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I have previously written about Hamas’ Oct. 7, 2023, attack on Israel, calling it “the most successful military raid of this century.”

I have described the Hamas action as a military operation, while Israel and its allies have called it a terrorist action on the scale of what transpired against the United States on Sept. 11, 2001.

“The difference between the two terms,” I noted,

is night and day — by labeling the events of October 7 as acts of terrorism, Israel transfers blame for the huge losses away from its military, security, and intelligence services, and onto Hamas. If Israel were, however, to acknowledge that what Hamas did was in fact a raid — a military operation — then the competency of the Israeli military, security, and intelligence services would be called into question, as would the political leadership responsible for overseeing and directing their operations.

Terrorism employs strategies that seek victory through attrition and intimidation — to wear an enemy down and create a sense of helplessness on the part of the enemy. Terrorists by nature avoid decisive existential conflict, but rather pursue asymmetrical battle which pits their strengths against the weaknesses of their enemies.

The war that has gripped the Levant since Oct. 7, 2023, is not your traditional anti-terrorism operation. The Hamas-Israeli conflict has morphed into a conflict between Israel and the so-called axis of resistance involving Hamas, Hezbollah, Ansarullah (the Houthi of Yemen), the Popular Mobilization Forces, i.e. militias of Iraq, Syria and Iran. It is a regional war in every way, shape, or form that must be assessed as such.

The Prussian strategist Carl von Clausewitz noted in his classic work, On War, that “war is not merely a political act but a real political instrument, a continuation of political intercourse, a carrying out of the same by other means.”

From a purely military perspective, the Hamas raid on Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, was a relatively minor engagement, involving a few thousand combatants from each side.

As a global geopolitical event, however, it has no contemporary counterpart.

The Hamas raid triggered a number of varied responses, some of which were by design, such as luring the Israeli Defense Forces into Gaza, where they would become trapped in a forever war they could not win, triggering the dual Israeli doctrines governing military response to hostage taking of the “Hannibal Doctrine” and the Israeli practice of collective punishment, the “Dahiya Doctrine.”

Both of these doctrines put the IDF on display to the world as the antithesis of the “world’s most moral military” by exposing the murderous intent ingrained into the DNA of the IDF, a propensity for violence against innocents which defines the Israeli way of war and, by extension, the Israeli nation.

Prior to Oct. 7, 2023, Israel was able to disguise its true character to the outside world, convincing all but a handful of activists that its actions in targeting “terrorists” were proportional and humane.

Today the world knows Israel as the genocidal apartheid state it really is.

The consequences of this new global enlightenment are manifest.

Changing the ‘Face of the Middle East’

President Joe Biden, on Sept. 9, 2023, during the G20 summit in India, announced a major policy initiative, the India-Middle East-European Economic Corridor, or IMEC, a proposed rail, ship, pipeline and digital cable corridor connecting Europe, the Middle East and India.

Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister, commenting on Biden’s announcement, called the IMEC “a cooperation project that is the greatest in our history” that “takes us to a new era of regional and global integration and cooperation, unprecedented and unique in its scope” adding that  it “will bring to fruition a years-long vision that will change the face of the Middle East and of Israel.”

But because the world now sees Israel as a criminal enterprise, the IMEC looks for all intents and purposes to be no more — the greatest cooperation project in Israeli history that would have changed the Middle East likely will never reach fruition.

For one thing, Saudi Arabia, a key player in the scheme, having invested $20 billion in it, says it will not normalize relations with Israel, necessary for the project, until the wars end and a Palestinian state is recognized by Israel, something the Knesset voted earlier this year would never happen.

The demise of the IMEC is just part of the $67 billion economic hit Israel has taken since the Gaza conflict began.

Tourism is down 80 percent. The southern port of Eilat no longer functions because of the anti-shipping campaign run by the Houthi in the Red Sea and the Gulf of Aden. Workforce stability has been disrupted by the displacement of tens of thousands of Israelis from their homes because of Hamas and Hezbollah attacks as well as the mobilization of more than 300,000 reservists. All this combine to create a perfect storm of economy-killing issues, which will plague Israel so long as the current conflict continues.

The bottom line is that, left unchecked, Israel is looking at economic collapse. Investments are down, the economy is shrinking, and confidence in an economic future has evaporated. In short, Israel is no longer an ideal place to retire, raise a family, work…or live. The biblical “land flowing with milk and honey,” if it ever existed, is no more.

This is an existential problem for Israel.

For there to be a viable “Jewish homeland,” demographics dictate there must be a discernable Jewish majority in Israel. There are just short of 10 million people living in Israel. About 7.3 million are Jews; another 2.1 million are Arabs (Druze and other non-Arab minorities comprise the reminder.)

There are some 5.1 million Palestinians under occupation, leaving a roughly 50-50 split when looking at the combined totals between Arab and Jew. An estimated 350,000 Israelis hold dual citizenship with an EU country, while more than 200,000 hold dual citizenship with the United States.

Likewise, many Israelis of European descent can easily apply for a passport simply by showing that either they, their parents, or even their grandparents resided in a European country. Another 1.5 million Israelis are of Russian descent, with many of those holding valid Russian passports.

While the main reasons for maintaining this dual-citizen status are convenience and economic, many view the second passport as “an insurance policy” — a place to run to if life in Israel becomes untenable.

Life in Israel is about to become untenable.

Escape From Israel 

Israel had already suffered from a growing emigration problem derived from dissatisfaction with the policies of the Netanyahu government — some 34,000 Israelis permanently left Israel between July and October 2023, primarily in protest over the judicial reforms being enacted by Netanyahu.

While there was a spike in emigration immediately after the Oct. 7, 2023, attacks (some 12,300 Israelis permanently emigrated in the month following the Hamas attack), the number of permanent emigrants in 2024 was around 30,000, a drop from the previous year.

But now Israel is being bombarded on a near-daily basis by long-range drones, rockets, and missiles fired from Hezbollah, militias in Iraq, and the Houthi in Yemen. The Iranian ballistic missile attack of Oct. 1 vividly demonstrated to all Israelis the reality that there is no viable defense against these attacks.

Moreover, if the Israel-Iran conflict continues to escalate (and Israel has promised a retaliation of immense proportions), Iran has indicated it will destroy Israel’s critical infrastructure — power plants, water desalinization plants, energy production and distribution centers — in short, Israel will cease being able to function as a modern nation state.

At that point, insurance policies will be cashed in as hundreds of thousands of Israelis holding dual passports vote with their feet. Russia has already told its citizens to leave. And if millions of other Israelis who qualify for European passports opt to exercise that option, Israel will face its ultimate nightmare — a precipitous drop in the Jewish population that skews the demographic balance decisively toward non-Jews, making moot the notion of an exclusive homeland for the Jews.

Israel is rapidly becoming unsustainable, both as a concept (the world is rapidly tiring of the genocidal reality of Zionism) and in practice (i.e., economic and demographic collapse.)

The Changing View From the US

This is the current reality of Israel — in one year’s time, it went from “changing the face of the Middle East” to being an unsustainable pariah whose only salvation is the fact that it has the continued support of the United States to prop it up militarily, economically, and diplomatically.

And herein lies the rub.

That which made Israel attractive to the United States — the strategic advantage of a pro-American Jewish enclave in a sea of Arab uncertainty — no longer holds as firmly as it previously did. The Cold War is long gone, and the geopolitical benefits accrued in the U.S.-Israeli relationship are no longer evident.

The era of American unilateralism is fading, rapidly being replaced by a multi-polarity with a center of gravity in Moscow, Beijing and New Delhi. As the United States adapts to this new reality, it finds itself engaged in a struggle for the hearts and minds of the “global south” — the rest of the world outside the EU, NATO, and a handful of pro-Western Pacific nations.

The moral clarity that American leadership seeks to bring to the global stage is significantly clouded over by its ongoing unquestioned support for Israel.

Israel has, in its post-Oct. 7, 2023, actions, self-identified as a genocidal state totally incompatible with any notion of international law or the basic precepts of humanity.

Even some Holocaust survivors recognize that modern-day Israel has become the living manifestation of the very evil that served as the justification for its creation — the brutally racist ideology of Nazi Germany.

Israel is anathema for everything modern civilization stands for.

The world is gradually awakening to this reality.

So, to, is the United States.

For the moment the pro-Israeli lobby is mounting a rear-guard action, throwing its weight behind political candidates in a desperate attempt to buy the continued support of their American benefactors.

But geopolitical reality dictates that the United States, in the end, will not commit suicide on behalf of an Israeli state that has lost all moral legitimacy in the eyes of most of the world.

There are economic consequences attached to American support for Israel, especially in the increased gravitational pull of the BRICS forum, whose growing list of members and those who are seeking membership reads as a who’s who of nations fundamentally opposed to the Israeli state.

The deepening social and economic crisis in America today will create a new political reality where American leaders will be compelled by electoral realities to address problems which manifest on American soil.

The day when Congress can allocate billions of dollars without question to oversees wars, including those involving Israel, is coming to an end.

Political operative James Carville’s famous adage, “It’s the economy, stupid” resonates as strongly today as it did when he penned it back in 1992. To survive economically, America will have to adjust its domestic and international priorities, requiring conformity not only with the will of the American people, but a new, law-based international order which largely rejects the ongoing Israeli genocide.

Apart from die-hard Zionists who will hold out in the unelected “establishment” of government civil service, academia, and mass media, Americans will gravitate toward a new policy reality where unquestioned support for Israel is no longer accepted.

This will be the final straw for Israel.

The perfect storm of global rejection of genocide, sustained resistance on the part of the Iranian-led “axis of resistance,” economic collapse and realignment of American priorities will result in the nullification of Israel as a viable political entity. The timeline for this nullification is dictated by the pace of collapse of Israeli society — it could happen in a year, or it could unfold over the course of the next decade.

But it will happen.

The end of Israel.

And it all began on Oct. 7, 2023 — the day that changed the world.

Reprinted with author’s permission from Consortium News.

The post The Fall of Israel appeared first on LewRockwell.

This has now reached the point that corporations and institutions are in effect “mining what remains of our trust” to boost profits / private gains.

Social cohesion is another ill-defined concept which is core to social and economic stability, despite the difficulty of measuring it. As with social trust, we sense its presence and its decay rather than measure ups and downs with any precision. Social trust is a core component of social cohesion, and we sense the decay of both, even if there is no easy metric to chart.

When did our trust in our core institutions start unraveling? Perhaps the more insightful question is: when did our institutions lose our trust? For trust is not just given, it is for institutions–government, healthcare, higher education, industry, media, etc.–to gain or lose by their actions and the disconnect between their claims and the reality.

In the broad sweep of recent history, the trust earned by institutions in the 1940s and 1050s began unraveling in the 1960s and accelerated in the 1970s. For many Americans, the inconsistencies of the official version of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in 1963 were deeply troubling. Similar inconsistencies arose in the 1968 assassinations of Martin Luther King, Jr. and Robert Kennedy.

If the public wasn’t being given the full story, why not? Was it really “national security,” or were institutional malfeasance and cover-ups what was actually going on?

The war in Vietnam was another source of institutions losing trust. Between the claims of victory just ahead, the 5 o’clock follies and body counts, the “splendid little war” transmogrified into a big, dirty war that could no longer be contained within the neat narratives established in the “good war” of World War II.

The majority of Americans still wanted to believe in the rightness of their government and the causes of American policy, but many others had suffered complete disillusionment and loss of trust in the official accounts.

Watergate fueled the disillusionment as cover-ups increasingly appeared to be the primary modus operandi of all institutions. This disillusionment increased as the Church Committee revealed the politicization of the nation’s law enforcement agency, the FBI, and the illegal domestic activities of the FBI and the nation’s premiere intelligence / covert action agency, the CIA, both of which sought to suppress critics of the war in Vietnam with illegal means.

While the conservative movement openly derided government competence in the 1980s, the big, bad government continued expanding regardless of whether “conservatives” or “liberals” were nominally in charge. The federal government’s footprint was reduced in President Clinton’s campaign to “reinvent government,” and the federal budget briefly enjoyed surpluses in the Internet boom years, but since then the expansion of government and institutional /corporate power has continued unabated.

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I’ve written many words on the authoritarian tendencies of Germany in particular and the modern Western state in general. It is the main focus of my blog. Whenever I describe some new repressive development, as I did on Wednesday, I receive always the same kinds of comments. Readers tell me that fascism must be returning to Germany and that our inherent National Socialist tendencies are manifesting themselves yet again. Others write that this is all happening because in Europe we do not have the American Bill of Rights, which means that we cannot fend off rapacious state bureaucrats with our guns. Many say that we did not draw sufficient lessons from our earlier experiences with totalitarianism.

Now, I fully agree with the spirit of these remarks. I too want to live in a world where the state does not arbitrarily house-arrest me and inject me with experimental medical substances whenever some virus is making the rounds. Precisely for these reasons, I think it’s important to understand why our states act the way that they do, and to develop an accurate perspective on state behaviour in general. This means clearing away some old myths. “Totalitarianism,” for example, is a caricature that liberal thinkers adopted in the postwar period to describe rival illiberal nationalist and communist ideologies. There are no self-identified totalitarians anywhere and no body of explicitly totalitarian political theory exists. What is more, modern-day German authoritarianism is basically the opposite of Nazism and is rooted in profound antifascist sensibilities. And while I have nothing against the right to bear arms (and would happily see this right reintroduced to the Continent), it is not the political panacea many seem to think it is. To beat back the state, you need something else entirely – something that is just as eagerly suppressed in the United States as it is here in the Federal Republic.

All of these theses owe something to the classical liberal perspective – the Western ideological tradition that emphasises freedom, individual rights and equality before the law. Many of my readers are classical liberals, and that’s totally fine. If I do not entirely share your views, that’s not because I want to take away all of your rights and freedoms. It’s rather because I think liberalism makes a variety of empirically incorrect claims about human nature, and also that it seriously misunderstands state power. Thus liberal mechanisms for binding the state have failed, and long association with the ruling elite has changed the nature of liberalism itself. Classical, negative-rights liberalism – where the state mainly locks up violent criminals and defends private property rights – has become defunct everywhere, precisely because it is inconvenient for people in charge. Elites have replaced it with positive-rights liberalism instead, where the state spends vast sums on social welfare programmes, sends your kids to Drag Queen Story Hour and blames white people for disproportionate black criminality. This successor ideology uses many of the same words and claims to be interested in many of the same things, but is in fact an entirely different animal.

