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The star of this “60 Minutes” interview is Bill Whitaker for being an actual journalist instead of an MSM propaganda bot. Notice Kamala’s speech consists mostly of slogans and catchphrases.

Her performance reminded me of Orwell’s, “Politics and the English Language” in which remarked:

As soon as certain topics are raised, the concrete melts into the abstract and no one seems able to think of turns of speech that are not hackneyed: prose consists less and less of words chosen for the sake of their meaning, and more and more of phrases tacked together like the sections of a prefabricated hen-house.

As Orwell points out later in the essay, this is an indication that the speaker is not actually thinking about what he or she is saying. Reviewing the interview for the Spectator, Freddy Gray observed:

Perhaps the most revealing moment was when Whitaker asked Harris why voters say they don’t know what she stands for. “It’s an election, Bill,” she said, with a dead smile. Whitaker then mentioned her flip-flops on issues such as fracking, immigration and Medicare.

“In the last four years I have been vice president of the United States and I have been traveling our country and I have been listening to folks and seeking what is possible in terms of common ground,” she replied. “I believe in building consensus. We are a diverse people. Geographically, regionally, in terms of where we are in our backgrounds and what the American people do want is that we have leaders who can build consensus, where we can compromise and understand it’s not a bad thing as long as you don’t compromise to find common sense solutions. And that has been my approach.”

Note that the above statement has no content. It strikes me as analogous to something a philandering husband might tell his wife when she asks him why, in recent months, he has taken so many business trips to New York City—something he never did in the past—and specifically, what does he do when he turns his phone off in the evenings between 9:00 p.m. and midnight.

To this question, the husband replies:

In the last four months I have been the head regional sales manager for my financial products company and I have been traveling to New York and listening to our portfolio manager and seeking what is possible in terms of what the market is going to do this fall. I believe in understanding what our analysts believe. Our equity markets analysts are a diverse group. Educationally, in terms of where they are in their backgrounds and what our investors do want is that we have analysts who can build consensus about how the market is likely to perform this fall.

Kamala Harris cannot think—at least not well. I believe that choosing her is an expression of the DNC’s contempt for its voters. The Machiavellians who run that mafia syndicate believe their voters are so brainwashed they will vote for Kamala simply because she is not Donald Trump.

This originally appeared on Courageous Discourse.

The post ’60 Minutes’ Interview With Kamala Harris appeared first on LewRockwell.

 

 

di David Waugh

Dopo il fallimento della Silicon Valley Bank il presidente Biden ha detto agli americani che “possono stare tranquilli che il nostro sistema bancario è sicuro, i vostri depositi sono al sicuro”. Eppure, per molti, è sempre più chiaro che le cose non stanno così.

In tutto il mondo occidentale le banche non sono sicure per coloro che hanno opinioni diverse dalla narrativa ufficiale. Le banche chiudono con una certa regolarità i conti dei depositanti con opinioni diverse dalla tale narrativa, spesso senza preavviso, una pratica chiamata “debanking”.

Anche una rapida analisi dei recenti casi di debanking rende chiaro che i conservatori e i gruppi a essi associati sono colpiti in modo sproporzionato. E l'avvento di un'economia senza contanti, alimentata dalle valute digitali delle banche centrali (CBDC), intensificherà questa tendenza. Con le CBDC gli stati saranno in grado di controllare direttamente l'accesso ai servizi finanziari.

Sebbene abbia accelerato, il debanking non è un fenomeno esclusivamente americano, né è una novità. In tutto l'Occidente l'attività bancaria digitalizzata ha portato a una politicizzazione dall'alto verso il basso dei servizi finanziari, permettendo di far cadere la scure del debanking su individui e grandi imprese.

Dieci anni fa la “Operation Choke Point” dell'amministrazione Obama fece pressione sulle banche affinché interrompessero i rapporti con le aziende ritenute portatrici di visioni ideologiche inaccettabili. Da allora, la tendenza ha solo intensificato il suo passo.

JP Morgan Chase ha iniziato a chiudere conti come minimo dal 2019 e, nonostante gli azionisti stiano reagendo, non c'è alcuna garanzia che riusciranno a far smettere questo fenomeno in accelerazione.

L'anno scorso il governo canadese ha fatto ricorso ai poteri di emergenza per congelare i conti e sequestrare i beni di un gruppo di camionisti che protestavano contro l'obbligo di vaccinazione.

Il politico britannico Nigel Farage ha fatto notizia quando Coutts, una banca fondata nel diciassettesimo secolo, ha deciso di chiudere il suo conto nonostante fosse cliente da oltre 40 anni. La banca ha deciso, in un promemoria privato, che il titolare del suo conto era un “truffatore disonesto” e che ci sarebbero stati danni “di reputazione” nel continuare il rapporto con lui.

Farage ha usato la sua influenza mediatica per scatenare una battaglia di pubbliche relazioni contro Coutts e la sua società madre NatWest, il cui CEO è stato costretto a dimettersi, non per aver chiuso l'account di Farage, ma per aver rivelato i dettagli del cliente a un giornalista. In ogni caso, le persone normali non hanno la capacità di attirare l'attenzione pubblica sul problema del debanking.

Le app finanziarie sono migliori? Purtroppo no. PayPal e altri provider di pagamento chiudono regolarmente gli account dei clienti che si impegnano in pensieri sbagliati, dimostrando quanto sia difficile accedere a qualsiasi servizio finanziario una volta che si è stati inseriti nella lista nera.

A peggiorare le cose ci sono le richieste di una “società senza contanti” e l'introduzione di valute digitali delle banche centrali semplificherà la capacità dello stato di controllare l'accesso al mondo finanziario. Abbiamo già visto lo stato lavorare dietro le quinte per controllare cosa vi è permesso leggere e sentire; immaginate se i controlli si estendessero a cosa potete comprare questo mese.

Una volta che il denaro assume la forma di una CBDC, diventa completamente programmabile, consentendo agli stati di decidere quali acquisti possono essere effettuati e quali no. Al denaro può persino essere assegnata una data di scadenza per incentivare la spesa e penalizzare i risparmiatori. Come ha affermato l'economista Jonathan Newman: “Denaro programmabile significa cittadini programmabili”.

Un gruppo di funzionari pubblici sta, però, chiedendo alle banche di cambiare le loro pratiche. Il governatore della Florida, Ron DeSantis, e alcuni repubblicani hanno promulgato una legislazione anti-CBDC, ma il loro lavoro non ne fermerebbe l'attuazione a livello federale.

Gli americani possono ripristinare la loro sovranità possedendo una criptovaluta decentralizzata come Bitcoin: possono in questo modo rimuovere una parte delle proprie finanze dal sistema bancario e costringere le istituzioni repressive a competere con un'alternativa.

Oggi in Occidente Bitcoin è comunemente associato alla speculazione, ma nei Paesi con valute instabili, o inaffidabili, è vista come un modo per ottenere l'indipendenza dai sistemi finanziari corrotti. Questo caso d'uso diventerà sempre più importante con l'avvento delle CBDC.

In quanto bene al portatore digitale, Bitcoin garantisce al suo detentore un controllo indipendente, simile a quanto avviene con i beni al portatore fisici, come l'oro o le obbligazioni.

In precedenza gli individui dovevano usare canali di pagamento di terze parti per effettuare transazioni digitali, consentendo a banche o governi di bloccare o annullare le transazioni. Ora chiunque può usare Bitcoin (o altre criptovalute) per conservare e trasferire ricchezza senza il permesso di un intermediario.

È importante sottolineare, però, che non tutte le criptovalute sono create uguali. Gli schemi di scansione dell'iride, come Worldcoin di Sam Altman, o il token FTT di Sam Bankman-Fried, non sono decentralizzati. I loro creatori sono sensibili alle pressioni governative.

Quando possedete un asset digitale indipendente dal sistema bancario, possedete una copertura contro la minaccia di essere debanked. Bitcoin elimina la possibilità per le banche di congelare tutta la vostra ricchezza e di conseguenza la possibilità di effettuare transazioni.

Con le CBDC all'orizzonte, un'amministrazione presidenziale che vede il sistema bancario come un'arma politica e con le banche disposte ad adeguarsi, è giunto il momento che gli americani capiscano che Bitcoin merita un posto nel loro arsenale per resistere alla tirannia.

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

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

A definition of “projection” is when one baselessly accuses others of doing something unsavory, immoral, or illegal that he is actually doing. For example, a thief who, without proof, accuses others of being thieves. This is what socialists do when they call their intellectual and political opponents “fascists” or compare them to Hitler. Fascism is socialism, as Lew Rockwell recently reminded us in an essay entitled “National Socialism Was Socialist.” Socialists calling opponents of socialism fascists and Hitler-like is a classic example of projection.

Socialists started out claiming that their goal was forced egalitarianism with the means being government ownership of the means of production. Then, according to Ludwig von Mises, it also came to be defined as government control of the private means of production through pervasive government regulation, controls, and regimentation. The ostensible goal was still egalitarianism but the means were different. In the 1976 edition of The Road to Serfdom F. A. Hayek wrote that by that time socialism also meant the pursuit of egalitarianism by yet another means – income redistribution through the institutions of the welfare state and the progressive income tax.

Today socialism is defined by its self-described “woke” practitioners as “diversity, equity, and inclusion” (DEI), a synonym for egalitarianism, along with comprehensive central planning through regulation in the name of “fighting climate change” (i.e., the “Green New Deal”). What these definitions of socialism have in common is that they would all require totalitarian governmental power and the further abolition of property rights, the rule of law, civil liberties, constitutionalism, and economic freedom in general, all in the name of “equity,” the new buzz word for socialist egalitarianism.

Today’s socialists see Donald Trump and his political followes as their main obstacle, so naturally they relentlessly label them as fascists and Hitler-like. A typical Washington Post headline was “How Trump’s Rhetoric Compares with Hitler’s.” Another one was “Yes, It’s OK to Compare Trump to Hitler.” National Public Radio’s web site had a headline announcing that “Donald Trump Used Language in a Speech that Echoed Hitler.” Joe Biden once publicly announced that “Trump echoes language you heard in Nazi Germany.” “Calling Trump Hitler has become part of the routine” of the Biden campaign, wrote POLITICO in early 2024, before it became “part of the routine” of the Harris campaign.

In reality it is today’s “woke” cultural Marxists in government, universities, the so-called “media,” the entertainment industry, and much of corporate America – including the people and institutions quoted above – who are the real fascists. They are the political children of the early twentieth century Italian communist Antionio Gramsci, who taught them that the road to socialism should proceed with a “long march through the institutions.” Their socialist long march as been concluded with the capture of all of the above-mentioned institutions. They are now busy rigging elections, “cancelling” anyone who disagrees with them, using “lawfare” to imprison their political opponents, and using the powers of government to try to destroy the First Amendment. Hillary Clinton, the widely acknowledged instigator of the “Russia Hoax,” the biggest political lie in memory, recently proposed prison sentences for anyone spreading “misinformation” ( i.e., criticizing her political agendas) on the internet. Talk about projection on steroids.

Fascism IS Socialism

Benito Mussolini, who ruled over fascist Italy, called himself an “international socialist” before he relabeled himself as a “national socialist,” which is what a fascist was defined as in the nineteenth century. Private enterprise was permitted in fascist Italy but was regulated and controlled with an iron fist by fascist politicians. As such, it was socialism as Mises explained.

