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Our diocese has asked the priests to promote a short survey about the laity to the faithful for a projected USCCB Pastoral Letter on the Laity. I wish that there would have been a survey about what kind of pastoral letters we need from the Bishops’ Conference, for I think the vocation crisis might be a topic of great interest and importance. I suppose the Pastoral Letter on the Laity will address the growing trend of lay pastoral “coordinators” in priest-less parishes, which is having a moment.

In some ways, the coordination by laity is a throwback to the pioneer past of the Church in America. However, the small communities who were building community and church buildings and sacramental practice for their families did not hire someone to be a sort of substitute priest. The itinerant priests, who were like the Protestant circuit preachers, were still leaders and formators of the Catholic community and not just Mass priests or sacramental providers. In the rust belt, pastoral coordinators are tending to ever smaller congregations in some historic (and often, beautiful) churches, and it is hard to escape the suspicion that it is a program of downsizing, part of the managed decline of once densely Catholic dioceses.

“Professional” lay “coordination” of parishes has many loose ends. What kind of training and continuing formation is given to the lay coordinator? The emphasis on pastoral or formation leaderships would be interesting in terms of an evangelization project, but sometimes what is more necessary is management expertise in business-like practices. Parishes are not businesses, but old physical plants require much attention, and thin capital reserves need fiscal acuity and creativity. I think that priests might be able to be pastors of more than one parish if those burdens were taken care of by persons, perhaps retired professional management types, who could coordinate more than one congregation’s issues.

However, the questionnaire for the Pastoral Letter does not seem to address such concerns. It is written in a kind of “corporation” prose that could have been helped by AI. The first question is: “How does your baptismal identity impact your engagement with Church and society.”

Perhaps it is my limited experience that makes me think that most lay people will not have very eloquent answers to this question. Why couldn’t we start with something about Jesus? What is your relationship with Him, how have you felt the call to discipleship? And then from Jesus we could talk about the necessary relationship with the Church that Jesus founded.

“Engagement with society” is quite (dare we say “too”) broad conceptually. What about, “How is your discipleship connected to your everyday life? What are the specifics of your following Jesus and taking up the cross?” The next question could be tightened up, also: “How do you feel co-responsible for the work and mission of the Catholic faith?” Wouldn’t the correct word be “Church,” not “faith”? But are we asking “feeling” questions or data questions? “Feeling” co-responsible and understanding our participation in the Body of Christ might be two different things.

The potential for ambiguity in the survey continues: “Where do you see the Holy Spirit at work in your relationship/engagement with the Church?” I suppose the “relationship/engagement” word combo is supposed to be a fine kind of distinction. Again, something about Jesus might be to the point. Even if you were asking, “How do you understand the Holy Spirit working in your life and what has that to do with your parish/local community of faith?” it might provoke more concrete responses.

“What are your joys, hopes and visions for the role of the laity within the Church and society?” is the next question. I know this echoes Gaudium et Spes, but it reminds me too much of the campaign rhetoric (like “Hope and Change”). We are all members of the Church, although our activity “within” the Church should be of our whole person and not a category of involvement. The laity are the Church, just as the clergy and religious are, but there seems a note of alienation or at least differentiation in “activity within the Church.” It’s a nuance and perhaps a false connotation I am responding to, but it is awkwardly put.

So is the next shot, in my opinion: “How do you primarily interact with lay ecclesiastical ministers, formators and lay apostolate leaders?” This is perhaps the real agenda of the designers of the survey. My first reaction is what is the use of the adverb “primarily”? I think they are looking for something like “generally” here. Can you react “secondarily” to professional lay leaders? Leaders of “lay apostolates” seem to be in another category for these other coordinators, formators, etc. People involved in lay apostolates are usually volunteers with very specific roles.

De-clericalizing pastoral care is a more complicated thing than just filling roles. When Catholics talk about their parishes, don’t they usually ask who the pastor is? Are they now to ask who the lay ministers, formators, etc. are? If deacons sometimes encounter resistance in their ministry (e.g., “I want a priest for my child’s baptism,” or “Why is the priest not preaching?”) are we so sure that the parish can be reimagined with a coordinator who “hires” sacramental provider priests? Wouldn’t people respond better to a deacon as a coordinator. Deacons are usually professionals with other capacities, but couldn’t we hire those who are retired from their original profession?

“What concerns might you have around lay ministry, formation, apostolates or the church workplace?” In terms of this essay, I would say, “see above,” but it is a catchall kind of question, mixing apples and oranges. And why do we say “church workplace” and not “parish”?

Developing lay pastoral ministry as a kind of substitute for ordained ministry is my worry here. Laity should participate in Church life, without a doubt. But isn’t the focus of lay discipleship in the world? Isn’t a quasi-institutional lay ministry a more complicated thing much beyond night school certification as lay ministers? Do lay coordinators have to promise something to the bishop, or do merely contractual requirements take care of pastoral care of a community?

In Catholic schools we have “teacher-ministers” who really aren’t sometimes because scarcity of personnel means low formation of those in the classrooms. Is the vision of the pastoral coordinators wedded to a tacit acceptance of what is really extraordinary in Catholic life: a growing Catholic population and a diminishing clergy in a non-missionary context.

Which is why I would like a Pastoral Letter about the vocation crisis.

This article was originally published on Crisis Magazine.

The post The Joys of Consultation: The Pastoral Letter on the Laity appeared first on LewRockwell.

Benjamin Netanyahu’s coalition government has taken control of TikTok and plans to control the social network X as well. However, the State of Israel’s propaganda has long eluded its citizens. Its purpose has never been publicly discussed. A small group decides its messages alone, without considering what would be useful to Israelis—such as combating anti-Semitism. The state’s resources have been seized solely by “revisionist Zionists,” even though they are an ultra-minority.

Israeli propaganda (הַסְבָּרָה – hasbara ) has rarely been a function of Israeli governments, but rather an operation of associations partially funded by them. These associations, which have their own ideologies, are not accountable for their actions to the Israeli people, but exclusively to their sponsors, including the governments in Tel Aviv. The self-proclaimed “largest democracy in the Middle East” thus funds profoundly anti-democratic operations without the knowledge of its citizens.

Israel’s chronic instability since its founding and the habit of appointing central directors of ministries according to political criteria rather than competence have blurred Israel’s message. Several competing powers deliver different messages  [ 1 ] . Ultimately, an authority was created for “public diplomacy” (propaganda). It has become particularly secretive.

Before the founding of Israel, the term hasbara referred to the act of explaining a position in the Diaspora. But over time, it became synonymous with “propaganda.”

In 1974, following the Yom Kippur War, Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin created a Ministry of Information, which he entrusted to General Aharon Yariv  [ 2 ] . But the latter resigned seven months later and devoted himself to the creation of a prestigious think tank, the Jaffee Center for Strategic Studies. It was not until 2006 that a “Ministry of Strategic Affairs and Hasbara” was again created (now the Ministry of Strategic Affairs and Public Diplomacy; a ministry that does not have a website and does not communicate, but which became famous in 2015 with its campaign against “the phenomena of delegitimization and boycotts against Israel”, that is to say the “Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions” (BDS) movement). This discreet ministry created its own ארגון לא ממשלתי המאורגן על ידי הממשלה (non-governmental organization organized by the government) (sic), Kela Shlomo (Solomon’s Sling) (later Concert, then Voices of Israel) led by Colonel Yossi Kuperwasser, Ambassadors Dore Gold and Ron Prosor and Brigadier Sima Vaknin Gill, former director of military censorship. Various companies (Black Cube, Psy-Group and Cyber ​​Shield  [ 3 ] ) spied on BDS activists on behalf of Kela Shlomo  [ 4 ] .

In recent years, approximately $200 million a year, or four-fifths of the Ministry of Strategic Affairs and Public Diplomacy’s budget, has been given to the Institute for the Study of Global Antisemitism and Policy (ISGAP). Ron Dermer, the current minister since 2022, was an advisor to Natan Sharansky and the author of his book, The Case for Democracy: The Power of Freedom to Overcome Tyranny and Terror. He was entrusted by Benjamin Netanyahu in late 2023 with a plan to minimize the Palestinian population of Gaza  [ 5 ] .

Specifically, Sharansky is the president of ISGAP. He is a Ukrainian revisionist Zionist; a disciple of the other Ukrainian, Vladimir Jabotinsky. He played a central role in the fight against Russia during the USSR era. He was the main reference for Senator Henry M. Jackson’s Straussians, emigrated to the United States, was awarded the Congressional Medal by Ronald Reagan, and became a minister under General Ariel Sharon. In 2001, he founded One Jerusalem, the association that campaigns to have Jerusalem recognized as the capital of the “Jewish state” alone (and not that of the Palestinian state). He now heads ISGAP and, in this capacity, oversees almost all of the hasbara.

Hasbara has won many battles. The latest for ISGAP was the US Congressional hearings of university rectors, which resulted in several resignations and sanctions against pro-Palestinian associations.

However, one cannot help but be surprised by the ineffectiveness of their international campaigns against anti-Semitism. Eighty years after the founding of the State of Israel, not only has the problem not been solved, but it has worsened  [ 6 ] . During this time, machismo, homophobia and racism have considerably declined. It must be considered that anti-Semitism is a means of pressure by the Israeli authorities on their own population. Let us remember that the revisionist Zionists used anti-Semitism to advance their cause in the diaspora.

During his conference at the Israeli Consulate General in New York, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu revealed that his country aims to control people under thirty-five via social networks  [ 7 ] .

According to YNetGlobal , he launched a campaign to take over social media and influence people under 25, “Project 545”  [ 8 ] . It was entrusted to Havas Media Network, the company of Yannick Bolloré (son of Vincent Bolloré and husband of Chloé Bouygues). The latter awarded Clock Tower X LLC a $6 million contract to “provide strategic communications, planning and media services in support of Havas’s commitment by the State of Israel to develop and execute a national campaign in the United States to combat anti-Semitism.” Clock Tower is the company created by Brad Parscale after he left Donald Trump’s campaign team.

According to a poll conducted for Israel in the United States, 47% of the population believes that the IDF is committing genocide.

The Israeli government’s main idea is to influence the responses of artificial intelligence by creating a multitude of social media accounts that will provide the narrative that ChatGPT and its rivals will feed on.

“Project 545” is the code name for this operation, funded to the tune of NIS 545 million, or $145 million, by 2025. It ended Israel’s contract with SKDKnickerbocker, the communications firm linked to the US Democratic Party.

According to Responsible Statecraft , the influencer network that Benjamin Netanyahu referred to during his speech at the Israeli Consulate General in New York was reportedly formed by Bridges Partners, the company owned by Yair Levi and Uri Steinberg. The campaign, titled Esther Project , has already cost $900,000. Fourteen to 18 influencers are believed to have published 75 to 90 posts during this period. The fees are being paid by the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

Three of the influencers have been identified. They are:
 by Lizzy Savetsky, a prominent online defender of Israel since the beginning of the war;
 of businessman Ari Ackerman, grandson of Israeli-American tycoon Meshulam Riklis;
 and digital creator Zach Sage Fox.

Uri Steinberg, meanwhile, is a former senior official in the Israeli Ministry of Tourism. He works at Natan Sharansky’s Institute for the Study of Global Antisemitism and Policy (ISGAP).

A tax document allows Bridge Partners’ overheads to be assessed  [ 9 ] .

Journalist Candace Owens, who relayed Xavier Poussard’s revelations about Brigitte Macron’s real identity, published screenshots of Charlie Kirk showing that his funding had been cut and that he had been threatened two days before being assassinated  [ 10 ] . Charlie Kirk had just taken a stand against the massacres in Gaza.