In what follows, I will try to describe state authoritarianism objectively – not from within the world of liberal assumptions, but from outside and sub specie aeternitatis. The truth is that modern liberalism, although it has retained much of its anti-authoritarian rhetoric, has presided over massive expansions to state power. To the extent Westerners have enjoyed more freedom from state harassment than East Europeans under communism or Germans under National Socialism, that has less to do with liberalism itself than with other supervening factors that have made the elevation of liberalism to a civic religion possible in the first place. If you’re truly interested in freedom and personal autonomy, it’s worth thinking about what is necessary to make states actually back off and leave you alone in reality, whatever ideology their leaders espouse.

I think many elements of liberalism make it hard to conceptualise authoritarianism, so I will begin with the former and proceed to the latter:

1) Liberalism in its negative classical form and its positive modern form is a universalising ideology. By this I mean that it makes claims on behalf of all peoples and all political systems everywhere. While it can be hard for adherents of universalising ideologies to understand that their ideologies are not, in fact, universal, the effort is very much worth it, because it brings many things into focus. Liberalism is both a relative newcomer to the long history of human politics and also highly unusual. Even today, at the height of its influence, liberalism is native only to a small minority of the world’s population. Europeans spent much of the 20th century imposing liberalism throughout Asia and Africa, in all the same lands where they had spent the 19th century preaching Christianity. Throughout all of this territory liberalism remains a set of political beliefs imposed from the outside. Even in core European countries like Germany, liberalism is relatively young and has a fraught and uncertain record. This perspective guards against the easy assumption that something which is not liberal must therefore automatically be communist or fascist. Most people do not identify with liberalism and there is a wide range of non-liberal and illiberal political thought out there.

2) Because liberalism claims to oppose the authoritarianism of the state, liberals automatically equate the absence of liberalism with authoritarianism. If it were not for liberal principles, they believe, we would be suffering at this moment under some unimaginably totalitarian dystopian illiberal regime. Conversely, they equate all manifestations of state authoritarianism immediately with a relapse to some rival, more primitive illiberal political system. When the state cracks down, they assume that it must be because of Nazism or whatever. I unreservedly accept that comparisons like these serve an important polemical purpose. They highlight the hypocrisy of our rulers and that really hurts, or they wouldn’t expend so much effort to discourage people from arguing in this way. Nevertheless, I think these arguments are incorrect analytically. As we learned during Covid, even liberal systems are capable of overt authoritarian interventions in the most personal and intimate areas of our lives.

3) The objective perspective becomes very important here. Subjectively and from within liberal ideology, it is tempting to argue that self-described liberal polities must not be liberal whenever they produce illiberal results. Society, however, is very complex, and we must be open to the possibility that even liberal systems can lead to authoritarian or illiberal places, despite or even because of the best liberal intentions of everyone involved. If we shrug off these unwelcome outcomes with “real communism has never been tried”-style dismissals, we risk blinding ourselves to how liberalism functions in reality. Liberalism, for example, is a fundamentally oppositional ideology. It is always arrayed against real or imagined ideological enemies. A lot of present German political authoritarianism is baked into our 1949 Basic Law, which establishes this Orwellian monstrosity we call “defensive democracy” full of mechanisms that our founders hoped would prevent illiberal communist and illiberal fascist subversion. This is why we have the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution, and it is why a great part of the political debate in the my country is consumed with weird histrionics about which political positions should be legally and socially acceptable in the first place. Positive-rights liberalism is even more authoritarian, as it commits itself to guaranteeing specific social outcomes. Recognising ever more arcane political rights, like the right to survive a viral infection, causes very unsettling illiberal outcomes, which however derive directly from (positive) liberal premises.

4) We should not, however, overestimate the influence of ideology. Human civilisations, always and everywhere, exhibit clear hierarchical features, and in all of them political power invariably accrues to a confined oligarchy, whatever ideological beliefs anybody espouses. This is as true of dictatorships as it is of liberal democracies. In the former, power is not in fact exercised by a single strong man, but is actually wielded by an entire elite class, whom the dictator merely represents in public and to outsiders. In the latter, the people are not in fact sovereign, as oligarchic rule quickly adapts to overcome the minor obstacles posed by such things as elections and the rule of law. Liberal ideology does exercise an influence on politics, but this influence is far subtler and also much stranger than its proponents allow. I hope, someday soon, to write a book about this.

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The global climate cult is getting ready to kick its war on food into overdrive with 13 nations – many of them major cattle and food-producing states led by the United States, Argentina, Brazil, Chile and Spain – signing onto a commitment to place farmers under new restrictions intended to reduce emissions of methane gas.

The Global Methane Hub announced in a May 17 press release that agriculture and environmental ministers and ambassadors from 13 countries, including the United States, have signed a commitment that pledges to reduce methane emissions in agriculture. The U.S. was represented by Biden’s climate czar, John Kerry.

What does this mean and why should you care? We’ll break it down.

According to the press release issued by these nations and posted at Global Methane Hub:

“Last month (in April 2023), the Global Methane Hub collaborated with the Ministries of Agriculture of Chile and Spain to convene the first-ever global ministerial on agricultural practices to reduce methane emissions. The ministerial brought together high-ranking government members to share global perspectives on methane reduction and low-emission food systems. The gathering led to a statement in which the nations committed to support efforts to improve the quality and quantity of, and access to, finance for climate change adaptation and mitigation measures in the agriculture and food sectors and to collaborate on efforts aimed at lowering methane emissions in agriculture and food systems.”

Conference participants included the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, Climate & Clean Air Coalition, Inter-American Institute for Cooperation on Agriculture, the World Bank, the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development, and the Inter-American Development Bank.

The World Bank, another creation of the post-World War II, U.S.-led liberal rules-based order, has been talking a lot lately, along with the U.N., about a coming famine. The World Bank issued a white paper just last week, on May 22, titled Food Security Update: World Bank Response to Rising Food Insecurity.

The director of the United Nations World Food Program has also been putting out, starting in September of last year, dire warnings about a coming global famine.

So it’s curious to me that, at the very time the globalists are warning about food shortages and famine, their mouthpieces at the World Bank, the U.N., and within the administrations of the U.S. and its allies (notice China and Russia are nowhere to be found in these preposterous anti-food policies), are talking about converting over to a new and unproven form of “sustainable” farming that’s focused more on reducing methane than it is on producing the highest yields of food.

Modern food production is bad, they tell us, because it produces methane which supposedly harms the environment.

“Food systems are responsible for 60% of methane emissions,” said Marcelo Mena, CEO of Global Methane Hub. “We congratulate countries willing to take the lead in food systems methane mitigation and confirm our commitment to support this type of initiative with programs that explore promising methane mitigation technologies and the underpinning research of methane mitigation mechanisms to create new technologies.”

John Kerry is also very excited about taking valuable, productive farmland offline, reducing the size of cattle herds, and turning our food-production systems over to technocrats and globalists offering vague promises of “new technologies.”

According to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, the U.S. is busy trying to mitigate methane emissions not just in America but worldwide, stating on its website: “The United States provides key leadership, funding and technical expertise for international methane emission reduction efforts, resulting in more than 1,140 methane mitigation projects through GMI as of 2021.” See map of EPA methane mitigation activity below:

In just one example, the Biden administration plans to spend $1.5 million in taxpayer funds on a program aimed at “empowering” female climate change activists in the “patriarchal” society of northern Kenya, documents reviewed by the Washington Free Beacon show.

John Kerry said in a statement, “Mitigating methane is the fastest way to reduce warming in the short term. Food and agriculture can contribute to a low-methane future by improving farmer productivity and resilience. We welcome agriculture ministers participating in the implementation of the Global Methane Pledge.”

The May 17 press release further states that, “The focus of the conference was the deployment of science-based practices, innovation, and technologies in line with sustainable food production…”

The nations signing onto this pledge to transform their farm policies are the United States, Argentina, Australia, Brazil, Burkina Faso, Chile, Czech Republic, Ecuador, Germany, Panama, Peru and Spain.

The government of Spain will organize a second conference in 2024 to monitor and advance implementation efforts related to the statement and encourage more countries to join, according to the May 14 press release.

In order to save the planet from emissions that come from cow farts, they claim it’s necessary to force farmers to change the way they farm, converting their land and livestock to more “innovative” methods and “science-based practices.” These methods will need to be implemented not just on farms but throughout the “food systems.”

They never come out and say what these “innovative” changes are, only that they will be based on “new technologies” and “science-based.”

We can presume from this language that among the practices being considered are replacing a major portion of the beef and dairy cattle, pork and chicken stocks that populations rely on for protein with insect larvae, meal worms, crickets, etc. The U.N., World Economic Forum and other NGOs have been promoting meatless diets and the consumption of insect protein for years, and billionaires have invested in massive insect factories being built in the state of Illinois, in Canada and in the Netherlands, where meal worms, crickets and other bugs will be processed as additives to be inserted into the food supply, often without clear labels that will inform people of exactly what they are eating. Bill Gates is also partnering with other billionaires to invest in the production of lab-grown meat, a process that involves using cancer cells from cows, chickens and pigs to quickly grow artificial meat.

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This article is adapted from a lecture delivered at the Albuquerque Mises Circle in New Mexico, September 14, 2024. Listen to an audio version, here.

Throughout its history, liberalism—the ideology today called “classical liberalism” or “libertarianism”—has suffered from the impression that it is primarily against things. This is not entirely wrong. Historically, liberalism coalesced as a recognizable ideology in opposition largely to mercantilism and absolutism throughout western Europe. Over time, this opposition extended to socialism, protectionism, imperialism, aggressive warfare, and slavery as well. In this regard, liberals have for centuries fought against a wide array of moral and economic evils that spread poverty, injustice, and misery.

Being “against” things, however, has never been sufficient in itself, and liberals have never contented themselves with being so. Liberalism, of course, has long been closely associated with so-called “bourgeois” values, private property, local self-determination, and—in spite of claims to the contrary—religious institutions. Today, however, these institutions that have long under-girded liberalism and the free society are in an advanced state of decay. These are the institutions that have made society and civic life possible without state control.

The decline of these institutions did not happen by accident. The power of the modern state is the result of long wars by the state against independent churches, against family ties, and against local self-determination.The state has never suffered rivals, so any organization that competes for the “hearts and minds” of the population must be made impotent.

So, we find that the challenge at hand is more than simply opposing the state. Rather, it is necessary to build up, reinforce, and sustain institutions that can offer alternatives to the state in terms of organizing and supporting human society.

After all, it is safe to say that most people we encounter today have become accustomed to looking to the state to meet an increasing array of needs and desires. These include pensions, health care, schooling, scientific research, and public safety, just to name just a few.

Thanks to the decline of the family, it is even possible now to imagine that for many millions of Americans, their most meaningful and enduring relationships are with government agencies.

In this environment, if we have any hope of supplanting state institutions with something better, there will need to be private institutions that can be plausibly put forward as replacements for the state institutions that so many have come to think provide, comfort, safety, and basic necessities.

Without these private institutions, liberalism’s job of providing a world of free, private, and prosperous institutions is much more difficult—or even impossible.

Societies Are Composed of Institutions

As libertarian historian Ralph Raico notes, liberals make a key distinction between the state and “society.” Society is simply those institutions that are not the state. Or as the philosopher David Gordon puts it, “Liberals believe that the main institutions of society can function in entire independence of the state.”

All these institutions outside the state are what we call “the private sector.” We often just associate the phrase with commercial enterprises, but it is also proper to speak of churches, families, and any non-state community organizations as “the private sector.”

The idea that the institutions of society, the private sector, can function without a state is an established historical fact. Since the beginnings of human civilization, even in the absence of states, people have built up institutions and relationships designed to provide order, security, and social safety nets. As described by Yale historian Paul Freedman, many societies have been held together by something other than “government in the sense that we understand it.” Rather, they can be held together with what Freedman calls “informal social networks and ties.” These include “kinship, family, private vengeance, religion.”

But we can also find more formal and recent institutions designed specifically to provide services that had once been provided by states and empires.

The Role of the “Corporations”

During the Middle Ages, and until the age of absolutism, for example, Europeans, faced with weak and limited state institutions, created what scholars call “corporations.” These were not the corporations we today associate with joint-stock companies. These organizations were in the words of economic historian Avner Greif, “voluntary, interest-based, self-governed, and intentionally created permanent associations. In many cases, they were self-organized and not established by the state.”

These included the Church itself, but also monastic orders, universities, the Italian city-states, urban communes, militias, and merchant guilds. All actively sought to protect their own commercial interests in Europe’s various legal institutions.

Moreover, whatever their provenance, these corporations tended to think of their own interests as distinct from the interests of the prince or civil power. The corporations thus acted as yet another institutional brake on state power. As Raico has shown, Europe’s decentralized political power—and the accompanying protections for private property—grew out of a complex legal environment of contracts, rights, and other legal considerations forced upon princes and civil authorities by the demands of these corporate groups. Thus, Europe came to be home to political and legal philosophies respecting the idea of “mine and thine” rather than the idea that all belongs to the prince or the collective.

To quote Raico:

Princes often found their hands tied by the charters of rights … which [Princes] were forced to grant their subjects. In the end, even within the relatively small states of Europe, power was dispersed among estates, orders, chartered towns, religious communities, corps, universities, etc., each with its own guaranteed liberties.

Not surprisingly, the rise of the modern state is closely connected to the state’s struggle against these institutions. As historian of the state Martin van Creveld has shown, in order to consolidate power, the state first had to gravely weaken or destroy the churches, the nobility, the towns, and the corporations. After all, these organizations competed with the state. They often provided economic safety nets of their own, and civil order through courts and local militias. They created a sense of community and social purpose apart from the idea of the nation or state. They provided key economic services, as in the case of the Hanseatic League, which offered safe trade routes and arbitration services for merchants.

These polycentric political systems were obstacles to the state’s consolidation of power, and as economist Murray Rothbard has noted, the process of abolishing nonstate institutions accelerated during the early modern period. By the sixteenth century in France, the process was in full swing.

Rothbard writes:

The sixteenth century French legalists [that is those who served the absolutist king] systematically tore down the legal rights of all corporations or organizations which, in the Middle Ages, had stood between the individual and the state. There were no longer any intermediary or feudal authorities. The king is absolute over these intermediaries, and makes or breaks them at will.

This process was necessary to end pockets of independence and potential resistance to the state. In earlier times, the state had to gain buy-in from a variety of organizations that could offer real resistance to its rule. As Alexis de Tocqueville noted in the nineteenth century: “Not a hundred years ago, amongst the greater part of European nations, numerous private persons and corporations were sufficiently independent to administer justice, to raise and maintain troops, to levy taxes, and frequently even to make or interpret the law.”

