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I was raised a Catholic. I still consider myself a Catholic, although it’s been a few years since I’ve been to Mass. I have many problems with the Church, as I do with organized religion in general. I have no problems with God. Or Jesus Christ. Who am I, with my poor intellectual capacity, to question the Creator of everything?

In the mid-1970s, what we used to call “Jesus Freaks” started popping up. I knew a few of them. They were actually pretty cool. I never argued about our foreign policy with them. I even briefly flirted with the “Born Again” thing myself. One of my catchier songs was They Took my Bible Away. One day, I’ll get the courage to play the tapes I have of my songs on YouTube or something. At any rate, at that time “born againers” seemed to me to just be extremely enthusiastic believers. To be more concerned with Jesus Christ than most Catholics or conventional Protestants. It wasn’t until I started meeting more of them, in the workforce, or while coaching youth sports, that I realized there really was a distinct difference between what they believed, and the religious instructions I’d received as a Catholic. I started to understand that “born again” Protestants rely almost exclusively on faith, and seem to harbor a thinly concealed antipathy towards Catholics and their “good works.”

As a child, it was drummed home to me, both at Mass and at home, to “be good.” Catholic “guilt” is a very real but unfairly named thing. It is instead a Catholic conscience. I feel guilt, even when it’s irrational, because my conscience insists that I should have done something differently, or not done it. Should have treated someone better. Done more to help those who need it. It gave me a nice, warm feeling to volunteer with the Special Olympics, or coach severely handicapped kids in the Top Soccer program, or teach basic computer skills to mostly African immigrants. But I’ve heard “born againers” scoff at this as “trying to work your way into heaven.” Well, I suppose maybe I am. I learned that Jesus will “come again, to judge the living and the dead.” I still think a lot about the Day of Judgment. I don’t know what would be more important in such a judgment, than your actions towards others.

It’s only been within the last year or so that my eyes have been truly opened on this subject. I knew that Christian “evangelicals,” which is the kindler, gentler way of saying “born againers,” were supporters of Israel. I understood that they placed far greater importance on the Book of Revelation than Catholics do. I also began hearing more references to “The Rapture,” which was a totally foreign concept to me. If you look at the passages in the Bible that are supposed to support this, it is never directly said that 144,000 people will suddenly be assumed into heaven. As a Catholic, the Virgin Mary is supposed to be the only human being ever assumed into heaven. Everything with evangelicals seems to revolve around the Biblical Israel, and they consider the present corrupt Middle Eastern ministate as this divine land. They interpret Biblical prophecy to mean that Jesus will return in a generation after Israel was restored. In the 1980s, the “born againers” preached that since it was getting close to forty years after the creation of Israel, the Second Coming was at hand. This was believed by many who supported Reagan. Now they have reinterpreted things.

Now, it is a Biblical “generation” we’re talking about, and this would mean the Second Coming will be occurring very shortly. Catholics were taught that no man will know the hour of Jesus’s return, and that he would come “like a thief in the night.” The evangelicals have proven to be quite adept at picking and choosing which Biblical verses to believe. They really hate my favorite, where Jesus said that “it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich person to enter the kingdom of God.” That would pretty much discredit the whole “prosperity gospel” thing, which has made the likes of Kenneth Copeland and Joel Osteen filthy rich. I sense that the “prosperity gospel” mantra runs through much of the evangelical community. Don’t dare say “money is the root of all evil” around them. They’ll quickly correct you; “It’s ‘the love of money.’” The televangelists seem to embrace this rather new “dispensationalism,” and they all certainly appear to have a pretty overt love of money.

Not that long ago, I started hearing a lot about the Scofield Bible, which birthed the evangelical movement just as surely as Joseph Smith’s Book of Mormon birthed theirs. Mormons are scoffed at by all other Christians, but Scofield Christians not only are tolerated, and even respected, they have become the face of modern Christianity in America 2.0. A pastor named Cyrus Scofield, who had a murky past which included abandoning his wife and children, bribery and theft of contributions, was chosen by powerful Jewish financiers like Samuel Untermeyer to add suitably pro-Zionist footnotes in what became the Scofield Reference Bible, which first appeared in 1909. This reference Bible was published and is still owned by the Oxford University Press. The footnotes were carefully selected, to all reflect a pro-Zionist perspective. Although Zionism was largely unheard of at the time, the goal was to make the Bible stress Jesus’s Jewishness, and the fact that the Jews were the “chosen” people of God.

Later, evangelical leaders like Billy Graham concentrated on the Scofield messaging, drumming home the idea that to oppose modern Israel or “the Jews” in general was to oppose God. Terms like “fundamentalism,” “nondenominational” and the oxymoronic “Judeo-Christian” became familiar to all Christians. While Catholic youngsters like me were regularly reminded that the Jews of his time had killed Christ, evangelicals embraced those who had rejected their savior, and insisted they were above criticism. Traditional Catholic priests like Father Charles Coughlin and Leonard Feeney attacked undue Jewish power and influence, as well as that of freemasonry. Billy Graham, meanwhile, had the ear of Richard Nixon as he preached the virtues of “Judeo-Christianity,” and Jim and Tammy Bakker sold gaudiness and materialism almost as shamelessly as the “Reverend Ike” had a few decades earlier. They begged for money, and told gullible old people that God would reward them for donating.

The scandals of Jim and Tammy Bakker, and then Jimmy Swaggart being caught with prostitutes on more than one occasion, did nothing to slow down the televangelists. Every televangelist I’ve ever seen is phonier than the most obnoxious used car salesman. They serve up the same series of Bible verses, to keep their flock tithing- a form of coercion not found in the Bible. They ignore other verses like the plague. Let me know when one of them talks about Jesus condemning the Jewish leaders as the “synagogue of Satan,” and being “just like your father- the first and greatest liar of them all.” Apparently, fundamentalists are taught to study those Scofield footnotes- written by a pastor who was a thief and had abandoned his family- rather than actual Biblical passages. Evangelicals specialize in talking the talk. I have met precious few who walk the walk. Their families are often even more dysfunctional than most. One Biblical admonition they ignore with impunity is “judge not lest ye be judged.”

Have you heard any evangelical pastor question why a rabbi is the head of one of the biggest porn sites on the internet- Pornhub? They love to talk about porn destroying lives, but never mention the one group that has always dominated the leadership positions in the world of pornography, from the days of girlie mags, to X rated films, and now online porn. How often do they condemn the transgender movement? Have any pastors led marches against the mutilation of children? Christian leaders should be leading protests against the tyranny and corruption of our secular state. You may still see a pro-life protest here or there. But the pro-choice people have a point; evangelicals certainly seem to care far more about the unborn than born children in desperate circumstances. Their emphasis is unduly on the sins of the flesh. Unless their own sins are exposed. Then they just keep lecturing others, seemingly more passionately than ever once they are caught with their own pants down.

Read the Whole Article

The post Evangelicals and the Veneration of Israel appeared first on LewRockwell.