The 2007 edition of The Road to Serfdom, published by the University of Chicago Press, included an appendix that was an essay by F.A. Hayek entitled “Nazi Socialism.” “The socialist character of National Socialism has been quite generally unrecognized,” wrote Hayek. This is remarkable on its face: Why would something called “national socialism” not be considered socialism?! (Hint: Because socialists understand that Hayek was right when he wrote in The Road to Serfdom that under socialism “the worst rise to the top” in politics. Hitler, Lenin, Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, Castro, Ceausescu, and the rest were not just aberrations).

“Pervasive anti-capitalism was at the heart of national socialism,” Hayek said. The Nazi Party Platform “was full ideas resembling those of the early socialists” including “a fierce hatred of anything capitalistic – individual profit seeking, large-scale enterprises, banks, joint-stock companies, department stores, international finance and loan capital, the system of ‘interest slavery.’”

Hayek described German national socialism as “a violent anti-capitalist attack” with “The End of Capitalism” being its slogan. “All of the leading men” of German and Italian fascism “began as socialists and ended as Fascists or Nazis,” he wrote.

Mussolini wrote in his book Fascism: Doctrine and Institutions that “The fascist conception of life stresses the importance of the State and accepts the individual only in so far as his interests coincide with the State. It is opposed to classical liberalism.” “If classical liberalism spells individualism,” said the fascist dictator, “Fascism spells government.” Mussolini announced with great bombast that the twentieth century was “the collective century, and therefore the century of the State.” What socialist would not approve of that?

The Italian and German fascists adopted both kinds of socialism that Mises described: They nationalized many industries, more than half in Germany, and the rest were de facto nationalized with pervasive government regulatory control and regimentation.

Nazi apologist Paul Lensch was a self-professed Marxist, a member of the Reichstag who praised the “war socialism” of World War I, and the author of Three Years of World Revolution. In it he followed Mussolini in denouncing “English liberalism” and especially individualism (i.e., respect for all individuals) and called for replacing these “inherited political ideas” with “Socialism,” which “must present a conscious and determined opposition to individualism.” Accordingly, the fundamental philosophical plank of the “25-Point Program of the Nazi Party” was “The Common Good Comes Before the Private Good,” with of course the state defining what “the common good” is. A classic definition of collectivism.

As good socialists the Nazis in their platform demanded that capitalist “usurers and profiteers [bankers and entrepreneurs] . . . must be punished with death.” The media were to be under strict government control to eliminate “known lies” about fascism, essentially identical to Hillary Clinton’s recent proposal to imprison spreaders of “misinformation” about her political preferences.

As with all twentieth-century socialist regimes the Nazis demanded monopolistic, centralized governmental power and the abolition of federalism, states’ rights, and decentralization. “We demand the formation of a strong central power in the Reich” and “unlimited authority of the central parliament over the whole Reich.” That of course is exactly what today’s “woke” cultural Marxists want with their election rigging, censorship, lawfare, and calls to abolish the Constitution, the Supreme Court, the electoral college, and anything else that would stand in the way of “unlimited authority” in the central government. They know exactly what they are doing because they are, after all, fascists.

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

The post The ‘Fascist’ Ad Hominem As an Act of Projection appeared first on LewRockwell.

On October 12, 2004 Lew Rockwell published my article Now and Then, my first on LRC. Over the intervening 20 years there have been upwards of 170 posts by me, with as few as one article in 2009 when my daughter was a year old and 23 articles in the COVID year 2020.

I am very fortunate to own a house in the countryside in Burgundy, France that I have called My Investment in Heaven (in another LRC post). There is a mezzanine in the house that serves no obvious purpose. I once asked the previous owner who had restored the house why he had constructed this mezzanine. His response was surprising, at least to me, “I don’t know. I just felt like doing it.” Perhaps like this gentleman and the mezzanine, I cannot say why I write. I am not a professional writer. I have never been paid by Lew Rockwell. I can say that writing is simply an urge, like scratching an itch. As I am just a voice from the hoi polloi, I can’t believe what I write has any impact on the world. But I do feel privileged to be an author listed among the important writers that Lew Rockwell assembles six times a week. For that I thank Lew profusely.

Lew has allowed me to post articles on a wide range of topics. There have been many posts on books, movies, travel, economics . . . (My author page at LRC: Ira Katz, Author at LewRockwell.)

That first article in 2004, comparing  the Global War on Terror to the war on communism, still stands up, at least for me.

“I now realize, what I did not then, that virtually all wars begin with lies and only achieve mixed results at best. So now I know that the terrorists are wrong, but our government is a greater threat to the blood and treasure of this country.”

There are articles that have been more personal, in a sense written for my daughter to read one day, that I have listed below regarding my life, my family, life in France, and spirituality (now relatively common on LRC but what I thought might be taboo in 2004).

There is much more for me to thank Lew for than accepting my contributions to LRC. It is LRC that has been my daily view on the world, in turn shaping my worldview. It is because of LRC that I could spot the Covid fraud from the very beginning (see the list below). Already by March 24, 2020 I was writing about the idiocy of lockdowns.

As a non-writer writer, I am ambivalent if people read what I have written. I used to send select friends long letters to appease my urge to write out what I thought. I even wrote articles that never left my computer. But I must admit that receiving feedback from readers is gratifying. For that I thank you, LRC readers, as well.

Life

The Madeleine for a Chicagoan – LRC Blog (lewrockwell.com)
Dread the Future? Here’s What Helped Me – LewRockwell
0 for 16: Reflections on Corporate R&D – LewRockwell
Measuring Success – LewRockwell
Passions That Cool: Sports and Travel – LewRockwell
This Is Not a Conversion Story – LewRockwell

Family

My Mom – LewRockwell
What’s in a Name? – LewRockwell
Coming Out of a Dark Wood – LewRockwell
I Am Thirsty But I Cannot Drink – LewRockwell

France

Living in Paris – LewRockwell
Why I Moved to France – LewRockwell
Becoming an Ex-Pat – LewRockwell
A Libertarian in the Wilderness – LewRockwell
A French Summer Vacation – LewRockwell
A Story of Patrimony – LewRockwell
A French Cemetery – LewRockwell
Vendange – LewRockwell

Spiritual

Two Fantastic Stories – LewRockwell
This Is Not a Conversion Story – LewRockwell
Faith and Reason – LewRockwell
A Prayer for Our Time – LewRockwell
Catholicism in Meudon – LewRockwell

Covid

Signs of the Times – LewRockwell
A Profile in Courage: Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. – LewRockwell
Eugenics – LewRockwell
Vaccine Wars: Update from the French Front – LewRockwell
My Noose Is Tightening – LewRockwell
Ivermectin, Covid-19, and Why It Could Be Miraculous – LewRockwell
To the Barricades … And to Church – LewRockwell
Covid Odds and Ends – LewRockwell
The End of Modernity – LewRockwell
A Hopeful Message From the Past – LewRockwell
Notes From the French Confinement – LewRockwell
The Resistance in Versailles – LewRockwell

The post A Voice From the <em>Hoi Polloi</em> appeared first on LewRockwell.

International Man: The 2024 US presidential election is a short time away. What types of surprises or twists could we expect?

Doug Casey: It’s long been said that there’s usually an October surprise. So what might happen between now and then?

All things considered, I expect the Democrats to win. Despite the fact that voting for a pair of hard-core leftists is clinically insane on the part of the average American, I think that they’ll win. The capite censi support leftist views on almost all major issues; the collectivists and statists have long since captured the moral high ground. Plus, the Dems control the apparatus of the State, and they’ll use it in any and every way possible. And, very importantly, 20 or 30 million illegal migrants realize that if Trump wins, there’s an excellent chance they’ll be evicted; they’ll find some way to vote against him. On top of that, the Democrats are notoriously better at cheating than Republicans, who tend to favor traditional Boy Scout values.

However, anything could happen between now and November 5. If a serious scandal, real or fabricated, is promoted against either Trump or Harris, that could sway the undecided.

A big October surprise might involve the US in an actual war because once a war starts, people don’t like to change horses in the middle of the stream. Anything could happen because we’re living in a chaotic environment.

“Our democracy” is nothing more than a degenerate collapsing empire that’s falling apart at the seams in every way possible. Anything can happen, including the old standbys—money, sex, and treason. I am forced, regrettably, to put my money on the bad guys. If only because the media will emphasize any Trump peccadillos while minimizing any Harris felonies.

International Man: The wars in Ukraine and the Middle East are raging as China eyes Taiwan.

Could we see a significant geopolitical development ahead of the election?

Doug Casey: I wouldn’t worry too much about China and Taiwan. The Chiang Kai-shek government essentially conquered the island after World War II; Taiwan has never been part of China itself. Legally speaking, China has no more right to it than they do to Tibet or Xinchiang. But that’s irrelevant in the world of realpolitik.

The relevant question is: Will Beijing try to conquer it? That makes no sense to me because the Taiwanese government is in a position to resist mightily, and even if the Chinese won, they’d destroy most of Taiwan’s economic value. So, thinking long-term, as the Chinese do, they’ll threaten and parade around Taiwan but won’t start a real war.

A greater danger is the idiotic US policy of defending the island while probing and threatening China, even though it’s exactly on the other side of the world. US neocons have clearly learned absolutely nothing from their catastrophic misadventures in Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan, and Iraq, among other places in Asia.

The wars in the Ukraine and the Middle East are bigger problems. There’s no question that the Ukraine will lose and NATO will be embarrassed. The real question is whether the war spins out of control.

Some idiot in NATO, perhaps at the prompting of that degraded little clown in Kiev who likes dressing up in faux military T-shirts, could launch a serious missile attack on the interior of Russia. At that point, the Russians would feel obligated to strike back.

The odds of a catastrophe in the Middle East are much greater. The Israelis seem to feel striking at Iran’s oil and developing nuclear facilities will put off the inevitable for another decade or so. Perhaps they feel now’s the time to help keep the Dems in office, with the US acting as their trained attack dog. But that’s a whole different discussion…

International Man: Inflation, mass migration, and a deepening cultural divide are some of the most pressing issues domestically.

How do you see these issues evolving before the election?

Doug Casey: It bears repeating that inflation is a process. People think of retail price rises as inflation. They’re not. They’re the effect of inflation. And inflation is caused by money printing.

Money printing is going to continue because the US government is running a $2 trillion deficit annually; most of it is being financed by the Federal Reserve.

Various factors determine how much, how quickly, and where that new super money comes down to a retail level to increase prices. But I don’t think anything new will happen on this front in the next 30 days because the cause of inflation is always months or years in advance of the effect of inflation.

On the other hand, mass migration continues apace, with thousands of people entering or being actively imported daily into the US. Even the average brain-dead American is starting to recognize that these people are being recruited, subsidized, and housed at their expense. It’s not just Springfield, Ohio. There’s also a place called Charleroi, Pennsylvania.

Charleroi is a town of only 4,000 people that’s already been inundated with over 2,000 Haitians. It’s totally overrun and a template for many more towns across the US.

Mass migration is going to be a big thing in the months and years to come. But the next 30 days aren’t enough to create a real backlash.