This also summarizes essentially what has been the struggle between the state and the private sector for centuries. Whatever was once private, separate, decentralized, or not under the control of the central state must be brought to heel.

Creating a Direct State-Citizen Relationship

Yet even after their medieval legal independence was abolished, churches, fraternal organizations, and families continued to be institutions critical to local solidarity, regional independence, and poverty relief.

Moreover, extended family enterprises made up a separate locus of power outside the state, and many of these families self-consciously sought to remain economically independent. Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawm’s view of the “bourgeois family” is not exactly complimentary, but he nonetheless captures some of the central role of the family in nineteenth-century society: “The ‘family’ was not merely the basic social unit of bourgeois society but its basic unit of property and business enterprise.”

But even this informal institutional competition with the state could not be tolerated. In the nineteenth century, the state’s opposition to independent institutions was taken to the next level with the welfare state. This came first in Germany, where a true bureaucratic welfare state was introduced for the first time by conservative nationalist Otto von Bismarck. Raico reminds us that the welfare state was a deliberate effort by Bismarck to end the population’s financial independence from the state.

Also, economist Antony Mueller concludes the welfare state established “a system of mutual obligation between the State and its citizens.” This further solidified the idea that the state was to enjoy a direct relationship with individuals, unimpeded by local, cultural, or religious institutional obstacles. It was this political need to—as one of Bismarck’s advisors said—”bind the people to the throne with chains of gratitude,” that led to the introduction of the welfare state.

This also represented a powerful way of circumventing the family unit as an institutional buffer between the state and the individuals. Certainly, poverty relief had existed in the past. But, it nearly always was administered at a household level. The state, prior to Bismark’s welfare state had not yet fully pierced the household family unit to deal directly with individuals.

Not surprisingly then, more than a century after Bismark, the family as an institution has gone into steep decline, and unless it is again strengthened, will cease to provide any counterbalance or institutional resistance to state power.

Public Schools

Perhaps no institution has done more to directly engage individuals than the public schools

The rise of the public schools and the replacement of private schooling and home schooling has been one of the state’s greatest achievements over the past century—great in the sense that it has done much to destroy the private sector.

Historically, public education has long been geared toward promoting cultural uniformity, assimilation, and a pro-government ideology in students. Private schools, on the other hand, have often been founded specifically for the purpose of offering an alternative to the regime’s schools. They have often focused on teaching a culture and curriculum different from that offered by the state. Often, these institutions either directly or indirectly encourage skepticism of the cultural and ideological norms pushed by public schools.

Needless to say, governments have never been enthusiastic about the existence of such institutions.

The War Against Private Christian Schools

By the early twentieth century, American public education reflected a watered-down version of Protestant Christianity. But the religious elements existed largely to offer a patina of religious morality behind what was primarily political ideological education. The most important role of the schools was to make students into good citizens of the American polity.

Private religious schools, however, didn’t necessarily play this game. Both Lutheran and Catholic groups often placed more emphasis on religious education, while even helping to perpetuate the values of the immigrant groups who populated the schools. Lutheran schools often taught use of the German language and the Lutheran religion. Many saw this as coming at the expense of cultural assimilation and “loyalty” to American governments. Even worse were the Catholic schools which taught religious and cultural views that were regarded by the Protestant majority as even more alien than those of the Lutherans.

Opposition to these schools was further increased by the jingoism of the First World War. So, it was not an accident that some of the greatest threats to private education would arise during the 1920s.

In his book Public Vs. Private: The Early History of School Choice in America, Robert Gross provides a history of the period:

In the 1920s, conservative Protestants staged the most concerted campaigns since the origins of public school systems to prohibit private education. In more than a dozen states they tried but failed to prohibit attendance at private schools, while in Oregon they successfully enacted a law compelling students to attend public schools exclusively.

This law “compelled children ages eight to sixteen to attend public school …Noncompliant parents faced heavy fines and imprisonment.”

The Oregon law, however, was not long for this world. It was struck down by the United States Supreme Court in 1925.

The arguments made by attorneys for the State of Oregon were the typical “do it for the children” claims. According to the State, parents simply couldn’t be trusted to educate their children properly. More specifically, since today’s school children are tomorrow’s voters, the State argued, the State has an overriding public interest in ensuring that the students receive a proper education. (What is proper, of course, is to be determined by the government.)

The answer, apparently, could be found in forcing parents to send their children to the (presumably higher-quality and more competent) government schools.

Decline of the Family

The state’s victory in making government institutions (i.e., schools) central to the lives of most children is further reflected in the institution that is supposed to be central to the lives of children: the family.

The trend of family decline has been clear for decades. In 1992, the sociologist David Popenoe published an exhaustive study on the state of families titled “American Family Decline, 1960-1990.”

In his study, Popenoe acknowledges that many factors in the decline of the family pre-date the 1960s. These include rising divorce rates and falling fertility. Yet, things did indeed accelerate from the 1960s to the 1990s.One key aspect of this is the falling fertility rate. In the late 1950s, the average Americna woman had 3.7 children over the course of her life. In 1990, Popenoe found, the average was 1.9. In 2023, it was under 1.8.

Whatever conclusion one may come to about what is the “correct” number of children to have, the Popenoe notes it illustrates a real trend away from interest in raising children. Survey data also backs this up, and as Popenoe puts it, we have witnessed “a dramatic, and probably historically unprecedented, decrease in positive feelings toward parenthood and mother- hood.”

The relevance of the fertility rate for our purposes is that it illustrates a declining interest in family life overall, which translates into a lack of stability and duration of family life, as we see in other indicators such as divorce.

Indeed, in recent decades, we also continue to see a widespread retreat form marriage. Poponoe found between 1960 and 1990, the proportion of women aged 20 to 24 who had never married, more than doubled, from 28% to 63%; for women aged 25 to 29, the increase was even greater, rising from 11% to 31.%

These trends have only continued,albeit at less dramatic rates, in the 30 years since Popenoe’s study. The trends illustrate that families are being de-institutionalized in a variety of ways. That is, family life is shorter in duration, and generally involves more unstable relationships which are less central to people’s lives.

Or as Popenoe puts it “family change is family decline.” This is illustrated in a number of ways. Children are more likely to leave the home before age eighteen in non-intact families. This is especially true for young women. Marriage rates have gone into deep decline, and are now at the lowest levels they have ever been. Marriage has been replaced in many ways by co-habiting couples, but non-married couples of these sorts tend to report shorter relationships.

The number of US adults living as part of a married couple has declined from 67 percent to 53 percent from 1990 to 2019.

We could name a variety of other statistics, and people may disagree over whether or not individual cases are good things or not, under various circumstances. But one conclusion is hard to dispute: these trends make it clear that the family is far less relevant and less important as a social institution than in the past. And, as such, it is ill-equipped to offer any sort of meaningful resistance to the state’s ongoing efforts to reduce all non-state institutions to dust.

Popenoe sums up what it means to be institutionally strong. He writes, “In a strong group, the members are closely bound to the groups and largely follow the group’s norms and values. Families have clearly become weaker in this sense.”

What is the reason for this? A lot of evidence suggests it is overwhelmingly an ideological issue. We hear much about how people say they can’t afford to start a family. Yet, marriage rates and fertility rates are now far below what they were during the Great Depression. Or we might note that fertility rates are lower now than what they were during 1942, when the world was caught up in one of history’s most bloody and destructive wars.

It is thus difficult to take seriously any claims that, by some objective measure, the world is too dangerous or too unaffordable to justify family and marriage.

Rather, the more likely scenario is simply that people don’t believe that marriage and child bearing are important. Robust historical analyses have shown this. For example, in a 2021 study co-authored by Enrico Spolaore, the greatest determinant of fertility rates in Europe over a 140 year period was the diffusion of French anti-fertility ideologies.

Family and marriage decline because people don’t believe they are important.

The Twilight of Nonstate Institutions

The decline of the family is just the latest evidence of how the state’s efforts to neutralize nonstate institutions have been enormously successful. Institutional obstacles to state power are shadows of their former selves. Long gone are the independent communes, the free towns, the local militias, and the independent monasteries and churches. In more recent history, even fraternal organizations and local charities have become increasingly invisible, and ever more dependent on the central government’s tax dollars. Religious observance is in deep decline. Church organizations such as schools and parishes are consequently much reduced. Families are less cohesive and less permanent.

In contrast, the most enduring economic and institutional relationships many people will have is with their national government. The vast majority of taxes are paid to central governments. Most healthcare and pension benefits come from national governments. States—not churches or local prominent families—now financially dominate universities, hospitals, and poverty relief.

This is all to the advantage of the state, since it means fewer individuals can rely on family or other local networks for economic or social security. It means fewer allegiances to any community except the vaguely defined and essentially imaginary national “community.”

Individuals Are Not Enough

In response to all this, some might say, “Oh, we don’t need any organizations or institutions. We only need rugged individualists!” It’s a nice idea, but there is no evidence of this actually working all by itself as a counterweight to state power. Historically, liberals have long understood that opposition to state power cannot be effective if based merely on opposition from diffuse individuals who share no preexisting and enduring practical, religious, familial, or economic interests and feelings of common cause.

Rather, resistance to the state has tended to be centered around some cultural or local institutional loyalty. Historically, this often took the form of local networks of families and their allies. Tocqueville noted that these groups provided a ready nexus around which to organize opposition to government abuses. He writes,

As long as family feeling was kept alive, the antagonist of oppression was never alone; he looked about him, and found his clients, his hereditary friends, and his kinsfolk. If this support was wanting, he was sustained by his ancestors and animated by his posterity.

Without these, or similar institutions, Tocqueville concluded, political opposition to the state becomes ineffective. Specifically, without institutions through which to practically build resistance to state power, even anti-regime ideology has no way of being brought into practice:

Tocqueville continues:

What strength can even public opinion have retained, when no twenty persons are connected by a common tie; when not a man, nor a family, nor chartered corporation, nor class, nor free institution, has the power of representing that opinion; and when every citizen—being equally weak, equally poor, and equally dependant [sic]—has only his personal impotence to oppose to the organized force of the government?

The Franco-Swiss liberal Benjamin Constant came to similar conclusions, noting that local social institutions often provide a cultural counterbalance to state power through solidarity and organization. Constant writes: “The interests and memories which are born of local customs contain a germ of resistance which authority suffers only with regret, and which it hastens to eradicate. With individuals it has its way more easily; it rolls its enormous weight over them effortlessly, as over sand.”

What Is to Be Done?

Thus, if we are to meaningfully oppose state power, it is necessary to encourage, grow, and sustain institutions and organizations over which states cannot so easily roll their enormous weight. When people support a local parish, raise a family, build a business, create mutual aid organizations, or foster local civic independence, they are doing work that is absolutely critical to fighting state power. While it is always good to speak ill of state power—and to oppose its countless violent and impoverishing grifts—this is not enough. We must also speak well of nonstate institutions and strengthen them in our daily work and daily lives.

Listen to this lecture on the Radio Rothbard podcast:

Note: The views expressed on Mises.org are not necessarily those of the Mises Institute.

The post Why It’s Not Enough To Hate the State appeared first on LewRockwell.

“America is a thing you can move very easily.”
–Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu

Tucker Carlson (TC:) So what’s AIPAC?

Rep. Thomas Massie, R-KY (TM:) AIPAC is the American Israel Public Affairs Committee. And they didn’t start out as a PAC in the sense of a political action committee, but now they have a political action committee. Ostensibly, it’s a group of Americans who lobby on behalf of Israel. They’re for anything Israel. And they’re a very effective lobbying group. …

I bet I may be the only Republican in Congress who hasn’t done homework for AIPAC. … They just want to know that you’ll do something for them. And if you’ll do something for them as a candidate, you’re more likely to do something for them as a congressman … when they saw I was going to win, that’s when they tried to get me to do the term paper.

They didn’t have a political action committee at the time. They couldn’t spend hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars against me at that time. It was just sort of like a whisper campaign … at that point, they sensed I wouldn’t do what they wanted when I got in. …

People think it’s a grassroots movement in Kentucky. It’s actually a top-down movement from AIPAC so that people who aren’t even Jewish will feel like they’ve got to support Israel, you know, no matter what. …

TM: I vote my conscience, which they won’t tolerate. So they ran with their 501(c)(4) before they had a super PAC. They were running educational advocacy ads against me saying that, you know, I’m bad on Israel. …

Let me explain to you. I’m a libertarian leaning Republican. I don’t vote for foreign aid for anybody. So don’t be offended when I don’t vote for your foreign aid. I don’t vote for wars anywhere. So don’t be offended if I tell you that. …

The situation went from bad to worse. This election cycle they spent $400,000 against me. … even though my election is over, they’re still running hundreds of thousands of dollars of negative ads. …

TC: It’s a little weird though, … Why not just let Thomas Massey be Thomas Massey in Northern Kentucky? Like why, why the need to crush you?

TM: I don’t know. I think it’s, they don’t want one horse out of the barn. If one person starts speaking the truth, they’re afraid it could be contagious … They were going to drive it over to the Senate and ask for unanimous consent. But now the senators are saying, wait, why wasn’t this unanimous in the house. Why should we do it unanimously in the Senate? …

TC: What I find interesting is it’s not just that they disagree with your views, … But they’ve called you a bigot and they call you an anti-Semite and say you’re a hater and try to destroy your character. …

TM: Right. There’s no need to do that. I’m not anti-Semitic. … I think it’s short-sighted on their side … it used to be just me voting against some of these resolutions. But recently, where they tried to ban passages in the New Testament, I think we got like almost two dozen Republicans who said, “Wait, hold on there.” …

TM: to understand AIPAC, I think it’s easiest to model them as a military industrial lobby. Their biggest thing is they want more equipment, more military equipment from the United States going to Israel. … every single penny of the 3.8 billion that they nominally get, now they’re getting way more than that, but what Israel nominally gets goes to US military contractors.” …

I think sometimes they [AIPAC] advocate for things that even Israelis wouldn’t advocate for. … Like, they would, I think, be okay with a war with Iran, like an all-out apocalyptic war with Iran, whereas there are people in Israel saying, “Whoa, hold on a second. We’d rather not have a war with Iran.” … But AIPAC does things that lead us in that direction. …

TM: I have Republicans who come to me on the floor and say, “I wish I could vote with you today. Yours is the right vote, but I would just take too much flack back home.”

And I have Republicans who come to me and say, “That’s wrong what AIPAC is doing to you. Let me talk to my AIPAC person.”

By the way, everybody but me has an AIPAC person.

TC: What does that mean, an AIPAC person?

