali potenze del mondo, Cina e Stati Uniti, stanno progressivamente autarchizzando le proprie economie. Se gli Stati Uniti hanno dalla loro l'innovazione tecnologica e l'energia relativamente a basso costo, la Cina può contare anche su un allargamento della sua sfera d'influenza tramite i BIRCS. Cos'ha l'Europa invece? Niente di tutto ciò, così come ha sottolineato di recente anche Draghi nella sua relazione.

Se fino al 2017 l'accentramento progressivo era stato messo sul pilota automatico, abbiamo visto che con la crisi sanitaria e l'escalation in Europa orientale e Medio Oriente ci sono state nuove vampate d'accelerazione in tal senso. Aspettiamocene, quindi, un'altra nell'arco di questa Commissione europea dato che senza tale propellente la macchina europea si ingolfa e salta in aria.

2/3
Senza dimenticare che Berlino è la seconda economia mondiale per esportazione dopo la Cina e i nuovi dazi approvati nei confronti quest'ultima danneggiano di più la Germania. Ma perché questo accanimento nei confronti dell'economia tedesca?

— Francesco Simoncelli (@Freedonia85) October 11, 2024

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

Our book, The Pfizer Papers: Pfizer’s Crimes Against Humanity, was published two days ago; it is already a bestseller. This is a book that three governments — the US, the UK and Australia — all sought to suppress. The story of how it came to be is extraordinary — 3250 highly credentialed doctors and scientists under the leadership of one extraordinary woman, Amy Kelly, worked for two years on the 450,000 internal Pfizer documents released under court order by a successful lawsuit by attorney Aaron Siri. In the process these volunteers confirmed the greatest crime against humanity of all time. Read on.

Introduction by Naomi Wolf

This book in your hands is the result of an extraordinary set of confluences. It also presents, in a format available in bookstores for the first time, material that has already changed history.

You are about to embark as a reader on a journey through an extraordinary story—one whose elements almost defy belief.

The Pfizer Papers is the result of a group of strangers—ordinary people with extraordinary skills, located in different places around the world, with different backgrounds and interests—who all came together, for no money or professional recompense at all; out of the goodness of their hearts, and motivated by love for true medicine and true science—to undertake a rigorous, painfully detailed, and complex research project, which spanned the years 2022 to the present, and which continues to this day.

The material they read through and analyzed involved 450,000 pages of documents, all written in extremely dense, technical language.

This far-flung, relentlessly pursued research project—under the leadership of DailyClout’s COO, the remarkably gifted project director Amy Kelly—brought one of the largest and most corrupt institutions in the world, Pfizer, to its knees. This project, pursued by 3,250 strangers who worked virtually and became friends and colleagues, drove a global pharmaceutical behemoth to lose billions of dollars in revenue. It balked the plans of the most powerful politicians on earth. It bypassed the censorship of the most powerful tech companies on earth.

This is the ultimate David and Goliath story.

The story began when lawyer Aaron Siri successfully sued the Food and Drug Administration, to compel them to release “The Pfizer Documents.” These are Pfizer’s internal documents—as noted above, 450,000 pages in number—that detail the clinical trials Pfizer conducted in relation to its COVID mRNA injection. These trials were undertaken to secure the ultimate prize for a pharmaceutical company, the “EUA,” or Emergency Use Authorization from the FDA. The FDA awarded EUA for ages 16+ to Pfizer in December 2020. The “pandemic,” of course (a crisis in public health that a book of mine, The Bodies of Others, confirmed, involved hyped and manipulated “infections” data and skewed mortality documentation) became the pretext for the “urgency” that led the FDA to bestow EUA on Pfizer’s (and Moderna’s) novel drug. The EUA is the hall pass, essentially, allowing Pfizer to race right to market with a not-fully-tested product.

The Pfizer Papers also contains documentation of what happened in “post-marketing,” meaning in the three months, December 2020 to February 2021, as the vaccine was rolled out upon the public. All leading spokespeople, and bought-off media, called the injection “safe and effective,” reading from what was a centralized script.