No matter who wins this election, the other side is going to be bitterly unhappy. The red people and the blue people really hate each other. So, we’re looking at the early stage of an actual civil war in the US. I’ve been saying this for about the last decade. It won’t be like the War Between the States of 1861 to 1865. There will be lots of talk of local secession movements, and there’s bound to be violence no matter who wins. And we haven’t really touched on the consequences of a financial meltdown, an economic meltdown, or the potential for US wars coming home.

International Man: Donald Trump has had two attempts on his life in the past few months. It seems there are elements of the Deep State that want to take him out.

What do you think will happen?

Doug Casey: The Jacobins are fully in control in Washington, DC.

Trump may not be a prize, but at least he’s a cultural conservative; at least he doesn’t want to overturn American culture and traditions. He doesn’t like the Jacobins, and they actively hate him. Of course he’s going to try to root them out if he’s elected—and they don’t want to be rooted out.

They want to cement themselves more deeply into power. Although the Democrats will likely win, elements of the Deep State may believe it’s better to be safe than sorry. They might figure that the third time is the charm in getting rid of him. These two attempts were highly suspicious in many ways. It’s especially fishy the way the trial of the most recent attempt by Ryan Routh is being slow-walked. Perhaps he’ll be “Epsteined.”

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.

International Man: What do you expect to happen in the financial markets ahead of the election? How are you positioned to profit?

Doug Casey: Money makes the horse run, and the gigantic US deficits are creating super money, courtesy of the Fed. Most of it flows into the stock market. It’s a bubble that will eventually burst with a 1929-style ferocity because of the scores of trillions of debt created by the Fed, and fractional reserve banking.

Will it happen between now and the election?

Nobody can predict that, and the economy is going to go deeper and deeper into the Greater Depression. But what will happen in the financial markets? Stocks and bonds are both egregiously overpriced, but it simply means I don’t want to own them. I don’t want to be that risky.

What am I doing?

I continue to own gold, and I’m very happy about it. I speculate in junior resource stocks, which remain quite cheap. Although they’ve been ticking up every week for the last several months, I think at some point they could go into a bubble, which would make me very happy.

Reprinted with permission from International Man.

The post Potential ‘October Surprises’ Before the Election appeared first on LewRockwell.

Voluntary cooperation is robust, multiply-protected, and loss-limiting, and brings healthy deflation. A government regulator makes a system fragile, fraught with a single point of failure, and loss-compounding, and brings sickening inflation.

Donald Trump and his unity team members Robert Kennedy and Elon Musk promise to limit cronyism and slash waste.

Both approaches deny that state-government and national-government administrative states are themselves peak cronyism. If government people stop hosting business-crony socialists but still host activist-crony socialists, that’s still tyranny. Also, it’s unconstitutional.

The only adequate approaches are to fully executively close and legislatively repeal.

When there are no government regulators, that doesn’t mean that there’s a vacuum. Instead, people naturally take care of themselves and one another.

Voluntary Cooperation Increases Safety and Quality

Many people take advantage of the considerable information they have available and use it to make the choices that they expect to be the best for them. In doing so, they self-regulate.

Their choices affect others, creating a network of interactions. In this network, people’s interactions with others regulate the others.

So then when people are free, they increase safety and quality by taking decentralized, interdependent actions:

• Product raters compete to find and play up even small advantages and disadvantages.
• Media people spread bad news very quickly.
• Customers stop buying harmful products very quickly.
• Retailers and distributors stop carrying harmful products.
• Civil complainants can eliminate product lines and companies.
• Insurers work to prevent and limit losses.
• Producers anticipate problems and prevent them.

The resulting system is robust and resilient, and the people in it select naturally for improved performance. This is why freeing people to take care of themselves in the Dutch Republic, England, and the USA enabled people to create dramatic gains in how much value they added, bringing modern material comforts to the world.

Government Regulation Sounds Straightforward

Decentralization is only one way that safety and quality can be improved.

Complex modern systems include power grids, chemical plants, air-traffic-control systems, aircraft carriers, and nuclear plants. In such systems, safety and quality are improved by a variety of high-reliability organizations, which prevent most failures and also recover from failures.

Failures can be prevented and recovered from in several different ways:

Figure. System characteristics for high reliability.

In voluntary cooperation, the overall system benefits extensively from the actions of individuals. Individuals analyze conditions locally and take actions locally.

When a government regulator is introduced, the existence of this regulator displaces some actions of individuals, stopping individuals from analyzing some conditions and from taking some actions.

A system that otherwise would mostly be decomposable or action-focused gets transformed. It mostly becomes holistic or leader-focused.

Government Regulation Makes Systems Fail Badly

Holistic sounds smart. Leader-focused sounds natural. Organizations that have these characteristics can operate with high reliability. But systems that include government regulators can’t.

The problem is that when a system includes a government regulator, the presence of the regulator changes the system in ways that degrade safety and quality. Multiple independent layers of protection get stripped away, or never even form in the first place.

Larger complex systems need robust multiple independent protections. Such protections are what prevent most failures, localize the failures that slip through, and limit the resulting losses.

When people are free, their voluntary cooperation is robust, multiply protected, and loss-limiting.

Adding a government regulator makes the system fragile, fraught with a single point of failure, and loss-compounding:

Government regulators are why the Deepwater Horizon explosion and spill wasn’t prevented by normal voluntary cooperation; why the two Boeing 737 MAX crashes weren’t prevented by developing an optimal new design; and why the East Palestine derailment wasn’t prevented by better precautions, and the subsequent toxic release wasn’t prevented by better planning and coordination.

Government immunities, regulators, and buyers are the reasons why producers of lipid nanoparticle mRNA covid shots have been able to kill and disable multitudes of people.

When producers are getting by with delivering subpar safety and quality, ask yourself: Are these producers selling directly to users, or have governments in some ways cut out the customers? Almost always you will find that governments are involved.

What’s needed isn’t government regulators but the opposite: getting government people out of the way of letting people naturally create protections on their own.

Producers do make errors, but producers mostly prevent errors. Customers buy from other producers to gain even the slightest advantages, so customers relentlessly pressure producers to improve performance in even the smallest ways. The producers that survive and thrive get better and better.

When producers do make errors, these are localized to individual producers and to their customers. Also, damage gets stemmed as quickly as possible. This is the only way that producers can limit how many customers they lose, so that they can stay in business and earn competitive profits.

To make errors affect everybody and continue interminably, it’s necessary to create and host government regulators. To optimally increase safety and quality, we must fully close and repeal government regulators.

Constitutional Government Ends Inflation

Eliminating government scope eliminates spending not only on labor but also on software, office equipment, offices, utilities, land, tax collection, and borrowing. Eliminate enough unconstitutional scope, and we will eliminate inflation and usher in healthy deflation—in which increases in productivity make prices fall.

Governments as a whole are waste and deprivation. We do far better on our own.

The post Repeal Government Regulators. Improve Safety and Quality, End Inflation appeared first on LewRockwell.

“What makes it possible for a totalitarian or any other dictatorship to rule is that people are not informed; how can you have an opinion if you are not informed? If everybody always lies to you, the consequence is not that you believe the lies, but rather that nobody believes anything any longer… And a people that no longer can believe anything cannot make up its mind. It is deprived not only of its capacity to act but also of its capacity to think and to judge. And with such a people you can then do what you please.”—Hannah Arendt

In a perfect example of the Nanny State mindset at work, Hillary Clinton insists that the powers-that-be need “total control” in order to make the internet a safer place for users and protect us harm.

Clinton is not alone in her distaste for unregulated, free speech online.

A bipartisan chorus that includes both presidential candidates Kamala Harris and Donald Trump has long clamored to weaken or do away with Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which essentially acts as a bulwark against online censorship.

It’s a complicated legal issue that involves debates over immunity, liability, net neutrality and whether or not internet sites are publishers with editorial responsibility for the content posted to their sites, but really, it comes down to the tug-of-war over where censorship (corporate and government) begins and free speech ends.

As Elizabeth Nolan Brown writes for Reason, “What both the right and left attacks on the provision share is a willingness to use whatever excuses resonate—saving children, stopping bias, preventing terrorism, misogyny, and religious intolerance—to ensure more centralized control of online speech. They may couch these in partisan terms that play well with their respective bases, but their aim is essentially the same.”

In other words, the government will use any excuse to suppress dissent and control the narrative.

The internet may well be the final frontier where free speech still flourishes, especially for politically incorrect speech and disinformation, which test the limits of our so-called egalitarian commitment to the First Amendment’s broad-minded principles.

On the internet, falsehoods and lies abound, misdirection and misinformation dominate, and conspiracy theories go viral.

This is to be expected, and the response should be more speech, not less.

As Justice Brandeis wrote nearly a century ago: “If there be time to expose through discussion, the falsehoods and fallacies, to avert the evil by the processes of education, the remedy to be applied is more speech, not enforced silence.”

Yet to the government, these forms of “disinformation” rank right up there with terrorism, drugs, violence, and disease: societal evils so threatening that “we the people” should be willing to relinquish a little of our freedoms for the sake of national security.

Of course, it never works out that way.

The war on terror, the war on drugs, the war on illegal immigration, the war on COVID-19: all of these programs started out as legitimate responses to pressing concerns only to become weapons of compliance and control in the government’s hands.

Indeed, in the face of the government’s own authoritarian power-grabs, coverups, and conspiracies, a relatively unfettered internet may be our sole hope of speaking truth to power.

The right to criticize the government and speak out against government wrongdoing is the quintessential freedom.

You see, disinformation isn’t the problem. Government coverups and censorship are the problem.

Unfortunately, the government has become increasingly intolerant of speech that challenges its power, reveals its corruption, exposes its lies, and encourages the citizenry to push back against the government’s many injustices. Every day in this country, those who dare to speak their truth to the powers-that-be find themselves censored, silenced or fired.

While there are all kinds of labels being put on so-called “unacceptable” speech today, the real message being conveyed by those in power is that Americans don’t have a right to express themselves if what they are saying is unpopular, controversial or at odds with what the government determines to be acceptable.

Where the problem arises is when you put the power to determine who is a potential danger in the hands of government agencies, the courts and the police.

Remember, this is the same government that uses the words “anti-government,” “extremist” and “terrorist” interchangeably.

This is the same government whose agents are spinning a sticky spider-web of threat assessments, behavioral sensing warnings, flagged “words,” and “suspicious” activity reports using automated eyes and ears, social media, behavior sensing software, and citizen spies to identify potential threats.

This is the same government that keeps re-upping the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), which allows the military to detain American citizens with no access to friends, family or the courts if the government believes them to be a threat.

This is the same government that has a growing list—shared with fusion centers and law enforcement agencies—of ideologies, behaviors, affiliations and other characteristics that could flag someone as suspicious and result in their being labeled potential enemies of the state.

For instance, if you believe in and exercise your rights under the Constitution (namely, your right to speak freely, worship freely, associate with like-minded individuals who share your political views, criticize the government, own a weapon, demand a warrant before being questioned or searched, or any other activity viewed as potentially anti-government, racist, bigoted, anarchic or sovereign), you could be at the top of the government’s terrorism watch list.

Thus, no matter how well-meaning the politicians make these encroachments on our rights appear, in the right (or wrong) hands, benevolent plans can easily be put to malevolent purposes.