During his speech in New York, Benjamin Netanyahu said: “The most important purchase that is being made is (…) TikTok. Number one. And I hope it goes through because it can be substantial. And the other one? X. We need to talk to Elon [Musk]. He’s not an enemy, he’s a friend. We should talk to him. Now, if we can achieve those two things, we will achieve a lot. We need to fight the fight, give direction to the Jewish people and give direction to our non-Jewish friends.”

Billionaire Safra Catz became executive vice president of Larry Ellison’s Oracle when it acquired 45% of the social network TikTok on September 25. She said, “We need to integrate love and respect for Israel into American culture.” Oracle will store TikTok’s US user data on its cloud computers.

At the same time, the Israeli Foreign Ministry has just created the company Show Faith by Work, which it has registered as a foreign agent of influence in the United States  [ 11 ] . This time, the aim is to disseminate the official version of the October 7 attack and messages against the existence of a Palestinian state to all American Christian Zionists. A budget of 3.2 million dollars has been planned, including the rental of a caravan which will allow propaganda films to be shown during Christian gatherings.

—

[ 1 ]  “Public diplomacy in army boots: the chronic failure of Israel’s Hasbara”, Gal Hadari & Asaf Turgeman, Hasbara, Israel Affairs , 24:3, 482-499 (2018), DOI: 10.1080/13537121.2018.1455374.

[ 2 ]  Israel’s Public Diplomacy. The Problems of Hasbara, 1966–1975 , Jonathan Cumming, Rowman & Littelfield (2016).

[ 3 ]  “  Spying on Linda Sarsour: Israeli Firm Compiled BDS Dossier for Adelson-funded US Group Battling Her Campus Appearances  ”, Uri Blau, Haaretz , May 28, 2018.

[ 4 ]  “  BDS is a dirty business. Those who battle it on Israel’s behalf must stay clean  ”, David Horovitz, The Times of Israel , June 17, 2018.

[ 5 ]  “  Netanyahu’s Goal for Gaza: “Thin” Population “to a Minimum”  ”, Ryan Grim, The Intercept, December 3, 2023.

[ 6 ]  Acting Propaganda: Viewpoints from Israel , Ron Schleifer & Jessica Snapper, Sussex Academic Press (2015).

[ 7 ]  “  @MiddleEastEye  ”, X , September 27, 2025.

[ 8 ]  “  Report: Israel to spend over half a billion shekels turning ChatGPT into public diplomacy tool  ”, Daniel Edelson & Raphael Kahan, YNetGlobal , October 6, 2025.

[ 9 ]  “  NSD/FARA Registration Unit  ”, September 26, 2025.

[ 10 ]  “  Turning Point USA responds: Yes, The Text Messages Are Real  ” Candace Owens Ep 249, YouTube, October 7, 2025.

[ 11 ]  “  Israel wants to hire Chris Pratt and Steph Curr  ”, Nick Cleveland-Stout, Responsible Statecraft , October 07, 2025.

The post Israeli War Propaganda on Social Media appeared first on LewRockwell.

This is a a story about a fight between titans in which Europe, due to its leaders stupidity, is the most significant casualty.

Dutch government seizes control of Chinese-owned chipmaker Nexperia – Politico.eu, Oct 13 2025
The move could inflame wider trade tensions between Beijing and the European Union.

The Dutch government has granted itself the power to intervene in company decisions at Dutch-based Chinese-owned chipmaker Nexperia.

The highly unusual step, announced late Sunday, grants the country the power to “halt and reverse” company decisions — meaning Nexperia cannot transfer assets or hire executives without Dutch government approval, according to national media.

The move is a significant escalation in relations between the Netherlands and China and could inflame wider trade tensions between Beijing and the European Union, with Europe caught in the middle of a tit-for-tat chips war between the U.S. and China.

The Dutch have effectively stolen a big Chinese owned company.

The background via Pekingology:

Wingtech Technology is a privately-run, Shanghai-listed Chinese electronics and semiconductor conglomerate headquartered in Jiaxing, Zhejiang Province. It began as an original design manufacturer (ODM) for smartphones and consumer devices and has since grown into one of China’s most prominent integrated technology companies, combining electronics assembly, chip design, and semiconductor manufacturing.

Wingtech in 2019 acquired Nexperia, a Dutch semiconductor firm that was formerly part of Philips’ chip division, NXP. Headquartered in the Netherlands, Nexperia is a global semiconductor company with a rich European history and over 12,500 employees across Europe, Asia, and the United States.

In December 2024, the U.S. Department of Commerce added Wingtech to its Entity List, restricting its access to American components and technology. The U.S. unilateral sanctions threatened heavy losses and forced the Apple supplier to announce, in March 2025, the spin-off of a major part of its operations.

Zhang Xuefeng is the founder of Wingtech and CEO of Nexperia, which closed the 2024 financial year with a total revenue of $2.06 billion.

A successful businessman from China bought the Dutch company. He invested heavily and the company grew with several research and manufacturing sides throughout Europe and the world. The company paid a lot of taxes and the Dutch were happy.

In late 2024 Wingtech was put on the U.S. entity list to block Chinese semiconductor development by cutting it off from U.S. products and technology licenses.

In June 2024 the U.S. planned to extend the entity list. Not only would chip companies in China be prohibited from use of U.S. content but any international company that was 50% or more owned by a Chinese entity would likewise be penalized.

On September 30 2025 the U.S. Commerce Department extended its export restrictions:

A U.S. Commerce Department interim final rule vastly expands the number of entities subject to export control restrictions by extending the Entity List and MEU List restrictions to non-U.S. entities 50% or more owned, directly or indirectly, by listed parties effective as of September 29, 2025.

(The new Chinese export controls on rare earth metals and certain other technologies are a direct response to those new U.S. restrictions.)

The U.S. move cut of Nexperia and other partially Chinese owned companies in Europe from U.S. content.

The Dutch government, which had been forewarned and pressed by the U.S., panicked:

US officials told their Dutch counterparts that the Chinese CEO of Nexperia “will have to be replaced” for the company to be exempt from Washington’s entity list, newly disclosed court documents show.

The disclosure comes after the Dutch government effectively seized control of the semiconductor firm, a subsidiary of the Chinese company Wingtech, forcing a change in management under an obscure law known as the Goods Availability Act.

In doing so, the Dutch authorities removed founding CEO Zhang Xuezheng from his role, sparking fury in Beijing.

Court documents released by the Amsterdam Court of Appeal on Tuesday show that the United States told Dutch officials in June about a forthcoming change in the entity list, which bars American companies from trading with firms on the list.

On Sunday October 12, after the company was seized, Wingtech dropped a bombshell filing with the Shanghai Stock Exchange. It describes how Nexperia’s 2nd level management, under Dutch government pressure, deposed of the Chief Executive Officer and owner of the company:

On 1 October 2025 (Netherlands time), Ruben Lichtenberg, a Dutch national who serves as the statutory director and Chief Legal Officer (CLO) of both Nexperia Holding and Nexperia Semiconductor, filed—with the support of two other executives, Chief Financial Officer (CFO) Stefan Tilger and Chief Operating Officer (COO) Achim Kempe, both German nationals—an urgent petition before the Enterprise Chamber requesting a corporate investigation and immediate provisional measures on behalf of both Nexperia entities.

On the same day, the Enterprise Chamber granted several emergency measures immediately, without a hearing, which took effect at once. These measures included suspending Mr. Zhang Xuezheng from his positions as executive officer of Nexperia Holding and non-executive director of Nexperia Semiconductor; suspending the operation of Article 3 of the Board Rules of Nexperia Semiconductor, which defines the CEO’s duties and authorities; and placing all shares held by Wingtech subsidiary 裕成控股有限公司 Yuching Holding Limited (a Hong Kong-registered company and the sole shareholder of Nexperia Holding) under temporary management by an independent third-party trustee for management purposes, effective until the Enterprise Chamber’s oral hearing scheduled for 6 October 2025 and its subsequent ruling on the request for immediate relief.

Wingtech’s official WeChat blog released a scathing announcement, which was widely distributed in China.

Internal Legal Actions Are a Malicious Extension of External Pressure

Certain foreign executives within Nexperia have attempted to use legal means to forcibly alter the company’s ownership structure.

Their actions are closely aligned with the Dutch government’s administrative directives and, in essence, represent an effort to usurp shareholder rights and subvert lawful corporate governance under the guise of “compliance.”

We strongly condemn such politically motivated attempts to seize control.

We Will Resolutely Defend Our Lawful Rights
…

Today the Chinese government reacted to the Dutch raid of the Chinese owned company by cutting it off from Chinese technologies and products:

Chipmaker Nexperia, a subsidiary of China’s Wingtech Technology and a major supplier of mature chips for the automotive and consumer electronics sectors, announced on Tuesday that it has been banned by the Chinese Ministry of Commerce from exporting products made in China, including those produced by its subcontractors, after the Dutch government took over the company using a Cold-War-era law to secure Europe’s chip supply.

Nexperia said it is seeking an exemption from the export ban, which could affect Dutch access to its chips. The company operates an 80,000-square-meter assembly site in Guangdong province near Hong Kong, as well as fabrication, assembly, and testing facilities in Germany, the Philippines, Malaysia, and Britain.

If the Dutch government does not retract its decision to practically confiscate Nexperia the company will die. Its business is globalized. Parts of its products are made all over the world. Its products and sales in Europe depend on subcontractor products which are made in China.

The company is important to Europe. It produces some 90 billion bread and butter components per year which flow into other higher value European products. Sure, other Chinese companies will be happy to replace those parts. But where is the win for the Netherlands or Europe in that?

In the trade war between U.S. and China Europe should have stayed neutral. It should not have buckled under pressure from either side but rely on its own substantial trade powers to stay out of the fight. It is a fight in which the U.S. has no chance to win.

It was a huge mistake by the Dutch to submit to U.S. demands and to seize Nexperia. It was a huge mistake for Europe to submit to U.S. demands.

The minions leading Europe who have allowed for this deserve to be fired over their utter strategic stupidity.

Reprinted with permission from Moon of Alabama.

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The pool of speculative fervor will be drained, as impossible as that seems in this moment in history.

2025 may go down as The Year When Everything Happened in No Particular Order, tracking William Gibson’s famous line that “The future is already here, it’s just not very evenly distributed.”

Those expecting inflation will find it, those expecting deflation will find it, those expecting a stock rally will get a rally, those expecting a crash will get a crash, and so on.

The forces that drove reliable trends have all weakened or reversed:

1. ever-lower interest rates lowered the cost of credit/capital to near-zero.

2. the deflationary forces of globalization: everything got cheaper and disposable.

3. expanding workforces increased income and consumption.

4. credit/asset bubbles created wealth without productivity improvements or sacrifice.

5. energy supply kept up with rising consumption.

6. the external costs of the “waste is growth” Landfill Economy (pollution, depletion, etc.) were ignored / not priced in.

These titanic forces still have the momentum of recency bias: most people expect the rest of the 2020s to be an extension of the 40+year Bull Market in Everything.

Feedback (doing more of what’s failed) and buffers (print more money and everything will be fixed) are working to maintain the status quo sand castles as the tide rises.

Those castles closest to the sea will dissolve first (the periphery I often refer to). Those with resources will be shoveling sand to build walls around their castles.

But the tide is relentless and so we’re in a period of flux where those benefiting from the status quo are fighting the erosion of all the forces that enabled the status quo to reach such heights.

As they lose ground, they redouble their policy efforts, pushing policies to new extremes–extremes which further destabilize the system.

The global economy is a complex self-organizing adaptive system, and so blunt-force policies intended to protect the status quo stability end up generating unintended consequences which have their own consequences (the second-order effects I often mention).

Those trying to control the system find their control is imperfect.