Many people who took this injection, as it was launched in 2020–2021–2022 and to the present, did not realize that normal testing for safety of a new vaccine—testing that typically takes ten to twelve years—had simply been bypassed via the mechanisms of a “state of emergency” and the FDA’s “Emergency Use Authorization.” They did not understand that the real “testing” was in fact Pfizer and the FDA observing whatever was happening to them and their loved ones, after these citizens rolled up their sleeves and submitted to the shot. As we can never forget, many millions of these people who submitted to the injection were “mandated” to take it, facing the threat of job loss, suspension of their education, or loss of their military positions if they refused; in some US states and overseas countries, people also faced the suspension of their rights to take transportation, cross borders, go to school or college, receive certain medical procedures, or enter buildings such as churches and synagogues, restaurants and gyms—if they refused.

The FDA asked the judge in the Aaron Siri lawsuit to withhold the release of the Pfizer documents for seventy-five years. Why would a government agency wish to conceal certain material until the present generation, those affected by what is in these documents, is dead and gone? There can be no good answer to that question.

Fortunately for history, and fortunately for millions of people whose lives were saved by this decision, the judge refused the FDA’s request, and compelled the release of the documents; a tranche of 55,000 pages per month.

When I heard about this, though, I was concerned as a journalist. I knew that no reporter had the bandwidth to go through material of this volume. I also understood that virtually no reporter had the training or skill sets required to understand the multidimensional, technically highly specialized language of the reports. In order to understand the reports, one would need a background in immunology; statistics; biostatistics; pathology; oncology; sports medicine; obstetrics; neurology; cardiology; pharmacology; cellular biology; chemistry; and many other specialties. In addition to doctors and scientists, in order to understand what was really happening in the Pfizer documents, you would also need people deeply knowledgeable about government and pharmaceutical industry regulatory processes; you would need people who understood the FDA approval process; you would need medical fraud specialists; and eventually, in order to understand what crimes were committed in the Papers, you would need lawyers.

I was worried that without people with all of those skill sets reading through the documents, their volume and complexity would lead them to vanish down “the memory hole.”

Enter Steve Bannon, the former Naval Officer, former Goldman Sachs investment banker, former advisor to President Trump, and current host of the most popular political podcast in America and one of the most listened-to worldwide, WarRoom.

He and I come from opposite ends of the political spectrum. I had been a lifelong Democrat, an advisor to President Bill Clinton’s reelection campaign, and to Al Gore’s presidential campaign. He, of course, is a staunch Republican-turned-MAGA. I had been deplatformed in June 2021, before the Pfizer documents came out, for the crime of warning that women were reporting menstrual dysregulation upon having received the mRNA injections. As a career-long writer on women’s sexual and reproductive health issues, I knew that this was a serious danger signal and that this side effect would affect fertility. (Any eighth grader should be able to foresee that as well.) Upon my having posted this warning, I was banned from Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, and other platforms. I was attacked globally, all at once, as an “anti-vaxxer” and “conspiracy theorist”; and my life as a well-known, bestselling feminist author, within the legacy media, ended. No one in that world would talk to me anymore, publish my work, or return my calls. I was un-personed.

(It turned out, upon two successful lawsuits in 2023 by Missouri and Louisiana attorneys general, that it was actually the White House, the CDC, and senior leaders of other government agencies, including the Department of Homeland Security, that unlawfully pressured Twitter and Facebook to remove that cautionary tweet of mine, to shut me down, and to “BOLO” or Be On the Lookout for similar posts. This suppression is now the subject of a pending Supreme Court decision on whether or not it violated the First Amendment.)

In this dark time in my life, to my surprise, I received a text from Steve Bannon’s producer, who invited me onto WarRoom. I brought forward my concerns about women’s reproductive health in the wake of mRNA injection, and to my surprise he was respectful, thoughtful about the implications, and took the issue very seriously. I returned again and again, to bring that and other concerns that were emerging in relation to the mRNA injections to his audience. I was relieved to have a platform on which I could share these urgent warnings. At the same time, I was sad that the Left, which was supposed to champion feminism, seemed not to care at all about serious risks to women and unborn babies. I recognized the irony that a person whom I had been taught to believe was the Devil Incarnate, actually cared more about women and babies than did all of my right-on former colleagues, including the feminist health establishment, who had always spoken so loudly about women’s wellbeing and women’s rights.