Even the most well-intentioned government law or program can be—and has been—perverted, corrupted and used to advance illegitimate purposes once profit and power are added to the equation. For instance, the very same mass surveillance technologies that were supposedly so necessary to fight the spread of COVID-19 are now being used to stifle dissent, persecute activists, harass marginalized communities, and link people’s health information to other surveillance and law enforcement tools.

We are moving fast down that slippery slope to an authoritarian society in which the only opinions, ideas and speech expressed are the ones permitted by the government and its corporate cohorts.

The next phase of the government’s war on anti-government speech and so-called thought crimes could well be mental health round-ups and involuntary detentions.

Under the guise of public health and safety, the government could use mental health care as a pretext for targeting and locking up dissidents, activists and anyone unfortunate enough to be placed on a government watch list.

This is how it begins.

In communities across the nation, police are already being empowered to forcibly detain individuals they believe might be mentally ill, based solely on their own judgment, even if those individuals pose no danger to others.

In New York City, for example, you could find yourself forcibly hospitalized for suspected mental illness if you carry “firmly held beliefs not congruent with cultural ideas,” exhibit a “willingness to engage in meaningful discussion,” have “excessive fears of specific stimuli,” or refuse “voluntary treatment recommendations.”

While these programs are ostensibly aimed at getting the homeless off the streets, when combined with advances in mass surveillance technologies, artificial intelligence-powered programs that can track people by their biometrics and behavior, mental health sensor data (tracked by wearable data and monitored by government agencies such as HARPA), threat assessments, behavioral sensing warnings, precrime initiatives, red flag gun laws, and mental health first-aid programs aimed at training gatekeepers to identify who might pose a threat to public safety, they could well signal a tipping point in the government’s efforts to penalize those engaging in so-called “thought crimes.”

As the Associated Press reports, federal officials are already looking into how to add “‘identifiable patient data,’ such as mental health, substance use and behavioral health information from group homes, shelters, jails, detox facilities and schools,” to its surveillance toolkit.

Make no mistake: these are the building blocks for an American gulag no less sinister than that of the gulags of the Cold War-era Soviet Union.

The word “gulag” refers to a labor or concentration camp where prisoners (oftentimes political prisoners or so-called “enemies of the state,” real or imagined) were imprisoned as punishment for their crimes against the state.

The gulag, according to historian Anne Applebaum, used as a form of “administrative exile—which required no trial and no sentencing procedure—was an ideal punishment not only for troublemakers as such, but also for political opponents of the regime.”

This age-old practice by which despotic regimes eliminate their critics or potential adversaries by making them disappear—or forcing them to flee—or exiling them literally or figuratively or virtually from their fellow citizens—is happening with increasing frequency in America.

Now, through the use of red flag laws, behavioral threat assessments, and pre-crime policing prevention programs, the groundwork is being laid that would allow the government to weaponize the label of mental illness as a means of exiling those whistleblowers, dissidents and freedom fighters who refuse to march in lockstep with its dictates.

Each state has its own set of civil, or involuntary, commitment laws. These laws are extensions of two legal principles: parens patriae Parens patriae (Latin for “parent of the country”), which allows the government to intervene on behalf of citizens who cannot act in their own best interest, and police power, which requires a state to protect the interests of its citizens.

The fusion of these two principles, coupled with a shift towards a dangerousness standard, has resulted in a Nanny State mindset carried out with the militant force of the Police State.

The problem, of course, is that the diagnosis of mental illness, while a legitimate concern for some Americans, has over time become a convenient means by which the government and its corporate partners can penalize certain “unacceptable” social behaviors.

In fact, in recent years, we have witnessed the pathologizing of individuals who resist authority as suffering from oppositional defiant disorder (ODD), defined as “a pattern of disobedient, hostile, and defiant behavior toward authority figures.”

Under such a definition, every activist of note throughout our history—from Mahatma Gandhi to Martin Luther King Jr. to John Lennon—could be classified as suffering from an ODD mental disorder.

Of course, this is all part of a larger trend in American governance whereby dissent is criminalized and pathologized, and dissenters are censored, silenced, declared unfit for society, labelled dangerous or extremist, or turned into outcasts and exiled.

As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, this is how you subdue a populace.

The ensuing silence in the face of government-sponsored tyranny, terror, brutality and injustice is deafening.

This originally appeared on The Rutherford Institute.

The post Disinformation Isn’t the Problem. Government Coverups and Censorship Are the Problem appeared first on LewRockwell.

Israel appears to have begun its long-planned ethnic cleansing of northern Gaza, with the IDF dropping bombs, issuing evacuation orders for multiple hospitals, attacking civilians with sniper drones, and besieging civilian populations in order to force tens of thousands of people to either move south or die. Israel has reportedly been dropping leaflets on the Jabalia refugee camp ordering people to leave, and then shooting anyone who tries to.

Since the seventh of October last year Israel has committed roughly 100 October sevenths in Gaza; scores of American medical workers who volunteered in the enclave signed an open letter to president Biden estimating the real death toll from Israel’s onslaught at over 118,000. Israel has also committed about two October sevenths in Lebanon during that time, with the majority of the 2,100 Israeli killings in that country coming just in the last few weeks.

As Israeli murderousness ramps up in both Gaza and Lebanon, Benjamin Netanyahu has issued a statement addressed to the Lebanese people telling them that they need to somehow defeat Hezbollah in order to “save Lebanon before it plunges into the abyss of a long war that will lead to destruction and suffering like we see in Gaza.”

So we went from “limited operation” to Israel threatening what they did to Gaza—an ongoing genocide—in Lebanon. pic.twitter.com/6k7cH6np2b

— Assal Rad (@AssalRad) October 8, 2024

Israeli officials have been saying they’re going to destroy Lebanon like they destroyed Gaza for months. Back in December Israel’s defense minister Yoav Gallant said, “Every person in Lebanon can take the map, the aerial photograph of Gaza, place it on an aerial photograph of Beirut, and ask themselves if this is what they want to happen there.” Now Netanyahu himself is saying this.

Notably, Netanyahu’s statement was delivered in English, with English subtitles. This wasn’t actually a plea made to the people of Lebanon, it was propaganda made for western consumption. Netanyahu does not actually believe the Lebanese people are going to take up arms against Hezbollah to stop their country from being destroyed, he’s just creating a narrative to justify what he already plans on doing to Lebanon.

And the US is encouraging Israel to move forward. On Tuesday State Department Spokesman Matthew Miller told the press that the Biden administration no longer supports a ceasefire with Hezbollah, saying “We support Israel’s efforts to degrade Hezbollah’s capability” instead. Two weeks ago CNN reported that the administration has also essentially given up on a ceasefire in Gaza.

.@NBCNews claims US officials have discussed joining Israel in offensive strikes against Iran, and passing them off as “defensive” after the fact.

This should raise alarm bells – Congress has not declared war on Iran, which would be disastrous for the U.S. and the region. pic.twitter.com/tA6r9vGFvS

— NIAC (@NIACouncil) October 8, 2024

And we haven’t even talked about Iran yet. NBC News reports that US military officials have been discussing directly joining in Israel’s planned attack on Iran, potentially launching their own airstrikes on the Iranian military whenever Israel begins its attack.

Whether the US joins with Israel in its coming attack or not, Iran has already made it clear that it will retaliate against any further aggressions by Israel, and Israel has made it clear that if Iran strikes back it’s going to ramp up its aggressions and perhaps start attacking Iranian energy infrastructure. If this blows up into full-scale war, as looks increasingly likely, it’s inevitable that the US will come to Israel’s defense.

Axios and its Israeli intelligence insider Barak Ravid have a new report out on how super duper frustrated the Biden administration is becoming with Israeli warmongering. In typical Axios fashion the outlet reports that the White House is becoming “increasingly distrustful” of Israel’s planned military operations against Iran and Lebanon, but that, in typical Biden administration fashion, its American sources admit that the US “would very likely help Israel defend itself regardless” of whatever happens.

Vice President Harris Says Iran Is the US’s ‘Greatest Adversary’
The vice president also said the US ‘must win the competition for the 21st century with China’
by Dave DeCamp@DecampDave #KamalaHarris #Iran #Israel #China #hawkshttps://t.co/9SNkFzxR9Z pic.twitter.com/eEb8m1fsQv

— Antiwar.com (@Antiwarcom) October 8, 2024

Whoever wins the US election in November appears to be committed to riding with Israel down this path into the depths of hell.

In an interview with 60 Minutes, Vice President Kamala Harris defended the Biden administration’s genocidal support for Israel, saying the weapons it has been giving them “allow Israel to defend itself.” She also named Iran as the number one enemy of the United States.

In an appearance on The View, Harris was asked what she would have done differently from President Biden, and she said “There is not a thing that comes to mind.” Then later she added, “You asked me what is the difference between Joe Biden and me, that will be one of the differences: I’m going to have a Republican in my Cabinet.”

And lest you make the mistake of thinking Trump would be any better, last week the former president said that Israel should attack Iran’s nuclear facilities, and criticized the Biden administration for not being sufficiently aggressive on this front.

Trump says Israel should “hit” Iran’s nuclear facilities. Yet another bold “anti-war” statement on his part — a terrifying blow to the Deep State and military-industrial complex pic.twitter.com/BXwfCiR46Y

— Michael Tracey (@mtracey) October 5, 2024

“They asked [Biden], what do you think about Iran, would you hit Iran?” Trump said at a campaign event on Friday. “And he goes, ‘As long as they don’t hit the nuclear stuff.’ That’s the thing you want to hit, right? I said I think he’s got that one wrong.”

Anyone who still says Trump is a peacemaker is a damn fool. Statements like this are in full alignment with the absolute worst warmongers in Washington like John Bolton or Lindsey Graham.

Anyway, that’s where we’re at right now. That’s the trajectory the US empire has us on. An active genocide and ethnic cleansing in Gaza, the threat of another extermination campaign in Lebanon, and acceleration toward a direct war of unimaginable horror with Iran.

These psychos must be stopped.

__________________

My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece here are some options where you can toss some money into my tip jar if you want to. Go here to find video versions of my articles. If you’d prefer to listen to audio of these articles, you can subscribe to them on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Soundcloud or YouTube. Go here to buy paperback editions of my writings from month to month. All my work is free to bootleg and use in any way, shape or form; republish it, translate it, use it on merchandise; whatever you want. The best way to make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list on Substack, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. All works co-authored with my husband Tim Foley.

The post Slaughter in Gaza And Lebanon as War With Iran Approaches appeared first on LewRockwell.

These Trusted Flaggers are charged with eradicating “hate speech” and “fake news” from social media; platforms that ignore their Trusted Flagging can be fined or face other serious sanctions.

Are you one of those schoolmarm hall-monitor types?

Do you have a screechy voice and do you enjoy looking down your nose at other people?

Do your favourite pastimes include complaining to the manager, telling teenagers not to say bad words and levelling self-superior moral disapproval at everything you don’t like?

Well, then the European Union is just the place for you! Under our fantastic new Digital Services Act (DSA), you can engage in all these recreations, and what is more, you can do so in an official capacity, as a Trusted Flagger!

In places like the United States, censorship is a thing that the three-letter agencies and the major social media platforms have to hash out among themselves behind closed doors. Things are different here in Europe, where the DSA has imposed upon all of us a totally legal censorship regime for the purposes of cracking down on notionally “illegal” internet content. Any censorship regime of course requires censors, and that’s where you, the aspiring Trusted Flagger, come in. This is your golden opportunity.