In 2025, there is no part of the world that is safe for Christians.  Leftist prosecutors in Europe, Australia, Canada, and the United States criminalize fundamental tenets of the Christian faith as discriminatory forms of “hate speech.”  Chinese communists replace images of Jesus Christ with portraits of Xi Jinping.  Hindus beat and murder Christians in India.  Islamic nations sentence Christian converts to death.  Nigerian Muslims attack Christian churches during prayer services and torture and murder so many Christian worshipers as to constitute genocide.  The assassin who murdered Christian martyr Charlie Kirk allegedly did so because he believes that Charlie’s Christian teachings were “hateful.”

It is a dangerous time to be a Christian.  Michael Snyder wrote an illuminating article a couple weeks ago entitled “Most of the Population of the World Lives in a Nation Where Christians Are Being Persecuted.”  In a sober analysis, he takes the reader on a tour of Christian persecution, torture, and mass slaughter around the planet.

Children in China are prohibited from attending Christian church services, and the Chinese Communist Party rewrites Bible verses to support official pronouncements from the State.  Sharing the gospel online is a crime, and Christian pastors are regularly arrested and “disappeared.”  In India, Hindu terrorists set Christian churches and Bibles on fire and beat up and murder Christian parishioners.  Muslims in Indonesia hunt down Christians as if they were animals.  Muslims in Nigeria have massacred or abducted a hundred thousand Christians over the last six years and have destroyed some 20,000 Christian churches and schools.  Islamic governments in Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Iran discriminate against Christians, punish them ruthlessly for their beliefs, and execute anyone brave enough to convert to Christianity.  In North Korea, Christianity is outlawed, and practicing Christians who are discovered are summarily executed or condemned to death in labor-intensive concentration camps.

The corporate news media do not report on the systematic persecution and killing of Christians around the world.  On Friday, President Trump attempted to do journalists’ jobs for them by addressing the ongoing genocide of Christians in Nigeria.  On Truth Social, the president wrote, “Christianity is facing an existential threat in Nigeria.  Thousands of Christians are being killed.  Radical Islamists are responsible for this mass slaughter. … The United States cannot stand by while such atrocities are happening in Nigeria, and numerous other Countries.  We stand ready, willing, and able to save our Great Christian population around the World!”  Nigerian Christians desperately hope that President Trump will find a way to save their brothers and sisters.

Muslims’ slaughter of Christians in Nigeria is so horrific that even left-leaning commentator Bill Maher describes it as a genocide much worse than anything that is happening in Gaza.  “They are literally attempting to wipe out the Christian population of an entire country,” Maher told his studio audience a few weeks ago.  “Where are the kids protesting this?”

The “kids” are nowhere to be found.  Their college professors brainwashed them to see “systemic racism” everywhere it is not but to view Christians as “fascists,” “nationalists,” and even “Nazis.”  Leftist billionaires and taxpayer-funded NGOs organize riots to “protest” Israel, “climate change,” duly elected conservative politicians, and “white supremacy.”  Those same billionaires and NGOs are completely silent as Christians are massacred because, for many leftists, Christians are the “enemy.”

Western universities and institutions have discriminated against Christians for so many years that leftist lawmakers and leftist voters now openly endorse anti-Christian bigotry.

A new California law mandating that foster parents “affirm a child’s self-identified sexual orientation or gender identity” effectively bans Christian couples from helping children in need.  The state of California argues that Christians who object to the “trans” ideology are a “danger” to kids.  In other words, only Californians who embrace chemical castration, bodily mutilation, the enabling of mental illness, hormone poisoning, and made-up pronouns are considered sufficiently stable to look after children.  As Kevin Snider of the Pacific Justice Institute warns, “there is now a very small step for the state to deem any parent as unfit to raise [his] own children if the family holds a view that contradicts the state’s ideology on gender and sexual orientation.  This could result in a visit by Child Protective Services with tragic consequences for the home.”  California is coming for Christians’ children.

In Finland, government prosecutors continue to harass Christians for quoting the Bible.  In 2019, Päivi Räsänen — a medical doctor, longtime member of Parliament, Finland’s former Interior minister, and the wife of a pastor — used a Bible verse to criticize Finland’s state church for sponsoring an LGBT “pride” parade.  After the prominent Finnish Christian publicly stated that males and females are biologically different, police investigators interrogated her for some thirteen hours, forced her to justify her Christian worldview, and demanded that she publicly apologize and recant her Christian beliefs.  Because she would not do so and instead defended the authority of God’s Word, she was criminally charged for illegal “hate speech.”  Prosecutors have repeatedly asked Finnish courts to “wipe the internet” of Räsänen’s media appearances and writings, in which she has used her medical education and Christian faith to distinguish men from women and to promote the Bible’s moral teachings.

Although two lower courts have acquitted her, prosecutors have appealed and now argue before Finland’s Supreme Court that quoting the Bible should be considered a criminal offense under the country’s war crimes laws.  One of Räsänen’s attorneys, Lorcán Price, argues that the outcome of the case will reverberate across Europe because it addresses directly whether a Christian can publicly express the tenets of Christianity.  “Can you speak the truth as you see it freely, even if it might offend somebody, or will you be prosecuted for hate speech?”

However Finland’s Supreme Court decides, governments across Europe continue to persecute Christians and criminalize Christianity.  In addressing the implications of Räsänen’s ordeal in Finland, The Federalist’s Joy Pullmann noted recently that citizens in the United Kingdom are regularly arrested for praying silently near abortion facilities, citizens of the Netherlands are arrested for publicly expressing a pro-life worldview, and the mayor of Brussels mobilized riot police last year to shut down a conference whose scheduled speakers recognize the scientific reality of two distinct biological sexes.  Free speech, freedom of religion, and freedom of association are under sustained attack in Europe.  Censorship and discrimination against Christians are pervasive.

If there is a silver lining to this global campaign of persecution against Christians, it is this: Lukewarm Christians and even non-Christians have begun to recognize that they cannot hide and hope for the best during the worldwide war against Christians.  The battle between good and evil does not spare the cowardly, the weak-willed, or the naïve.  Those who champion the toleration of sin or advocate for the acceptance of incompatible beliefs lay down a red carpet of moral relativism that invites evil to triumph.

One Christian pastor in Ohio, Michael Clary, wrote an essay in which he describes how Charlie Kirk’s assassination roused him from hypnotic conditioning to be “inoffensive” and made him realize that only bold defenses of the Christian faith can confront and defeat evil.  Weak Christians not only invite sin into the world, but also invite greater persecution against Christians.  What Charlie Kirk proved through his short time on Earth is that Christian courage and strength must be renewed.  Or, as writer Michael Austin eloquently observes, “Christian leaders must pave the way in confronting the works of darkness with the gospel of light, without compromise or cowardice.”

Christ’s followers are suffering around the world.  They are hunted, beaten, raped, burned, hanged, and slaughtered.  The governments of formerly Christian countries insist on making Christ’s teachings a crime.  Chinese, European, and American officials wish to censor the Bible.  Christians must find faith and courage to face these evils now.  Because much worse is sure to come.

This article was originally published on American Thinker.

The post Christians Persecuted and Killed Around the World appeared first on LewRockwell.

Massacre fetishist Lindsey Graham said “Trump is my favorite president” because “we’re killing all the right people and we’re cutting your taxes” during a speech to the Republican Jewish Coalition Annual Leadership Summit on Friday.