Given my appearances on WarRoom leading up to 2022, it was natural that the subject of the Pfizer documents came up on that show when the documents were released. I shared my concern that they would be lost to history due to their volume and technical language. Bannon said something like, “Well, you will crowdsource a project to read through them.”

I was taken aback, as I had zero skills related to, or knowledge about how possibly to do such a thing. I answered something like, “Of course.”

So, my news and opinion platform DailyClout was deluged with offers from around the world, from WarRoom listeners with the skill sets needed, to decipher the Pfizer documents. I was terrified. It was chaos. I had excellent people on my team. But none of us knew how to manage or even organize the deluge of emails; we did not know how to evaluate the thousands of CVs; and even once we had “onboarded” these thousands of people, in different time zones, to “the project,” our inboxes became even more terrifying, as it was literally impossible to organize 3,250 experts into an organization chart that could systematically work through these documents. Emails were getting tangled or went unanswered. People asked questions we could not answer. We had no idea what structure could allow such a huge number of disparate experts to work through the vast trove of material.

A few weeks in, as I was in despair, Bannon had me on again. He asked about the progress of the project, and I replied, more upbeat than I felt, that many people had joined us, and they were starting to read. “Of course, you will begin delivering reports,” he prompted. “Of course,” I answered, horrified at being in so far over my head.

I have never had a corporate job, so it had not even occurred to me that a series of reports was the format that the analyses of the documents should take.

Then something happened that I can only describe as providential. We put out a call to the volunteers for a project manager, and Amy Kelly reached out. Ms. Kelly is a Six Sigma-certified project manager, with extensive experience in telecommunications and tech project management. She is also a simply inexplicably effective leader. The day that she put her hand to the chaos in the inboxes, the waters were stilled. Peace and productivity prevailed. Ms. Kelly somehow effortlessly organized the volunteers into six working groups, with a supra-committee at the head of each, and the proper work began.

I can only explain the scope and smoothness and effectiveness of the work that followed, as occurring in a state of grace.

Read the Whole Article

The post The Pfizer Papers: Pfizer’s Crimes Against Humanity appeared first on LewRockwell.

My time in the medical field has led me to accept many medical practices are adopted because of politics or economics rather than because existing evidence shows they work. Nonetheless, certain instances of this happening still astound me to this day, particularly the blacklisting of DMSO (dimethyl sulfoxide) as:

•This simple chemical is incredibly safe and effective and treats a wide range of challenging medical conditions that impact millions that still lack an effective therapy (outside of DMSO).

•Because of its efficacy, once discovered, it took the country by storm, resulting in millions using it, the scientific community getting behind it and publishing thousands of studies on DMSO, numerous pharmaceutical companies making large investments to bring it market, professional athletes promoting it, numerous governors, congressional representatives and senators (on behalf of both themselves and their constituents) pressuring the FDA to give it a fair chance for decades and state legislatures independently legalizing it because the federal government would not.

•Many approved pharmaceutical products take advantage of DMSO’s properties to work (e.g., in those products, DMSO is often classified as an inert “vehicle”). Similarly, DMSO is FDA approved for one condition (interstitial cystitis) and is approved for a wide variety of veterinary uses (e.g., the same conditions it treats in humans).

•Over the past 40 years, more than 10,000 articles on the biological implications and 30,000 articles on the chemistry of DMSO have appeared in the scientific literature—much of which, as I’ve shown here is remarkably compelling and paradigm shifting in healthcare.

•Yet, despite all of that, DMSO was effectively erased from history. It is now widely seen as an unproven and dangerous therapy, and even within the natural health field, most people do not know it exists.

Because of all that, I’ve felt a responsibility to use this platform to get the knowledge on DMSO out, which I began by presenting the strong case that DMSO is an incredible therapy for:

•Circulatory disorders like Reynaud’s and varicose veins.
•A wide range of neurological disorders, including ischemic and hemorrhagic strokes, and spinal cord injuries leading to paralysis or dementia.
•Allowing patients who’ve had decades of chronic pain (from a variety of different causes) to get their lives back.
•Healing a wide range of injuries (e.g., sports injuries, traumatic impacts) and chronic musculoskeletal problems (e.g., spine and shoulder issues) and wounds (e.g., burns or surgical incisions).
•Chronic rheumatic conditions (e.g., arthritis).
•Complex protein disorders (e.g., amyloidosis).
•Down Syndrome.