TM: It’s like your babysitter, your AIPAC babysitter who is always talking to you for AIPAC. They’re probably a constituent in your district, but they are firmly embedded in AIPAC. … I’ve had four members of Congress say, “I’ll talk to my AIPAC person.” And it’s clearly what we call them, my AIPAC guy. …

TC: Why have I never heard this before?

TM: It doesn’t benefit anybody. Why would they want to tell their constituents that they’ve basically got a buddy system with somebody who’s representing a foreign country? …

TC: Have you seen any other country do anything like this?

TM: No. … Not only do they not have a Putin guy. They don’t have a Britain guy. They don’t have an Australian guy. They don’t have a Germany dude. …

I guarantee there’s some spreadsheet at AIPAC where the AIPAC dude who’s matched up with the congressman is there, and then all the congressman’s votes on the issue.

Has the congressman been to Israel? They pay for trips for congressmen and their spouses to go to Israel. … I’m probably one of a dozen that hasn’t taken that trip…

Excerpted from Tucker Carlson’s interview with Rep. Thomas Massie: Israel Lobbyists, the Cowards in Congress, and Living off the Grid

“America is a thing you can move very easily.“–Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu

HERE for updates, additions, comments, and corrections.

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“As the US increasingly resembles ancient Rome, being president is more and more dangerous. Something around 35 emperors met violent deaths, most from people in and around their courts. In other words, members of the Roman Deep State. An ugly situation is brewing in and around Washington DC.” — Doug Casey

Don’t kid yourself: Kamala Harris does not want to be President of the United States. She doesn’t even want the ceremonial stuff, the incessant shuffling from one photo op to the next, the tedious Easter egg rolls, the prayer meetings, the turkey pardonings, the tiresome state banquets for men in strange headgear who are unfamiliar with using the fork and knife, and forbidden to sip chardonnay. . . .

It’s obvious she has been played for a chump, that she was sandbagged into play-acting “the candidate” by an odd coalition of the distraught and the desperate — that is, the many agency blobsters who fear prison and the perfidious politicians such as Pelosi, Schumer, Mitch the Turtle, the Clintons, and Obama, paid to cover for the blob, often doing it badly, who fear the judgment of history, as well as the loss of their fortunes. Distraught and desperate characters make foolish decisions.

About thirty seconds after “Joe Biden” vowed to stay in the 2024 race, a delegation of these panicked pols paid him a call and passed him the black spot, knowing he could not credibly front for the massive election cheat underway. He was barely able to front for the previous one in 2020, when every lever of power got pulled to-the-max to conceal the truth about the steal, and to severely punish those who dared to murmur doubts about the election’s freeness and fairness.

How did they decide that Kamala would do any better? I assure you we will find out when the party explodes in recriminations sometime after November 5. It will probably turn out to look like the 2017 movie, The Death of Stalin, a frantic vaudeville of scheming buffoons oblivious to mundane doings of the suffering nation they pretend to serve. Unlike Nikita Khrushchev in 1953, Kamala did not prevail among this gang of squabbling clowns by force of personality or guile. She was merely a default setting as veep, arrived at to present the illusion of continuity and solidarity where none existed. She was not even involved in the backstage action. I doubt that anyone even asked her if she wanted the assignment — she was only notified after-the-fact. Thus, all the drinking.

The outstanding question: will the Democratic Party actually go ahead and attempt to execute an election steal despite growing evidence of a developing Trump landslide that might obviate it? The works are already in motion. The mail-in ballots went out long ago and early votes are getting cast by the day. The overseas ballots that require no US address or voter verification are flooding in by the millions and four years of open borders has 10-million illegal aliens (at a minimum) dispersed around the nation, great gobs of them planted in swing states, processed through the DMVs and social services — with the requisite automatic voter registration — their ballots already pre-bundled for harvest.

It could go a few ways. One is, just let’er rip, harvest all those fake votes, stuff the drop-boxes, flood the zone, and do it all right in America’s face as if to say: we can do whatever we want. . .  to get whatever we want. . . and you can’t stop us. That is probably the point where blue America finds out exactly what the Second Amendment was designed for. You might also expect a whole lot of state-organized resistance, especially in the populous red ones, Texas, Florida, real court cases over fraud this time, contested certification.

Or, the election could come out a hopeless unresolvable muddle. There’s no precedent for this and no provision in the Constitution, but you can imagine the Supreme Court having to decide a necessary do-over minus all recent gimmicks, paper ballots only, voters with proof of citizenship only, all voting on one re-scheduled election day before January 1. This novelty would be something apart from the clunky Congressional machinery established for settling electoral college disputes, since it is predicated on various states’ inability to determine their electoral college vote in the first place, based on patent irregularity and fraud.

You could also imagine a period of disorder so deep and grave that the regime behind “Joe Biden” declares martial law. . . or, alternately the military — the martial institution — has to take matters into its own hands, shoving aside even “Joe Biden” and his filthy retinue. Appalling to consider, I’m sure, but these things happen in history, and the Party of Chaos has set enough mischief in motion to wreck the election and wreck the country. Call it catastrophizing, if you will. There it is.

But to step back from that abyss, it appears that Mr. Trump’s momentum accelerates by the day, that he is becoming, at last, an implacable, irresistible juggernaut who will, perforce, overcome all the gimmicks, traps, and frauds arrayed against him. Kamala seems to think so. Have you ever seen such resignation, such loserdom-in-action as her recent performance on CBS’s 60-Minutes, or her pitiful admission on ABC’s The View that she couldn’t think of anything she would do differently beyond the excellent management of national affairs under “Joe Biden” (and herself as veep). Surely that said it all. She has nothing, brings nothing.

Long ago, she was a pretty girl with a law degree and an infectious laugh on the fringes of local politics in San Francisco. The winds of fortune blew her this way and that way until she ended up way over her head, used by the reprobates around her as a mere device to stay out of jail. She ends as an historical prank on her own country. It must be deeply demoralizing to be used like that in front of the whole world.

Reprinted with permission from JamesHowardKunstler.com.

The post Kamala Unwinding appeared first on LewRockwell.

It’s impossible to count on corrupt Arab regimes – the weak link – to stop the Gaza genocide, Pepe Escobar writes.

ISTANBUL – Of all the countless analyses across the lands of Islam about the profound significance of fateful Al-Toofan (Al-Aqsa Flood) on October 7, 2023, this one stands out: a cycle of conferences in Istanbul earlier this week, including October 7, titled Palestine: the Lynchpin of Civilizational Renaissance, linked to the Kuala Lumpur Forum for Thought and Civilization.

Call it a Malaysia-Turkiye partnership: Southeast Asia meets West Asia, a graphic illustration of the multi-nodal world that will be congregating in less than two weeks in Kazan, capital of Muslim Russia, for the long -awaited BRICS summit under the Russian presidency. Significantly, the centrality of Gaza was not debated in Doha, Riyadh, or Abu Dhabi, all of which would have unlimited funds to host such discussions.

Istanbul was a unique opportunity to compare insights by Osama Hamdan, representing the whole Palestinian Resistance; Numan Kurtulmus, the speaker of the Turkish Parliament; Hamas top diplomat Khaled Meshaal, speaking from Doha on the “strategic victory” of the Resistance. And all that compounded by a strong message by Dr. Mahathir Mohammad, former Malaysian Prime Minister and president of the Kuala Lumpur Forum.

Dr. Mahathir emphasized that a sound solution would be “a UN peace-keeping force in Gaza protecting them”. The main problem is the Ummah “not having an alternative to UN veto powers”. Hence “Muslim countries must team up – as there are no means of applying pressure to Israel.”

Illustrating Mahathir’s call, Muslim-majority nations are responsible for only 6% of global GDP and 6% of investments, while harboring 25% of the world’s population.

Mahathir boldly proposed, “we can deny our oil to the rest of the world” and “take back funds invested in dollar bonds, thus forcing the West to take action” in Gaza. Now try to convince MbS in Riyadh and MbZ in Abu Dhabi about it.

“Focus on popular organizations. Forget about governments”

The redoubtable Sami al-Arian, Kuwaiti-born Palestinian, director of the Center for Islam and Global Affairs (CIGA) at the Sabahattin Zaim University in Istanbul, and whose astonishing life story includes being persecuted and thrown in solitary confinement in the U.S. as a “suspected terrorist” summed up the impotence of Arab political elites when it comes to Palestine: after all the Arab world “is the weakest link on global terms” – with 63 military bases only in West Asia controlled by CENTCOM. And still, “what other cause can galvanize the whole world apart from Palestine?”

Al-Arian stressed that Al-Aqsa Flood “exposed the Arab world”, as the destruction of Palestine was “imposed to make Israel the regional hegemon”. There is a glimmer of hope though: “Look at all those things that divide us. We should focus on popular organizations. Forget about governments.”

Al-Arian, who lives and works in Istanbul, tackled head on one of the key running themes of the conference: the complex relationship between Turkiye and the West: “Turkiye is with the West, basically. There is no 100% support for Palestinians. Many are still subject to notions of Orientalism.” He also evoked how 35 then future nations lived in peace within the borders of the Ottoman Empire, which spanned 35 million square kilometers.

In Palestine, Al-Arian sees three possible scenarios ahead:

1.The continuity of “Netanyahu’s delusions”. There is “no evidence” that the U.S. is opposing any of them. There is “no deterrence apart from the Axis of Resistance.”

2. Denying these delusions is hard as “Israel has [Arab] regimes on its side. Yet Israel must be engaged on all fronts.” Palestine “is the symbol of all that is just”, and “not a symbol only for Palestinians.” It is imperative to “dismantle the Zionist structure, and Palestine cannot do it on its own.”

3.The third scenario is not so far-fetched anymore – considering the looming U.S. presidential elections: “The U.S. may opt to remove Netanyahu”, as in the Democrats terrified of losing because of the Netanyahu cabinet’s war spiral.

A State of Judea out of control

A measure of consensus emerged out of several conversations with scholars and researchers from Egypt, Sudan, Pakistan, Malaysia, Mauritania, Bosnia.

-When Israel sees others as “amalek” or inferior, there are no other possible borderlines.

-If Israel goes down, that will be good for everyone in West Asia: no more instrument to Divide and Rule.

And then there’s Israel’s internal divisions. UK-based Israeli historian Ilan Pappé, author of the seminal The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, offered a startling concise analysis of the clash between the State of Judea and the State of Israel, as Palestinians are seen as being in the way of a neo-Zionist messianic coalition taking a settler colonial ideology to the extreme.

Pappé argues that what came out of the success of the State of Judea in the November 2022 elections, as they aligned with Netanyahu, shattered the myth of Israel as “progressive occupiers” and “liberal” ethnic cleansers. It’s impossible to reconcile all that with genocide.

Pappé stressed how “they want to implement their idea quickly, removing any charade of legality”, including the creation of a “new ministry for the West Bank to intensify the ethnic cleansing.”

And it’s bound to get much worse. Cue to dangerous lunatic and Minister of Finance Bezalel Smotrich, stating on the Franco-German network ARTE that, “I want a Jewish state that includes Jordan, Lebanon, and parts of Egypt, Syria, Iraq, and Saudi Arabia. According to our greatest sages, Jerusalem is destined to extend all the way to Damascus.”

The bottom line, adds Pappé, is that in the Israeli society after al-Aqsa, “the state of Judea is taking over – army, security services, the police.” Their electoral base supports a regional war. Pappé is adamant: “The State of Israel is already gone. And the State of Judea is a suicidal state. More than 500,000 Israelis have already left, and that could be 700,000. Genocide and ethnic cleansing are now established facts.”

The “lack of social cohesion” in a “deeply divided society” ultimately is pointing to the “violent disintegration” of Israel.

Confronting Atrocity Inc.

Prof. Mohammad Marandi of the University of Tehran, in his intervention at the conference and several private conversations, offered the essential synthesis of all that’s in play linking Palestine, Lebanon and Iran. These are arguably his key insights.

On resistance and personal responsibility:

“In a sense the greatest heroes are the Lebanese, who willingly put themselves at risk. Then of course we have Ansarallah in Yemen, who shut the doors of trade to the Israeli regime, and did it at an enormous price. Yemen, Hezbollah were offered extraordinary concessions by the Americans, but they refused (…) The Israeli regime simultaneously bombs Syria, regularly, because they support the Resistance. Is it capable of doing all this on its own? Of course not. It has the support of the collective West. Whether it’s intelligence gathering, technology aid, political cover, weapons. Without the West, the Israeli regime would fail. I’ve encouraged people, as individuals, to stop purchasing any goods produced in Western countries. As individuals, we also have a responsibility.”

On Iran’s strategic patience:

“We are waiting in Tehran for the Israeli regime to strike. And Iran will strike back harder. When the regime bombed the Iranian consulate in Damascus, we knew that without Syria, support for Hamas, Islamic Jihad and Hezbollah would be very difficult. And the aftermath of October 7 would be much more serious than what we see today. After the bombing in Damascus, Iran struck back. Some people said this was insufficient. Now we all know that the objective of the Iranians was to gather intelligence about anti-aircraft and missile defense capabilities. And we saw the result of that last week. If the regime strikes Tehran, it will see something far worse. I am optimistic about the future although the days ahead, months ahead, will be painful.”

On the assassination of Sayyed Nasrallah:

“I went to Lebanon as soon as the Shock and Awe bombings began. And I was there before Hassan Nasrallah, the great martyr of the Resistance, was assassinated. I was literally a thousand meters away when they struck. They killed hundreds of people and brought down six apartment towers to murder Sayyed Hassan. This is what the Israeli regime is willing to do. It is brutal, it is illegitimate, we cannot have dealings with an illegitimate regime. The Western media gives a story that is so unbelievable, and dishonest.”

Several of the incandescent themes discussed in the conference were channeled at the Center for Islam and Global Affairs (CIGA) at Zaim University, when The Grayzone’s Max Blumenthal presented his new documentary

Atrocity Inc: How Israel Sells the Destruction of Gaza: an extended reportage that eviscerates the leading Israeli-American narrative of post-October 7, the “beheaded babies” hoax that was essential to manufacture consent in the West for the Gaza genocide.

The cycle of conferences in Istanbul made a few things quite clear. It’s impossible to count on corrupt Arab regimes – the weak link – to stop the Gaza genocide, now being extended to serial bombings of Lebanon. It’s impossible to have the Talmudic psychopathological extremists in Tel Aviv to engage in diplomacy – except by military force.

Yet it may be possible for a groundswell of public opinion across the Global Majority to drive the imposition of severe, practical constraints on Atrocity Inc. – for instance, economic strangulation – and thus ultimately contribute to shape the advent of a sovereign Palestine into a viable lynchpin of Islamic civilizational renaissance.