It’s like this: The DSA requires all EU member states to empower a “Digital Services Coordinator” to enforce our happy new internet rules. And Article 22 of the DSA requires these Coordinators to appoint “Trusted Flaggers” to run about the internet reporting content violations, so that wrongthink can be deleted without unnecessary bureaucratic hurdles or “undue delay.” The DSA obligates all major social media platforms to take Trusted Flagger reports superseriously. They will be the new traffic policeman of our information motorways.

You’ll be happy to know that literally anybody can apply to become a Trusted Flagger, provided he can demonstrate that he has “particular expertise and competence for the purposes of detecting, identifying and notifying illegal content,” that he is “independent from any provider of online platforms,” and that he “carries out his activities … diligently, accurately and objectively.” In Germany, our Digital Services Coordinator is the Bundesnetzagentur, the federal agency responsible for regulating telecommunications. They are accepting Trusted Flagger applications at this very moment! All you have to do is fill out this brief online form! It’s amazing.

Klaus Müller, President of the Bundesnetzagentur, explains his newfound Digital Services Corodinator-authorities in this way:

Have you ever been annoyed, surprised or possibly horrified when you saw images, videos or texts on social platforms where people were defamed or discriminated against, possibly in violent confrontations, and you thought, you shouldn’t have to read or see that? Or where products were offered that couldn’t possibly be real? Many people encounter these kinds of things every day. The European Union has said that what is forbidden in the normal analog world must also in future be forbidden in the digital world. And thanks to the Digital Services Act, the Bundesnetzagentur now bears responsibility for this.

What can we do for you? Well, you can give us your complaints, you can give us information, you can help us to take action against platforms that do not react to your reports … You can help us identify systematic risks that we will address either together with the European Commission in Brussels or here in Germany, so that platforms are a safe place. What we will not do is censor content. That is not our job. It is, however, our job to ensure that people are safe and perhaps a little happier when using social networks and e-commerce platforms. That is our job, as the Federal Network Agency, as the new Digital Service Coordinator.

I want to implore the aspiring Trusted Flaggers among you not to lose heart at Müller’s claim that his new internet policing enterprise will not “censor content.” This is just a polite fiction he has to maintain to keep rabble who are still enamoured of quaint outdated concepts like freedom of expression off his back. In fact he hopes that you, his legions of Trusted Flaggers, will censor as much content as possible. This is why in the very next breath he emphasises that it is his job – and by extension, your job – not merely to make “people … safe,” but also to make them “happier.” As we all know, censorship concerns the enforcement of social and political harmony, particularly in that uncouth and untamed realm known as the internet. It is all about feelings, and it is especially about weaponising hurt feelings to make the online world a less threatening place for pink-haired gender lunatics, the racially aggrieved and everybody else with stupid and shrill political ideas.

In case you are a total idiot (which Trusted Flaggers are likely to be), our Digital Services Coordinator has published an entire sixteen-page instruction manual to help you through the Trusted Flagger application process. These instructions include a helpful appendix enumerating all the things they want you to flag. The third such category of Flaggable Things is “Disallowed Speech,” which includes the usual boring stuff like “defamation” and “death threats,” but also stretches well beyond the bounds of the merely illegal to encompass “discrimination” and “hate speech” too. These, happily, are terms borrowed from Anglosphere race activism discourse; they are totally alien to those sections of the German Criminal Code governing speech. While the DSA claims to be all about targeting illegal content, our aspiring Trusted Flaggers can take heart that those who have busied themselves with applying the DSA have a much more expansive vision. They’re going to make everyone happier online, and as we all know campaigns to make people happier always turn out well in the end.

The applications are rolling in, and our Digital Services Coordinator is happy to announce that he has approved our first Trusted Flagger to assist in forcing websites like X, Instagram and Facebook to remove not only “illegal content,” but also “hate speech and fake news very quickly and without bureaucratic hurdles … to make the internet a safe space.” And who is this first Trusted Flagger, you ask? Well, it is an internet tattle-tale operation run by the Baden-Württemberg Youth Foundation and funded by the Green-controlled Family Ministry.

Read the Whole Article

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Two disturbing news items out of Iran suggest that Iran may already have a nuclear bomb capacity.

Firstly an Armenian station recorded a seismic event measuring 4.4 on the Richter scale in Iran on Saturday 5th October and according to Armenian researchers, its characteristics suggest it was more like an explosion than an earthquake.

Secondly a source in the Islamic republic said in a private conversation with an official close to Khamenei that

“Allah has already given us everything, everything is far away from the eyes of the Zionists, and we are ready to release this genie in response to any hint of a real threat to the existence of our state”

Iran has announced (the Iranian Tasnim agency) it has plans to conclude a “Resistance Pact” with a number of Middle Eastern countries and movements which will guarantee military and economic assistance in the event of an attack by the United States or Israel on one of the signatory parties. The “movements” will undoubtedly include Hamas, the Houthis and Hezbollah all dangerous Iranian proxies committed to attacking Israel.

This scenario does not of course come under the above threat of using a nuclear bomb under a “real threat to the existence of our state” but is nevertheless ominous as in April of this year, Iranian authorities suggested that they might revise their nuclear doctrine in the event of aggression from Israel.

(First the USA and then Russia have made similar “revisions” to their nuclear strike doctrines in recent years)

Combined with news of an Iranian Russian agreement which could have provided Iran with Russian nuclear technology in return for missiles and possible Israeli attacks on Iranian nuclear facilities (supported by Donald Trump) the war rhetoric has now been made all the more dangerous by these seismic indications of a possible bomb test in Iran.

Iran’s main nuclear facilities are south of Tehran and it was in the desert to the south of Tehran in the area of Kavir that the Armenian sources (published on Tigranes Telegram channel) detected the seismic event on 5th October 2024

 

Earthquakes normally have an aftershock or seismic “tail” which a nuclear test does not exhibit. These graphs show the difference with examples of past tests and earthquakes in Pakistan, India, Russia and North Korea:

Iran has been expanding its uranium enrichment programme since 2018, reducing the so-called “breakout time” it would need to produce enough weapons-grade uranium for a nuclear bomb to a matter of weeks from at least a year under the (President Trump abandoned) 2015 accord.

Actually making a bomb with that material would take longer. How long is less clear and the subject of debate. Iran is now enriching uranium to up to 60% fissile purity, close to the 90% of weapons grade, at two sites, and in theory it has enough material enriched to that level, if enriched further, for almost four bombs, according to a yardstick of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), the U.N. watchdog

It is interesting that there is a lack of western press coverage of this possible nuclear test by Iran, nor any attempt to refute the reports.

This originally appeared on Freenations.

The post Has Iran Just Tested a Nuclear Bomb? appeared first on LewRockwell.

That most of us live in a low-value, low-trust economy of shoddy goods and services hidden beneath high-tech frictionless, faceless transactions is not recognized.

Social trust manifests in all sorts of ways, and it’s often amorphous and difficult to measure. We sense its presence or absence, but exactly what is it? Is it our trust in strangers, or our trust in institutions, or a warm and fuzzy feeling that our society isn’t falling apart?

In several critical ways, social trust isn’t warm and fuzzy, it’s all about the money, honey. In high-trust societies, transactions are frictionless and low-cost. In low-trust societies, transactions must go through multiple levels of verification, trusted third-parties, etc., each of which is costly.

Correspondent Bruce H. illuminates the differences between high-trust and low-trust transactions:

“There must be a high degree of social trust in order to make business transactions. If you think the other person is likely to take the goods and not pay, you are not likely to engage as freely, and the “shadow work” of ensuring that a transaction is honored drains the economy.

In cultures where cunning and deception are seen as laudable, business transactions are slow, proceeding only carefully, in a time-consuming way because both parties have to ensure the other’s compliance at every phase of the arrangement. This is costly.

In cultures where personal honor take primacy, a quick handshake is sufficient and work can begin immediately, confident that payment or the exchange will proceed to both parties benefit.

That, in essence, is what my father told me about his experience of doing business around the world.

There are places where you just discuss what is needed and agree on a price shake hands and write it down, there are places where you make sure the paperwork is in order and signed before you work, there are places where you make sure they have the money they claim they have and do all the paperwork and get some up front, and there are places where you make sure the money is in the hands of some secure third party (which, of course costs money) before you sign any agreements.

This also absolutely correlates between the relative wealth of these places. The places with the least trust are the poorest, those with the highest levels of trust are the wealthiest, all other factors being equal.”

It’s the money, honey: low-trust = poor, high-trust = wealthy as cumbersome, time-consuming costly transactions suck the life out of an economy.

There are other financial aspects of high-trust / low-trust societies. In high-trust economies, transactions are the core of the economy. The vast majority of transactions occur online or with complete strangers. In low-trust economies, trusted relationships are the core of the economy, and so business is conducted in much smaller circles which are connected by trusted go-betweens, often related by family or other close social ties.

This relationship-based economy was the model used in the ancient world, and it works well when trade and communications took months or even years. It works well on high-value transactions, for example, ships carrying luxury goods long distances. It works less well in a globalized, commoditized economy where the volume of transactions and business is enormous and covers a range of goods and services.

We can understand the U.S. economy as bifurcated into high-trust / low-trust segments which are difficult to tease apart unless we analyze the society and economy through the lens of class, an unpopular analysis in our supposedly classless culture.

Read the Whole Article

The post Social Trust: It’s Not Warm and Fuzzy, It’s the Money, Honey appeared first on LewRockwell.

Netanyahu is a despicable brute. But his slapping down of Macron is a priceless demonstration of how much of a non-entity the French leader is.

French President Emmanuel Macron got his marching orders with a smack on the head for daring to propose an arms embargo on Israel.

Israel’s obnoxious leader, Benjamin Netanyahu, reportedly mauled Macron in a phone call for having the nerve to make such a suggestion.

With his typical bluster and deceit, Netanyahu claimed that Israel was fighting for Western civilization against an “axis of evil” led by Iran and that Macron should be ashamed of himself for not backing Israel.

It seems that Monsieur President got the message and has now shut up.

Earlier, according to reports, the French leader said in an interview with French media that he would be pushing for a diplomatic solution in the region which would involve an international halt on arms exports to Israel: He said: “I think that today, the priority is that we return to a political solution, that we stop supplying weapons [to Israel] to lead the fighting in Gaza.”

Macron added: “Our priority now is to avoid escalation. The Lebanese people must not in turn be sacrificed, Lebanon cannot become another Gaza.”

In response, Netanyahu blew a gasket, claiming: “As Israel fights the forces of barbarism led by Iran, all civilized countries should be standing firmly by Israel’s side. Yet, President Macron and other Western leaders are now calling for arms embargoes against Israel. Shame on them.”

As a matter of legal fact, Macron’s call for halting arms exports is correct. The International Criminal Court has ruled that the Israeli regime’s offensive on Gaza could amount to genocide. Under the Genocide Convention, all states are obliged not to facilitate in any way another state that is engaged in genocide. That means that all weapons exports to Israel should be banned.