In turn, I’ve received numerous reports from readers (I’ve been gradually sharing here) from readers who’ve experienced rapid life-changing benefits from DMSO, very similar to the data I provided, which showed DMSO had an 80-90% success rate in treating.

Yet, despite all of this, I’ve still only touched the tip of the iceberg of what can be done with DMSO (e.g., in upcoming articles I will also review how DMSO is also quite helpful for a variety of eye, ear, dental, gastrointestinal, and autoimmune conditions such as tinnitus and macular degeneration, along with also having remarkable utility in treating cancer, challenging infections and debilitating collagen disorders). As a result, I’ve also received numerous queries from readers who inadvertently discovered many of those benefits when they used DMSO for a chronic pain condition.

For example, some of the more recent reports I’ve received include:

After AMDs articles, I used DMSO on an acute bruise and it completely took the pain away AND resolved the swelling that was developing. . It’s hardly even tender today. Incredible

Dear MWD, you are so right on learning to doctor yourself. I don’t travel without DMSO, ivermectin and aspirin. Two nights ago at bedtime I developed chest pains that radiated between my shoulder blades. Being in New Mexico (Oh, Lord, don’t let me die in New Mexico) I put DMSO along my carotids on my neck and took 2 aspirin. In an hour the pain was gone and I slept soundly. Scared the hell out of my poor husband.

After reading this I got a tub of 70/30 gel and applied it to my sons feet three times per day. He was riding his skateboard barefoot and crunched his toes under his feet. No broken bones.

Within three days he said he felt no pain or discomfort at all. For the sort of injury it was it seemed like the sort of thing which would take weeks to stop hurting and for all discomfort to end for a sixteen year old!

Excellent research – I’ve given DMSO to my mom and it has helped her arthritis immensely.

I am an 81 year old woman who was injured by the first of a series of 2 Shingrix shots in 2019. I never took the second shot. Eight days after receiving that shot I developed excruciating pain in my arms, hands, legs and feet. Although being told by two doctors that the vaccine did not cause the pain, the neurology team at a major medical institution diagnosed my condition as acute inflammatory demyelinating polyneuropathy(AIDP), on the spectrum of Guillame Barre. They treated me with gabapentin which relieved the pain. However, I was left with neuropathy in my feet which caused severe and painful spasms in my feet along with numbness on the bottom of my feet. After several weeks seeing a neurologist, I asked her what could be done to help this situation. She said there was nothing. After this article I started using DMSO on the bottom of my feet and over the tops of my toes when I went to bed. The first time I used it, I had no spasms which always happened at night when I was trying to go to sleep. I’ve now used it for 3 days and still no spasms. It’s like a miracle. I’ll continue using it to see if it helps resolve the numbness in my feet. God bless you, AMD. I never would have tried this without your articles and would have suffered needlessly forever. I owe you a great debt. Thank you. I’m telling everyone about DMSO and sending your articles as well. Your contributions are, without doubt, some of the most important I have read.

Likewise, a grateful reader reported their wife (a retired nurse) had a fall that injured her back and left her in severe pain and unable to walk which chiropractic did not help, and then a few days later, the ER could not help either. However, rather than accept an admission to the hospital, she took DMSO, her back worked itself out, and she was spared months of recovery with the standard of care.

Note: I’ve also received reports on a variety of other conditions (e.g., one subscriber shared a DMSO mixture shrunk their hemorrhoid), and another shared DMSO has gradually been shrinking their cataract.

If we take a step back, it should be clear that DMSO should be in widespread use, but instead something very wrong happened with DMSO which resulted in it getting blacklisted. This was due to the FDA continually doubling-down on an unshakable ideological crusade against DMSO that I believe ultimately resulted from the FDA not wanting to lose its grip over the practice of medicine in the United States (as the therapeutic potential of DMSO greatly threatened the FDA’s ability to control how medicine was practiced).