Long cycles are now in play. Interest rates fell for 40 years–the longest such run in recent history. Now interest rates will rise for some period of time, likely culminating in a financial crisis with no easy resolution, because printing money–the solution for the past 40 years–will be the problem, not the solution.

Demographics are also in play. Workforces are shrinking, retirees living off the earnings of the workforce are soaring.

The world desires ever greater quantities of energy and consumption, but the cheap, easy to exploit materials have already been exploited. Now everything will become more expensive, regardless of technological improvements.

Physical, chemical and cost limits will matter.

Whatever we seek, we can find–but that may prove ephemeral.

Everyone’s on the lookout for Black Swans, but that’s not the way Black Swans work.

Read the Whole Article

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Click here:

Ron Paul

 

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Click Here:

Eugyppius

 

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The Left is now crowing that “libertarianism” has ruined the Argentinian economy as Milei is in D.C. today begging for a $20 billion bailout.  The article in the link cites establishment D.C. Beltway libertarians at the Cato Institute and Reason Foundation (and National Review) as the chief defenders of bailout beggar Milei.

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New York, come tutte le altre roccaforti democratiche sono un inferno dal punto di vista della quotidianità. Chi ci vive lo sa bene. La recente decisione di Trump di invaire la Guardia nazionale a Chicago e Portland, ennesime due grandi città americane che vengono attenzioante da tale provedimento, è una rispsota a una situazione che rischia di andare fuori controllo. Come a Detroit. I sindaci di tutte queste città democratiche hanno reso i posti da loro amministrati delle zone di guerra... letteralmente. Le ragioni sono sempre le stesse, le conosciamo bene: qualunque cosa toccano i democratici si trasforma in un girone infernale. Non c'è più nemmeno il beneficio del dubbio di pensare che siano degli incapaci, a questo punto anche i più scettici devono cedere all'unica idea possibile rimanente: c'è un disegno nel distruggere il tessuto sociale americano, distruggere la tenuta del patto sociale stesso. Mandare la Guardia nazionale era il minimo che Trump potesse fare visto che sono diventati, a tutti gli effetti, enclavi criminali. Tutte le grandi città che finiscono nelle grinfie di questa gente sperimentano un degreado verticale della qualità della vita; poi ci sono anche interi stati, come ad esempio la California, roccaforte della cricca di Davos. Non si può non concludere, quindi, che questo è qualcosa di voluto, un risultato ricercato, figlio di quelle contromosse avviate da suddetta cricca di Davos per mettere i bastoni tra le ruote all'amministrazione Trump e minimizzare, quanto più possibile, i danni che sta subendo dalla riorganizzazione del Paese. Il caos sociale, i venti di secessione e la spada di Damocle della guerra civile sono tutti strumenti nella “cassetta degli attrezzi” della cricca di Davos.

____________________________________________________________________________________

di Barry Brownstein

(Versione audio della traduzione disponibile qui: https://open.substack.com/pub/fsimoncelli/p/i-newyorkesi-flirtano-con-il-programma)

Vivere a New York City non è facile. Il Cato Institute classifica lo Stato di New York come quello meno libero degli Stati Uniti. Oltre alle elevate imposte statali sul reddito, i residenti di New York City pagano un'imposta aggiuntiva del 3,876% sui redditi superiori a $50.000. L'imposta sulle vendite totale di New York City è dell'8,875%.

Oltre al carico fiscale, i residenti di New York City e dello Stato devono sopportare pesanti oneri normativi. Burocrazia imponente e corruzione vanno di pari passo, e New York non è certo priva di entrambe.

A New York, burocrazia e corruzione si traducono in un costo scolastico per studente sbalorditivo, pari a $36.293, il più alto del Paese. Sarebbe sbagliato credere che una spesa talmente ingente si possa tradurre in eccellenza educativa.

E ora, il candidato democratico a sindaco, Zohran Mamdani, afferma di voler “abbassare i costi e semplificare la vita” ai residenti di New York spendendo ancora di più. Promette il congelamento degli affitti, autobus gratuiti, asili nido gratuiti e negozi di alimentari gestiti dall'amministrazione pubblica.

Mamdani ci dice che i suoi negozi di alimentari si concentreranno “sul mantenimento dei prezzi bassi, non sul profitto”. Questi negozi pubblici non pagheranno l'affitto, o le tasse sulla proprietà, e “trasferiranno i risparmi ai clienti”. Mamdani promette di ricreare magicamente il miracolo della distribuzione alimentare in chiave moderna: “Acquisteranno e venderanno a prezzi all'ingrosso, centralizzeranno lo stoccaggio e la distribuzione, e collaboreranno con i quartieri locali per prodotti e approvvigionamento”. Nel suo spot su TikTok ci dice che i prezzi dei negozi di alimentari privati ​​sono “fuori controllo” e che i suoi negozi non aumenteranno i prezzi.

Alle primarie democratiche Mamdani ha ottenuto i voti dei laureati. Uno dei sostenitori di Mamdani, analfabeti economicamente ma “colti”, proveniente da una “famiglia conservatrice del nord dello stato di New York”, ha scritto un messaggio alla madre dopo le elezioni: “È stato bello sentire che il mio voto contava e che stava contribuendo ad aprire la strada al mondo in cui voglio vivere”.

Il mondo che questo elettore immagina non sarà quello in cui vorrebbe vivere.

Invece di una riforma fiscale e normativa, i piani socialisti di Mamdani risolveranno tutto con regali, spese folli e una generosa dose di “globalizzazione dell'Intifada”, antisemitismo e sentimenti anticapitalisti.

F. A. Hayek spiegò perché molte persone sostengono i politici che promuovono progetti socialisti. Nel suo libro, The Road to Serfdom, scrisse che le persone vogliono essere “sollevate dalla necessità di risolvere i [propri] problemi economici e [...] dalle scelte difficili che questo spesso comporta”.

Mamdani attribuisce al capitalismo la responsabilità delle scelte economiche che tutti dobbiamo affrontare. Per usare le parole di Hayek, gli elettori “sono fin troppo propensi a credere che la scelta non sia realmente necessaria, che sia loro imposta dal sistema economico in cui viviamo”.

Con queste mentalità Hayek ci avvertì di aspettarci “discorsi irresponsabili su una ‘abbondanza potenziale’”.

Il politico che fa campagna elettorale con un piano, per quanto ridicolo, ha un vantaggio quasi insormontabile rispetto al politico che cerca di spiegare come il processo di mercato risolva i problemi senza l'intervento dei pianificatori centrali. Quando le persone sono astoriche e analfabete in materia economica, desiderano ardentemente un piano.

Ciò che gli elettori non vedono è che una tassazione e una regolamentazione eccessive compromettono il funzionamento del mercato. Più il mercato è debole, più il governo interviene per dirigerlo, e per condizionare noi.

Hayek è stato chiaro sul dove tutto questo porta: “Dato che nelle condizioni moderne dipendiamo per quasi ogni cosa dai mezzi che i nostri simili ci forniscono, la pianificazione economica implicherebbe la direzione di quasi tutta la nostra vita”.

Oggi l'attuazione dei piani di Mamdani per i negozi alimentari non porterà a diffuse privazioni e carestie. Perché? Mamdani non può mettere fine a tutte le alternative dei negozi alimentari privati. Chi desidera l'esperienza del DMV quando fa la spesa può fare acquisti nei negozi di Mamdani. A seconda di quanti soldi dei contribuenti intende sprecare, Mamdani potrebbe indebolire i negozi tradizionali, soprattutto per quanto riguarda i prodotti di prima necessità come latte, uova e carne. I negozi statali metterebbero fuori mercato alcuni negozi tradizionali. Le più a rischio saranno le piccole botteghe a conduzione familiare.

Nonostante le accuse di Mamdani di speculazione sui prezzi, il supermercato medio opera con un margine di profitto di circa l'1,6%. I supermercati sono spinti a operare in modo efficiente con il minimo spreco a causa della forte concorrenza. I burocrati non sanno nulla di efficienza, né hanno la conoscenza per gestire i supermercati. Con una contabilità onesta, i supermercati di Mamdani opererebbero con perdite enormi.

I capitalisti contro cui si scaglia Mamdani non sempre si comportano virtuosamente, ma come sottolinea John Mueller nel suo libro, Capitalism, Democracy and Ralph's Pretty Good Grocery, il processo di mercato nel capitalismo tende a “premiare comportamenti imprenditoriali onesti, equi, civili e compassionevoli, e ispira una forma di assunzione di rischi che può essere definita eroica”.

Nel suo libro, Conscious Capitalism, il fondatore di Whole Foods, John Mackey, osserva: “La fiducia è fondamentale per avere un buon rapporto con i clienti”.

Market Basket è una catena di supermercati del New England. Qualche anno fa clienti, dipendenti e venditori hanno scioperato durante un'acquisizione ostile, costringendo a un'inversione di tendenza. Market Basket, insieme a Wegmans, è nota per la forte fedeltà dei suoi clienti e anche dei suoi dipendenti. L'amministratore delegato di questa catena di supermercati ritiene che “Market Basket abbia un obbligo morale nei confronti delle comunità che serviamo”. Sostiene le sue parole offrendo prezzi bassi ai clienti e avanzamenti di carriera per i dipendenti. Market Basket promuove i dipendenti in base al merito, non all'anzianità. Al contrario, l'anzianità fa avanzare i dipendenti pubblici, che sono molto difficili da licenziare. Nei negozi di Mamdani dovreste aspettarvi che i dipendenti si comportino come i negozianti dell'era sovietica.

Wegmans figura costantemente nella lista delle “100 migliori aziende in cui lavorare” della rivista Fortune. Il suo ex-presidente, Robert Wegman, ha affermato, riferendosi al suo trattamento dei dipendenti: “Non ho mai dato più di quanto ho ricevuto”. In questa dichiarazione di principio, si percepisce la convinzione che il mondo degli affari sia un'impresa “win-win”, non “win-lose”.

Le persone attratte dal socialismo vogliono ricevere prima di dare. I loro eroi, come Mamdani, credono che ai miliardari non dovrebbe essere permesso di accumulare tanta ricchezza. Se Mamdani venisse eletto, aspettatevi che i ricchi newyorkesi fuggano dalla città.

Oggi i supermercati offrono fino a 60.000 articoli diversi. Supponiamo che i punti vendita di Mamdani funzionino più come un Trader Joe's, con solo 4.000 articoli. Su quali basi tali punti vendita decideranno cosa tenere in magazzino? Nel suo libro, Dismantling Utopia: How Information Ended the Soviet Union, Scott Shane ci aiuta a rispondere a questa domanda.

Shane era curioso di sapere perché “alcune delle file più lunghe a Mosca fossero per le scarpe”. Naturalmente dava per scontato che “l'inefficiente economia sovietica non producesse abbastanza scarpe”.

Con sua sorpresa, Shane scoprì che per ogni adulto e bambino, l'Unione Sovietica produceva “più di tre scarpe all'anno”. Come poteva esserci una carenza di scarpe?

Shane ce lo spiega: “La comodità, la vestibilità, il design e la combinazione di taglie delle scarpe sovietiche erano così fuori sintonia con ciò di cui la gente aveva bisogno e desiderava che essa era disposta a fare la fila per ore pur di acquistare ogni tanto un paio di scarpe, solitamente importate”. I pianificatori sovietici avevano scelto una scarpa di consenso, ed era una che soddisfaceva poche esigenze.

Persone come me che vivono in campagna non penserebbero mai che i consumatori pagherebbero due o tre volte il prezzo per uova biologiche certificate, allevate al pascolo, rispetto a quelle “normali”. Eppure la quotidianità ci dice che sono disposti a pagare un sovrapprezzo, e i supermercati dedicano un notevole spazio sugli scaffali a marche diverse di uova.