The thing is, though, Macron’s talk is cheap and lacking in genuine concern for ending the year-long horror in Gaza, which has now been extended to Lebanon. For a start, as Macron admitted, France has negligible arms exports to Israel. That is not due to any ethical stance by France. It is simply because it has not been a supplier of arms to Israel in recent years, although France crucially helped Israel develop nuclear weapons illegally in the early 1960s – a reprehensible legacy that continues to destabilize and menace relations in the region.

So an embargo on Israel, as called for by Macron, will not impact French business in the slightest. Given that, it is, therefore, an easy call by Macron for a halt to weapons sales.

The United States and Germany are the two main arms suppliers to Israel, accounting for nearly 70 and 30 percent of all imports.

What is of more interest to Macron is “exporting” French prestige to the rest of the world.

Since Israel launched its genocidal assault on Gaza one year ago, the French leader has said nothing about stopping the international supply of weapons to the Israeli regime even as the death toll has increased to more than 41,000 people, mainly women and children.

The United States has the predominant leverage over Israel. Over the past year, the U.S. has supplied an estimated $18 billion worth of weapons to Israel, including warplanes and heavy bombs. The slaughter could have been stopped almost immediately if the Biden administration had used its leverage. European leaders like Macron could have put pressure on the U.S. to do so, but they didn’t. That is the real shame.

However, lately, what concerns Macron more is the expansion of Israel’s genocide to Lebanon is an embarrassing blow to France’s international image and illusions of grandeur. After all, Lebanon is a former French colony in the Middle East carved from the Ottoman Empire by Britain and France under the Sykes-Picot agreement (1916).

Lebanon has been an independent nation since 1943. Nevertheless, Paris maintains a strong influence on the country’s politics and business under a presumed “special relationship.” It must be galling for Macron, who waxes lyrical about his ambition of renewing “France’s Greatness” and geopolitical importance, to see the former French colony being blasted apart by Israel.

Over 2,000 Lebanese civilians have been killed in Israeli air strikes over the past two weeks. The capital, Beirut, is pounded with impunity by heavy Israeli bombardment. Millions of people are being forcibly displaced – and the French state is doing nothing to alleviate the suffering and violation of Lebanon’s sovereignty. Not that France did much when Israel previously invaded Lebanon in 1982 and 2006. But this time, given that Macron has made such a song and dance about restoring La France, the impotence in Paris is all the more humiliating.

Macron’s call for an arms embargo was initially welcomed by Middle Eastern nations, including Lebanon, Egypt, Qatar, and, of course, the Palestinians.

It seems the French president is aiming to create pressure on the United States and Germany to exert leverage on Israel and for France to get the kudos. He won’t get much change out of that move, as Netanyahu’s slap-down showed.

But another reason for the feebleness is that the ultimate aim is not a principled call to stop the conflict in Gaza or Lebanon but rather to salvage France’s reputation as a diplomatic player. Vanity is not a sound basis for anything substantial or meaningful.

Macron and Biden had announced a joint statement on September 25 calling for a ceasefire in Lebanon. The Israeli regime rudely ignored that call and proceeded to escalate the violence with the assassination of Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah in Beirut and intensified bombing of Lebanon.

Lebanon is being torn apart by Israeli aggression and France is seen as not being able to do anything about it. Neither having any political courage to do anything nor having any political clout.

Netanyahu is a despicable brute. But his slapping down of Macron is a priceless demonstration of how much of a non-entity the French leader is.

And by extension that applies to all the European so-called leaders who sit on their hands while the U.S.-backed Israeli regime murders with impunity.

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

The post Macron Slapped Down for Cheap Talk on Israel Arms Ban appeared first on LewRockwell.

Watch this conversation between Alex Jones and two independent investigators, who have been trying to locate undocumented migrant children in the US. (Link in footnote)

Even if you think the stories about children being flown around the country on secret flights is an exaggeration, if you think the problem is being created through disinformation, watch the interview.

I believe you’ll come away convinced there has to be a massive federal and state manhunt for these kids—which of course is not happening. On purpose.

The two investigators, Anthony Rubin and Carlos Arrelano (Muckraker[dot]com), talk about going to houses where children are supposed to be, and the houses are boarded up and no one is living there.

They visit a house, the child they’re looking for isn’t there, but illegal alien men are living in the house with other migrant children. One of the kids says she knew the missing child, but she doesn’t know what happened to her. She’s gone. Who are these other migrant kids living with the men? Unknown.

Children are moved around the country in buses, and dropped off at 3 in the morning in a field or a park, and someone else picks them up and takes them away. There are no records.

—CHILDREN, separated from their parents who apparently still live in Guatemala or Honduras or who knows where. The kids are now in America, at the mercy of undocumented unknown adults.

Many kids.

Obviously, money is changing hands. People aren’t doing this for nothing.

Who would pay for these children? Slave owners, rapists, men who want to force the children to work for no pay.

The two investigators say Guatemala is a major problem. At some houses, the men, who are living with undocumented children, don’t answer questions directly. First, they speak among themselves in an old Guatemalan dialect no one else understands. Then they provide an agreed-upon answer in Spanish.

As we know, all this is happening because the southern border is wide open, and because unlimited immigration is unofficial federal policy.

Brainwashed Americans believe this kind of immigration is CHARITY. They proudly wear “their badges of honor.”

They refuse to look below the surface. Of course they do.

Because what they’d see would terrify them.

It would make them realize the charade they support is brutal and violent and inhuman.

FOOTNOTE: “Witness To Massive Child Smuggling Breaks Down On Air” | Infowars[dot]com | (here)

Reprinted with the author’s permission.

The post Brutal: Migrant Children Missing in the US appeared first on LewRockwell.

“Dow closes at record high after blow-out jobs report” proclaimed NBC News on Saturday. It is not surprising the story would ignore all historical perspective, even history within the past few months. Incumbent presidents routinely take credit for job creation during their administrations and the gullible American public largely believes them. Perceived as prospectively continuing the policies of the Biden administration, good news from the jobs report helps Kamala Harris’s election chances.

It isn’t just ignoring that only two months ago, the Bureau of Labor statistics revised downward their previously reported number April 2023 – March 2024 by over 800,000 jobs (around 27 percent)*. It’s the surreal practice of even talking about supposed job creation over the past four years as if most of it weren’t just recovering jobs lost during the 2020 Covid lockdowns.

During March and April of 2020, the BLS reported net job losses of almost 22 million. Of course, these were not the type of job losses sustained during the 2008 financial crisis. These were people ordered to stay home by the government as part of a suite of responses to Covid that did nothing but harm.

As people were allowed to go back to work, there were several months for which the BLS reported millions of “jobs created.” But everyone understood these were mostly just people previously ordered to stay home returning to work. At least while Trump was still president.

But once Joe Biden was inaugurated, the national media started ignoring that reality and treating higher than usual jobs reports as vindication of “Bidenomics.” The truth is it took years just to recover the number of jobs lost during March-April 2020. The 22 million jobs reported lost during that period were not added back until September 2022.

That’s 31 straight months of zero jobs created on net while millions of undocumented mouths to feed entered the country. That is an economic blow the likes of which modern Americans have never experienced in their lifetimes. And the problems it created were by no means solved after September 2022 when the economy finally began adding new jobs on net.

One cannot just start counting jobs created after September 2022 as “net jobs.” One also has to recognize the opportunity costs of the lockdowns. During those 31 months of net zero job creation, one must count the new jobs that would have been created during those 31 months. Job creation 2016-2019 averaged about 184,000 jobs/month. Had the economy continued at that pace during those 31 months, an additional 5.7 million new jobs would have been created during that time.

Once you net out job creation from March 2020 – July 2024 (August and September 2024 numbers are still “preliminary”) and subtract the 818,000 job downward revision, the economy has created a net 4.8 million jobs since March 2020. That’s an anemic 94,000 jobs per month on average over the past four and a half years, about half the jobs/month the economy was reported to have been creating 2016-19.

Had the lockdowns never been imposed and job creation averaged what it had 2016-19, the economy would have created a net 9.7 million jobs March 2020 – present. It has created half that number.

This might explain why the public has failed to acknowledge the supposedly strong economy. Why the numbers say job growth is strong but no one “feels it.” Why the Biden administration “isn’t getting credit” for the supposedly wonderful job it has done.

The American economy has nowhere near recovered from the Covid lockdowns and won’t for many years to come. From one perspective, the economy never recovers from these disastrous government interventions because capital formation is like compound interest. If you artificially lower a number in the past, the losses going forward are exponential.

Historians tend to ignore these considerations. The official story still says the New Deal saved the economy rather than dealt it a blow comparable to the Covid Regime’s. It is likely they will write the history of the 2020s in much the same way, with Fauci and company the heroes rather than destroyers of the wealth of an entire generation.

It is not until the public finally begins to consider what Bastiat called “that which is not seen” that anything will change. And that seems a long way off.

*As the job losses won’t be finalized by the BLS until February 2025, the BLS web page does not yet reflect the 800,000 jobs downward revision.

This originally appeared on Tom Mullen Talks Freedom.

The post Job Creation Still Hasn’t Recovered from the Useless Covid Lockdowns appeared first on LewRockwell.

 

 

di Wanjiru Njoya

Ludwig von Mises descrive così l'obiettivo del socialismo rivoluzionario: “Sgomberare il terreno per costruire una nuova civiltà liquidando quella vecchia”. Una delle principali strategie per liquidare una civiltà comporta lo smantellamento delle sue fondamenta legali e filosofiche. Questo ruolo è svolto da attivisti che operano “atti di sabotaggio” sovvertendo il significato delle parole: “I socialisti hanno progettato una rivoluzione semantica convertendo il significato dei termini nel loro opposto”.

George Orwell definì questo linguaggio sovversivo “Neolingua”. Peter Foster la descrive come “una sorta di esperanto totalitario che cerca gradualmente di ridurre la gamma di ciò che si può pensare eliminando, contraendo e fabbricando parole”.

Mises spiega che i dittatori esprimono le loro idee in neolingua proprio perché nessuno sosterrebbe i loro piani:

Questo capovolgimento della connotazione tradizionale di tutte le parole nella terminologia politica non è semplicemente una peculiarità del linguaggio dei comunisti russi e dei loro discepoli fascisti e nazisti. L'ordine sociale che, nell'abolire la proprietà privata, priva i consumatori della loro autonomia e indipendenza, e quindi sottopone ogni essere umano alla discrezione arbitraria della pianificazione centrale, non potrebbe ottenere il sostegno delle masse se non se ne camuffasse il carattere principale. I socialisti non ingannerebbero mai gli elettori se dicessero loro che il loro fine ultimo è quello di renderli schiavi.

Nella proliferazione del Neolingua, la reinterpretazione dei “diritti umani” si è rivelata una delle armi più potenti di sabotaggio. Gli attivisti sopraccitati hanno preso il controllo del diritto internazionale, delle ONG e delle associazioni di beneficenza, con una rete globale di personale che monitora il rispetto dei “diritti umani”. Esercitano la loro influenza su questa industria per minare la libertà umana attraverso la ridefinizione del significato di “diritti umani”. Sotto la bandiera dell'uguaglianza e della non discriminazione, limitano la libertà di parola e altre libertà. In altre parole, la dottrina dei “diritti umani” ora denota l'esatto opposto: la distruzione della libertà umana.