In turn, I believe what happened is a critical story to be told because:

•The entire story of DMSO is a remarkable example of thousands of dedicated scientists and doctors giving everything they could to bring this critical innovation to the public and thus highlight the incredible potential our scientific apparatus has to address the problems that plague humanity. In contrast, because of the decades of rigid suppression of independent science, we’ve become habituated to science being unable to solve our basic problems—something that urgently needs to change.

•The FDA’s gross misconduct with DMSO set the stage for what the agency continues to do to this day, and helps to explain why so many remarkable treatments have been withheld from the public while dangerous and ineffective ones are continually pushed upon the public (e.g., consider what happened throughout COVID-19).

Is DMSO Safe?

Throughout the FDA’s war against DMSO, the FDA has always cited two reasons to justify its conduct.

•That no evidence existed DMSO worked, which as I showed in the first and second part of this series, was an absurd claim as data from thousands upon thousands of patients showed DMSO worked dramatically better than the existing therapeutic options.

•That DMSO was an incredibly dangerous drug that it was critically important to protect the public from—something I’ve argued was a patent lie.

Note: these lies now extend far beyond America. For example, this posting by Health Canada, beyond characterizing DMSO as a dangerous solvent, makes numerous demonstrably false claims about DMSO and declares no evidence exists for DMSO’s efficacy—which is extraordinary given how many of clinical trials have proven DMSO works and how easy many of those studies are to locate.

Furthermore, beyond the above points being absurd, the existing standards within the FDA are that if unmet medical needs exist or there is no viable cure for a serious illness, those standards can be loosened (hence why the COVID vaccines were approved, or more recently, why an incredibly unsafe and ineffective Alzheimer’s drug was approved despite the FDA’s outside panel vetoing it and resigning in protest once the FDA overrode them. In the case of DMSO, this is particularly relevant as many of the diseases DMSO was proven to treat (e.g., Down Syndrome, Spinal Cord Injuries, Scleroderma) are severe illnesses that have remained incurable for decades.

All of this thus raises the question. How safe is DMSO? Since that data is relevant to both understanding the FDA’s crusade against it and likewise for anyone considering using it, I have done my best to compile all of that data here..

Read the Whole Article

The post The Remarkable History and Safety of DMSO appeared first on LewRockwell.

The International Crisis Summit descended on Tokyo last week to warn about the new “replicon” self-amplifying mRNA vaccines that are about to be unleashed like a third atomic bomb upon the population of Japan. James Corbett was there to cover the proceedings, to document the speeches, to participate in a massive rally in the heart of Tokyo against this dangerous new medical intervention, and to lecture sitting members of the Japanese Diet about his bodily sovereignty.

The post Japan Rising appeared first on LewRockwell.

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The post Mark Halperin on Why He Thinks Trump Will Win and the Left’s Mental Collapse appeared first on LewRockwell.

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

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

Excerpt 1: Tariffs [see here]:

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

Trump: “But there are no tariffs.”

Interviewer: “There are tariffs already.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Advisor: Great idea!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

My Fellow Americans:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Burns followed this up by saying,

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

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

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

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

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

The threat to US global hegemony

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Reprinted with permission from MacleodFinance Substack.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This originally appeared on SchiffGold,com.

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

Glenn Greenwald — It’s Tuesday, October 15.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

They say that you need to distinguish between two processes.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Source: Ukrainska Pravda sources in Ukraine’s special services

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Reprinted with permission from Moon of Alabama.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Read the Whole Article

The post Living Through Helene appeared first on LewRockwell.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Online Etymology Dictionary defines “disinformation” as follows:

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

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

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

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

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

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

Read the Whole Article

The post Disinformation: The Democrats Favorite Tool and Smear appeared first on LewRockwell.

 

 

di Nick Giambruno

L'imperatore francese Napoleone III usava un set unico di posate in alluminio solo per i suoi ospiti più onorati a cena.

Agli ospiti normali, invece, faceva trovare utensili d'oro.

A metà del XIX secolo l'alluminio era più raro e desiderabile persino dell'oro.

Di conseguenza i lingotti di alluminio trovarono un posto tra i tesori nazionali della Francia e i gioielli in alluminio divennero un simbolo dell'aristocrazia francese.