“We’ve run out of bombs; we didn’t run out of bombs in World War II,” the senator said.

If Lindsey Graham ever gushed about me this effusively for any reason I think I would have to shave my head and join a convent or something, because it would be a clear and undeniable sign that I had been living my whole entire life completely wrong.

Lindsey Graham tells Republican Jewish Coalition not to worry about Tucker Carlson and Nick Fuentes: “I feel good about the Republican Party. I feel good about where we’re going as a nation. We’re killing all the right people and we’re cutting your taxes.”

“Trump is my favorite… pic.twitter.com/dTJPy2Uvs0

— Chris Menahan (@infolibnews) November 2, 2025

It says a lot about how much of a warmonger Trump has become that he himself actually slammed Lindsey Graham repeatedly during his first crack at the presidency for being such a firebreathing war slut.

In 2016 Trump said of Graham, “I hear his theory for the [Iraq] war; you’ll be in there forever. You’ll end up starting World War III with a guy like that.”

In 2017 Trump slammed Graham and his war porn circle jerk partner John McCain, saying “The two senators should focus their energies on ISIS, illegal immigration and border security instead of always looking to start World War III.”

In 2018 Trump attacked Graham for opposing the withdrawal of US troops from Syria, tweeting “So hard to believe that Lindsey Graham would be against saving soldier lives & billions of $$$. Why are we fighting for our enemy, Syria, by staying & killing ISIS for them, Russia, Iran & other locals? Time to focus on our Country & bring our youth back home where they belong!”

In 2019 Trump said during a press conference, “Lindsey Graham would like to stay in the Middle East for the next thousand years with thousands of soldiers and fighting other people’s wars. I want to get out of the Middle East.”

Trump used to at least posture as an anti-interventionist who didn’t get along with the warmongers of the DC swamp. Now he’s best butt buddies with the most bloodthirsty swamp creatures alive.

Trump is using the attacks in Nigeria as a trick to get ppl to hate Islam. A lot of ppl are falling for this. “Radical Islamists” is used yet again. He’s trying to get Americans to fear Islam so you will love Israel. pic.twitter.com/i9RzeBXjiZ

— Sabby Sabs (@SabbySabs2) November 2, 2025

They love him, and why wouldn’t they? He bombed Iran. He bombed Yemen. He poured genocide weapons into Israel to incinerate Gaza and to bomb Lebanon, and has been aggressively stomping out free speech that is critical of Israel’s war crimes. He’s been bombing Somalia at an unprecedented rate. He’s giving every sign that he’s getting ready to do something truly horrible in Venezuela. He’s even threatening to invade Nigeria now.

Back in March, Trump’s intelligence chief Tulsi Gabbard embarrassingly tweeted that “President Trump IS the President of Peace. He is ending bloodshed across the world and will deliver lasting peace in the Middle East.” Now she’s spending her whole career helping Trump commit mass military violence around the globe.

Trump duped his base into believing he’ll make peace, and he turned out to be Lindsey Graham’s gooiest wet dream incarnate.

Hopefully some lessons are being learned here.

_______________

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The post The Nastiest Warmongers Are Trump’s Biggest Fans Now appeared first on LewRockwell.

Unconfirmed reports from Spain and elsewhere in Europe say that cash holdings in households may soon be restricted. No sums are given (yet). From the outset, it would look like one of those nonsensical “directives” coming out of Brussels, checked and supervised personally by Madame Von der Leyen, the ever-unelected, controversial head of the European Commission.

As a second thought, you may think, it’s just one more of these fear-mongering measures to keep the population down, on their knees and easily manipulable.

The traditional Tavistock method to keep people on their toes, obedient and submissive.

However, Whitney Webb, the extraordinary geopolitical analyst, just reports in a 22-minute video what supposedly is expecting us around the world, but presumably starting with the west, namely a monetary conversion into all-digital control called Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC) which will be linked to electronic or digital IDs which, in turn, are linked to each individual’s biometrics (finger prints, face recognition, iris-scans and more).

This would mean absolute control of everything you do, intend to do – or not to do.

It would mean, you are obedient, or your bank account is blocked, for good or for a while, if you are not obedient and submissive to “authorities’” orders.

Remember, first trials of this evil-control’s workability were carried out during the 2022 Canadian trucker strike, when bank accounts of leaders were blocked, some for good.

This was not just a warning, but a prediction of what was to come.

By remaining largely silent around the world, populations accepted this insane government interference in people’s privacy. It was – and still is – against human rights, against basic freedoms as inscribed in almost all western countries’ Constitutions, including in Canada’s.

That would have been one opportunity for a world revolution against government interferences in peoples’ constitutional and international rights; an opportunity missed. Now there is a second one….

As we may be confronted not only with universally unwanted, but compulsory digital IDs, but also with control over our – in many cases – hard-earned money. Imposed obedience to accept illegal government actions against us, the People. Your bank account can be blocked if you “misbehave”; meaning you do not follow orders, for example, enforced infractions on your body, like unwanted “vaccinations”, or if the central-control system discovers your environmental / CO2 footprint is too heavy -never mind the vast, immense boot-prints of all military and wars.

We are not there yet.

In her elaborate explanation of what is planned to keep humanity in shackles, starting with financial shackles followed by mind-control (already largely going on), Whitney Webb describes the complex combinations and coordination of digital ID with CBDCs, or other types of digital money, like through a myriad of payment applications in your smart phone or watch and even in some cases chips implanted on people’s wrists.

Whitney explains that the “directives” come from the Bank for International Settlements (BIS in Basle, Switzerland, also called the Bank of all Central Banks) and the complex relationship between the BIS, national central banks, the international banking system and the users of the banking system, essentially “you and me” – everybody.

This entirely privately run institution, the BIS – without any international legitimacy – controls some 95% of all central banks, including China and Russia, though not Iran (yet).

The BIS controls about 97% of the worldwide money flow. The financial institution is a behemoth of monetary power. Who is behind it? You may guess – and your guess is most likely going in the right direction.

Importantly, Whitney says that CBDCs are unlikely to be used on a retail basis, i.e., by regular consumers, but mainly for interbank transaction, including with national central banks. This may already be the case today.

However, if the e-ID system and banking or monetary central control are firmly linked, there is no need for the regular consumer to use CBDCs. Regular money is controlled by the banks, through centrally controlled e-IDs, to which the banks are, or would be linked.

People’s e-IDs will very likely be lodged on each individual’s smartphone, through a personalized QR code, which will include your health data, purchasing habits, lifestyle data and a zillion more points of information. Eventually, the centrally controlled QR code knows more about you, than you know about yourself.

What if you do not have a smartphone? You may simply become a “nobody” – with access to nothing. No matter what authorities tell you – lie to you now, to sooth your mind, “that an e-ID is not obligatory”. That is in practice pure BS, as the time will come, whether compulsory or not, you will not be able to do anything without an e-ID.

But, if you are a member of an ever-growing group of cellphone objectors, throwing that away – returning to an analog life, a life we happily and largely had until close to the turn of the millennium; barely a bit more than a quarter of a century back. It should not be impossible to return to these days. Should it?