Lo stesso tipo di decisione viene presa in ogni corsia di un supermercato. Fermatevi un attimo nel reparto yogurt per dare un'occhiata all'incredibile varietà di scelta: greco, bulgaro, islandese, biologico, non biologico, latte intero, parzialmente scremato, senza grassi, zuccherato, non zuccherato e un numero sorprendente di gusti.

Mamdani condanna il capitalismo e i profitti, ma non comprende il meccanismo del mercato. Prezzi e profitti aiutano gli imprenditori a individuare il mix di prodotti ottimale per i loro clienti. Nel socialismo le decisioni vengono prese in base ai capricci dei burocrati.

Hayek nel suo saggio, The Use of Knowledge in Society, scrisse:

Sono convinto che se [il sistema dei prezzi] fosse il risultato di un deliberato progetto umano, e se le persone guidate dalle variazioni dei prezzi capissero che le loro decisioni hanno un significato che va ben oltre il loro obiettivo immediato, questo meccanismo sarebbe acclamato come uno dei più grandi trionfi della mente umana.

Mamdani non è impressionato dal miracoloso processo di mercato; è impressionato dalle invettive della sua mente presumibilmente superiore.

Vivevo a Baltimora quando, negli anni '80, arrivò una nuova ondata di emigrati sovietici. Le famiglie ospitanti, che aiutavano questi nuovi arrivati ad adattarsi alla vita americana, mi raccontavano dei primi incontri degli emigrati con la cornucopia del nostro Paese. Raccontavano di emigrati sbalorditi dall'abbondanza nei supermercati. Alcuni rimasero paralizzati, sopraffatti dalla vastità della scelta; altri riempirono freneticamente i carrelli, temendo che gli scaffali sarebbero rimasti vuoti il ​​giorno dopo.

Rimasero stupiti nello scoprire che nessun funzionario governativo dettava l'ubicazione dei supermercati, o gli orari di apertura dei negozi; nessun funzionario dettava cosa vendevano, o chi erano i loro fornitori.

Non molti anni dopo, nel 1989, Boris Eltsin, allora membro del Parlamento sovietico, visitò un supermercato in un sobborgo di Houston. Nemmeno le élite sovietiche avevano accesso a una tale abbondanza. Sbalordito e perplesso, Eltsin chiese: “Quanto costa? Serve un'istruzione speciale per gestire un supermercato? Sono tutti così i negozi americani?” Jon Miltimore sottolinea: “L'esperienza di Eltsin quel giorno era in contrasto con tutto ciò che sapeva”.

Mamdani ha sperimentato la cornucopia generata dal processo di mercato; non ha le scuse di Eltsin. Per promuovere il suo programma socialista, Mamdani indossa intenzionalmente dei paraocchi e induce gli elettori a credere di non dover assumersi la responsabilità delle proprie scelte economiche.

Alcuni ignorano la sua ascesa, sostenendo che l'adesione dei Democratici a candidati così radicali sia autodistruttiva per il loro partito. Ciò che mi preoccupa è la probabilità che una crisi economica pre-2028 possa creare sostegno per candidati presidenziali in stile Mamdani. Se gli elettori di New York City non lo sconfiggeranno alle urne a novembre, potremmo avere nuovi casi di devastazione dei mercati.

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

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The federal government should have four-day work weeks.

America will benefit by giving federal employees more time away from their daily redistributive work to do something productive, such as work on a side business. For those who do not wish to be productive, this extra day each week can be used for leisure, spending time with their family, or practicing a hobby. However it is spent, it will be better for the American people than if federal employees are at work.

For this reason, it is hard to have too many federal holidays. Of course, private businesses need not follow the calendar of federal holidays. I, for one, do not recall the last time I took a Monday off of work simply because the government said I should.

Below are 12 more reasons federal employees should get another day off work.

1.) October 14 — Charlie Kirk Day

Charlie Kirk was born October 14, 1993. If politics can be put aside, Kirk is an appropriate representation of American ideals: upstanding, person of faith, open to discussion, well-read, encouraging others to better themselves, to have big families, and to speak truth in the world around them. That is someone emblematic of the finest values of American culture from Plymouth to this day.

But Let’s Not Stop There

President Trump should lead the US Congress in adding these 11 other holidays to the federal calendar — days that focus on the heart of what America seeks to represent.

2.) Late August/Early September — Entrepreneurs’ Day

To be celebrated the Friday before Labor Day, Entrepreneurs’ Day brings into focus the fact that there would be no labor without risk-taking capital and risk-taking entrepreneurship.

3.) November 11 — Mayflower Compact Day

Signed on November 11, 1620, the Mayflower Compact starts, “IN THE NAME OF GOD, AMEN.” It is a testament to the Christian founding of America, a detail not to be forgotten and worthy of annual remembrance.

4.) February 24 — Marbury v. Madison Day

The US Constitution does not offer the judiciary a supreme check on the rest of government. This crappy case does. The unanimous decision, written by John Marshall, was released on February 24, 1803. It should be remembered and debated in perpetuity, even long after it is overturned.

5.) November 2 — James K. Polk Day

This US President, born November 2, 1795, brought the expansion of the US to its present lower 48 boundaries. Though there were gory moments, I am grateful for the decisive people who helped bring America to its present boundaries.

6.) January 6 — Patriots’ Day

January 6, 2021 was part of the 2020 color revolution against the American people. After allowing our CIA and State Department to launch color revolutions all over the world from the end of World War Two until the present day, that behavior finally came to be visited upon our own country.

In 2020, the Covid lockdowns, the mail-in ballots, through to the stolen election, and all the way up to Inauguration Day, a color revolution was launched against the American people by its deep state and established interests, who had no desire to see sensible and popular peaceful reform take place through the ballot box.

As many as one million Americans showed up on January 6, in Washington DC to oppose that coup. Thousands of regular people had their lives disrupted for peacefully engaging in protest, a protest at which a very small number engaged in violence. This evil on the part of law enforcement was done with effectiveness and alacrity uncommon in our government.

The movie J6: A True Timeline, succinctly tells the story of that day. Often in too unbiased of a way.

The one million or so people who showed up that day, not paid and bussed in, not funded by their unions, but on their own dime and their own time, were making a bold statement and showing the American people and the deep state that America was still alive and well and would not give up in their pursuit of living in a more free land. The actions of that million or so people are worthy of remembering long into the future. This holiday begs the questions: “What kind of country do we want?” Those pulled into the legal system that day, targeted for retribution, will forever be regarded as heroes.

Making January 6 Patriots’ Day has a dual purpose — it provides a day for celebrating Christmas in the old Eastern calendar, as well as for those who celebrate January 6 as Epiphany, or Three Kings, a fitting behavior for a Christian land.

7.) December 20 — Secession Day

December 20, 1860, South Carolina seceded from the Union. It did this in the spirit of 1776, in the spirit of the Declaration of Independence, complaining that the US Government had gotten out of line in the amount of tax it was levying on the people, and for other reasons less significant, but more highly bandied about by history in order to suppress the just nature of secession.

8.) June 30 — Thomas Sowell Day

Thomas Sowell was born June 30, 1930, making this a day to celebrate a great American.

From the earliest days of his ministry to the mid-1960s, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King told a story of the importance of black Americans behaving upright, having strong families, and holding themselves accountable for their own actions. King presented a powerful Christian message on this topic until around 1965 when he began to cater increasingly to a northern urban audience, rather than a southern Christian audience. Though King never abandoned the message of individual accountability, his life has been twisted by his most vocal disciples into one big support for perpetual grievance culture and more welfare programs. Few Americans have their interest served by the divisive manipulation of this topic.

Dr. Sowell takes us in a different, healthier, and far more impressive intellectual direction that supports the American experiment. Sowell has excelled in economics, policy, ethnic relations, the economics of liberty, economics of immigration, social phenomena of all manner, social theory, and has appealed to both an academic audience and a popular audience.

Sowell is worthy of praise, though he has been criticized for glaring mistakes, such as: attempting to describe the real estate boom and bust without considering the role of The Federal Reserve Bank, being a brilliant economist but a terrible philosopher, terrible on foreign policy, and a “useless” historian on the topic of World War Two, improperly researching the work of Jean-Baptiste Say while criticizing Say’s Law, misunderstanding the critique of Eugen von Bohm-Bawerk against Karl Marx and erroneously ending up nearly in favor of Marx in his labor theory of value, even showing “a surprising sympathy for Marxism,” publishing old and overly sympathetic ideas of his on Marxism from his time as a Marxist in the 1960s rather than throwing those ideas in the garbage where they belong, accordingly publishing a book that is entirely pro-Marxist with the exception of its final chapter. These criticisms would not be appropriate to ignore.

Sowell is brilliant in so many areas and is a counterpoint to our overly divisive and toxic mainstream discussions on race and ethnicity in America that his life’s work allows for healing and a day to honor him is appropriate.

For example, Sowell dismisses the legacy of slavery argument, claiming it an appeal to emotion rather than based on facts:

“If we wanted to be serious about evidence, we might compare where blacks stood a hundred years after the end of slavery with where they stood after 30 years of the liberal welfare state….Despite the grand myth that black economic progress began or accelerated with the passage of the civil rights laws and ‘war on poverty’ programs of the 1960s, the cold fact is that the poverty rate among blacks fell from 87 percent in 1940 to 47 percent by 1960. This was before any of those programs began.”

Sowell blames the welfare state as a source damage in black homes:

“A vastly expanded welfare state in the 1960s destroyed the black family, which had survived centuries of slavery and generations of racial oppression. In 1960, before this expansion of the welfare state, 22 percent of black children were raised with only one parent. By 1985, 67 percent of black children were raised with either one parent or no parent.”

His voice is a welcome one for our era, in which so few people are willing to take responsibility for their own lives.

9.) August 22 — Good Samaritan Day / Iryna Zarutska Day

On August 22, 2025, a woman seeking refuge in the US was murdered by a violent criminal who had been released leniently many times. America has a duty for its guests and for Americans, alike, to keep the country free of crime. This is the day that Americans are reminded of the parable of the Good Samaritan, and encouraged to be helpful to others in need, and in which prosecutors and courts are told to give deference to the one who helps, rather than the one who sits idly by, or even callously walks off. Judges are to be held accountable for their neglect.

10.) Late November — Family Day

The day after Thanksgiving is widely known as Black Friday, a long coveted day by American politicians and retailers to encourage consumer spending in the United States in preparation for Christmas. More appropriate and edifying is to celebrate this as a day focussed on family, whether or not money is spent procuring gifts on this day.

11.) Late November / Early December — Christ The King Day Observed

To be celebrated the Monday after Thanksgiving, bringing Thanksgiving to an even longer weekend. This is a day to celebrate Jesus Christ as Lord over all the earth, appropriate for a Christian country.

12.) August 23 — Dolly Madison Day

On August 24, 1814, Dolly Madison, after her husband provoked a war with Great Britain, was forced out of the White House. She behaved so admirably.

The White House Historical Association writes:

“On August 24, 1814, during the War of 1812, British troops invaded Washington, D.C. First Lady Dolley Madison ordered the Washington painting to be saved, and it was taken down off the wall and sent out of harm’s way by a group of individuals–Jean Pierre Sioussat, the White House steward; Paul Jennings, an enslaved worker; Thomas McGrath, the White House gardener; and two men from New York, Jacob Barker and Robert G.L. De Peyster. Later that night, British troops set fire to the White House and destroyed many of the first family’s possessions. They could not, however, claim the capture or destruction of George Washington’s famous portrait. The portrait currently hangs in the East Room of the White House, paired with a full-length portrait of Martha Washington.”