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

The post Could Palestine Be the Catalyst for an Islamic Renaissance? appeared first on LewRockwell.

It is not uncommon to be doing something seemingly innocuous when one is flooded with wild thoughts, musings that seem randomly meaningless, leading nowhere.  Thoughts that think us.  To dismiss them, however, is a mistake.  For me, these unbidden guests usually visit me when I am out walking or lying in bed right before sleep.

Recently, as I was again walking across the meandering Housatonic River through the covered wooden bridge in Sheffield, Massachusetts, I found myself waylaid by the thought of the word “preposterous,” which is usually understood to mean absurd, very silly, or foolish.  Being happily eccentric and language obsessed, I thought of its etymology, which from the Latin means before-behind or before-after, which makes preposterous an absurd, nonsense word itself, which seemed appropriate to thoughts that were approaching me from the other side as I walked ass-backwards (my behind behind me) toward them.  I wanted to see ahead to make sure I wasn’t bushwacked by something more absurd than a word.

For when I exited the bridge, I passed a plaque commemorating a reported UFO sighting by forty people and an alleged abduction on September 1, 1969 by Thomas Reed, who claims that when he was nine years-old he and his family were taken briefly aboard a disk-shaped flying UFO as they were driving down the dirt road between the corn fields and the marshes that I was approaching.  While this strange, fascinating story is not the focus of my reflections, if it interests you, you can read about it here.

I mention it because of what the plaque evoked in me and the seemingly preposterous nature of Reed’s claim and the weirdness of those of the many people who said they saw the same UFO.  I am not passing judgment on them, for I believe those forty people saw something, but what they saw I do not know.  I must admit I am glad I was not beamed up on my recent walk, for I wasn’t dressed appropriately for such an encounter.

What intrigues me about their stories is that they happened at a time very similar to today when the world seemed to be spinning out of control.

In 1969, secular black magic was in the air as the U.S. war against Vietnam raged on, led by the “peace candidate” in the 1968 presidential election, Richard Nixon.

There was the counterculture’s wide use of drugs (the CIA”s introduction of LSD, etc.), its turn to eastern religions and New Age esoterica, and the crisis of traditional religion as pagan practices were revived.

There was the murder of Sharon Tate and others by Charles Manson’s gang (deeply involved with satanism, Nazism, and occultism) in early August that was shortly followed by the Woodstock music mud festival, with both preceded by Apollo 11 to be followed by Seymour Hersh’s revelations about the My Lai massacre.

Throughout the year, and those preceding and following, the FBI’s COINTELPRO, the CIA’s operations CHAOS and MKULTRA were in full force, spying on Americans, creating chaos and mayhem in minds and on the streets, a part of a vast effort at political mind control and disassociation of the personality through the most evil means.

And “ironically,” in December 1969, the U.S. Air Force’s Project Blue Book – its decades long investigation of UFOs – was officially ended with the conclusion that there was no evidence indicating that sightings categorized as “unidentified” were extraterrestrial vehicles or were in any way beyond the range of modern technological science.

In October, as in before-after, the U.S. Department of Defense’s ARPANET program – Advanced Research Projects Agency Network (now DARPA) – the predecessor of the Internet, made it its first communication between two computers.

Then, as if to culminate a decade of assassinations and absurdity, despite a very vocal peace movement, in December, the Altamont music festival was riven by murder and mayhem, as if to imply, contrary to Don McLean’s 1971 “American Pie,” that this was the day the music died.

The list goes on and on.  Let’s just say the times were psychedelic, as if society were on a non-stop bad acid trip and the CIA’s takeover of the country was nearly complete.

Jump ahead a half-century to today.

Now we have the long-planned Internet – ARPANET’s and the Pentagon’s baby – and digital madness with conflicting narratives that are akin to acid-trips.  Mental dissociation at its finest.

Nixon is long gone but his successors have carried on his ruthless Vietnam war policies in grand traditional style with the U.S forever wars (El Salvador, Iraq, Serbia, Afghanistan¸ Libya, Syria, etc.) , with war against Russia via Ukraine, its backing of the Israeli genocide of the Palestinians and aggressive war against its neighbors, the push for war with China – all leading to the greatest chance of nuclear war since 1962.

The renewed media reports about UFOs (now called “unidentified anomalous phenomena”) and the Pentagon’s denials are kept alive by technologues like Elon Musk, among others, in his recent jocular exchange with Tucker Carlson.  You know, there are a lot of satellites up there but let’s not discuss the Pentagon’s mind control, the games it has being playing for decades to create fear.

We have Artificial Intelligence (AI) and massive drug use far exceeding that of the 1960s that is officially promoted, as reality evaporates before and behind more and more people’s eyes.

For the massive growth of mental problems, LSD, that old bad-ass standby, is now advocated by the mainstream media as excellent therapy, while the weaponization of disease with Covid propaganda spins along as the world awaits the promulgation of the falling leaf virus and the call to cut down all trees.

Spying on Americans and censorship of free speech is the rule of the day, far deeper and wider than the most inflamed imagination could conjure.

There is an electoral system in shambles that has become a running joke, at least for those who get it.

MKULTRA mind control on a vast scale flourishes, despite all the denials, via the Internet and digital devices meant to confuse, promote doubt, and crazy speculation.

There is the leitmotif that has persisted for 60 years, the continued decline and mockery of traditional religious beliefs together with the promotion of New Age “spirituality” tied to consumerism. Shopping being the real religion now.

And lest I forget, we have the media and educational promotion of sexual and identity confusion under the guise of new definitions, such as the meaning of the word “gender.”

Finally, there is no mass peace movement as wars rage, except for those college students protesting Israel’s genocide of Palestinians and a few scattered groups.

You can easily fill in what I have omitted because there is no doubt you feel this disturbing “reality” of living in a society of screen spectacles and scrambled brains.

In other words, social madness, the “after” to  1969’s “before” – absurdity repeating itself, is the rule of the day, or more accurately, has been continuing for the past 55 years.

A preposterous scene.

Weirdness and Chaos are today’s celebrity couple, as people are subjected to, and subject themselves to, smoke and mirrors and mind control through an addiction to cell phones, the perfect propaganda tool.  Just put your hand in your pocket wherever you are and “they” are with you, in your hand, in your head, your constant companion, corrupting your mind and soul.

All this juxtaposed history did not occur to me in specifics as I walked down the beautiful dirt road past the UFO plaque; it came to me in more general terms.  But in a flash.  The particulars here recounted come from my having lived through the 1960s and my knowledge of history, the teaching of which has fallen into desuetude as universities have, in the words of the recently retired Columbia University Professor Rashid Khalidi, “For some time now, I have been both disgusted and horrified by the way higher education has developed into a cash register – essentially a money-making, MBA, lawyer-run, hedge fund-cum-real estate operation, with a minor sideline in education, where money has determined everything, where respect for pedagogy is at a minimum.”

In his book, Scorched Earth: Beyond the Digital Age to a Post-Capitalist World, Jonathan Crary, sums it up nicely: “One of the foremost achievements of the so-called knowledge economy is the mass production of ignorance, stupidity, and hatefulness. . . . programmed unintelligibility and duplicity.”

A close relative of mine, a brilliant man, highly skeptical, scientifically inclined, and very logical, a guy who scoffs at wild claims that he subjects to careful analyzes, was recently on a flight into LAX airport.  He had a window seat, and as the plane was on its long descent, the plane at approximately 15,000 feet, he saw a quivering disk-shaped object about 150 feet beyond the plane’s wing.  Startled beyond belief, he regretted not taking a photo of it before it was gone.  As soon as he landed, however, he asked the pilot if he had seen it.  The pilot said no, but it was probably a drone, which would make it a very high-flying drone indeed.  My relative called me immediately to tell me.  He said it was the size of a small car and it quivered like a quarter when dropped on a countertop.  He said it looked like no drone he had ever seen, and though amazed, characteristically concluded that he didn’t know what it was.

I mention this because such sightings are not just the wild imaginings of people prone to believe anything.  They are part of our current “reality,” seen by many people but shrouded in mystery.  Government authorities dismiss these sightings as figments of people’s imagination or weather balloons, drones, etc.  Any evidence to the contrary is dismissed, like so much else, as the conspiracy thinking of nutty people.  In other words – preposterous, meaning absurd.  This is part of the game of mind control that has been going on for decades, the effort to create social neurosis and confusion throughout society.

I offer these thoughts because I was waylaid by a word – preposterous – that went to my head.  If I have not kept to the subject, whatever it might be or whatever you expected, it is because, as the psychologist Adam Philips puts it, “In this picture digression is secular revelation, keeping to the subject is the best way we have of keeping off the subject.”  And so I will end with a few words from the great mystical and political poet, Czeslaw Milosz, a former Polish diplomat, who raises a question that cuts to the heart of our current dilemma.

Most people are ashamed, Milosz has written, to ask themselves certain questions that the seething infinity of modern relativity has bequeathed us. Such relativity is at the heart of our modern spiritual crisis, which is also the political one.  Space and time have lost all dimensions; the experience of the collapse of hierarchical space and time is widespread.  For those who still call themselves religious believers, “when they fold their hands and lift up their eyes, ‘up’ no longer exists,” Milosz rightly says.  The map and the territory are one as all metaphysics are almost lost.  And with its loss go our ability to see the advancing banner of the king of hell, to grasp the nature of the battle for the soul of the world that is now underway.  Or if you prefer, the struggle for political control.

What is before is behind or what is before is after.  It is preposterous but it is true.

Reprinted with the author’s permission.

The post The Preposterous Nature of “Reality” appeared first on LewRockwell.

Dear Bishops of Canada,

Recently, a radical left-wing politician in Canada put forth a Private Members’ Bill seeking to criminalize “Residential School denialism.” According to the politician, the government of Canada system of boarding schools for Native children that was largely facilitated by the Catholic Church in Canada committed “genocide.” As a result, this person believes that any Canadian who “denies” the “genocide” should be criminally charged. Leaving aside the fact that Private Members’ Bills rarely ever make it past the first reading, this is still a cause for alarm and reflection, and I believe the bishops of Canada must take this as a “wake up call.”

Before I continue, please know that it is not my intention to offend or disrespect the offices that you all hold, which are apostolic. That being said, there are some harsh truths that should be considered, and I cannot mince words when the truth is at stake.

We all lived through that awful summer of 2021, when dozens of Catholic parishes were either burned to the ground or damaged severely by malcontents and activists who hate the Church. Of course, these acts of bigotry and violence were spurred on by the bogus claims that Catholic schools had murdered thousands of unnamed Native children and thrown them into “mass graves.” At this point, anyone with even half of their wits about them knows that the whole mass grave hoax was just that, a hoax. Nevertheless, the public was more than willing to accept the narrative without even giving it a second thought because they have been indoctrinated with the myriad lies that plague the Church in our once great nation and abroad.

Virtually all Catholics and non-Catholics in Canada have accepted a “black legend” of sorts about our beloved Church and seem to believe that the Catholic Church is an archaic organization with a very dark past. This is, of course, a lie.

You are all in charge of Catholic education in Canada. As a former Catholic school teacher, I can tell you that Catholic schools are not immune from this lie, and I would argue that Catholic educators are often the worst offenders in this regard.

In any event, what makes this whole saga so tragic goes beyond denial of the fact that there were no mass graves and that there was no genocide. Many Canadians are willing to accept the fact that what was reported was false, as is evidenced by the growing awareness of this fact in much of the mainstream press. However, the public must know that not only were there no veritable concentration camps run by nuns and priests, but the schools run by the Church were exceptional.

The nuns and priests who braved the harshest climates of Canada during the early years of development were not maniacal murderers who sought to abuse children. On the contrary, they were the spiritual sons and daughters of the great missionaries who watered the soil of our country with their blood.

They followed the lead of the great martyrs Brébeuf, Jogues, and their companions. When these great men arrived on our shores, they found a civilization—if we can call it that—groping around in the dark of a diabolical paganism. Reading their journals, one is shocked with horror at what they report: mass starvation was rampant, children were so malnourished that they routinely suffered from physical and mental disabilities; there was nothing resembling true marriage and women were often treated no better than whores and objects; in some cases, if sled dogs were injured or died, women would pull the sleds and be whipped by their masters if they did so poorly; cannibalism was not uncommon; and they enjoyed no written language.

Our great martyrs did not flee from this challenge. On the contrary, they embraced their own deaths—the most gruesome deaths imaginable—if only they could save one soul. In fact, Brébeuf loved the people of our country so much that when he was summoned home the first time, he is recorded as saying that he was not worthy to stay in Canada because of his sins. Can you fathom such a deep love of souls such as his? If we were all to do an examination of conscience and compare it to Brébeuf’s, doubtless we would seem like Satan incarnate when compared to him. Nonetheless, he saw his first exit from this land filled with iniquity and savagery as a punishment.

Could any of us even dare to stand in the same room with a man such as him and do anything but weep at our frailty and unworthiness to breathe the same air?

Your Excellencies, you are all the heirs of his great sacrifice.

It is said that we are all standing on the shoulders of giants. Well, in the case of Brébeuf, it is said that he was such an imposing man that he would carry two canoes while portaging long distances across Huronia. To say that you stand on the shoulders of giants is a literal truth. And, this mountain of a man stood on the Holy Shoulders of Christ, the same Sacred Shoulders that bore the Cross that is the instrument of our salvation.

Respectfully, what have you done to honour this great man? Have you stood boldly in the public square and told the truth without compromise or concern for political correctness? Have you led the Catholic school systems that you rightfully oversee into the truth?

I believe you all know the answer to these questions.

Read the Whole Article

The post An Open Letter to the Bishops of Canada appeared first on LewRockwell.

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1. Against Method 
2. The Day Dixie Died: Southern Occupation, 1865-1866 
   
3. WHAT IS TRUE LOVE ACCORDING TO THE BIBLE?: “Love Is When Your Name Is Safe In Someone’s Mouth” (The Truth, Love & God series) 
4. Betrayal At Bethesda: The Intertwined Fates of James Forrestal, Joseph McCarthy, and John F. Kennedy 
5. Summer, 1945: Germany, Japan and the Harvest of Hate 
6. The Second World War
7. Jew to the Jews: Jewish Contours of Pauline Flexibility in 1 Corinthians 9:19–23.
8. The Skeptical Environmentalist: Measuring the Real State of the World
9. The Education of Henry Adams: An Autobiography
10. The Myth of Mental Illness: Foundations of a Theory of Personal Conduct
11. Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World
12. The Heart Speaks: A Cardiologist Reveals the Secret Language of Healing
13. World Without Cancer; The Story of Vitamin B17
14. Towards a World War III Scenario: The Dangers of Nuclear War 
15. The Source and Significance of Coincidences: A Hard Look at the Astonishing Evidence
16. The Bible Has The Answer (Henry Morris Signature Collection)
17. The War on Populism: Consent Factory Essays, Vol. II
18. Disintegration: Indicators of the Coming American Collapse 
19. The Prepper’s Water Survival Guide: Harvest, Treat, and Store Your Most Vital Resource 
20. July 1914: Countdown to War

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di Michael Lebowitz

La prima parte di questo saggio andava a descrivere una curva dei rendimenti in bull steepening e cosa implicasse per la crescita economica e la linea di politica della FED. C'era anche una descrizione degli altri tre tipi di spostamenti della curva dei rendimenti e cosa significano per l'economia e la linea di politica della FED.