About the QR code. QR stands for “Quick Response,” referring to a type of barcode that stores information for rapid access via a smartphone. It is a two-dimensional square matrix that can hold an almost unlimited amount of data.

Remember, every time you go to a restaurant, museum or else, where they offer you to scan a QR code to read the menu or their program, you are recorded and centrally controlled, contributing to your own lifestyle profile, to be on record by the central control-masters.

Just imagine, what happens when your smartphone is lost, or stolen or hacked? Not only your personal codes for bank accounts and other protected access and important data are at risk, but you become vulnerable for blackmailing of any kind.

Watch the full Whitney Webb video above.

As mentioned before, we are not there yet.

Many people in the West – even in obedient Switzerland – have started hoarding cash for what is suspected may happen perhaps soon, and especially unannounced – a financial lockdown (though Whitney did not mention a lockdown in her video, nor a timeframe), perhaps for an extended period, during which you have no access to your bank account, through whatever means – ATMs (Automated Teller Machines), debt and credit cards, various options of cellphone payment system, you name it. Nothing will work.

Cash may come in handy. Is that why the European Commission may want to ban or limit the amount of cash you are “allowed” to hold at home?

Some people could starve.

On a larger scale, Whitney also mentions the World Economic Forum (WEF), the UN (working in full collaboration with the WEF), the World Bank and the IMF as the chosen instruments to implement the UN Agenda 2030 – the achievements of the so-called sustainable development goals (SDG).

Whitney acknowledges it is the Washington Consensus in new cloths, indebting countries to the brink, as the current monetary system can survive only on debt – and on the pressure on natural, national resources that can be exerted on indebted countries through debt. It is enslavement by debt.

This is yet another means – other than the never-ending climate threat – of making us, We, the People, submissive, preparing us for what is to come.

Having said this – a real risk – it may also be another fear campaign. Such campaigns have also a purpose, mostly the same as the objective they propagate, namely making people – the masses – submissive, so that the minorities have little chance to stand up and resist.

Whatever is behind this Whitney Webb’s (maybe controlled?) video, We The People, have already witnessed and many have lived – too many miseries, atrocities, wars – threats of wars, man-made (as in geoengineering) climate disasters, so that we should not guess that it may not hit us as hard as we are made believe.

We should act now.

We are maybe five seconds before midnight. Maybe an hour before midnight.

But midnight will arrive – either as Armageddon, or as the way to the LIGHT.

It depends on us, We, The People.

This article was originally published on Global Research.

The post Cash Control, Lockdown, CBDC, Digital ID, Biometrics? appeared first on LewRockwell.

The New York Times has just published an excellent editorial on the dangerous direction in which America is headed under President Trump. It is entitled “Are We Losing Our Democracy?” The editorial lists 12 factors pointing toward America’s slide into authoritarianism. I highly recommend reading it.

Trump and the U.S. national-security establishment are now accelerating America’s slide into authoritarianism with their violent and deadly regime-change operations in Venezuela. Using the federal government’s decades-old drug-war racket, Trump, the Pentagon, and the CIA are illegally killing innocent people on the high seas, engaging in CIA interventionism inside Venezuela (including, no doubt, state-sponsored assassinations), and now threatening to launch direct military bombing attacks on Venezuela itself. As Randolph Bourne pointed out, “War is the health of the state.”

Meanwhile, after flipping back and forth on the Russia-Ukraine war, Trump seems to have finally settled on the side of Ukraine. No doubt the Pentagon played a major role in influencing Trump in this direction, given that it’s the Pentagon, operating through its Cold War dinosaur NATO, that is the entity that is actually waging war against Russia by using Ukraine as its proxy.

Why do I bring up Ukraine in the context of addressing what is going on with Venezuela? Because it’s ironic that ever since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, U.S. officials and their supporters in the mainstream press have condemned Russia for its “unprovoked” war of aggression against Ukraine, ignoring completely the role that NATO (i.e., the Pentagon) played into intentionally provoking Russia’s invasion.

Why is that ironic? Because those same U.S. officials and many of their mainstream-press acolytes are now non-plussed by the U.S. aggression against Venezuela! It’s as if the U.S. government’s aggression is no big deal while supposed Russian aggression reflects an attempt to conquer the world. (To its credit, in its editorial the New York Times condemns Trump’s and the Pentagon’s extra-judicial killings in the Caribbean as “defiance of U.S. and international law.”)

Trump’s and the Pentagon’s illegal killings in the Caribbean and the CIA’s paramilitary interventionism in Venezuela are bad enough. But make no mistake about it: If Trump launches direct military attacks on Venezuela itself, this will be one more illegal U.S. war of aggression against a country that has not attacked the United States. That’s important because that’s the type of war that was condemned as a war crime at Nuremberg. Moreover, it will be a war that is illegal under our form of constitutional government, given that the U.S. Constitution requires a congressional declaration of war before the president can wage war against another nation state.

What about the much-vaunted U.S. war on drugs? Doesn’t the U.S. government wield the legal authority to enforce its drug war against other nations?

Absolutely not! Every nation on earth has the authority to adopt its own drug policy. No nation is legally required to follow the U.S. government’s dictates on drug prohibition. If Venezuela decided to legalize drugs, that would be its prerogative. By the same token, if the Venezuelan government has drug laws but declines to enforce them, that too is its prerogative. If the Venezuelan government decided to do nothing about drug cartels and drug gangs producing, selling, and exporting drugs, that also would be its prerogative. No nation-state has the legal duty to adopt the U.S. government’s decades-old racket of drug prohibition.

Thus, President Trump’s, the Pentagon’s, and the CIA’s use of their crooked, corrupt, deadly, and destructive drug-war racket to attack and bomb Venezuela will be as illegitimate as President Bush’s, the Pentagon’s, and the CIA’s bogus use of WMDs to attack Iraq. No nation-state has the legitimate authority to attack another nation state — and kill innocent people in the process — in the purported attempt to enforce its own morally bankrupt policy of drug prohibition.

As I pointed out last July —before Trump took steps to concoct the Venezuela crisis — Americans had better brace themselves for another foreign war — as a way to quell the MAGA rebellion over the Jeffrey Epstein files. If that was, in fact, why Trump concocted this crisis, his strategy has worked brilliantly. Excited over the prospect of a regime-change war against Venezuela, Trump’s MAGA supporters have forgotten their Epstein rebellion, and, for all practical purposes, their rebellion is over. The Epstein files will remain secret.

And make no mistake about it: If Trump uses the drug war to launch a regime-change war against Venezuela, America will slide even further into authoritarianism. But of course, that’s what some people would call making America great again.

Reprinted with permission from Future of Freedom Foundation.

The post Another Regime-Change War Will Accelerate America’s Slide into Authoritarianism appeared first on LewRockwell.

In the grim theater of the NATO-orchestrated Ukrainian conflict, the latest events have once again laid bare the rot at the heart of the Neo-Nazi junta. What began as a US-engineered attempt to bleed Moscow dry has devolved into a farce of self-inflicted wounds, mass desertions and brazen acts of sabotage and terrorism that even the staunchest Atlanticist mouthpieces can no longer whitewash.