In a letter to her sister, Madison depicts how the President had left the White House to continue governing elsewhere and knew that the evacuation of the White House, if needed, could be handled under her capable charge.

In this behavior by Mrs. Madison, the values of Proverbs 31, are highlighted, values that should be promoted in our culture, rather than the caustic relationships between men and women that contemporary American culture tends to promote. Every upstanding parent can hope to raise such trustworthy daughters as this resilient and sensible Madison.

In contrast to the toxic celebration “International Women’s Day,” a divisive communist creation, which celebrates a person for simply being born, this is a holiday that celebrates virtue, and encourages discussion of that virtue.

This is the same war in which the Star Spangled Banner was written, September 14, 1814. The effects of that war in the development of central banking in the United States were extensive, as well as taxation, and federalization of power. All of these are important matters, and are further addressed in the existence of the next three holidays I will write about.

What holidays do you think need to be added to the federal calendar of holidays?

The post It’s Time To Add Another Federal Holiday: Charlie Kirk Day (And 11 Other Suggestions) appeared first on LewRockwell.

Continued U.S. ‘dominance’ requires striking out in multiple directions, because the unidirectional war on Russia unexpectedly has failed.

Trump: “This problem with Vietnam … We stopped fighting to win. We would have won easy. We would have won Afghanistan easy. Would have won every war easy. But we got politically correct: ‘Ah, let’s take it easy!’. It’s that we’re not politically correct anymore. Just so you understand: We win. Now we win”. All these would have been easy – along with Afghanistan.

What was the meaning to Trump’s reference to Vietnam? ‘What he was saying is that ‘we’ would have won Vietnam easily, if we hadn’t been woke and DEI’. Some veterans might amplify, ‘You know: we had enough firepower: We could have killed everyone’.

“No matter where you go”, Trump adds, “no matter what you even think about, there’s nothing like the fighting force that we have [including] Rome … No one should ever want to start a fight with the USA”.

The point is that in today’s Trump circles, not only is there no fear of war, but there is this unsubstantiated delusion of American military power. Hegseth said: “We are the most powerful military on the history of the planet, bar none. Nobody else can even come close to it”. To which Trump adds, “Our market [too], is the greatest in the world – no one can live without it”.

The Anglo-U.S. ‘Empire’ is backing itself into the corner of ‘terminal decline’, as French philosopher Emmanual Todd puts it. Trump is attempting, on the one hand, to coerce into being a new ‘Bretton Woods’ in order to re-create dollar hegemony through threat, bluster and tariffs – or war, if needs be.

Todd believes that as the Anglo-U.S. Empire falls apart, the U.S. is lashing out at the world in fury – and is devouring itself through the attempt to re-colonise its own colonies (i.e. Europe) for quick financial shakedowns.

Trump’s vision of U.S. unstoppable military force amounts to a doctrine of domination and submission. One that runs counter to all the former narrative-talk of western values. What is clear is that this policy shift is ‘joined at the hip’ with Jewish and Evangelical eschatological creeds. It shares with Jewish nationalists the conviction that they too, in alliance with Trump, verge on quasi universal domination:

“We crushed Iran’s nuclear and ballistic projects – they are still there, but we took them back with the help of President Trump”, Netanyahu boasts. “We had a precise alliance, within the framework of which we shared the burden [with the U.S.] and achieved the neutralization of Iran”. According to Netanyahu, “Israel emerged from this event as the dominant power in the Middle East, but we still have something to do – what started in Gaza will be ended in Gaza”.

“We need to ‘deradicalise’ Gaza – as was done in Germany after World War II or in Japan”. Netanyahu insisted to Euronews. Submission however, is proving elusive.

Continued U.S. ‘dominance’, however, requires striking out in multiple directions, because the unidirectional war on Russia – which was supposed to provide the world with an object lesson in the ‘craft’ of Anglo-Zionist domination unexpectedly has failed. And now time is running out on America’s deficit and debt crisis.

This – whilst articulated as the Trumpian desire for domination – is also throwing out nihilistic impulses for war and at the same time fracturing western structures. Bitter tensions are arising across the globe. The big picture is that Russia has seen the writing on the wall: The Alaska summit has born no fruit; Trump is not serious about wanting to recast relations with Moscow.

The expectation in Moscow is now leaning toward the expectation of U.S. escalation in Ukraine; a more devastating strike on Iran; or some punitive, performative action in Venezuela – or both. The Trump team seem to be talking themselves up into a state psychic excitement.

The Jewish Oligarchs and the right-wing of the Cabinet in Israel, in this emerging picture, existentially need America to remain as a feared military hegemon (just as Trump promises). Without the American ‘unstoppable’ military cudgel and absent the centrality of dollar use in trade, Jewish Supremacy becomes nothing more than an eschatological chimaera.

A crisis of de-dollarisation, or a bond market blow up – juxtaposed with the rise of China and Russia and BRICS – becomes an existential threat to the supremacist ‘fantasy’.

In July 2025, Trump told his cabinet, “BRICS was set up to hurt us; BRICS was set up to degenerate our dollar and take our dollar … off as the standard”.

So what comes next? Plainly the U.S. and Israeli initial goal is to ‘sear’ Hamas’ psyche with defeat; and if there is no visible expression of utter submission, the overarching aim likely will be to drive out all Palestinians from Gaza and to install Jewish settlers in their place.

Israeli Minister Smotrich – a few years ago – argued that complete displacement of the Palestinian and Arab non-submissive population would only be finally achieved during ‘a major crisis or big war’ – such as occurred in 1948, when 800,000 Palestinians were expelled from their homes. But today, despite the two years’ of massacres, Palestinians have not fled, nor submitted.

So Israel, for all Netanyahu’ boasts of having crushed Hamas, has yet to defeat Palestinians in Gaza – and some in the Hebrew media are calling the Sharm el-Sheik aAccord “a defeat for Israel”.

Netanyahu and the Israeli Right’s ambitions are not circumscribed by Gaza.They extend much further – they seek to establish a State on the full ‘Land of Israel’, which is to say, Greater Israel. Their definition of this colonial project is ambiguous, but likely they want southern Lebanon up to the Litani River; probably most of southern Syria (up to Damascus); parts of the Sinai; and maybe parts of the East Bank, which now belong to Jordan.

So – despite two years of war – what Israel still wants, Professor Mearsheimer opines, is a Palestinian-free Greater Israel.

“Furthermore”, Professor Mearsheimer adds:

“you have to think about what they want with regard to their neighbours. They want weak neighbours. They want to break their neighbours apart. They want to do to Iran what they did in Syria. It’s very important to understand that [while] the nuclear issue is of central importance to the Israelis in Iran, they have broader goals – which is to wreck Iran, turn it into a series of small states”.

“And then the states that they don’t break apart – like Egypt and Jordan – they want them to be economically dependent on Uncle Sam, so that Uncle Sam has huge coercive leverage over them. So, they’re thinking seriously about how to deal with all their neighbours and make sure that they’re weak and don’t pose any kind of threat to Israel”.

Israel clearly seeks the collapse and neutralisation of Iran – as Netanyahu outlined:

“We crushed Iran’s nuclear and ballistic projects – they are still there, but we took them back with the help of President Trump … Iran [now] is developing intercontinental ballistic missiles with an 8,000 km range. Add another 3,000 and they can target New York City, Washington, Boston, Miami, Mar-a-Lago”.

As a possible ceasefire deal begins to take shape in Egypt, the wider regional picture is that the U.S. and Israel to seem intent on provoking a Sunni–Shia confrontation to encircle and weaken Iran. The last days’ EU–GCC joint statement on the UAE’s claims to own sovereignty over Abu Musa and the Tunb Islands reflects a growing analysis in Tehran that Western powers are once again using Gulf monarchies as instruments to stir regional instability.

In short, this is not about the islands or oil – it is about manufacturing a new front to weaken Iran.

And with all such projects for the re-ordering of the Region to acquiesce to Israel’s hegemony, the big Jewish donors want to ensure a situation whereby the U.S. supports Israel unconditionally – hence the large funding directed at the MSM and social media to ensure an across all society support for Israel in America.

The two-year anniversary of 7 October poses a question: How does the balance sheet stand? The U.S.-Israel partnership has succeeded in destroying Syria, turning it into a hell of internecine killings; Russia has lost its foothold in the region; ISIS has been revived; sectarianism is on the upsurge. Hizbullah was decapitated but not destroyed. The region is being Balkanised, fragmented and brutalised.

JCPOA Snapback for Iran has been triggered and on 18 October, the JCPOA itself expires. Trump then is left with a ‘blank sheet’ on which he can write an ultimatum demanding Iranian capitulation, or military action (if he so chooses).

On the other side of the account, were we to look back to the Resistance’s initial objectives of exhausting Israel militarily; creating internecine warfare within Israel; and putting into moral and practical question the principle of Zionism that confers special rights for one population group over another, then it might be said that the Resistance – at a heavy, heavy cost – has had some success.

More significantly, Israel’s bloody wars have already lost it a generation of young Americans, who are not coming back. Whatever the circumstances to the killing of Charlie Kirk, his death has let the genie of ‘Israeli First’ dominance in Republican politics escape free from the bottle.

Israel has already lost much of Europe, and in the U.S., the Trump and Israeli Firsters’ intolerant insistence on fealty to Israel and its actions has triggered intense First Amendment push-back.

That puts Israel on track to ‘loose’ America. And that could be existential for Israel, who may need to fundamentally re-assess the nature of Zionism (which was, of course, Seyed Nasrallah’s stated objective).

How would that look? Accelerating migration – leaving a patchwork of Zionist holdouts surviving amidst a stagnant economy and global isolation. Is that sustainable?

What will be the future that heralds for Israel’s grandchildren?

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

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Disgraced and fired former FBI director Jim Comey is finally facing his day in court for having lied while under oath.  Unethical New York Attorney General Letitia James has been indicted on bank fraud charges.  Warmonger and former national security advisor John Bolton might soon be indicted for illegally retaining classified documents.  Russia Collusion Hoax co-conspirator, anti-American communist, and former director of the CIA John Brennan might similarly find himself in the dock.  Notoriously dumb “yes-man,” Russia Collusion Hoax co-conspirator, and former director of national intelligence James Clapper is under criminal investigation.  Former FBI director Chris Wray has been accused of lying to Congress regarding the number of plainclothes agents operating during the January 6, 2021, protest for fair elections.  Other well-known names are being scrutinized for criminal prosecution.

As each shoe drops, the corporate news media shriek about President Trump going after his “political enemies” and directly involving himself in Department of Justice charging decisions.  A reasonable journalist might wonder how former chiefs within the Intelligence Community could be considered “political enemies” if they weren’t performing their duties in a political manner.  But such an obvious follow-up question is never asked, and instead Comey, Brennan, Clapper, Wray, and other former, powerful officers within the administrative state are described as if they acted, at all times, selflessly and for the good of the country.

The propaganda press is very concerned about portraying members of the permanent government as being above politics because if the American people understood them to be just as political as members of Congress, then voters might start to wonder why such a vast, unelected administrative state is allowed to exist.  The financial and media elites who control the mainstream press constantly convey to the public the unconstitutional idea that the heads of important departments and agencies act unilaterally and independently.  They pretend that the director of the FBI and the attorney general of the United States do not answer to the president.  They pretend that the CIA and U.S. military operate autonomously from the White House.  Mainstream media “reporters” desperately work to convince Americans that unelected bureaucrats are entitled to wield tremendous power all on their own.  They are not.

Article II of the Constitution lays the foundations for the Executive Branch, and the first sentence of the first section is specific and clear: “The executive Power shall be vested in a President of the United States of America.”  The first sentence of the second section defines the president’s authority over the military: “The President shall be Commander in Chief of the Army and Navy of the United States, and of the Militia of the several States, when called into the actual Service of the United States.”  When it comes to executive authority, all power resides with the president.  Likewise, every Executive employee — from cabinet secretary to parking attendant — acts as a delegated beneficiary of the president’s Executive power.