Gli spostamenti della curva dei rendimenti tendono a correlarsi con diverse performance azionarie. Con le crescenti probabilità che un lungo bull steepening possa essere alle porte, spetta a noi quantificare come vari indici azionari, settori e fattori si sono comportati durante simili movimenti.

Limitazione delle perdite con l'analisi della curva dei rendimenti

Le azioni passano molto più tempo a seguire un trend al rialzo che al ribasso. Tuttavia, in quei periodi relativamente brevi in ​​cui persistono trend ribassisti a lungo termine, si consiglia agli investitori di adottare misure per ridurre i rischi e limitare le perdite. Un approccio attivo vi mette in una posizione di vantaggio. Inoltre quando il mercato riprende il suo trend al rialzo, avete ampi fondi per acquistare azioni a prezzi più bassi e profili di rischio-rendimento migliori.

Abbiamo discusso questo argomento in Bear Market Wealth Management:

La crescita della ricchezza avviene nel corso di decenni. In questo lasso di tempo si verificano molti cicli rialzisti e ribassisti. Mentre gli investitori tendono a concentrarsi sullo sfruttare al meglio i cicli rialzisti, è altrettanto importante evitare di lasciare che i mercati ribassisti invertano i propri progressi. La quantità di tempo trascorso nei mercati ribassisti è minima, ma il tempo perso per recuperare la propria ricchezza può essere sostanziale.

Potreste chiedervi perché un articolo sulle curve dei rendimenti obbligazionari inizi con una discussione sulle strategie di mercato ribassista per le azioni. Ebbene, alcuni spostamenti di suddetta sono ben correlati con rendimenti positivi del mercato azionario e altri con rendimenti negativi. I precedenti ambienti di bull steepening non sono stati favorevoli agli investitori buy and hold, pertanto speriamo che questa analisi vi guidi nella preparazione per ridurre il rischio, se necessario.

La storia recente del bull steepening

Il grafico qui sotto traccia i rendimenti a 2 e 10 anni e la curva dei rendimenti a 2 e 10 anni. Inoltre in grigio sono evidenziati i periodi che consideriamo di bull steepening. Abbiamo definito tali periodi in base al movimento della curva dei rendimenti e alla coerenza del trend. Per essere in bull steepening la curva doveva essere in aumento, con i rendimenti a 2 e 10 anni in calo per 20 settimane o più, e almeno l'80% di tali settimane doveva essere nel trend di bull steepening.

Come mostrato, ci sono stati cinque periodi di questo tipo sin dal 1995. Il più recente si è esteso da maggio 2019 a marzo 2020. L'attuale bull steepening non si è verificato abbastanza a lungo da soddisfare i nostri standard definiti sopra.

I cicli di bull steepening sono ribassisti per la maggior parte delle azioni

Dopo aver definito i periodi, abbiamo quindi studiato vari indici azionari, settori e fattori per valutarne le performance durante i periodi di tempo. Per ricordarvelo, le negoziazioni bull steepening si verificano in genere quando l'economia rallenta e cresce l'attesa dei tagli dei tassi della FED. Questi tratti descrivono adeguatamente il periodo attuale.

Inoltre il bull steepening attuale arriva sulla scia di una curva dei rendimenti che è risultata invertita per due anni. Invertita significa che il rendimento sul decennale è inferiore a quello sul biennale. Un'inversione riduce gli incentivi per le banche a prestare, aumentando così le probabilità di debolezza economica.

Come descritto nella Parte Uno, l'inversione della curva dei rendimenti è un avvertimento di recessione, ma di solito non è tempestiva. Al contrario, quandio l'inversione viene riassorbita di solito ciò preannuncia una recessione entro un anno o meno.

La curva dei rendimenti è tornata brevemente in territorio positivo mentre apportiamo le modifiche finali a questo articolo, pertanto ora abbiamo un avviso di recessione molto più esplicito.

Il grafico qui sotto mostra che, nonostante l'allarme sia più forte, una recessione può richiedere più di un anno per manifestarsi.

 

Rendimenti obbligazionari

Per definizione, tutti i titoli del Tesoro forniscono rendimenti positivi in ​​un bull steepening. Mentre i rendimenti a due anni scenderanno più di quelli a dieci anni, la durata di questi ultimi sarà di gran lunga maggiore. Da una prospettiva di rendimento totale, i bond a più lunga durata spesso forniscono rendimenti migliori rispetto ai bond a più breve durata.

La tabella seguente mostra il rendimento totale (cedole e prezzo) per le obbligazioni a due e dieci anni durante i cinque periodi di bull steepening.

Rendimenti azionari

Il primo grafico qui sotto traccia i rendimenti medi di 19 asset, indici azionari, fattori e settori durante i cinque periodi di bull steepening. Il secondo ne compone i rendimenti nei cinque periodi.

Successivamente suddividiamo i rendimenti per classi simili di azioni. Abbiamo aggiunto oro e industrie minerarie aurifere al grafico dei rendimenti dei fattori. I grafici mostrano il rendimento medio e la media dei ribassi massimi durante i cinque periodi.

Ci sono alcune importanti conclusioni da trarre:

• L'oro e le industrie minerarie aurifere sono di gran lunga i migliori performer durante i periodi di bull steepening.

• Oltre all'oro e alle industrie minerarie aurifere, i beni di prima necessità sono stati l'unica altra categoria ad avere un rendimento medio e composto positivo.

• Ogni indice, settore, attività e fattore, compresi l'oro e le aziende minerarie aurifere, ha avuto un rendimento medio negativo in qualche momento durante il periodo di steepening.

• Le differenze tra il valore e la crescita dell'indice S&P non sono state tanto significative quanto sospettavamo.

• Allo stesso modo, le differenze tra l'indice S&P 500 e gli indici S&P small e mid-cap erano minime.

• I settori con beta più basso e più orientati al valore hanno chiaramente sovraperformato i settori e i fattori con beta più alto durante la fase di accelerazione dello steepening.

Una dichiarazione di non responsabilità sulle aspettative

È facile estrapolare il passato al futuro, tuttavia ciascuno dei cinque periodi sopra è stato diverso. Non c'è dubbio che il prossimo bull steepening, che sia ora o in futuro, avrà caratteristiche diverse. Le performance passate potrebbero non essere un indicatore affidabile del futuro.

Siamo attualmente a 12 settimane di un ciclo di bull steepening. Se persiste per altre otto settimane, raggiungerà la soglia che abbiamo utilizzato per calcolare i risultati di cui sopra. Se così fosse, i dati per calcolare i rendimenti e i ribassi attesi partiranno da fine maggio. La data di inizio anticipata potrebbe distorcere le nostre aspettative.

Ad esempio, l'oro è salito di circa il 10% dalla data di inizio. Se questo è un ciclo persistente di bull steepening e l'oro alla fine eguaglia il rendimento medio del 13% nei cinque periodi precedenti, ha uno spazio di rialzo limitato. Tuttavia il suo ribasso medio nei periodi precedenti è di circa il 6%. Pertanto se questo caso rispecchia il rendimento e il ribasso medio, dovremmo aspettarci un calo dell'oro del 15% prima di rimbalzare a circa il 3% in più rispetto ai livelli attuali.

Analogamente, i settori con prezzi superiori ai livelli di fine maggio potrebbero subire un calo superiore al rendimento medio rispetto ai livelli attuali, per eguagliare il rendimento medio.

Riepilogo

I risultati del nostro studio sono coerenti nei cinque intervalli di tempo, pertanto se l'attuale bull steepening continua, c'è una buona probabilità che l'oro, le industrie minerarie aurifere e i settori più conservativi e con beta più basso superino le performance del mercato più ampio.

La performance recente dei settori dei servizi di pubblica utilità e dei beni di prima necessità, insieme all'oro e alle industrie minerarie aurifere, potrebbe indicare che gli investitori stanno scommettendo su un'accelerazione del bull steepening.

Vi lasciamo con due grafici che mostrano l'importanza della gestione del rischio durante un ciclo di bull steepening che fa da anfitrione a una recessione.

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

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There is a great believe peddled by main stream media that the Biden administration is trying to hold the Zionists   back from their devastating action in Gaza, Lebanon and beyond, but unfortunately fails to do so. Some commentators argue that this is the case because the Israel lobby has a very strong position in U.S. policies and can direct the U.S. government into any direction of its liking.

My hunch is that this is putting the cart before the horse.

It is in fact the Biden administration which is using the Israeli (and Ukrainian) government to serve its foreign policy purposes. As I remarked:

This has been the general theme of a media campaign for a while. “Natanyahoo is steamrolling Biden and the poor guy can do nothing about it.”

I do not buy it. One phone call from the White House to the Pentagon would hold resupply flights from the U.S. to Israel. Without constant supply renewal the Israeli Air Force would have to stop its bombing campaigns in Gaza, the West Bank, Lebanon, Syria and Yemen within days if not within hours.

But instead of calling the Pentagon, the whole Middle East team around Biden, Antony Blinken, Brett McGurk and IDF soldier Amos Hochstein, has been urging Israel to extend its campaign.

They are hoping, like the neoconservatives in 2006 during the Bush administration, for the ‘birth pangs of a new Middle East’, which will forever change the strategic situation on the ground.
…
The conclusion from this is that Netanyahoo is largely doing exactly what the Biden administration wants him to do.

Gilbert Doctorow, the well known historian and journalist, is of similar opinion:

More on tails wagging dogs and vice versa

Some viewers/readers support my contention that the United States is using Israel as its proxy in the Middle East and is not just enabling but even directing Israel’s rampage in the region to ‘kick ass’ generally and to reinforce American dominance there in line with American global hegemony. Far from being outraged by the Israeli atrocities, the U.S. government is satisfied to see Israel take revenge for the many humiliations that the United States has suffered in the Middle East, most recently in the disorderly and disgraceful pull-out from Afghanistan but going back, say, 40 years to the hostage taking at the American embassy in Teheran by the new revolutionary Iranian leadership there that overthrew the American backed Shah.

Others in my audience have not hesitated to say that they think I am wrong, and that indeed Prime Minister Netanyahu is leading Joe Biden & Company around by the nose, which just happens to be the consensus view in mainstream media.

Most of this discussion is not visible to the broad public. However, the ‘Judging Freedom’ channel which has 450,000 subscribers and its host, Judge Andrew Napolitano put my proposition on the dog (USA) wagging the tail (Israel) to several of his best-known panelists in the 24 hours following my interview with him. To be sure, my idea seemed so ‘contrarian’ that it demanded a response from the mightiest minds in the alternative media camp. They obliged. With one exception, the mightiest minds were dismissive of my interpretation in more respectful, less respectful ways.
…

Professor John Mearsheimer and Larry Johnson are two of the guest on the Napolitano show who reject Doctorow’s thesis.

However, Doctorow and I are not the only ones delving into this conundrum. Professor of history at Columbia University Adam Tooze, a rather famous commentator, joined us with his current Guardian comment:

Facing war in the Middle East and Ukraine, the US looks feeble. But is it just an act?

There is one school of thought that says the Biden administration is muddling through. It has no grand plan. It lacks the will or the means to discipline or direct either the Ukrainians or the Israelis. As a result, it is mainly focused on avoiding a third world war.
…
But what if that interpretation is too benign? What if it underestimates the intentionality on Washington’s part? What if key figures in the administration actually see this as a history-defining moment and an opportunity to reshape the balance of world power? What if what we are witnessing is the pivoting of the US to a deliberate and comprehensive revisionism by way of a strategy of tension?

Revisionist powers are those that want to overturn the existing state of things. In an extended sense, this can also mean a desire to alter the flow of events; for instance, to redirect or halt the process of globalisation. Revisionism is often associated with resentment or nostalgia for an earlier, better age.

Tooze digs down into the various action the Biden administration has taken against Russia, China and in the Middle East. He concludes:

In all three arenas – China, Ukraine and the Middle East – the US will say that it is responding to aggression. But rather than working consistently for a return to the status quo it is, in fact, raising the stakes. While insisting that it supports the rules-based order, what we are witnessing is something closer to a revival of the ruinous neoconservative ambition of the 1990s and 2000s.
…
[T]here is more going on here than simply muddling through. First the Trump and now the Biden presidencies are willing contributors to the controlled demolition of the 1990s post-cold war order.

People seem to have forgotten that Biden was never a liberal in the progressive sense. Since being a freshman in Congress Biden has always been on the conservative side of things:

Alliances With Segregationists

1975: Mr. Biden joined Senator Jesse Helms, a Republican segregationist from North Carolina, in supporting an anti-busing amendment to an education spending bill. When the amendment failed, Mr. Biden wrote a narrower measure that prevented schools from using federal dollars to assign teachers or students by race. It passed, 50-43.

In a television interview, Mr. Biden called busing an “asinine concept” and said he had “gotten to the point where I think our only recourse to eliminate busing may be a constitutional amendment.”

In 2002 Biden was joined at the hip with the neoconservatives when he, as the Chairman of the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, feverishly argued for launching the war on Iraq:

In a speech days before the 2002 [Iraq war] vote, Bush did say approving the resolution “does not mean that military action is imminent or unavoidable,” but he also laid out in detail why military action “may” be needed. And on the day the war broke out, Biden acknowledged, “We voted to give him the authority to wage that war. We should step back and be supportive.”

When the Biden administration is sowing global chaos the way it currently does, it is acting along a path which Biden has long favored and with the intent to sow chaos, not because this or that outside power is pressing him to do so.

Reprinted with permission from Moon of Alabama.

The post Biden’s Intent Is To Sow Chaos – Netanyahoo And Zelensky Are Working For Him appeared first on LewRockwell.

The Dem candidate brags about 16 million new jobs on the Harris-Biden watch and Trump claims the Greatest Economy Ever—evidenced in part by low inflation that his successor purportedly blew sky high.