Three stark vignettes from the frontlines and beyond — a “suspicious” refinery blaze in Hungary, the hemorrhage of Ukrainian youth across borders and Vladimir Putin’s unflinching invitation to the world to witness the Kiev regime’s encircled doom — paint a portrait of a collapsing proxy state lashing out in panic. This is not the triumph of “democracy” peddled by Washington DC, but a death rattle of an empire’s gamble gone awry, where the multipolar world asserts itself against the unipolar delusions of the collective West.

All of us “conspiracy theorists” were quite intrigued by the “mysterious” explosion that occurred at Hungary’s Danube Refinery in Szazhalombatta on October 21, a facility owned by the MOL Group that processes 14.2 million tons of Russian crude annually via the Druzhba pipeline. It happened mere hours after a similar incident at Romania’s Petromidia refinery, with both hubs refining Russian crude. Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban, one of a handful of European leaders resisting the bureaucratic dictatorship in Brussels, didn’t really buy the whole “just a coincidence” narrative.

“The investigation is in full swing. We still do not know whether it was an accident, malfunction or outside attack,” Orban said, adding: “The Polish foreign minister advised the Ukrainians to blow up the Druzhba oil pipeline. Let’s hope it’s not that kind of case.”

Obviously, his words are laced with the dry irony of a man who has seen how the so-called “rules-based world order” works. Namely, arbitrary arson whenever it’s convenient is the political West’s primary modus operandi. Not to mention the Neo-Nazi junta’s propensity to blow up people or things it doesn’t like. Orban’s “hint” at these threats and “potential” perpetrators is a chilling reminder of how Eastern European supposed “NATO allies” (in reality, vassals and satellite states) are ready to sever their own economic lifelines in service to Washington DC’s sanctions regime and war profiteering.

It should also be noted that these “isolated infrastructure mishaps” have become quite common, especially in the last three years. Some countries, such as Serbia, experienced this decades ago, particularly during the direct NATO aggression in 1999, when “humanitarian interventionism” was used to mask the political West’s destruction of Serbian infrastructure.

And just like the US/NATO used intelligence assets on the ground to conduct such “humanitarianism”, it does the same in NATO-occupied Ukraine and elsewhere in Eastern Europe. The Kiev regime’s SBU and GUR, flush with CIA black budgets, have a proven track record of terrorist and sabotage attacks. The latest explosions “coincide” with Washington DC’s sanctions aimed against Russian energy exports. Orban directed MOL to hold energy prices steady for Hungarian consumers, underscoring the real stakes – energy security and the survival of economic sovereignty.

The Kiev regime’s likely involvement marks a new low, as this is not just an attack on a neutral neighbor that has been sending actual humanitarian aid, but a suicidal strike at Europe’s last shreds of energy autonomy, forcing reliance on exorbitantly expensive LNG imports from American fracking barons. And yet, amid its pyromaniacal folly, the Neo-Nazi junta keeps ignoring the tragedy of vanishing generations from NATO-occupied Ukraine. This demographic catastrophe lays waste to Zelensky’s hollow boasts of resilience, as in the last several months alone, hundreds of thousands have left the unfortunate country. Namely, since August 26, when the Kiev regime eased exit restrictions for men aged 18-22, nearly 100,000 moved to Poland alone, demonstrating that much (if not most) of the Ukrainian youth sees the NATO-occupied land as no more than an open-air prison. Given how the Neo-Nazi junta treats the populace, this analogy is more than fitting.

With such a massive exodus of young men, any “surge of volunteers” promised by Zelensky’s propagandists will remain confined to countless pipedream “victory plans” on the Kiev regime frontman’s table. This is no mere migration, but a referendum on forced conscription into the NATO-orchestrated meat grinder in Eastern Ukraine. Namely, while restrictions for men aged 18-22 were loosened, they remain in place for everyone else under 60. Entire generations of Ukrainians remain shackled by draconian martial law rules that make them eligible to be sent to certain death. The mainstream propaganda machine keeps trying to hide the disastrous situation on the frontlines as attrition rates devour battalions in mere days. And yet, NATO keeps insisting that the Kiev regime mobilize more men. Unsurprisingly, the latter usually retorts with more begmanding for weapons and munitions, as equipment losses make mobilizing additional troops pointless.

The youth, undoubtedly advised by parents and grandparents, uses this opportunity to slip across the border, where cheap labor seems like a far more attractive alternative to suicidal trench warfare. The implications are seismic: a hollowed-out military that largely exists on paper only, labor shortages crippling reconstruction fantasies and a devastated social fabric.

As the country experiences an unrelenting demographic collapse, this desertion wave signals that NATO-occupied Ukraine will become yet another society of “lost generations”. And they’re going to be the “lucky ones”, as millions of others are already dead or maimed for life. Amid this disaster, new cauldrons boil over in the Donbass, as the Russian military continues with its meticulous, yet unrelenting advance. Namely, at least 10,000 Ukrainian soldiers are now encircled in the directions of Kupyansk, Krasnoarmeysk (renamed to Pokrovsk in 2016) and Myrnograd.

President Vladimir Putin called upon these troops to surrender, but the Neo-Nazi junta gave orders to fight to “the last Ukrainian”, a fitting echo of Nazi Germany’s desperation in the aftermath of the pivotal Battle of Stalingrad. Thousands more are in jeopardy because of this stubbornness, while any military logic goes out the window, given that the entire Donbass frontline could soon collapse. Although he can simply press on and claim an easy win, President Putin, the “bloodthirsty tyrant” he is, effectively offered journalists from around the world to oversee the surrender of Ukrainian troops. Alongside his Defense Minister Andrei Belousov, he offered a humanitarian pause, two, three or six hours, to allow reporters to “see with their own eyes what’s going on”, converse with the besieged and depart unscathed. This is Moscow’s masterclass in surgical debunking of NATO’s narrative fog used by CNN and BBC to peddle tales of Russian “overstretch” and Ukrainian “heroism”.

And yet, the Neo-Nazi junta is responding by burrowing its head deeper in the sand. Its propaganda machine reports that “significant areas have already been infiltrated by the occupiers”. In other words, advancing Russian troops are “seamlessly” and “magically” entering these cauldrons, despite “heroic resistance”. Who in their right mind would believe this?

Well, certainly not hundreds of thousands of young Ukrainians fleeing this NATO-run hell on Earth. We can expect to see more of the Kiev regime’s desperation that breeds theater in the coming days and weeks, as such a disastrous defeat needs to be cushioned with “strategic victories”, like murdering civilians in terrorist attacks. For NATO, this is a rather “unpleasant” matter, as it poured trillions into the Kiev regime sinkhole, but all it got are sabotaged refineries straining EU unity, fleeing conscripts mocking “unwavering support” and encircled troops that no amount of Western “wunderwaffen” can untrap.

This article was originally published on InfoBrics.

The post Young Ukrainians Flee Suicidal Military Tactics While Kiev Regime Targets Hungary and Romania appeared first on LewRockwell.

Last week U.S. President Donald Trump published a confused tweet about nuclear testing:

…  Because of other countries testing programs, I have instructed the Department of War to start testing our Nuclear Weapons on an equal basis.  …

Some media panicky wrote that Trump had ordered to detonate nuclear warheads.