L'alluminio, noto per il suo numero atomico 13 nella tavola periodica, è un elemento onnipresente, ma esiste principalmente in composti chimici complessi e non nel suo stato metallico.

La procedura di trasformazione dei composti di alluminio in metallo puro era costosa, rendendolo più difficile da produrre rispetto all'oro. Il prezzo dell'alluminio all'epoca rifletteva esattamente questo.

Nel 1852 costava intorno ai $37 l'oncia, più costoso dell'oro a $20,67 l'oncia.

Ma il destino dell'alluminio stava per vedere una svolta drammatica verso la fine del XIX secolo.

Una scoperta monumentale nel 1886 rese possibile la produzione di alluminio puro su vasta scala a una frazione del costo precedente.

Prima di questa scoperta, la produzione globale era di appena una manciata di once al mese.

Successivamente la principale azienda americana di alluminio ne produceva 800 once al giorno. Nel giro di due decenni, tale azienda, che in seguito sarebbe diventata Alcoa, produceva oltre 1,4 milioni di once di alluminio al giorno.

Il prezzo crollò da un incredibile $550 per libbra nel 1852 a soli $12 nel 1880. All'alba del XX secolo una libbra di alluminio costava circa 20 centesimi.

In meno di un decennio e mezzo l'alluminio passò dall'essere il metallo più costoso del pianeta a uno dei più economici.

Oggigiorno non è più un metallo prezioso adatto alle feste reali, o al tesoro nazionale di un Paese. È diventato un elemento di uso quotidiano utilizzato nelle lattine di soda e nella carta stagnola per cucinare.

La trasformazione dell'alluminio da metallo molto apprezzato a materiale domestico poco costoso è esemplificativo della sua “durezza”, la caratteristica più importante di un buona forma di denaro.

Durezza non significa qualcosa che è necessariamente tangibile o fisicamente duro, come il metallo. Invece significa “difficile da produrre”; al contrario “denaro morbido” è facile da produrre.

Il modo migliore per pensare alla durezza è in termini di “resistenza alla svalutazione”, cosa che aiuta a renderla una buona riserva di valore, una funzione essenziale del denaro.

Vorreste investire i vostri risparmi in qualcosa che qualcun altro può creare senza sforzo o costo? Ovviamente no.

Sarebbe come conservare i vostri risparmi di una vita in gettoni per i videogiochi, alluminio, o valute fiat.

Di desiderabile in una buona forma di denaro è che qualcun altro non la possa realizzare facilmente.

Il rapporto Stock-to-flow

Il rapporto Stock-to-flow misura la durezza di un asset.

Rapporto Stock-to-flow = Offerta/Flusso

La parte “stock” si riferisce alla quantità di qualcosa, come le scorte correnti. È l'offerta già estratta, disponibile subito.

La parte “flusso” si riferisce alla nuova offerta aggiunta dalla produzione e da altre fonti ogni anno.

Un rapporto Stock-to-flow elevato significa che la crescita annuale dell'offerta è piccola rispetto a quella esistente, il che indica un asset durevole e resistente alla svalutazione.

Un rapporto Stock-to-flow basso indica il contrario: la nuova produzione annuale può facilmente influenzare l'offerta complessiva e i prezzi. Ciò non è auspicabile affinché qualcosa funzioni come riserva di valore.

Nel grafico qui sotto possiamo vedere la durezza di varie materie prime fisiche.

Nessun'altra materia prima fisica si avvicina alla durezza o alla resistenza alla svalutazione dell'oro.

Le materie prime monetarie, come l'oro e l'argento, hanno rapporti Stock-to-flow più elevati. Dall'altro lato, invece, le materie prime industriali hanno rapporti Stock-to-flow bassi, in genere intorno a 1x.

Con un rapporto Stock-to-flow di 60x, ci vorrebbero circa 60 anni di produzione attuale per eguagliare l'attuale offerta di oro.

Un altro modo di pensarci è guardare all'inverso del rapporto Stock-to-flow: il tasso di produzione annuale relativo alle scorte esistenti. Ad esempio, la produzione annuale di oro è circa un 1,7% rispetto alle sue scorte esistenti.