Il “diritto umano” alla non discriminazione

I diritti umani non significano più ciò che molti potrebbero supporre: il diritto alla vita, alla libertà e alla proprietà. Il corpus legale a essi connesso nel diritto internazionale è stato diviso da Karel Vašák in tre categorie: civile-politico, socio-economico e collettivo-di sviluppo. Si dice che queste categorie comprendano diritti negativi (cose che lo stato non deve fare, come interferire con la vita, la libertà o la proprietà), diritti positivi (cose che lo stato deve fare, ad esempio, fornire ai cittadini cibo, riparo, istruzione, assistenza sanitaria, ecc.) e diritti di solidarietà tra cittadini come la ridistribuzione della ricchezza attraverso schemi di assistenza sociale e la partecipazione paritaria al progresso economico attraverso misure come il salario minimo o la parità di retribuzione.

Le organizzazioni per i diritti umani monitorano i progressi in queste categorie e assicurano che il sistema legale lavori a favore degli obiettivi socialisti e contro la libertà. Ad esempio, il programma per i diritti umani delle Nazioni Unite educa il pubblico sulla necessità di sradicare il “discorso d'odio” e include nella “parità” di fronte alla legge, un diritto umano fondamentale, la protezione dal discorso d'odio. L'ONU afferma:

Affrontare l'incitamento all'odio non significa limitare o proibire la libertà di parola. Significa impedire che l'incitamento all'odio degeneri in qualcosa di più pericoloso, in particolare l'incitamento alla discriminazione, all'ostilità e alla violenza, proibiti dal diritto internazionale.

Da questa descrizione si può vedere che l'ONU prende un concetto che è ben consolidato nel diritto penale, vale a dire, proibire l'incitamento alla violenza, e lo collega alle nozioni di incitamento alla discriminazione e di incitamento all'ostilità, che non sono mai stati riconosciuti come crimini prima. Si aggiunge discriminazione e ostilità all'accusa di incitamento alla violenza perché, se non accadesse, sarebbe immediatamente chiaro a tutti che criminalizzare “discriminazione” o “ostilità” equivale a un cosiddetto psicoreato.

Il significato dei diritti umani

Nel suo articolo, “Non esistono i diritti umani”, il giornalista britannico Peter Hitchens sostiene che:

I diritti umani non esistono. Sono un'invenzione, fatta di puro vento. Se siete seriamente interessati a rimanere liberi, non dovreste affidarvi a queste frasi vaghe e flatulente.

Sono un'arma nelle mani di coloro che desiderano togliervi la libertà e trasformare la società, anche se probabilmente si tratta di un caso. È solo negli ultimi 50 anni circa che i giudici hanno capito che queste dichiarazioni infondate possono essere utilizzate (ad esempio) per abolire le frontiere delle nazioni o dare ai criminali il diritto di voto.

In questo contesto Hitchens non si riferisce alle antiche libertà protette dalla Magna Carta, ma ai diritti ora sanciti in strumenti come la Dichiarazione dei diritti dell'uomo delle Nazioni Unite e la Convenzione europea sui diritti dell'uomo. I diritti umani sono stati trasformati in concetti vaghi che riflettono semplicemente richieste politiche e di parte.

Murray Rothbard evita l'ambiguità che circonda il significato dei diritti umani definendoli come diritti di proprietà. In Ethics of Liberty spiega:

[...] il concetto di “diritti” ha senso solo se si intende come diritti di proprietà. Non esistono diritti umani che non siano anche diritti di proprietà, ma i primi perdono la loro assolutezza e chiarezza e diventano confusi e vulnerabili quando i diritti di proprietà non vengono usati come riferimento.

I diritti di proprietà sono identici ai diritti umani solo in due modi: la proprietà può spettare solo agli esseri umani, quindi i loro diritti di proprietà appartengono solamente a loro; il diritto della persona al proprio corpo, alla sua libertà personale, è un diritto di proprietà equivalente a un “diritto umano”. Ma ancora più importante per la nostra discussione, i diritti umani, quando non sono espressi in termini di diritti di proprietà, risultano essere vaghi e contraddittori, portando i liberal a indebolirli in nome della “politica pubblica” o del “bene pubblico”.

L'interpretazione rothbardiana dei diritti umani denota il diritto universale alla proprietà di sé e alla proprietà privata che spetta a tutti gli esseri umani.

Reinterpretazione burocratica

Il significato dei diritti umani è soggetto all'interpretazione da parte dei tribunali o di altri funzionari delle forze dell'ordine. I diritti umani, in ultima analisi, significano solo ciò che viene interpretato da questa gente, non ciò che potrebbero significare teoricamente, politicamente o filosoficamente. Lowell B. Mason, avvocato ed ex-presidente della Federal Trade Commission, spiega il significato dell'interpretazione burocratica osservando ironicamente che:

Quando lavoravo in uno studio privato, non dicevo mai ai clienti cosa fosse la legge; dicevo sempre loro cosa pensavano i burocrati che fosse la legge [...]. La legalità, o l'illegalità, di ciò che fate spesso non dipende dalle parole di una legge promulgata dai vostri rappresentanti eletti, ma dai capricci di una dozzina di burocrati anonimi.

Essendo ben consapevoli di ciò, l'obiettivo degli attivisti è di garantire che i “diritti umani” siano interpretati in modo da promuovere i loro scopi. Ciò spiega gli sforzi concertati per descrivere il “discorso d'odio” come una violazione dei diritti umani. In questo modo l'impegno degli stati a proteggere i “diritti umani” si trasforma, attraverso il prisma del principio di non discriminazione, in una serie di editti per proibire il discorso d'odio. La parola “odio” viene interpretata come la temerarietà di non essere d'accordo con i socialisti e, allo stesso modo, la parola “uguaglianza” viene interpretata come ridistribuzione della ricchezza per raggiungere l'uguaglianza nelle condizioni materiali.

Mason spiega come sia possibile per i burocrati reinterpretare la Costituzione e adattarla a ciò che ritengono la legge debba promuovere. Non importa quanto sia ben scritta, richiederà sempre un'interpretazione, ed è qui che i burocrati colpiscono quando pretendono di applicare il significato “in evoluzione” nella Costituzione.

“Certo”, vi rassicureranno, “la Costituzione resta un baluardo per la libertà, ma è uno strumento in evoluzione che si adatta ai tempi e, sebbene non sia stata abrogata o modificata, deve essere necessariamente reinterpretata in modo che il giusto processo (come era noto in passato) non ostacoli indebitamente l'amministrazione della legge”.

Attraverso la neolingua la Costituzione stessa viene reinterpretata, consentendo ai socialisti di affermare di proteggere la libertà di parola e anche il divieto di “incitamento all'odio”. Mises spiega che questo sovverte il concetto di libertà nel suo esatto opposto: “La libertà implica il diritto di scegliere tra assenso e dissenso, ma nella neolingua significa il dovere di assentire incondizionatamente e un rigoroso divieto di dissenso”. Il concetto di “incitamento all'odio” non è compatibile con la libertà di parola. Nel categorizzare qualsiasi dissenso come “odio” si nega l'essenza stessa della libertà di parola e della libertà di pensiero. Attraverso la neolingua orwelliana parole comuni come “libertà”, “giustizia” e “uguaglianza”, valori che la maggior parte delle persone sosterrebbe, vengono sovvertite e sfruttate per promuovere il socialismo.

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

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

Murray Rothbard conceptualized liberty as an emanation of property rights and self-ownership. Freedom of association is, therefore, best understood as “a subset of private property rights.” Just as property rights are absolute and limited only by respect for other people’s property rights, freedom of association is absolute and constrained only by other people’s freedom to associate or not associate with whom they will.

Unless we are all to live as slaves, human interaction should always be voluntary. The correct ethical principle is that no one should be forced to associate or not associate with others against his or her will. It follows that the antidiscrimination principle is incompatible with freedom of association. The civil rights framework of rules based on “protected grounds” such as race, sex, or religion, violates freedom of association in two ways. First, by coercing people into associating with others against their will, for example, by imposing “disparate impact” penalties for failing to achieve racial or gender “equity” in employment. Second, by forbidding people from associating with those of their choice, for example, by constraining a landlord’s freedom to choose his own tenants. The Fair Housing Act “prohibits discrimination by direct providers of housing, such as landlords and real estate companies as well as other entities, such as municipalities, banks or other lending institutions and homeowners insurance companies.”

These restrictions on freedom of association were originally justified as necessary to enable everyone to have the benefit of private property and contractual freedom. However, economists such as Walter E. Williams have shown that there is no empirical evidence of barriers to participation, at least not after the Civil Rights Acts of 1866 and 1964, and later the repeal of Jim Crow laws in the 1960s. A new justification for constraining liberty, therefore, rose to prominence, and the prevailing argument now is that restrictions are necessary to promote values such as diversity, equality, and inclusiveness. The antidiscrimination principle is now justified, not as a way of eradicating barriers to market participation, but as a way of advancing liberal values that we are all said to share.

The apparent consensus on liberal values is promoted by academics who argue that “all reasonable people” agree on the importance of egalitarianism and just disagree on how best to implement it. This apparent consensus is echoed by uniparty politicians. As Rothbard observes,

On the entire question of legally and judicially imposed “civil rights,” we have been subjected to a trap, to a shell game in which “both sides” adopt the same pernicious axiom and simply quarrel about interpretation within the same framework. On the one side, left-liberalism, which in the name of equality and civil rights, wants to outlaw “discrimination” everywhere, has pushed the process to the point of virtually mandating representational quotas for allegedly oppressed groups everywhere in society… But the Official Conservative opposition, which includes not only neocons but also regular conservatives, conservative legal foundations, and left-libertarians, adopts the self-same axiom of civil rights and equality.

Cancel culture

The axiom of civil rights and equality, now often expressed in the language of DEI, is a powerful weapon in the hands of those who take it upon themselves to dictate “our shared values.” They use the tools of cancel culture to control who is or is not permitted freely to associate with others. The cancel mob is against freedom of association for rebels who reject DEI values. Although the cancel mob can be shown to be wrong in most cases, as their reasons for cancellation are based on ideological disputes in which reasonable people strongly disagree with each other, it must be emphasized that freedom of association is not dependent on showing that the cancel mob has incorrectly stated the facts or that the cancel mob is unjustified in its opinions. Liberty based on self-ownership does not depend on showing that everyone agrees on how that liberty is to be exercised. Freedom of association is an absolute freedom whose boundaries lie only at the point where they encroach upon other people’s right freely to associate.

While anyone is entitled to boycott those with whom they disagree, and to encourage others to join the boycott, it is wrong to harness the backing or power of the state to prevent people from freely associating on grounds that they happen to hold different opinions or values. An example is the ongoing furor over preserving Confederate history, which has recently targeted a museum in Georgetown, Delaware, for displaying the Confederate battle flag. The NAACP objected to the museum receiving public funds, arguing that “supporting a group that displays the confederate flag makes a statement of public policy that’s an affront to the sensibilities and dignity of a majority of Americans.” In September 2024, the activists were back in the news: “The debate over the Confederate flag flying at the Marvel Museum in Georgetown continues as Delaware action group Speak Out Against Hate (SOAH) works to bring the issue back to the spotlight and have the flag taken down.”