Both are lying. Both ignore crucial matters of context—such as stage of the business cycle, Fed policy actions, forces arising from the $105 trillion global economy in which US growth, jobs and inflation are inextricably rooted and the fact of lag times in transmission of Washington policy into economic outcomes.

Among other things, these factors mean that comparing administrations based on the calendar happenstance of four or eight year presidential terms is inherently dubious. There are too many intervening and cross-cutting forces that usually far overpower the meager impact of White House policy pronouncements and implemented actions.

For instance, the Harris-Biden administration brags that they have created 16.6 million jobs since December 2020, but we are hard pressed to understand how Sleepy Joe had anything to do with the reported BLS numbers. Fully 9.8 million or 59% of these “new” jobs were not that at all; they were “born-again” jobs, reflecting the on-going spring-back of the US economy from from the Lockdown-induced 22 million jobs plunge 0f April 2020.

So if you go back to the February 2020 high water mark’s 152.309 million jobs, the gain under Harris-Biden through the 159.105 million figure reported for September 2024 amounts to just 151,000 net new jobs per month. As it happened, the US economy gained 261,000 per month of net new jobs during Obama’s second term and 181,000 per month during the Donald’s term through February 2020.

So Kamala has absolutely nothing to brag about: 40-year high inflation and the weakest rate of net job growth in decades. That’s made even more dramatic when you look at the monthly jobs gains relative to a continually expanding economy.

Annualized Growth of Net New Nonfarm Jobs:

• Obama’s Second Term: 2.36%.
• Trump Thru Feb 2020: 1.49%.
• Harris-Biden to date:1.27%

Harris-Biden Nonfarm Employment Growth—-Three Fifths Were Born-Again Jobs Owing to the Rebound From The Lockdown Plunge

Likewise, when it comes to the fundamental matter of overall economic growth, Trump has absolutely nothing to boast about, either. The growth rate of real final sales of domestic product, which is the best proxy for economic growth because it excludes volatile short-term inventory swings, posted at just 1.5% per annum during his 48 months in the Oval Office. That’s the second lowest of all presidents since Eisenhower and barely half the average economic growth rate between 1954 and 2016.

Indeed, the Donald has never been a stickler for even remote factual accuracy, but surely it does take some chutzpah to claim you ranked at the top of your class, when you actually scrapped the bottom, bested only by Bush the Younger and then by just a hair for last place.

Average Real Growth Per Annum:

• Kennedy-Johnson: 5.0%.
• Clinton: 3.8%.
• Reagan: 3.4%.
• Carter: 3.4%.
• Eisenhower: 2.9%.
• Nixon-Ford: 2.7%.
• Bush the Elder: 2.2%.
• Obama: 1.7%.
• Trump: 1.5%.
• Bush the Younger: 1.1%.
• All presidents, 1954 to 2016: 0%.

The above should constitute the proverbial, nuff said!

But the Donald’s partisans whine “because Covid”. And besides, inflation was running at 1.9% when the Donald left office.

Well, take the COVID-impacted quarters out of the calculation and you still get an average of just 2.2% per annum economic growth—right near the bottom.

As a matter of fact, however, Covid didn’t cause the plunge in employment and GDP during Q2 2020. The Lockdowns did, which the Donald ordered. And the contraction was aggravated mightily by Dr. Fauci and the Virus Patrol’s daily scary story briefings that kept

Americans hunkered-down in their homes—a destructive messaging campaign that was conducted from the White House bully pulpit with the Donald’s full endorsement and frequent participation.

Indeed, the whole Lockdown/pandemic dislocation amounted to a grotesque violation of the constitutional rights of speech, assembly, worship and property. So the Donald actually gets a very heavy black mark for their implementation on his watch because these gross constitutional violations never would have happened if he had been opposed them and sent Fauci et. al. packing. And most certainly the Donald doesn’t get a hall pass for the immense economic losses and contractions the Lockdowns caused.

Still, facts such as these are of minor moment in Trumpland. Besides, the claim of a great economy retains some resonance with the public owing to its remembrance that inflation was better behaved back then before the indexes hit 40 year highs in 2021-2022.

Yet here is the path of our trusty 16% trimmed mean CPI from 1992 to the present. For the period up to the pandemic disruptions after February 2020, you truly do need a magnifying glass to detect any differences among the administrations in power during those years.

And that goes for the Donald’s 38 months in the Oval Office up until February 2020, as well.

The 2.24% inflation rate per annum during that interval was right in the middle of the pack.

There was nothing Greatest Ever about it.

Per Annum Change In the 16% Trimmed Mean CPI:

• Clinton: 2.50%.
• Bush the Younger: 2.41%.
• Obama: 1.75%.
• Trump thru 2/2020: 2.24%

Again, when you take the whole term right through the pandemic quarters, the story is the same. Inflation averaged 2.12% per annum on the Donald’s 48-month watch.

Moreover, Trump’s thoroughly in-line rate of purchasing power loss meant that the saver’s and wage earner’s dollar of January 1993 continued to depreciate, reaching just 45 cents by January 2021. And the Donald did exactly nothing to stop this horrific confiscation of purchasing power and wealth.

In fact, he labored mightily and loudly while in the Oval Office to quash any incipient attempt at the Fed to shut-down the printing presses and aggressively drain the inflationary excess liquidity that had been pumped into the economy year-after-year in response to the so-called Great Financial Crisis. The resulting UniParty policy consensus thus essentially amounted to cheap interest rates and swelling financial asset prices, the better to pleasure its paymasters on Wall Street and to fund the exploding public debt.

Of course, “low interest man” Trump was 100% onboard.

Index Of Consumer Dollar’s Purchasing Power Since January 1993

And this gets us to the inflation acceleration that happened after the economy began to recover from the Q2 2020 crash, which saw real GDP plunge at a 32% annualized rate and nearly 22 million workers put on the streets.

Thereafter, the Y/Y trimmed mean CPI began marching stoutly uphill per the chart below, rising from 1.99% on a Y/Y basis in the Donald last month in office to a peak of 7.22% Y/Y in September 2022.

This 40-year high acceleration, however, did not happen by the economic equivalent of immaculate conception, nor was it owing to some flaw in capitalism that had laid dormant over previous decades. And most certainly it was not due to the policies of Harris-Bidden alone—since measured inflation was soaring long before they had made any real impact on the main street economy.

To the contrary, the Washington UniParty caused this inflationary lift-off owing to a burst of fiscal and monetary excess like had never before been recorded or even imagined. And that double whammy was launched and largely executed on the Donald’s watch, not Biden’s. It is only owing to the lag in policy transmission through the main street economy and into lagging government statistics that Biden has taken the wrap for the disaster shown below.

Y/Y Change In 16% Trimmed Mean CPI, February 2020 to August 2024

The booby prize for the inflation surge should be shared, of course. For want of doubt, here is the Washington spending bacchanalia that triggered the inflationary tsunami shown above. For the quarters before Q2 2020, government spending had been growing steadily at a $400 billion annualized rate.

Then the Donald ordered the Lockdowns in mid-March 2020, and soon was at the White House Bully Pulpit assuring tens of millions of families suddenly locked out of work and quarantined at home that cash help from Uncle Sam was on the way.

It surely was. Government spending in Q2 2020 increased by $3.54 trillion at an annualized rate. That was nearly nine times the Q4 2019 rate of growth.

Needless to say, this amounted to the Mother of All Demand Shocks. And worse still, it came at a time when much of the services sector was shut down, also upon the Donald’s orders. So this flood of demand figuratively flowed into the Amazon delivery vans, causing all working inventories in the domestic distribution system to be quickly depleted and foreign supply chains to be sucked dry shortly thereafter. Prices of merchandise goods consequently soared.

Nor was the $2.3 trillion CARES act which hit in Q2 2020 the end of it. The Y/Y spending growth rate in Q3 2020 was $2.42 trillion, or six times the pre-pandemic trend, and in Q4 the $1.07 trillion rate of government spending gain was still more than double the prior trend.

Moreover, during the 2020 election period, the Donald showed that he was not willing to leave well enough alone by advocating a second $2000 stimmy payment to 90% of US households. Subsequently, this got funded partially in the pre-Christmas Covid relief bill that Trump signed and the balance came in the American Rescue Act signed by Biden in early March 2021.

As it happened, however, both the second Trump bill and the Biden pile-on hit the spending stream in Q1 2021, causing government spending growth to soar once more, to a $3.64 trillion rate of Y/Y gain. Again, that was nine-times the pre-pandemic trend.

Needless to say, the four tall bars in the graph below tell you all you need to know. This crazy eruption of government funded demand at the very time that the Virus Patrol was sharply curtailing the supply of services is the true incubator in which the subsequent burst of 40-year high inflation was fostered. And the Donald’s statutory signatures are scribbled all over the result.

Annualized Rate Of Government Spending Change, Q1 2017 to Q4 2021

To be sure, had the Fed not accommodated the resulting massive US Treasury borrowing, interest rates would have soared to double digit levels and the economy would have shut down forthwith. But again, Trump was right in there midwifing the monetary transmission of the inflationary impulse from the unprecedented eruption of fiscal stimmies. He virtually green-flagged the Fed’s madcap print-a-thon.

To wit, between August 2019 and the April 2022 inflation peak, the Fed’s balance sheet grew by a staggering $5.18 trillion. But again, $3.60 trillion or 70% of that burst of inflationary money-printing occurred on the Donald’s watch.

Nor should the true significance of these “big numbers” be gainsaid. During the Donald’s last 16 months in office, the Fed printed more money than it had during the first 100 years of its existence!

In short, Trump was most evidently the principal policy author of the inflationary wave that has racked main street since 2020 and has become the #1 issue of the current campaign. And the irony is that Trump may ride back into office on the thoroughly spurious claim that Harris-Biden did it, instead.

In fact, the UniParty did it, yet their failed policies are all that is on offer in the abysmal presidential election now under way.

Eruption of the Fed’s Balance Sheet, August 2019 to April 2022

To be sure, the only candidate more clueless than the Donald about where the inflationary surge came from is Kamala Harris. Her claim that all will be well once she implements anti-gouging policies against the grocery store chains and food companies is so infantile as to be hardly worthy of refutation.

But for want of doubt, here is the change in food prices at the farm gate, wholesale/manufacturing level and retail grocery stores since February 2020. Self-evidently, if any gouging was done it was at the farm gate level, where prices are up by 25.9%. That’s just slightly less than the 27.8% gain in wholesale food prices and actually a tad more than the 25.3% gain at retail.

Needless to say, good luck with making a gouging case out of that data. But then again, if Harris is looking for a scape-goat rather than a solution she might as well blame the farmers. The farm states are already hopelessly red.

In any event, the real culprits are the spenders and money-printers. And not surprisingly, both candidates want more of both.

Index of Food Prices At Farm Gate, Wholesale And Retail Since February 2020.

Reprinted with permission from David Stockman’s Contra Corner.

The post Battle of the Liars: Trump Versus Harris and the Folly of UniParty Economics appeared first on LewRockwell.

“It is incredible how as soon as a people becomes subject, it promptly falls into such complete forgetfulness of its freedom that it can hardly be roused to the point of regaining it, obeying so easily and so willingly that one is led to say, on beholding such a situation, that this people has not so much lost its liberty as won its enslavement. It is true that in the beginning men submit under constraint and by force; but those who come after them obey without regret and perform willingly what their predecessors had done because they had to. This is why men born under the yoke and then nourished and reared in slavery are content, without further effort, to live in their native circumstance, unaware of any other state or right, and considering as quite natural the condition into which they were born.”
—Étienne de La Boétie, The Politics of Obedience: The Discourse of Voluntary Servitude

Love the quick profit, the annual raise,
vacation with pay. Want more
of everything ready-made. Be afraid
to know your neighbors and to die.
And you will have a window in your head.
Not even your future will be a mystery
any more. Your mind will be punched in a card
and shut away in a little drawer.
When they want you to buy something
they will call you. When they want you
to die for profit they will let you know.
—Wendell Berry, Manifesto: The Mad Farmer Liberation Front, Collected Poems: 1957–1982

I haven’t written political letters in a long time because, frankly, I no longer believe in political solutions.

I don’t believe in politicians, I don’t believe in political parties, and I don’t believe in any other aspect of the political clownsh*t show we are commanded to fix our eyes, minds, and hearts on while the philanthropaths, cruelites, WEFfers, corporations, organizations, governments, agencies, tyrants, kapos, and colluders are ramrodding through their bipartisan blueprints for our totalitarian enslavement behind the circus curtain.

That’s why I call myself politically agnostic. I’ve freed my mind of the ingroup/outgroup cognitive biases used to menticide, manipulate, and cleave us into perforated binaries we aren’t supposed to think outside of let alone tear up altogether.

What I do believe in is people—both as individuals and as groups of individuals with shared values and purpose rising up in a bombora of love against injustice, tyranny, and democide.

And that is why I’m asking you to join me in voicing our opposition to REAL ID, which is the United States version of papers-please digital ID.

Naturally, they’ve only given Americans until October 15, 2024, in the midst of what may be the most thermonuclear election in US history to submit comments on the latest action related to REAL ID.

Read the Whole Article

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Comments open on YouTube

The post Ryan Salame: Facing Prison for Donating to Trump, His Journey With SBF, & Why the Banks Hate Crypto appeared first on LewRockwell.

The joint-leader of President Trump’s transition team, Howard Lutnick, confirmed that Robert F. Kennedy Jr. will have a key position on the transition team of a second Trump administration, should the former president win a historic non-contiguous second term.

As reported in The Hill and The Financial Times, Lutnick said that transition team members will be selected based on their loyalty to the former president.

Lutnick, who is leading the transition team with former Small Business Administration head Linda McMahon, has named Kennedy an honorary member of that team alongside vice presidential nominee, Senator J.D. Vance, and former Democratic Representative and Army National Guard veteran, Tulsi Gabbard of Hawaii. The president’s son, Donald Trump Jr., will also be on the transition team.

If Trump wins, Kennedy will occupy an unprecedented position as a major independent policy maker and political leader in a Republican administration.

Kennedy has spoken at length about his private discussions with Trump, specifically around the Kennedy-led Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) movement. Kennedy wants all Americans to be able to afford a healthier lifestyle and food choices. He has also said that President Trump will hold pharmaceutical companies to account in an administration in which Kennedy will play a vital role.

Kennedy has also said Trump is committed to policies to restore and strengthen the First Amendment, which has come under attack from the Biden administration, Vice President Kamala Harris, and her running mate Governor Tim Walz.