It is the president of the United States — not the attorney general — who is the chief law enforcement officer of the federal government.  If President Trump decided to exercise his vested prosecutorial powers, he could try cases in federal courts.  When federal prosecutors enforce the law in courtrooms across the country, they are empowered to do so only because they are acting on the president’s behalf.  When corporate news publications pretend that federal prosecutors are entitled to act independently from the White House, they are willfully disregarding the U.S. Constitution and foisting an illegitimate form of government upon the American people.

As a simple thought experiment, consider what it would mean if senior officials in the Department of Justice were exclusively empowered to decide how to enforce the law.  It would mean that an unethical attorney such as Andrew Weissmann would be in a position to tell the president of the United States what he can and cannot do.  It would give government lawyers — whose Executive authority comes directly from the Office of the President — more authority than the president.  It would effectively rewrite the first sentence of the first section of Article II of the Constitution into some variant of this: The executive Power shall be vested in Andrew Weissmann or other unethical attorneys who have weaseled their way into becoming career bureaucrats within the Department of Justice.

We saw this illegitimate form of government play out in President Trump’s first term.  During the run-up to the 2016 election, Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama had conspired with Intelligence Community officers and White House officials to frame candidate Trump as a Russian spy.  Even though then-FBI director Jim Comey knew these allegations were false, the corrupt law enforcement officer used this frame-up job as leverage against President Trump the following year.

Conniving career bureaucrats in the Justice Department convinced Attorney General Jeff Sessions to recuse himself from all investigations involving the manufactured Russia Collusion Hoax.  President Trump eventually fired serial-liar Comey, and career bureaucrat and Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein (in his capacity as acting attorney general) appointed former FBI director Robert Mueller as a special counsel responsible for investigating the Democrat-constructed Russia Collusion Hoax.

Unbeknownst to the American people, Special Counsel Mueller was suffering from some form of dementia, so unethical government prosecutor Andrew Weissmann effectively ran a two-year harassment campaign whose ultimate purpose was to impeach President Trump and remove him from office.  During this time, dishonorable lawyer Andrew Weissmann effectively held more power than the president of the United States.

At any time, President Trump could have put an end to this nonsense.  He could have fired his attorney general and deputy attorney general.  He could have fired Mueller and Weissmann.  He could have concluded the whole affair and moved on.  But the pressure from Congress (Republicans included) and the propaganda press for President Trump to comply with the special counsel charade was intense.  Paul Ryan and other congressional RINOs even suggested that Trump would be impeached if he did not permit the manufactured investigation into the Democrat-constructed Russia Collusion Hoax to proceed.  In an effort to keep the peace, President Trump essentially gave corrupt lawyer and staunch Democrat Andrew Weissmann control over the presidency.

The Weissmann presidency was absurd.  When corrupt lawyers are empowered to tell the president of the United States what he may legally do, the Constitution has been entirely shredded.  Instead of an elected president exclusively vested with Executive power, we end up with an unelected legal bureaucracy that enigmatically delegates a handful of incidental powers to the sitting president.

The administrative state likes this arrangement.  Permanent government bureaucrats prefer to limit the president of the United States to theatrical performances that include signing ceremonies and kissing babies.  For everything else, they insist, Americans should leave it to the experts.  Let the prosecutors decide whom to indict.  Let the generals and admirals decide whom to attack.  Let the central bankers decide the value of American currency.  Let the spies wage covert wars at home and across the globe.  “Trust the vast bureaucracy,” the bureaucrats say, “because the administrative state is made up of impartial, incorruptible, competent, and well-meaning experts.”

Except there is nothing in the U.S. Constitution about a Central Intelligence Agency, Federal Bureau of Investigation, Internal Revenue Service, or Environmental Protection Agency.  These armies of unelected bureaucrats wield power as if they were a separate and unrivaled branch of government.  To the extent that these oversized monsters are remotely constitutional, however, it is only because they exercise delegated powers belonging exclusively to the president of the United States.

The buck stops with the president, not with the bureaucrats.  Corporate news publications that insist it should be the other way around have no interest in protecting the Constitution.  They seek to undermine it.

This article was originally published on American Thinker.

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When it comes to destroying your brand, Norwegian Nobel Committee is the Bud Lite of peace prizes. After all, back in 2009 they gave the Peace Prize to a President Barack Obama who then went on to bomb at least seven countries, set the Middle East on fire, and even conduct drone strikes on American citizens!

Other awardees have had similarly suspicious records as peacemakers. They even gave a Peace Prize to the likes of Henry Kissinger.

This year has proven to be no different. Last week the Nobel Committee announced that the 2025 Peace Prize would go to Venezuelan politician María Corina Machado. Machado has a long history in the Venezuelan opposition including support for and participation in the US-backed, 2002 coup against then-president Hugo Chavez.

She is likewise a strong opponent of current Venezuelan president, Nicolas Maduro, and in 2018 even wrote a letter to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu asking for Israel’s assistance in overthrowing the Venezuelan government.

Shouldn’t we be cheering anyone seeking to overthrow Maduro’s authoritarian style of socialism that is hardly helping the people of the country? Perhaps, but what Machado is seeking is very different from working for change in her country’s system of government. She has long worked with and been paid by the US government’s “regime change” apparatus, the National Endowment for Democracy (NED).

NED was founded under President Reagan to do openly what the CIA has been notorious for doing in secret: overthrowing foreign governments that Washington doesn’t like. Scratch any of the “color revolutions” of the past 30 years and you will find the participation of the National Endowment for Democracy.

Nowhere have these coups and revolutions promoted and funded by NED (and the CIA itself) been even remotely successful. They have only produced broken, ravaged, burned-out shells like we have seen in Libya and elsewhere. They produced chaos and called it freedom and democracy. They even helped put al-Qaeda in power in Syria!

No, you don’t have to love Maduro or his style of governance to be critical of outside attempts to oust him. In President Trump’s first term, he set his neocons loose on Venezuela and the result was the almost comical rise of the political nobody Juan Guaido.

I say “almost comical” because Trump’s neocons wasted untold millions of our dollars on the farce.

Is the Nobel Peace Prize just another deep state, soft-power tool intended to boost the US global military empire? The timing of the award going to the relatively unknown Machado is suspicious. President Trump has parked an armada of warships off the Venezuelan coast as his aides openly talk about “decapitation” strikes on the Venezuelan government. After the extrajudicial killing of some 20 civilians in his attacks on at least four boats off the Venezuelan coast, President Trump is openly bragging that no one dares launch a boat in the area.

The “Peace Prize” endows Machado with a new sense of moral authority and gives weight to any “green-light” she may again give to outside militaries to attack her own country.

What’s wrong with heeding Machado’s calls to “liberate” her country? President John Quincy Adams said it best, America “goes not abroad, in search of monsters to destroy. She is the well-wisher to the freedom and independence of all. She is the champion and vindicator only of her own.”

We should leave Venezuela alone.

The post The Nobel (War Is) Peace Prize appeared first on LewRockwell.

I’ve seen a lot of empire loyalists going “Why aren’t the Free Palestine people cheering about the ceasefire?”

If you saw a man beating a child into a coma, would you cheer after the beating stopped? No, your first reaction would be horror at what happened and your second would be fear that he’ll attack the kid again. And then at some point you’d start wondering why the guy isn’t in jail.

They actually expected a bunch of parades and trophies for pausing a genocide. They thought they’d get applause and adoration and then everything would go back to how it was pre-2023.

That’s adorable. That’s precious. Not gonna happen, but it’s cute that they thought it would.

❖

Drop Site News reports that after the ceasefire was announced Israeli troops went on an arson spree and torched food, homes and critical infrastructure to ensure that Palestinians would have nothing to return to.

I keep thinking the Israeli military has run out of ways to shock me, but they somehow keep finding new ones.

❖

TYT’s Ana Kasparian was in hot water last week for rubbing her hands together while talking about how creepy and evil Jewish oligarch Larry Ellison is, with critics hastening to compare her depiction of Ellison to the antisemitic “Happy Merchant” meme.

Online Zionists eager to stoke the antisemitism hysteria actually went out of their way to digitally insert the Happy Merchant meme into the actual footage of Kasparian’s portrayal, which was probably done to show the similarities between the portrayal and the meme but in practice made it look as though TYT had displayed an antisemitic graphic during their show.

There is no reason to believe Kasparian was being antisemitic with her portrayal of Ellison, who is indeed creepy and evil. Ask a small child to imitate someone who is wicked and sneaky and they’ll rub their hands together looking sinister in the exact way Kasparian did without knowing anything about Jews or Judaism. The only reason anyone felt the need to insert the Happy Merchant meme into the footage in the first place was because hardly anyone knows what the fuck that is.

This has gotten so fucking stupid. You can’t even talk like a normal person in real time without getting accused of doing an antisemitic trope. Nobody can keep track of every little thing on the ADL no-no list. These freaks were accusing Greta Thunberg of being a Nazi for taking a pro-Palestine photo with an octopus plushie, because apparently octopuses are somewhere on the no-no list.

You’re expected to tip toe around and avoid any reference to money, noses, blood, and who knows whatever the fuck else. Penguins? Poodles? IKEA furniture? No one knows. Nobody can keep track of all that shit, especially when speaking in a real-time format and you don’t have time to pause and research whether a certain normal hand gesture is on the antisemitic trope list. It’s an absurd dynamic designed to stagnate all conversation around criticisms of genocide, empire, and oligarchy.

❖

I got into an interaction with someone online who told me I should hate Hamas because they are a proscribed terrorist group. I said “Oh well if the GOVERNMENT says we have to hate Hamas then I stand corrected.” He said it had nothing to do with the government, arguing that it was just “common sense,” after literally just having cited the proscription of Hamas by his government.

It’s amazing how common this viewpoint is. Westerners actually think “terrorist” is some kind of innate quality that certain groups have, instead of a completely made-up designation imposed by specific governments.

They don’t understand that it’s a government-applied label; they think it’s something that those groups actually ARE. They’re so herd-like in their thinking that they actually allow their rulers to interpret reality on their behalf. And they don’t even know they’re doing it.

The overwhelming majority of the world’s governments do not consider Hamas a terrorist group. It’s a label that’s only applied by the Five Eyes states, the EU, Japan, a couple of the empire’s Latin American client states, and Israel. For everyone else it’s just a Palestinian armed resistance group.

In the US-centralized empire, “terrorist” just means “a population which poses an inconvenience to the interests of the empire”. It’s not a real thing. The UK designated Palestine Action a terrorist group because its activists put paint on some war planes to protest a genocide, while an actual, literal Al Qaeda leader has been warmly embraced by western states because he facilitated their regime change objectives in Syria. There are no consistent standards by which Iran’s IRGC should be considered a terrorist group while Israel’s IDF and Mossad should not.

Anyone who regurgitates the word “terrorist” is just telling you they’re a mindless and compliant empire drone.

❖

The Gaza holocaust will be a litmus test for high-profile figures for decades. Everyone’s comments or lack thereof on Israel’s genocidal atrocities will be looked up and amplified whenever their name rises to public attention. It will be the first step in determining whether anyone deserves to be listened to, taken seriously, or voted for. Their comments on Gaza in the mid-2020s will be the first gate through which they must pass to be considered worthy of attention by normal people.

❖

Someone asked me, “Why do you care so much about Palestine?”

I told them ultimately it’s not even especially about Palestine. I care about humanity. I don’t want my kids and grandkids living in the kind of world that would watch civilians get ripped to shreds in full view of the entire planet with the support of my government and its allies. I think that’s pretty reasonable.