I disagreed with that interpretation:

All nuclear warheads the U.S. has are under the control of the Department of Energy. It is the sole agency that can do test explosions of nuclear warheads. The nuclear delivery vehicles which are used to deploy the war heads are under the control of the Department of Defense (or ‘Department of War’ as Trump calls it).

Trump said “Because of other countries testing programs” and “start testing … on an equal basis” both in reference of nuclear delivery vehicle tests of other countries.

Trump thereby likely meant to order the DoD to test its nuclear delivery vehicles, just like Russia has recently done. He did not order the DoE to test nuclear war heads.

The testing of nuclear delivery vehicles, like intercontinental missiles, is a routine that has been done every year since those exist.

It is nothing to panic about.

On Sunday the Energy Secretary confirms that no nuclear explosions are involved (archived):

The nuclear testing ordered by President Trump will not involve nuclear explosions, U.S. Energy Secretary Chris Wright said on Sunday, adding that the testing would involve “the other parts of a nuclear weapon” to ensure they are working properly.

Mr. Wright’s comments came four days after Mr. Trump made the declaration that he was ordering the U.S. military to resume nuclear testing “on an equal basis” with other countries, raising the specter of a return to the worst days of the Cold War.

“I think the tests we’re talking about right now are systems tests,” Mr. Wright said in an interview on the Fox News show “The Sunday Briefing.” “These are not nuclear explosions. These are what we call noncritical explosions.”

Noncritical or subcritical explosion test are those where, for example, the chemical explosives which, within a nuclear warhead, are supposed to initiate the nuclear fission are tested for their stability. That is, like testing the wiring of a warhead detonator, routine stuff which every country that has nuclear weapons does on a regular basis.

The Los Alamos National Laboratory is where the U.S. is doing these tests:

Subcritical experiments allow researchers to evaluate the behavior of nuclear materials (usually plutonium) in combination with high explosives. This configuration mimics the fission stage of a modern nuclear weapon. However, subcrits remain below the threshold of reaching criticality. No critical mass is formed, and no self-sustaining nuclear chain reaction occurs—there is no nuclear explosion.
…
Although subcrits don’t create self-sustaining nuclear reactions, in many ways, they harken back to the days of full-scale nuclear testing. Since the 1992 moratorium on full-scale nuclear testing, subcrits have provided valuable data related to weapons design, safety, materials, aging, and more. This information helps scientists determine if America’s nuclear weapons will work as intended.

These experiments are legit even under the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty. They are, just as I had said, no need to panic.

Reprinted with permission from Moon of Alabama.

The post Trump’s Nuclear Weapon Tests Won’t Include Nuke Explosions appeared first on LewRockwell.

It should come as no surprise that Russia has spent so much money miniaturizing nuclear power plants and equipping its delivery systems with them: 9M730 Burevestnik missiles and Status-6 Poseidon torpedoes. The United States is dispersing its nuclear technology by providing Australia and South Korea with nuclear-powered submarines, and by supplying Ukraine with long-range missiles. But in this arena, the Pentagon is technically outmatched.

US President Donald Trump hailed the agreement with Chinese President Xi Jinping as a major success. The United States will reduce the tariff on major Chinese goods by 10%, bringing it down to 47%. In exchange, China will resume purchasing US soybeans and postpone for one year the restrictions on rare earth mineral exports to the US. In reality, this is a limited and precarious trade truce.

Significant was the statement made by Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi before the meeting between Xi Jinping and Donald Trump. He warned that “a multipolar world is emerging,” urging an end to “the politicization of economic and trade issues, the artificial fragmentation of global markets, and the use of trade wars and tariff battles.” “The frequent withdrawal from agreements and the failure to uphold commitments, while blocs and cliques enthusiastically form, have subjected multilateralism to unprecedented challenges,” Wang asserted, without naming specific countries but clearly referring to the United States.

During the meeting, President Xi Jinping emphasized, “China and the United States should be partners and friends. This is what history has taught us and what reality demands.” The United States’ position is demonstrated by the fact that, just minutes before the meeting with Xi Jinping, Trump stated he had ordered the Pentagon to launch nuclear weapons tests “on an equal footing” with China and Russia. In reality, China has not tested nuclear weapons since 1996, and Russia has not tested them since 1990. And although the United States has never ratified the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty, which prohibits the detonation of such weapons, past presidents have adhered to the Treaty.

On Truth Social, Trump claimed that Beijing currently ranks third in the world in terms of nuclear weapons, after Russia and the United States, but that “within five years it will be on par with us.” Trump fails to mention that China maintained a limited nuclear arsenal for decades, consisting mostly of medium-range defensive weapons unable to reach the United States, and that it began producing long-range nuclear weapons after the United States threateningly deployed nuclear weapons on its border.

At the same time, Trump gave South Korea the green light to build a nuclear-powered submarine capable of carrying nuclear missiles. The submarine will be built in the United States at a shipyard purchased by a South Korean company in 2024. Australia, too, through the AUKUS agreement with the United States and Great Britain, will be able to acquire nuclear-capable attack submarines clearly aimed at China and Russia. In Europe, Ukraine is receiving, via NATO under US command, weapons with increasingly long ranges capable of striking targets deep inside Russian territory. Soon, weapons of this type could be manufactured directly in Ukraine through “joint production” agreements with NATO defense industries. Ukraine could thus possess weapons with dual conventional and nuclear capabilities directed against Russia.


It should come as no surprise that, in such a situation, Russia is producing and testing newly designed nuclear delivery systems: the Burevestnik nuclear-powered cruise missile, capable of striking heavily fortified targets at any distance, and the Poseidon nuclear-powered underwater vehicle, capable of autonomously reaching enemy shores and triggering a radioactive tsunami with the underwater detonation of a high-yield nuclear warhead. A weapon analogous to the Russian Poseidon is likely also being developed by China.

This article was originally published on Voltaire.net.

The post The Policy of Nuclear Gunboats appeared first on LewRockwell.

Two Democrat federal judges are doing their best to give President Trump the budgetary authority that Congress refuses to use, and Trump looks the gift horse in the mouth.  Instead of bickering with the judges, he should just accept their gift.  It would allow a smooth transaction from a dysfunctional democracy riven with faction and hate into a well functioning autocracy free of special interest control of a corrupt legislature.

President Trump has been ordered by the judiciary to begin making SNAP payments on November 5 despite the absence of a congressional authorization.  Some say this is rule by judges.  I see it as judicial recognition that US democracy is so dysfunctional it must be replaced by an autocrat who can keep the government functioning.  This is the end fate of all democracies, and America has now reached this point.

Obama-appointed US federal district judge John McConnell has ordered Trump to pay the 42 million Americans with entitlements to working Americans’ incomes the benefits in the absence of Congressional authorization.  

The Democrats refuse to pass a budget because they say Trump is “crushing people all across the country” by attempting to limit free health care to immigrant-invaders who walked into the US to collect free food, housing, and medical care.

As it is more important to Democrats that immigrant-invaders are supported by American taxpayers than to continue legislative control over the federal budget, Trump should accept the gift of power and dispense with the no longer needed Congress.  