Due cose possono spiegare l'eccezionale rapporto Stock-to-flow dell'oro.

Innanzitutto il metallo giallo è indistruttibile.

L'oro non decade, né si corrode; ciò significa che la maggior parte di quello prodotto anche migliaia di anni fa è ancora in circolazione oggi e contribuisce alle attuali scorte.

In secondo luogo, l'oro ha una storia di migliaia di anni di produzione, a differenza di altri metalli.

Questi due fattori rendono le scorte esistenti di oro più grandi rispetto alla nuova produzione. Ciò significa che nessuno può aumentarne arbitrariamente l'offerta, il che contribuisce a renderlo una riserva di valore neutrale. È ciò che conferisce all'oro proprietà monetarie uniche e ineguagliabili tra gli altri metalli.

È importante chiarire che durezza non è la stessa cosa di scarsità. Sono concetti correlati, ma non la stessa cosa.

Ad esempio, platino e palladio sono più rari dell'oro, ma non sono beni durevoli. La produzione attuale è elevata rispetto alle scorte esistenti.

A differenza di quelle auree, le riserve di platino e palladio non sono state accumulate nel corso di migliaia di anni. È il motivo principale per cui una nuova offerta può facilmente far tremare il mercato.

A causa dei loro rapporti Stock-to-flow bassi, il platino (0,4x) e il palladio (1,1x) sono ancora meno adatti a funzionare come moneta rispetto all'argento. I loro rapporti Stock-to-flow bassi indicano che sono principalmente metalli industriali, corrispondenti a come le persone li usano oggi. Quasi nessuno usa platino e palladio come moneta.

Ecco il punto principale: la durezza è la caratteristica più importante di una buona moneta; tutte le altre caratteristiche monetarie sono prive di significato se essa è facile da produrre.

Ecco perché la storia della moneta è la storia della vittoria di quell'asset più solido e perché l'oro ha sempre regnato sovrano.

Ma ora ha un serio concorrente...

Il rapporto Stock-to-flow di Bitcoin oggi è circa 57x, leggermente al di sotto di quello dell'oro.

Secondo il suo protocollo, sappiamo esattamente come crescerà la sua offerta in futuro.

Una caratteristica fondamentale è che la nuova offerta viene dimezzata ogni quattro anni, il che fa sì che la durezza di Bitcoin raddoppi ogni quattro anni.

Il processo in cui la nuova offerta di bitcoin viene dimezzata ogni quattro anni è noto come “halving”, o come paice definirlo a me “indurimento quantitativo”.

Ecco un altro modo di pensarci: nel 2023 il mercato dell'oro doveva assorbire circa 117 milioni di once troy in nuova offerta; quest'anno il mercato dell'oro deve assorbirne leggermente di più, circa 119 milioni di once troy in nuova offerta.

Negli anni successivi possiamo aspettarci che la quantità di nuova offerta aumenti gradualmente.

Bitcoin ha la dinamica opposta: la quantità di nuova offerta che il mercato deve assorbire si riduce costantemente.

Nel 2023 il mercato di Bitcoin doveva assorbire circa 328.500 bitcoin in nuova offerta; dopo l'halving di maggio, dovrà assorbirne circa 164.250 bitcoin ogni anno fino all'halving del 2028.

Dopo quest'ultimo, il mercato di Bitcoin dovrà assorbire circa 82.128 bitcoin aggiuntivi ogni anno fino all'halving del 2032.

Questo processo di riduzione della nuova offerta continuerà fino al 2140, quando verrà creato l'ultimo bitcoin. È allora che la fornitura totale raggiungerà i 21 milioni. Oggi è di circa 19,5 milioni, il che significa che la stragrande maggioranza, circa il 93%, dell'offerta totale di bitcoin è già stata creata.

Ciò significa anche che solo 1,5 milioni di bitcoin in più saranno creati nei prossimi 117 anni.

In altre parole, l'offerta di bitcoin crescerà di circa il 7% nei prossimi 117 anni. Per fare un paragone, la massa monetaria degli Stati Uniti è aumentata di circa il 35% sin da marzo 2020.