Ideally, given that taxation is theft, we should abolish taxes and thereby avoid the need for disputes over the allocation of public funds. But given that everyone is forced to pay taxes, the notion that some self-appointed activists should get to dictate which groups of taxpayers have opinions worthy of their respect should be rejected. The NAACP opposition to this museum is primarily based on their objection to groups associating for purposes of preserving Confederate history, an aim which the NAACP considers “an affront to their sensibilities” and against “the values of the people.” They are upset by the flag and monument raised by the Delaware Grays Sons of Confederate Veterans on museum grounds. Yet the NAACP fails to recognize that, as illustrated by a recent survey, Americans are split roughly in half on the question whether Confederate monuments should be destroyed with 52% supporting efforts to preserve them. Therefore, this is clearly a question on which people reasonably disagree, and neither side of the debate can claim a monopoly on “the values of the people.” Each side represents only the values of those who share their view, and freedom of association, therefore, becomes paramount.

Freedom of association does not depend on showing that everyone, or even a majority, agrees with the aims of any association. Freedom of association is an absolute liberty of free people, subject only to the freedom of others not to associate with them. The solution for anyone who disagrees with the heritage preserved by a museum is simply to not visit the museum, and leave others at liberty to support the museum should they wish.

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

The post Freedom of Association and Cancel Culture appeared first on LewRockwell.

Elon Musk is all in.

(0:00) Elon Musk Is All in on Donald Trump
(6:35) Providing Starlink to Victims of Hurricane Helene
(9:22) If Trump Loses, This Is the Last Election
(21:49) The Epstein and Diddy Client List
(33:38) Vaccines
(35:49) The Movement to Decriminalize Crime… pic.twitter.com/jNqB1ThqQz

— Tucker Carlson (@TuckerCarlson) October 7, 2024

The post Tucker Talks to Elon Musk appeared first on LewRockwell.

Hillary Clinton, John Kerry, and Democrat Law School Deans Say Free Speech Threatens Their Agendas. Democrats are no longer the party of John F. Kennedy. They and their media whores are the party of Joseph Goebbels, Reich Minister of Propaganda.

“We are not afraid to entrust the American people with unpleasant facts, foreign ideas, alien philosophies, and competitive values. For a nation that is afraid to let its people judge the truth and falsehood in an open market is a nation that is afraid of its people.” — President John F. Kennedy. See this.

Hillary Says the First Amendment means “We Lose Total Control”

Clinton Continues Her Censorship Campaign on CNN, and the presstitute media supports their own demise.

Jonathan Turley notes that Hillary and the Democrats want free speech only for their ideological agendas. Everyone else has to shut up.

Watch tens of millions of dumbs..t Americans vote for this tyranny on November 4.

If Empire Of Lies Crumbles, Hillary Clinton Warns: “We’ll Lose Total Control”

Hillary Clinton told CNN host Michael Smerconish that unless social media companies are censored “we lose total control.” Only censorship and the First Amendment’s destruction can save the Elites’ Empire of Lies.

Wall Street Journal Editor Emma Tucker said: “We owned the news. We were the gatekeepers, and we very much owned the facts as well.”

She added that people are learning that they cannot trust the whore media and that, consequently, the presstitutes are having a difficult time protecting the official narratives, which are lies that permit a handful of corrupt elites to impose their agendas.

The First Amendment is under full scale attack by Democrats. They openly admit that it is a major block to their ability to gain power by manipulating the information that people receive.

Read The Empire of Lies by Paul Craig Roberts.

“Paul Craig Roberts is one of the best and most-informed political commentators today. I urge everybody to read his indispensable book The Empire of Lies, ” Llewellyn H. Rockwell.

PCR is a national treasure

This is the best of several books by PCR I’ve read. I like the layout, with topics grouped in such a way that you can inform yourself about them by category.

PCR is careful with his prose. He doesn’t assert certainty unless he really is certain, and he uses conditional language wherever that’s appropriate.

If you want to get up to speed on current events and recent, relevant history with one book, this is the one to buy.

Unbiased Potential Truth in a World of Lies

In a nutshell, this collection of essays is an exposé of major deceptions in five critical areas. In addition to a detailed chapter on deception vis-à-vis economics, which was PCR’s formal profession as a professor at US universities and as the chief of economic policy under President Ronald Reagan, he also tackles US foreign policy, notably the War in Ukraine, September 11, COVID-19 vaccines, and the unreliability of the corporate media. While I don’t agree with everything in the book, it is intellectually honest and unhindered by political correctness, which is a rarity in the current age of self-censorship. The book represents a refreshing novel account of current and past events that shaped the 21th century from the perspective of a highly critical and analytical Washington insider.

What is particular refreshing about the book is that the author is clearly not representing nor defending the left or the right. This is not a political manifest; the author’s stated intention is to get to the truth wherever it leads.

The post Democrats Are the New Gestapo appeared first on LewRockwell.

Yesterday Peter joined Michael Gayed and Will Rhind on the Lead-Lag Report. They cover a variety of topics, including the future of the dollar, China’s role in the economy, the prospects of war in the Middle East, and gold’s path to a $3000 price point and beyond.

Early in the interview, Peter laments the possibility that the United States will decline economically. China is poised to surpass our economy as the dollar continues to weaken:

“I think the media is constantly writing China’s obituary. And I think they’ve got it wrong. Just like they downplay the significance of the problems in the US economy, they overplay the significance of the problems of the Chinese economy. I’m not saying it’s perfect over there in China. But I think they have a lot going for them that people are overlooking.”

Michael and Peter discuss the role of U.S. foreign policy– specifically having a military presence around the world– in driving up deficits and the debt:

“We’re all over the world. We’ve got our troops all over the world, but we can’t afford to deploy them. We can’t afford to provision them without borrowing money, and that is not sustainable. I mean, it’s going to crumble. I don’t think the world is going to pay an ever-increasing tribute to the United States to maintain this situation. I think it’s going to come to an end. Yes, it’s gone on for a long time, and our military has probably been part of what’s enabled it.” 

With tension in the Middle East ratcheting up this week, Peter delivers a masterful explanation of why wars are terrible for the economy. The temptation to inflate combined with the physical destruction of productive goods mean wars inevitably impoverish all involved:

“You’re more likely to debase your currency with a war, and it’s actually twofold, depending on how big the war is. Wars can result in the destruction of goods, and there’s a destruction of productive capacity. So, you have less supply of goods in a war. A lot of times, if it’s a big war, you have to produce ammunition and military hardware at the expense of civilian consumer goods. So, wars tend to reduce the supply of consumer goods but increase the quantity of money. Governments today don’t want to pay for wars. They don’t want to tell the taxpayer, ‘We’re fighting a war, so we’re raising your taxes.’ … And they go out and borrow, creating bigger deficits. So, the Fed has to print more money.”

The trio also discusses Peter’s opinions on investments other than precious metals, including stocks and crypto. He argues that Bitcoin highlights the difference between large institutional investors and retail investors trying to cash in on a trend:

“Bitcoin peaked out in November 2021, and priced in gold, it’s almost 40% below that peak. Despite all that money spent, all that hype, all those ETFs in the market, all that institutional buying. So that tells you something. It tells you there’s a lot of people that have been selling their Bitcoin into all the hype. And I think the people selling Bitcoin are a lot smarter and know a lot more than the people who have been buying it.”

Peter is optimistic for the future of gold. With no end in sight for the Fed’s money printing, there’s a distinct possibility that gold’s price could increase by many multiples over the next couple of decades:

“I think the potential is much higher because we’re going to print so much money. We’re going to have so much inflation that the dollar is going to lose a lot of value, and you’re really going to need a lot of dollars to buy gold. If gold can go from $20 an ounce to $2,600 an ounce, it can go from $2,600 to $26,000, or even to $100,000. There’s no limit because, again, gold isn’t changing—it’s the value of the dollar that’s decreasing.”

Halfway through the interview, Peter also drops some trivia about his wife, Lauren. Did you know she both sang and acted in a 2022 Bruce Willis film? Check out the full recording (starting at 38:30) for the details!

This originally appeared on SchiffGold.com.

The post Gold’s Potential Is Wildly Untapped appeared first on LewRockwell.

Executive summary

The CDC lied. People died.

The COVID vaccine had no benefits

1. It actually increased your risk of getting COVID. We know that from the Cleveland Clinic study.
2. It did nothing to reduce your risk of hospitalization. We know that from the data revealed in a study published in JAMA by a top epidemiologist at the VA.
3. The vaccine did absolutely nothing to reduce your risk of dying from COVID. I’m going to show you that below. It’s crystal clear. Rarely in science do you see anything that is this perfect.

In short, the COVID shots were all downside with no benefits. The vaccines and the vaccine mandates cost a lot of people their careers or their lives.

It was a massive con job by the FDA and CDC to make us believe that the vaccines worked when their own numbers show that it didn’t do a damn thing. In fact, I’d bet that they probably didn’t even look at their own numbers from CMS.

No upside, all downside.

My new analysis of the US nursing home data is undeniable

The US Nursing home COVID mortality data is gold standard per-facility data on the most vulnerable population for COVID. There is nothing in the world better than this dataset.

I’ve written about the US Nursing home data many times before (most recently in this article), but now I have a new way to present the data that shows the full story instantly:

This is the only graph you need to see to prove that the COVID vaccine did nothing to reduce the risk of dying from COVID. The “gap” between cases and deaths did NOT change after the shots were rolled out. Some people say, “cases dropped” but as you can see, cases skyrocketed to new highs 12 month later. Also, we know from the Cleveland clinic study that the COVID vaccines increase your risk of getting COVID which explains why the height of the peak nearly doubled post-vaccine rollout.

What does it show? It shows the vaccines did NOTHING to reduce mortality. Zero. Zilch. Nada. It’s not even a close call. It’s OBVIOUS from just looking at one graph.

You can verify all this for yourself. I’ve created a dedicated github with the files and the code and the analysis spreadsheet with the graph below.

Here are the details…

The graph aggregates data from 15,058 nursing homes that is reported on a weekly basis. The blue lines (left axis) are cases. The orange lines (right) axes are SHIFTED deaths. The deaths were left shifted by applying a weighting factor of 0,.8,.2 to the death by week. This causes the death curve to align with the cases instead of being delayed. See the spreadsheet for details.

Secondly, I adjusted the scale of the right axis so that deaths would be scaled to match cases.

These two adjustments make it very easy to visualize the case fatality rate (CFR).

When the curves diverge is when you have a change in the CFR.

If the vaccines worked, we should have seen the curves start to diverge more and more from December 2020 through the end of March 2021 (see this article for the rollout curve), and then continue to diverge (at a slower pace) as more and more people were vaccinated.

But this didn’t happen.

You can see the curves are virtually right on top of each other (which is stunning) until the week ending 7/11/2021 is when we see the very start of a divergence but the divergence (gap between the curves) remains FLAT until Omicron hits. So this was not the vaccine “kicking in.” If that were the case, we’d see a rise over 3 months to maximum divergence and it would continue to diverge after that corresponding to the rollout of the COVID vaccine to nursing homes in the first few months of 2021.

The CFR drops precipitously a second time starting the week ending 12/26/21.

Read the Whole Article

The post Official US Nursing Home Data Shows That the Covid Vaccines Did Nothing To Reduce Covid Mortality appeared first on LewRockwell.