The post Trump Should Accept the Gift the Democrat Judges Are Trying To Give Him appeared first on LewRockwell.

Nine trans women; that is, men who want to be women, according to Glamour UK.

The post And the Woman of the Year Is… appeared first on LewRockwell.

Lew,

The theory that an exploding microphone was involved in the death of Charlie Kirk and the possibility that Israeli intelligence played a role is gaining traction. Former Mossad chief Yossi Cohen tells us the manipulated equipment method has been a reality since at least 2002 and deployed in virtually every country in the world. The use of exploding walkie talkies and pagers by the IDF in Lebanon and elsewhere is common knowledge. Jon Bray, who has 8000+ followers on X (he suspects his reach is being suppressed), came up with the highly technical theory and provides details with the expertise of an engineer. He contends Kirk’s wireless mic contained an explosive with a pellet that propelled into and expelled out of his neck, making the entry wound also the exit wound. Many believe an additional simultaneous event occurred, possibly a shot from Charlie’s right side. This is the article that includes the interview with Cohen. See here.

Jon Bray has posted a video incorporating Cohen’s revelations with his own work. See here.

The post The Manipulated Equipment Method and the Charlie Kirk Assassination appeared first on LewRockwell.

Lew,

Turning Point USA, co-founded by Charlie Kirk, started as a sort of Mises Institute for college kids according to Baron Coleman, an important independent journalist on Kirk’s assassination. Coleman says TPUSA did not begin as a religious organization or a non-profit focusing on cultural issues, but rather its founding mission was economic liberty. This makes sense since Kirk began his political activism as a teenager attending Tea Party events. As you well know, Ron Paul is a proponent of Austrian economics and is the philosophical and ideological father of the Tea Party movement. Coleman mentions the Mises Institute at 1:38 in this video. Link:

Coleman, who has a legal background, has reported that many individuals were doing Google searches on people and places connected to the Kirk assassination months prior to the tragic event on 9/10. The searches were from Israel and Washington, DC. Google Trends tracks IP addresses, and while those addresses remain confidential, the location of where those searches origin is revealed. 

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Writes Bill Madden:

I think that both major political parties are two of many conduits of influence and control flowing from our super-rich controllers to the ignorant and apathetic American masses.  President Biden and most Democrats were “influenced” to flood the country with poor, uneducated people from third-world countries while the Republicans were obviously “influenced” to do nothing.

When people argue that our country was built by immigrants, they don’t seem to understand that the immigrants who built our country were 90% European ancestry.  When Lockheed opened a manufacturing plant for political reasons in Marietta, GA, they proved to the world that they could teach farmers to build aircraft.  It just took a lot of time and money.  I feel the same way about Biden’s illegals.  It might take fifty years just to get them off of the government’s welfare programs. 

We shouldn’t tolerate the treatment that is being forced on us by what are, for the most part, whores for special interests.

The post Hummm? appeared first on LewRockwell.

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

____________________________________________________________________________________

(Versione audio della traduzione disponibile qui: https://open.substack.com/pub/fsimoncelli/p/cosa-sapere-sullinseminazione-delle)

Sono trascorse tre settimane da quando un violento temporale ha scatenato catastrofiche inondazioni nella regione collinare del Texas, uccidendo 135 persone tra uomini, donne e bambini.

Tra gli sforzi di salvataggio e recupero, alcuni hanno attribuito le inondazioni alla società di inseminazione delle nuvole Rainmaker Technology Corporation e al suo amministratore delegato, Augustus Doricko, che ha ricevuto minacce di morte dopo che l'operazione di inseminazione delle nuvole della sua azienda, a 130 miglia dalla zona dell'alluvione, ha attirato l'attenzione del pubblico.

L'inseminazione delle nuvole è l'atto di far piovere da cumuli già esistenti su una determinata area; non aggiunge umidità all'atmosfera.

L'azienda di Doricko ha condotto operazioni programmate di inseminazione delle nuvole nella contea di Karnes, a Sud-est del luogo in cui si è verificata la tempesta, e sia lui che le autorità statali hanno spiegato che tali attività non hanno avuto alcun effetto sull'alluvione.

Tuttavia voci insistenti, unite al verificarsi di altre catastrofiche inondazioni nella Carolina del Nord e nel Nuovo Messico, continuano a far sì che i metodi di inseminazione delle nuvole e di modificazione del clima siano al centro dell'attenzione.

“Le inondazioni in Texas sono una tragedia [...]. Più di ogni altra cosa dovremmo preoccuparci di prenderci cura di loro [delle vittime]”, ha detto Doricko a The Epoch Times. “Ma per quanto riguarda le persone che ci ritenevano responsabili, o che avevano domande sulle nostre operazioni, ho accolto con favore l'opportunità di informare la gente”.

Cosa vuol dire inseminare le nuvole?

L'inseminazione delle nuvole non crea nuove nuvole, piuttosto consiste nel far volare un aereo, o un drone, nelle nuvole che si formano naturalmente e rilasciare al loro interno piccole quantità di ioduro d'argento e sale da cucina.

Queste particelle aggiunte estraggono il vapore acqueo dalle nuvole, dando luogo a precipitazioni forzate, sotto forma di pioggia o neve.

“Lo ioduro d'argento è un agente di inseminazione preferito perché la sua struttura cristallina è quasi identica a quella del cristallo di ghiaccio naturale”, afferma il Dipartimento delle Licenze e della Regolamentazione del Texas (TDLR) sul suo sito web. “Quando posizionato nella parte superiore della nube convettiva in espansione, ricca di goccioline surraffreddate, il cristallo di ioduro d'argento può crescere rapidamente sfruttando quel vasto campo di umidità disponibile”.

“Nel giro di pochi istanti il cristallo di ghiaccio si trasforma in una grande goccia di pioggia, abbastanza pesante da cadere attraverso la massa di nuvole come un pozzo di pioggia”, aggiunge il dipartimento.

Secondo la legge statale il TDLR è responsabile della regolamentazione nell'uso dell'inseminazione delle nuvole attraverso una procedura di licenza e autorizzazione, ed è inoltre incaricato di promuoverne lo sviluppo e la dimostrazione attraverso la ricerca.

Questa tecnologia ha debuttato circa 80 anni fa: i primi test furono condotti per aumentare il manto nevoso a New York nel 1945. Da allora è stata utilizzata in vari stati per aumentare il manto nevoso, oltre a fornire un po' di sollievo ai terreni agricoli nei periodi di siccità e a ricostituire le falde acquifere.

Nel caso di Rainmaker, il team ha effettuato un volo di 19 minuti il 2 luglio per inseminare due nuvole per conto della South Texas Weather Modification Association, al fine di aumentare i livelli delle falde acquifere. L'associazione, un'organizzazione no-profit che copre 10 contee e ha sede a Pleasanton, in Texas, è finanziata dai distretti idrici locali e dalle commissioni di contea.

Le due nubi inseminate “sono persistite per circa due ore dopo l'inseminazione prima di dissiparsi” tra le 15:00 e le 16:00, ha scritto Doricko in un post del 5 luglio su Twitter.