Dal punto di vista storico gli halving e i loro enormi shock di offerta hanno catalizzato mercati rialzisti da capogiro, dove Bitcoin è salito alle stelle (10 volte o più).

L'halving del maggio scorso, però, è stato molto diverso...

Questo perché la durezza di Bitcoin, misurata dal rapporto Stock-to-flow, è il doppio di quella dell'oro.

Ecco come Bitcoin diventerà presto la moneta più solida che il mondo abbia mai conosciuto e continuerà a diventare più solida man mano che il suo rapporto Stock-to-flow si avvicina all'infinito.

Per migliaia di anni l'oro è sempre stata la moneta più solida dell'umanità. Tutto questo è destinato a cambiare e la maggior parte delle persone non ne ha idea.

Scarsità assoluta

Bitcoin ha un altro attributo unico: non è solo scarso, ma lo è in senso assoluto.

Ad esempio, immaginate che il prezzo del rame aumenti di 5 o 10 volte.

Potete star certi che ciò stimolerebbe una maggiore produzione, espandendo alla fine la fornitura di rame. Ovviamente lo stesso vale per qualsiasi altra materia prima.

Ecco perché c'è un famoso detto nel settore minerario: “La cura per i prezzi alti sono i prezzi alti”.

Tale dinamica che incentiva una maggiore produzione e, in definitiva, una maggiore fornitura, facendo poi scendere i prezzi, esiste per ogni materia prima fisica. Tuttavia l'oro è il più resistente a questo processo.

Questa risposta dell'offerta è il motivo per cui la maggior parte dei prezzi delle materie prime nel tempo tende a invertirsi fino ad arrivare intorno al costo di produzione.

Questa dinamica è ancora più marcata per il denaro.

Quando un asset ottiene proprietà monetarie, la reazione naturale è che le persone ne producano di più, molto di più.

Questa è nota come la trappola del denaro facile.

Bitcoin la scardina, perché la sua offerta è inflessibile. È l'unica merce in cui prezzi più alti non possono indurre una maggiore offerta.

In altre parole, Bitcoin è il primo e unico asset monetario con un'offerta completamente non influenzata dall'aumento della domanda.

Questa è una caratteristica sorprendente e rivoluzionaria.

Ecco la conclusione: l'oro e altre merci sono scarse, ma solo Bitcoin lo è in senso assoluto.

Ciò significa che l'unico modo in cui può rispondere a un aumento della domanda è che il suo prezzo salga. A differenza di ogni altra merce, aumentare l'offerta in risposta all'aumento della domanda non è un'opzione.

La capitalizzazione di mercato di Bitcoin oggi è di circa $528 miliardi.

La capitalizzazione di mercato di tutto l'oro estratto nel mondo, che ha impiegato migliaia di anni per accumularsi, è di circa $12.300 miliardi.

Ciò significa che Bitcoin ha una capitalizzazione di mercato all'incirca pari al 4,2% di quella dell'oro, anche se ne ha superato (del doppio) la durezza.

Supponendo che l'oro rimanga stabile e Bitcoin salga di circa 23 volte, avrebbe una capitalizzazione di mercato all'incirca pari all'oro. A quel punto un singolo bitcoin varrebbe oltre $620.000.

Penso che sia una possibilità reale negli anni a venire, anche se potrebbe accadere molto prima poiché la truffa della valuta fiat continua a sgretolarsi a un ritmo accelerato.

Se questo vi sembra impossibile, allora pensate a questo...

Dieci anni fa il prezzo di Bitcoin era di circa $100; oggi è circa 271 volte tanto.

Bitcoin ha fatto numerosi movimenti mozzafiato al rialzo in passato. Penso che possa farlo di nuovo, soprattutto ora che le aziende, gli investitori istituzionali e persino gli stati iniziano ad acquistarlo per la prima volta. Ovviamente è importante ricordare che le performance passate non sono un'indicazione per risultati futuri, per nessun investimento.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Reprinted with permission from International Man.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Brace yourself: a tsunami approaches.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This is how evil wins.

This is how freedom falls and tyranny rises.

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

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

We are at our most vulnerable right now.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Consider for yourselves:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Life is good in America, too.

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

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

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

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

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

This originally appeared on The Rutherford Institute.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So, what can be done?

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

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