_____________

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The post They Seriously Expected Parades and Trophies For Pausing a Genocide appeared first on LewRockwell.

Taki Theodoracopulos knows his history. African tribes conducted slave wars on one another prior to the discovery of the Americas. The conquering of others and enslaving them released the warriors of the successful tribe from ordinary work, thereby permitting them to concentrate full time on their fighting ability.

Surplus slaves were sold for revenues to Arabs or depending on the time in history to whoever the customers were. The smartest of the African tribes conducting slave wars traded those enslaved to Muslims for firearms, thus giving them the advantage in the black African slave wars.

The vast majority of the blacks that ended up in the New World were provided by the black king of Dahomey. Many of the slaves were themselves formidable warriors defeated in battle.

Despite the fact that black slaves brought to America by slave traders financed by Jews, and despite the fact that Muslims were the main customers for black slaves long before there were any white people in North and South America, today American blacks adopt African and Muslim names. As Taki says, it is “like Jews adopting Adolf as their favorite first name, or Palestinians naming their newly born Bibi.”

Here is a totally ignorant, totally indoctrinated product of American “education” giving us the facts as CNN, a lie machine, invents them. She claims that blacks enslaved by whites for no other reason than their skin color jumped “into the waters infested with sharks rather than” be a slave forced to “work by the whip.”

The stupidity of this CNN woman is beyond comprehension. Rather than to be a valued investment doing agricultural work and carefully treated for the investment the slave represented to the owner, the slave preferred to be eaten by sharks. This is the mentality of CNN, the most absurd of the ridiculous Western media.

A year or so ago I read an article in the City Journal. It was about a white slaveowner in the Caribbean who owned 50 black male slaves who worked his sugar plantation. The author raised an interesting question: who was the real boss, the lone white man or the 50 black men, some of whom where highly trained fighters?

The simple-minded, easily indoctrinated black female CNN product of the CNN lie machine actually is so entirely ignorant that she believes people without a labor force other than already enslaved people for which they pay a high price, purchase them not for their labor but in order to beat them, whip them with whips, rape their wives and daughters and, thereby, make their huge investment in their labor worthless, and thereby fail as an agricultural producer, and likely be murdered by angry blacks who outnumbered the whites 50 or 100 to 1.

As I have previously reported, Abe Lincoln’s “Emancipation Proclamation” was a war measure that intended to produce a black slave revolt in the entire South, thus causing the Southern troops to desert the front lines and rush home to the defense of their wives and children.

Not a single Confederate soldier left the front. The  war criminal in the White House–Abe Lincoln–believed the propaganda in Uncle Tom’s Cabin, one of the most evil of all propaganda tracts.

The slaves did not revolt. Why? Because they were not treated as the Northern propagandists reported. Indeed, in many cases, the slaves ran the plantation. Black oversears were common. Imagine blacks whipping other blacks. This is the mentality of CNN.

Today in American Universities, now reduced to anti-American propaganda machines, reside America’s real enemies. Our enemies are not George W. Bush’s chef, a recently deported victim of ICE’s lack of judgment. America’s enemies are white liberals and woke left and Israel.

And yet it is their enemies that Americans embrace.

A people this utterly stupid has no future.

The post ‘African Rulers Virulently Opposed British Antislavery Efforts’ – Taki appeared first on LewRockwell.

“Art is magic liberated from the lie of being truth.”

– Theodor Adorno, Minima Moralia

It is hard to keep your head when all about you, nuts are knocking on it to remind you of things that are not true in a world where reality is hard to find because of endless propaganda, artificial intelligence, personal betrayals, and nuts who know nothing but can’t stop telling you the nothing that they know. They are always falling but seem to be reborn endlessly, popping up in new clothes as advocates for the latest fashionable truths that they rejected only yesterday. They always jump on the band wagon, aka the nut wagon, where they trade old falsehoods for new truths to create chaos. It makes one a wee bit suspicious.

Knock, knock. Who’s there? You’re nuts. What about them?

See what I mean? It’s very hard these days. Nudniks repeat the same circular explanations for why things are as they are until you feel your head will explode. One minute you expect the world to end in a nuclear war; the next you are munching on peanuts and sipping wine as the full moon rises with a grin as if to say it’s time for a Moon Dance “’Neath the cover of October skies / And all the leaves on the trees are falling / To the sound of the breezes that blow / And I’m trying to please to the calling / Of your heartstrings that play soft and low.” But everyone knows the Irish are nuts, crazy romantics and always looking for a fight or a roll in the hay after a few drinks.

Which reminds me, my ninety two year-old mother-in-law, who had dementia in her last years, once said to me, after I asked her at dinner if she would like a roll, “Well, that’s the first time a man has ever asked me that!” So I passed her one.

As chance would have it, as a refuge from the nuttiness of the 1970s, the so-called “Me Decade” of navel gazing, Watergate, the death of the anti-war movement, the Arab Oil Boycott, the Son-of-Sam killings, and the conservative retrenchment under Ronald Reagan, among a few highlights, we came to live in the beautiful Berkshires mountains of western Massachusetts, an area that produces many nuts.

One day in August 1980 when we were living in New York City, my wife and I were walking north along the Hudson River in Riverside Park. About fifty yards or so in front of us a woman jumped in fright, screaming as three big cats crossed the path in front of her. As we approached, we saw that they were monstrous rats, who then recrossed the path to their cozy abode in the big rocks along the riverbank.

Sometimes rats are just rats, this time they seemed oracular. It was time for us to leave.

Within a few weeks, having put some belongings in storage, we got a small tent and sleeping bags and headed north to western Massachusetts, where we had previously lived. While camping up on a mountain side, I went down to a pay phone that we passed on our way up and made a chance phone call to a number I had seen in the local newspaper, a call that led that very night to an apartment and the start of our forty-five year long life in the southern Berkshires, an area of exquisite natural beauty, despite or maybe because of the nuts.

“I wish I didn’t know now what I didn’t know then,” sings Bob Seger in “Against the Wind.” Those lines come back to me as I walk through the sun-dappled woods these luminescent October days. It sure seems like paradise. The breeze in the trees and the fluttering multi-colored leaves, the pine needles like a soft bed underfoot. Most migratory birds have headed south but the remaining ones are flitting about. The cool air intermingles with sunny warm spots that stop you in your tracks in wonder at the beauty of the world despite its man-made horrors.

And then, of course, the reminders of what as a boy I didn’t know then but do know now that follow me everywhere, even as I try to revel in the beauty of my enclosure in this magical forest. Not the revelations of the nuts who know nothing but can’t stop telling me the nothing that they now tell me they know – that they have just discovered – but the truth about the CIA’s MKUltra mind- control program that is now nearly synonymous with the digital life of the Internet and the intelligence agents posing as liberators of the public mind. Mind-control on a vast, vast scale of false trails to lead the nuts into thinking they have cracked the shell to grasp the inner truth. As Adorno puts it:

It is precisely the critical element that is wanting in ostensibly independent thought. Insistence on the cosmic secret hidden beneath the outer shell, in reverently omitting to establish the relation between the two, often enough confirms by just this omission that the shell has its good reasons that must be accepted without asking questions.

Look, they seem to say, this is the secret truth, but unlike the King’s Men, their revelations always put Humpty Dumpty’s shell back together again. And so it goes, as the nuts rain down on our sore heads.

I try not to think of such things as I walk, but when I return home with bumps on my head from the nuts hitting me, I sit and reflect on what crept to mind when I was walking, trying to forget.

I think also of my trust in others when I was a boy, and how in recent years that trust has evaporated as people have used me and my writing for their own agendas. Always taking and never giving, always asking me to review their books and never reviewing mine. Using my words as if they were theirs. Acting as if we were walking the same dissidents’ road together when their forked tongues had them secretly following the one most traveled. I am saying this with a sigh, that what Bob Seger passionately sings in “Against the Wind” seems so true: “And the years rolled slowly past / And I found myself alone / Surrounded by strangers / I thought were my friends.”

If it sounds like I am complaining, it is because my head is sore. The woods are lovely, dark and deep this time of year, and I return from my walks with pockets full of mumbles of false promises together with black walnuts, chestnuts, hickory nuts – even acorns and pine cones – that the wind has blown down to hit my head hard to remind me to wake up. As another singer, Paul Simon puts it in his great song, “The Boxer”:  “All lies and jest / Still, a man hears what he wants to hear / And disregards the rest.”

“Well, I’m older now but still running against the wind.”

Reprinted with the author’s permission.

The post Nuts or Not, We Have the Music appeared first on LewRockwell.

Wars are mass-murder, massive theft, and unrelenting propaganda.  In this country they’re lucrative overseas entanglements, as government diverts loot from taxpayers to the war industry.  They’re also perpetual, as war embellishes the sanctity of the State as well as providing grounds for increased plunder of its population.  Wars are government as Houdini, drawing attention to the bloody far-away while relieving attention on the corrupt close-at-hand.  For the victor, the propaganda is inked as truth in the history books.  War is the health of the state, Randolph Bourne concluded, but not for the people under it:

In the freest of republics as well as in the most tyrannical of empires, all foreign policy, the diplomatic negotiations which produce or forestall war, are equally the private property of the Executive part of the Government, and are equally exposed to no check whatever from popular bodies, or the people voting as a mass themselves.

Government-controlled monetary policy is cover for counterfeiting, an insidious form of taxation that creates gross economic distortions and inequalities.  Presidential elections are extravagant contests between straw men owned by those behind the throne.  Formal education is indoctrination into dominant narratives.  The US Constitution is a feel-good distraction from the larceny and depravity of the political class.

Blogger JD Breen has published a brief history of the 21st century in two parts (here and here).   “As last century was launched when the Maine sank in Havana harbor, this one turned when the Twin Towers were toppled. . . . The remnants of the U.S. Constitution went in the shredder.”  Shocking, but not surprising, he said, given the destruction wrought by US intervention in Muslim countries over the decades.

But government, as we’ve learned, is never accountable for wrong-doing. If it was, it would imply the state is fallible, a blasphemous idea.

Instead of blaming their own covert coups and military misadventures, government officials told us “the terrorists hated us for our freedoms”. So to keep us safe, they stripped more of them away.

They invaded countries they’d already wanted to conquer, cracked down on the one they already ruled, and counterfeited trillions of new currency so we could pay for their “mistakes”.

According to a Brown University report, total cost of the post-9/11 government adventure was $8 trillion and 900,000 deaths.  And what of 9/11 itself?  Was it merely a coincidence it amounted to the New Pearl Harbor sought by the neocon think tank, the Project for the New American Century (1997-2006)?  Is it possible the exceptional nation is completely devoid of moral scruples?

It’s not as if our condition has improved since then — see Part II of Breen’s history.  And what do we make of the end phase of the ongoing genocide in Gaza, conducted by Israel, funded involuntarily by US taxpayers?  Or the proxy war in Ukraine, another wealth- and lives-draining operation?  Or the regime’s war on the First Amendment following the assassination of a beloved conservative activist?

“We must have government,” Robert Higgs wrote in Chapter One of his classic, Crisis and Leviathan, originally published in 1988. “Without government to defend us from external aggression, preserve domestic order, define and enforce property rights, few of us could achieve much.”Since then Dr. Higgs has taken a different perspective:

Everyone can see the immense harm the state causes day in and day out, not to mention its periodic orgies of mass death and destruction. In the past century alone, states caused hundreds of millions of deaths, not to the combatants on both sides of the many wars they launched, whose casualties loom large enough, but to “their own” populations, whom they have chosen to shoot, bomb, shell, hack, stab, beat, gas, starve, work to death, and otherwise obliterate in ways too grotesque to contemplate calmly.