In addition, Kennedy told talk show host Tucker Carlson that he would be responsible for eliminating “corruption” from agencies such as the FDA, NIH, and the CDC.

This originally appeared on The Kennedy Beacon.

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Americans who pay attention are critical of Israel for its control not only of US foreign policy but also US domestic policies, such as those regulating speech, and even tenure decisions of Catholic universities. CIA personnel have complained that attempts to rein-in Israeli spying on America have been politically blocked. John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt in their book, The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy, reveal Israel’s power over America.

It is hard to see it any other way when American universities, such as Harvard, prevent students from protesting Israel’s genocide of Palestine, and when in the middle of the genocide, the US Congress shows its support for the genocide by inviting Israeli prime minister Netanyahu to address Congress and reward his war crimes with 53 standing ovations. How can Washington be any more subservient to Israel than that?

The visible evidence indicates that Israel controls America, not America controls Israel. But there is another view. It is well stated here by Michael Hudson and Richard Wolfe. Gilbert Doctorow shares it.

Hudson and Wolfe are credible witnesses, because they, especially Hudson, participated in the formation of Washington’s policy to use and direct Israel in behalf of US hegemony in the Middle East. Israel is Washington’s proxy against the Muslims, just as Ukrainians are Washington’s proxy against Russia, just as Georgians were when Washington sent them to invade South Ossetia, and just as the British and Europe are by serving Washington’s hegemony at the risk of their own destruction.

Looking at it from this standpoint, the view that Israel controls Washington serves as a cover to protect Washington from responsibility for Israel’s actions that serve Washington’s agendas.

Instead of choosing between the two explanations, I would say both are true. The cover has been in place for 50 years, and during that time due to belief in it, acquired its own power. The consequence is that whereas Israel has as much power over Americans’ First Amendment rights as the US Supreme Court, Israel continues as Washington’s proxy against the Arabs.

The Hudson-Wolfe explanation originated as an interview hosted by Nima Alkhorshid on October 6, 2024. At places it seems there are errors in the transcription that result in confusion, but if you attend to the confusing passages you can figure out what is being said.

In the last part of the interview, Hudson and Wolfe seem to agree with my position that the Russians, Arabs, and Iranians are miscalculating when they rely on threats of wider war and demonstrations of ability to strike Israel to bring the Washington hegemon to his senses. What they are actually doing is giving away their strategic advantage to Washington and to Israel without getting credit for trying to stop the widening of the wars.

Hudson and Wolfe support the point that I have often made. No one with a wide audience, money, or clout from a think tank, university, or major foundation is saying a word about the risks of two wars spinning out of control into nuclear war. Those few of us speaking are isolated individuals denounced as Russian agents, anti-semites, and purveyors of disinformation. This should scare the world to death. We are approaching Armageddon from two directions, and the word can’t get out.

The post Does Israel Wag America or Does America Wag Israel appeared first on LewRockwell.

I’ll let the documentation tell the story here, which story is about what started the war in Ukraine, taking that as the case for discussion here because the likeliest conflict to produce a world-destroying World War Three (WW3) would be further expansion of the war between Russia and America’s NATO that has been going on in the battlefields of Ukraine; and, so, what follows is documenting exactly how this war actually started:

——

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2004/nov/26/ukraine.usa

https://archive.is/Kq2W3   [19 August 2013]

“US campaign behind the turmoil in Kiev”

25 November 2004, Ian Traynor the Guardian’s European editor. He is based in Brussels [LATEST: “Nato members could act against Syria without UN mandate: 25 Aug 2013: Kosovo-style humanitarian intervention could justify Nato military action against Assad regime after alleged chemical attacks”]

With their websites and stickers, their pranks and slogans aimed at banishing widespread fear of a corrupt regime, the democracy guerrillas of the Ukrainian Pora youth movement have already notched up a famous victory – whatever the outcome of the dangerous stand-off in Kiev.

Ukraine, traditionally passive in its politics, has been mobilised by the young democracy activists and will never be the same again.

But while the gains of the orange-bedecked “chestnut revolution” are Ukraine’s, the campaign is an American creation, a sophisticated and brilliantly conceived exercise in western branding and mass marketing that, in four countries in four years, has been used to try to salvage rigged elections and topple unsavoury regimes.

Funded and organised by the US government, deploying US consultancies, pollsters, diplomats, the two big American parties and US non-government organisations, the campaign was first used in Europe in Belgrade in 2000 to beat Slobodan Milosevic at the ballot box.

Richard Miles, the US ambassador in Belgrade, played a key role. And by last year, as US ambassador in Tbilisi, he repeated the trick in Georgia, coaching Mikhail Saakashvili in how to bring down Eduard Shevardnadze.

Ten months after the success in Belgrade, the US ambassador in Minsk, Michael Kozak, a veteran of similar operations in central America, notably in Nicaragua, organised a near identical campaign to try to defeat the Belarus hardman, Alexander Lukashenko.

That one failed. “There will be no Kostunica in Belarus,” the Belarus president declared, referring to the victory in Belgrade.

But experience gained in Serbia, Georgia and Belarus has been invaluable in plotting to beat the regime of Leonid Kuchma in Kiev.

The operation – engineering democracy through the ballot box and civil disobedience – is now so slick that the methods have matured into a template for winning other people’s elections. …

If the events in Kiev vindicate the US in its strategies for helping other people win elections and take power from anti-democratic regimes, it is certain to try to repeat the exercise elsewhere in the post-Soviet world.

The places to watch are Moldova and the authoritarian countries of central Asia.

——

video:

the transcript: https://archive.ph/9Srw5#selection-461.0-469.162:

Since Ukraine’s independence in 1991, the United States has supported Ukrainians as they build democratic skills and institutions, as they promote civic participation and good governance, all of which are preconditions for Ukraine to achieve its European aspirations. We’ve invested over $5 billion to assist Ukraine in these and other goals that will ensure a secure and prosperous and democratic Ukraine.

Today there are senior officials in the Ukrainian government, in the business community, as well as in the opposition, civil society and religious community who believe in this democratic and European future for their country and they’ve been working hard to move their country and their president in the right direction.

We urge the government, we urge the president to listen to these voices, to listen to the Ukrainian people, to listen to the Euro-Maidan and take Ukraine forward.

——

https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2014/mar/19/facebook-posts/united-states-spent-5-billion-ukraine-anti-governm/

https://archive.is/5HOzl [30 April 2016]

“Facebook posts stated on March 19, 2014 in a Facebook meme:”

President Barack Obama spent “$5 billion paying Ukrainians to riot and dismantle their democratically elected government.”

A meme on Facebook says President Barack Obama spent “$5 billion paying Ukrainians to riot and dismantle their democratically elected government.”

By Katie Sanders

March 19, 2014

The United States spent $5 billion on Ukraine anti-government riots

It’s a conspiracy with mainstream crossover: The United States bankrolled the bloody political uprising in Ukraine.

We saw the claim pop up recently in a story on RT (the Russian-funded English language cable network), and found lots of talk about it on reddit, Facebook and other websites.

The claims have the same basic structure. While President Barack Obama publicly said Ukrainians have the right to determine their own future, the U.S. government pumped $5 billion into the country to promote regime change.

In a Facebook meme, someone put it this way:

Obama “spends $5 billion paying Ukrainians to riot and dismantle their democratically elected government.”

So is there any truth to this claim? PunditFact dove in.

The roots

The claim is rooted in a December 2013 speech by Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs Victoria Nuland to the U.S.-Ukraine Foundation, a non-governmental agency that promotes democracy in the former Soviet republic.

Nuland had returned days earlier from her third trip to Ukraine in five weeks to assess the protests over President Viktor Yanukovych’s policies to move away from the European Union, she said.

She made clear the United States supported the protesters’ fight and spoke of how she met with Yanukovych, pressing him to end the pushback from Ukrainian security forces because it is “absolutely impermissible in a European state, in a democratic state.”

She described how American taxpayer money has supported Ukraine’s democratic development despite the country’s challenges.

“Since Ukraine’s independence in 1991, the United States has supported Ukrainians as they build democratic skills and institutions, as they promote civic participation and good governance, all of which are preconditions for Ukraine to achieve its European aspirations,” she said. “We have invested over $5 billion to assist Ukraine in these and other goals that will ensure a secure and prosperous and democratic Ukraine.”

Her eight-minute speech (video) attracted little to no media attention.

The truth

We had a feeling that folks repeating the claim missed important context from Nuland’s speech. Wasn’t Nuland talking about money given since Ukraine broke away from the Soviet Union?

The State Department said yes.

“The insinuation that the United States incited the people of Ukraine to riot or rebel is patently false,” said Nicole Thompson, a State Department spokeswoman.

Since 1992, the government has spent about $5.1 billion to support democracy-building programs in Ukraine, Thompson said, with money flowing mostly from the Department of State via U.S. Agency for International Development, as well as the departments of Defense, Energy, Agriculture and others. The United States does this with hundreds of other countries.

About $2.4 billion went to programs promoting peace and security, which could include military assistance, border security, human trafficking issues, international narcotics abatement and law enforcement interdiction, Thompson said. More money went to categories with the objectives of “governing justly and democratically” ($800 million), “investing in people” ($400 million), economic growth ($1.1 billion), and humanitarian assistance ($300 million).

The descriptions are a bit vague, which could lead people to think the money was used for some clandestine purpose.

But even if it that were so, the money in question was spent over more than 20 years. Yanukovych was elected in 2010. So any connection between the protests and the $5 billion is inaccurate.

And Obama was elected in 2008, so any connection between $5 billion and Obama also is inaccurate.

The challenge

We attempted to drill down and verify the expenditures independently but found that a difficult task.

That’s a byproduct of the United States’ foreign aid investments, which rival no other country (though supporters note the spending equals only 1 percent of all federal spending). The massive check-writing across dozens of agencies to non-governmental organizations to scores of countries and regions around the world is almost impossible to untangle.

“As it stands, it is nearly impossible to find a figure,” said Nicole Valentinuzzi, communications manager of Publish What You Fund, a group that pushes for aid transparency across the world. “These kinds of things would be easily verifiable if people were given timely information.”

The State Department created ForeignAssistance.gov to help taxpayers, journalists and others find out where the money is going, but the data is limited in the number of years available and not reported by all agencies.

“The Foreign Assistance dashboard is not capturing this information in an up-to-date, current way,” Valentinuzzi said, “so responding to a humanitarian crisis is a bit untraceable while it happens, which we argue makes it less effective, basically.”

That said, the United States is working on being more transparent.

The site started under the Obama administration and is a “work in progress,” Thompson said. Eight agencies, such as U.S. AID, Millennium Challenge Corporation and the Treasury Department, have begun posting planning and spending data to the site. Still, 14 agencies, including the departments of Agriculture, Energy, Transportation, and Health and Human Services, have not.

From that website, we calculated the United States spent $456.4 million in Ukraine since 2009. Again, that’s an incomplete picture based on incomplete data reporting.

Some examples? The United States spent about $20 million on Peace Corps programs in Ukraine over the past four years. It spent about $40 million through U.S. AID on health programs in the countries since 2010 — fighting HIV/AIDs, malaria and providing for maternal and child health. The United States spent an additional $80 million or so working on projects related to weapons of mass destruction, according to ForeignAssistance.gov.

Our ruling

Contrary to claims, the United States did not spend $5 billion to incite the rebellion in Ukraine.

That’s a distorted understanding of remarks given by a State Department official. She was referring to money spent on democracy-building programs in Ukraine since it broke off from the Soviet Union in 1991.

We rate the claim Pants on Fire.

——

Here’s my article about how the Poynter Institute, which owns PolitiFact, is funded by U.S.-and-allied billionaires, and fronts “policing truth” for their Governments. The same people who control Governments in the American empire control also this agency that rates a clear truth that they don’t like as being instead a “Pants on Fire” lie. And they do it by taking as Scripture that Government’s allegations (such as that to take over a targeted country’s Government by deceiving its population, is to produce a “democracy” there).

Read the Whole Article

The post How the U.S. Government Deceives the World appeared first on LewRockwell.

Both gold and silver consolidated in a tight range close to all-time highs this week. Spot gold traded at $2660 in European trade this morning, up $3 from last Friday’s close, and silver was $32.05, up 43 cents on the same timescale. Comex volumes in both metals declined over the week, consistent with a consolidation.

The passing of October Comex contracts has led to a jump in gold stands-for-delivery, amounting to 10,840 contracts representing 1,084,000 ounces (32.6 tonnes) in the last four trading sessions, and 1,155 silver contracts representing 5,775,000 ounces (179.6 tonnes).

Interestingly, there is evidence of overnight Asian demand returning, which is likely to be from the Middle East given escalating tensions in the region. This week has seen attacks and a ground invasion by Israel into Lebanon attacking Hezbollah, and a missile attack by Iran against Israel. At the time of writing, we await the Israeli’s response, thought by many likely to be an attack on Iran’s oil refinery at Abadan on the Shatt al-Arab. An escalation of this sort would certainly drive oil prices sharply higher, because the Hormuz Strait would be effectively closed because cargos would be uninsurable.

WTI crude jumped 11% from its low on Monday morning to $74.30 today, reflecting these concerns. But it appears that wider financial markets are sleepwalking through a rapidly developing Middle East war. The assumption appears to be that America is not involved, so there’s nothing to see. But as informed commentators, such as Gilbert Doctorow now points out on his Substack, America supplied the two-tonne bombs dropped on Beirut on locations guided by US intelligence and by US AWACS early warning systems. The US appears to be very much involved, albeit covertly, and the situation is likely to deteriorate rapidly.

Market complacency is bound to be shattered. And this week saw the dollar’s trade weighted index recover some of its poise, bouncing off the crucial $100 level. This is my next chart.

There is little evidence of a war-driven flight into the dollar. The Bank of Japan signalled there’s no rush to raise rates further leading to a sharp fall in the yen. Furthermore, Andrew Bailey of the Bank of England indicated that the bank might cut rates aggressively if inflation continues to decline, knocking sterling down by a few cents.

Against a stronger dollar in forex markets, gold has held its poise. It is no longer as overbought as it has been recently, with Open Interest on Comex declining by 35,848 contracts in the last eight trading sessions while the price has held. And the tightness of physical supply facing renewed Middle Eastern demand is set to drive gold prices higher in the coming weeks, despite the dollar’s TWI.

Silver is also behaving strongly. We should not forget that in living memory silver circulated widely as money in the Middle East and other Asian regions. Adding growing monetary demand to four years of supply deficits and the price effect promises to be explosive. I shall end with silver’s technical chart to remind readers of how bullish this set up looks technically

Reprinted with permission from MacleodFinance Substack.

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