Yet, almost incomprehensibly, people fear that without the state’s supposedly all-important protection, society will lapse into disorder and people will suffer grave harm.

And for assurance we can do it if we try, as I’ve quoted many times, from Thomas Paine::

There is a natural aptness in man, and more so in society, because it embraces a greater variety of abilities and resource, to accommodate itself to whatever situation it is in. The instant formal government is abolished, society begins to act: a general association takes place, and common interest produces common security.

If we want a consistent, moral approach to life we should let the engine of prosperity and peace, the laissez-faire free market, meaning a market unobstructed by government, serve as our governing apparatus, not “government” as we’ve known it.

A revised birth certificate

The following is at best a draft of what a new Declaration of Independence  — Declaration of Independence from the American State —might look like:

When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, a decent respect for the opinions of mankind requires they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all people possess certain inalienable rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness; that to secure these rights, we recognize that sovereignty resides with each person only, that we are free to contract with security agencies for protection of life and property, as we judge necessary.

We further hold that the American state secures its false sovereignty through a monopoly of force over the area comprising its claimed boundaries, which through repeated infractions of our natural liberties threaten our survival, prosperity, and general well-being.

Though prudence will dictate that governance long established should not be changed for light and transient causes, we hold that our American society is approaching full collapse due to the state’s means of governance, consisting of, but not limited to:

• Plunder of the people through vast and complex schemes of taxation
• State control of the monetary unit through its central bank, the Federal Reserve, that produces severe economic inequalities, periodic crises, and crushing debt
• Suicidal foreign policy with an end-of-civilization nuclear component
• Onerous regulations that fatten administrative state functions while draining wealth from those who produce it
• Corrupt elections and corruption of elected officials by other states, especially Israel
• State-controlled education and media that ensures preferred narratives remain unchallenged from mainstream sources
• Numerous false flags used to violate our freedom and safety while justifying war
• Propaganda, an ongoing stream of lies and deceptions
• Widespread psychological problems, including drug and alcohol addiction

We, therefore, as voluntary signatories to this Declaration, declare we are absolved from all allegiance to the American state, and that all political connection between it and us is hereby totally dissolved.  And for the support of this Declaration, should the state refuse to recognize our freedom, we mutually pledge to each other our lives, our fortunes, and our sacred honor.

The post Breaking Free From State Rule appeared first on LewRockwell.

Kishore Mahbubani is a Singaporean diplomat who has served for ten years as as ambassador to the United Nations. His talks about global policies and their development are always of interest.

His most recent one under the question “What will geopolitics look like in the next ten years?” is no exception (video).

The most important part starts at 22:54 min. Here I am mostly interested in what Mahbubani has to say about Europe (edited machine transcript):

I want to emphasize that the in current situation the key word you got to understand is complexity. [The world] is extremely complex because there are a lot of moving parts all the time. So for a start clearly and at the at the highest strategic level as you know in the cold war was bipolar the cold war ended and it became unipolar. And now we have what you have a strange combination of both a bipolar and multipolar world.
[…]
But there are also other powers [besides the U.S., China and India] that are clearly changing the situation.

Again, clearly Russia matters, right? And the biggest strategic mistake that the Europeans made in dealing with Russia is that they only look at the size of its economy and didn’t look at the overall national strength and their military capability.

So the Ukraine war could have been avoided if the Europeans had just shown some degree of respect for Russia’s own long-term strategic interests. And the tragedy of the Europeans trying to punish the rest of the world for buying Russian oil is that they could have avoided this war with Russia if they had shown some strategic common sense in dealing with Russia.

He later blames the mistake on the serious lack of abilities of the current crop of European leaders:

So all that is what I mean with complexity. It is not a simple black and white chessboard, you know, it’s extremely complex and you got to watch all the moving parts.

The people who can get the big picture are the ones who will succeed and thrive and those who don’t, like the Europeans, sadly .. .

The Europeans live in a delusionary world, and I mean that quite seriously because they, you know if you just look at the photograph of the European leaders sitting on sofas in front of the school teacher Donald Trump at his desk lecturing these European leaders. They look like school children. I mean the optics itself captured what had happened.

And for a respected prime minister of the Netherlands Mark Rutte, whom I met, who is a very thoughtful intelligent guy by the way, for him to call Trump daddy? I mean it shows you that something has gone wrong.

So this actually I must tell you: In my last conversation with Kissinger he told me candidly that the quality of mind of these Europeans has gone down so much they don’t understand how much the world has changed. So this is an example of where – if you understand the world you can navigate through it, but if you don’t understand the world, like the Europeans, they seem to be in trouble.

Mahbubani diagnosis of Europe’s disease is in my view correct. But what might be the best therapy to correct this situation?

Reprinted with permission from Moon of Alabama.

The post Mahbubani on Europe’s Strategic Disease appeared first on LewRockwell.

For most Americans, and certainly for baby boomers, we remember the first major exposé before Congress during the Church Committee hearings, when William Colby, the head of the CIA admitted under oath that the agency had its tentacles in much of the American mainstream media and promulgated bogus stories for citizens to consume.

This revelation shocked and saddened the public, because Americans had long placed their trust in The New York Times, the Washington Post, and the major television networks. It was the first time many realized that forces working behind the scenes were manipulating the truth for their own advantage, and these forces were completely hidden from public view.

For investigative journalists, those hearings opened a Pandora’s box. Around the same time, Daniel Ellsberg’s release of The Pentagon Papers revealed the extent of deception behind America’s involvement in the Vietnam War. We learned that the narratives surrounding the Gulf of Tonkin incident were fabrications for going to war.

As a result of those lies, at least 58,000 American soldiers died and over 300,000 were wounded. Even more tragic, more than 1.5 million Vietnamese, who were mostly civilians, lost their lives. The US left Southeast Asia contaminated with Agent Orange, a toxin that continues to harm human life and the environment to this day. Hundreds of thousands of American soldiers became ill after the war, not only from PTSD but also from exposure to this deadly chemical. Once again, those we trusted — presidents, legislators, secular experts, and the media — deceived us. They denied any connection between exposure and illness just as they denied accountability.

The same pattern repeated itself decades later with the invasion of Iraq. The public was again led into a war built upon false narratives and largely perpetuated by the New York Times and its top journalist Judith Miller. Again, thousands of civilians died; the country was poisoned with depleted uranium, leaving yet another lethal legacy for future generations. Across history, countless examples reveal how special interest groups and lobbyists have infiltrated federal agencies in order to dominate the political system and control much of the media. Yet no one has been held accountable for the destruction and suffering that these lies and wars have inflicted upon innocent people.

Fast forward to the Trump and Biden years. Americans were told that the COVID-19 vaccines were “safe and effective” by the very same media and federal authorities they had trusted for decades. Few acknowledged that much of the science behind these assurances had been captured by private entities and compromised by conflicts of interest. Again, accountability was absent. 

The same was true for the tobacco industry cover up that funded misleading research and public campaigns to deny a link between smoking and cancer. In 2008, the major Wall Street banks’ reckless speculation, completely ignored or denied by rating agencies and public regulators, created a financial crisis that decimated people’s savings and left millions of Americans homeless. Yet few executives faced any consequences, which again confirms suspicions that the system protects power and not people. And then perhaps one of the most unconstitutional and egregious examples was the Cambridge Analytica scandal whereby social media manipulation reached new heights when private data from millions of Facebook users were used to influence elections. 

The average American remains deeply trusting. Americans believe that legislators, journalists, professional institutions, and public health officials possess greater knowledge and therefore act in the public’s best interest. But if our leaders in government, media, and industry have been consistently wrong, from the Korean War onward, why should anyone still believe them? Why do they refuse to admit when they are wrong?

No matter how respected someone may be in their field, if that person dares to challenge the prevailing groupthink in science, medicine, nutrition, geopolitics, or whichever party holds the White House, they are quickly labeled an outcast. They face censorship and ridicule, or even professional punishment. So why doesn’t the public rise up to question these narratives? Why have we grown so complacent?

We are now beginning to see that those who control the White House, Congress, and even the social media platforms, such as Facebook and X, have become handmaidens of the CIA, Homeland Security, the national security state, and the military-industrial complex. Yet unlike in earlier eras, none of these so-called puppet masters have been held to account. That, however, may finally be changing. James Comey’s perjury before Congress was recently exposed thanks to declassified documents released by Tulsi Gabbard. The curtain is beginning to lift on decades of corruption within federal agencies. Figures such as Robert F. Kennedy Jr. are now leading what some see as a revolutionary crusade for transparency and a systemic reform in our federal healthcare system.

But there remains a deeper problem and it lies in the silence of average Americans. In most cases, the mainstream media continues to defend those now being exposed and continues to reinforce the very institutions under scrutiny. This should serve as a wake-up call; we should not place blind trust in government agencies, the media, or even the scientific and medical establishments. The Pentagon and its allies operate within a self-serving hierarchical cabal, which has become insulated from accountability. Somewhere along the way, we lost the distinction between subjective belief and objective truth.

And now we are witnessing the cabal of corporate and bureaucratic power, which once controlled narratives from behind closed doors has been joined, and in some ways replaced, by a new alliance rooted in grievance, nationalism, Christian patriotism, and populist fervor. Under the Trump administration, ideology has become a weapon of identity to transform disinformation into a badge of loyalty. The same tactics once used by corporate lobbyists to manipulate markets are now being employed by demagogues to coerce emotions. Nationalism, cloaked in the rhetoric of fanatical patriotism, has become the new currency of control. Yet it serves the same ends to divide, distract, confuse and dominate. What was once the propaganda of corporate power has evolved into the propaganda of tribal belonging, which may be an even more volatile force because it falsely masquerades as freedom and liberty.

Life itself is not a science, nor should science ever dictate what life means to us. Credentials, titles, university degrees and institutional power do not confer moral authority or wisdom. As the philosopher Hannah Arendt wrote in The Origins of Totalitarianism,

“The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the convinced Communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction and the distinction between true and false no longer exist.”

To paraphrase, the purpose of propaganda is not to make people believe lies but to make them believe nothing. Propaganda and fear work together to dissolve a shared sense of truth. When citizens are bombarded by contradictions, falsehoods and shifting narratives, they eventually stop believing in anything at all. That loss of belief makes them more malleable and easier to control.

When people believe in nothing, they become vulnerable to believe anything. That is where tribalism begins, and where volatile separation and division take root. Those in power want you to believe only in them. This is why we see no massive peaceful marches to end wars in the Middle East or Ukraine. We have come to trust our unhinged ideologies and the political identities they represent more than we trust ourselves. Why can’t we look beyond our narrow belief systems to find common ground?

Propaganda has reached every corner of daily life. Consider that more than 100 million American adults are now clinically obese, and 74 percent are overweight. This is not simply a matter of personal choice. It reflects a failure of truth. The public has been misled about what they eat and how food affects their health. Never has a Surgeon General stood before the nation to declare that we must stop the insanity of industrial food and its devastating impact on our wellbeing. If we were completely honest with ourselves, we might begin to ask: What beliefs control our perception of reality? How often have we trusted, only to discover that we were wrong?

When you look in the mirror, who stands beside you? Is it the CEO of McDonald’s or Coca-Cola, the executives at Pfizer, or the heads of MSNBC, CNN, and Fox? Because without these figures feeding our complacency, many of us would finally break free from our comfort zones. It is time to stop pretending we are uninformed and powerless. We can no longer afford to remain passive in the face of deception and the nation’s growing tyranny.

History shows that breakdowns often precede breakthroughs. Yet today we seem to be racing toward catastrophe at accelerating speed. When all the assumed rules of how society operates no longer seem to make sense, collapse becomes inevitable. America, we have a problem.

The original source of this article is Global Research.

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