Did Rainmaker conduct any operations that could have impacted the floods? No.

The last seeding mission prior to the July 4th event was during the early afternoon of July 2nd, when a brief cloud seeding mission was flown over the eastern portions of south-central Texas, and two…

“Le nuvole naturali hanno in genere una durata che va dai 30 minuti a qualche ora al massimo, e persino i sistemi di tempesta più persistenti raramente mantengono la stessa struttura nuvolosa per più di 12-18 ore”, ha affermato.

Doricko ha dichiarato a The Epoch Times che, in molti casi, l'inseminazione delle nuvole è l'unica opzione logica per risolvere il fabbisogno idrico nell'entroterra occidentale e nelle zone costiere, nonostante i tentativi di utilizzare l'acqua di mare attraverso la desalinizzazione.

“La stragrande maggioranza dell'acqua che attraversa la troposfera negli Stati Uniti viene semplicemente riciclata dall'oceano e non precipita su di esso”, ha affermato Doricko. “Quindi possiamo prelevare una piccola percentuale in più di quell'acqua direttamente sopra le nostre teste e cambiare radicalmente l'approvvigionamento idrico nell'Ovest americano”.

Dove e quando avviene l'inseminazione delle nuvole?

Doricko ha dichiarato a The Epoch Times che la sua azienda conduce operazioni di inseminazione delle nuvole anche nello Utah, nella California meridionale, in Colorado e in Oregon.

Solo nello stato del Texas sono in corso da decenni numerosi progetti di modificazione meteorologica che interessano decine di milioni di acri, ma tutte le attività sono state sospese dopo le inondazioni.

L'inseminazione delle nuvole può essere effettuata in vari periodi dell'anno. L'azienda di Doricko gestisce un'operazione stagionale nello Utah da ottobre ad aprile, integrando il manto nevoso in previsione di un suo scioglimento precoce.

“È la stagione con le nuvole più fredde, quindi è proprio in quella finestra temporale che si verificano le maggiori opportunità di inseminazione; poi la neve che produciamo agisce come una sorta di batteria naturale di acqua che si scioglie e poi si disperde nei fiumi e nelle falde acquifere nel corso della stagione secca”.

Doricko ha sottolineato che le operazioni hanno un effetto interstatale.

“Se produciamo più neve in Colorado, non ne trarrà beneficio solo il Colorado, giusto? Ne trarranno beneficio anche lo Utah, il New Mexico e tutti gli altri stati del bacino del fiume Colorado”, ha dichiarato a The Epoch Times.

“Quindi è naturale che ci sia una collaborazione interstatale e possibilmente una collaborazione e una supervisione federale su queste cose, perché l'acqua ha un impatto su tutti nel bacino”.

“E in una certa misura lo vediamo già quando gli stati del bacino inferiore, come California, Nevada e Arizona, finanziano operazioni di inseminazione delle nuvole negli stati della regione superiore perché sono beneficiari del manto nevoso presente in quelle zone”, ha aggiunto.

Tuttavia tutte le operazioni di inseminazione delle nuvole richiedono quelli che lui chiama “criteri di sospensione qualificati”.

“Se c'è il rischio di inondazioni, se c'è un forte temporale, se i bacini sono troppo pieni, allora bisogna sospendere le operazioni anche quando i clienti vogliono più acqua, per non arrecare danni”, ha affermato Doricko.

Ad esempio, in Texas tutte le attività di inseminazione delle nuvole sono state sospese a causa delle forti piogge cadute nello stato fino a luglio.

Segnalazione e regolamentazione dell'inseminazione delle nuvole

Doricko ha spiegato che la maggior parte dei suoi clienti sono enti governativi di qualche livello, come i dipartimenti statali dell'agricoltura o i lavori pubblici comunali.

“L'acqua è un bene pubblico”, ha affermato.

“Ci sono aziende agricole, ecosistemi, servizi residenziali, centrali idroelettriche e industrie, tutti quanti hanno bisogno di acqua. E l'acqua che deriva dall'inseminazione delle nuvole non entra nelle tubature e non raggiunge una specifica abitazione; precipita lungo un bacino idrografico, e poi scorre nei fiumi e tutti attingono dai bacini idrici o dalle falde acquifere. È quindi naturale che molti dei nostri clienti facciano parte di enti governativi”, ha aggiunto Doricko.

La legge federale richiede che le operazioni di inseminazione delle nuvole siano segnalate alla National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) con almeno 10 giorni di anticipo. Tuttavia la NOAA non ha l'autorità di regolamentare tale pratica.

Norme separate sono in vigore anche a livello statale. In Texas, ad esempio, i potenziali “inseminatori di nuvole” devono ottenere una licenza e un permesso statali per la modificazione meteorologica.

“Una persona o un'organizzazione che voglia impegnarsi nella modifica del clima deve presentare domanda al TDLR e dimostrare di possedere sufficienti competenze meteorologiche e di soddisfare i requisiti di sicurezza finanziaria e altri requisiti”, ha dichiarato lo stesso dipartimento a The Epoch Times in un'e-mail.

“La legge del Texas consente ai licenziatari di condurre operazioni contrattuali in determinate circostanze, ma non supervisioniamo il processo di assegnazione dei contratti da parte dei licenziatari, se non assicurandoci che la persona che esegue la modifica meteorologica soddisfi i requisiti necessari”.

Per quanto riguarda la trasparenza dettagliata sulle operazioni eseguite, non ci sono requisiti. Doricko ha suggerito che dovrebbe essere richiesta maggiore trasparenza a livello federale, in modo che possano essere forniti al pubblico dati più concreti sull'efficacia dell'inseminazione delle nuvole per il Paese.

Doricko spera che nel prossimo futuro vengano emanate ulteriori normative federali e, con esse, anche più ricerche.

Ricerca sull'inseminazione delle nuvole, effetti collaterali, costi

La ricerca sull'inseminazione delle nuvole e sui suoi effetti è andata avanti sin da quando questa pratica è iniziata alla fine degli anni '40.

Ad esempio, il Salt River Project (SRP) in Arizona ha dichiarato a The Epoch Times di aver recentemente completato un progetto di ricerca sulla “fattibilità dell'inseminazione delle nuvole invernali” nello stato, basato su modelli computerizzati.

“Al momento l'SRP non sta partecipando ad alcun volo di inseminazione delle nuvole e non ci sono piani per il prossimo futuro”, ha affermato un portavoce del progetto in un'e-mail.

“I nostri esperti in materia di acqua stanno attualmente analizzando i dati e al momento non abbiamo informazioni da condividere in merito alla siccità e al sostegno all'agricoltura”.

Doricko ha affermato che la quantità di ioduro d'argento utilizzata nelle operazioni di inseminazione delle nuvole è minima e che utilizzarne 50 grammi causerebbe la dispersione delle precipitazioni su centinaia di chilometri quadrati.

Finora la ricerca non ha evidenziato effetti collaterali negativi derivanti dall'uso dello ioduro d'argento.

Il TDLR afferma sul suo sito web che “non sono stati osservati impatti ambientali significativi in ​​relazione alle operazioni di inseminazione delle nuvole, compresi i progetti esistenti da 30-40 anni” e che la quantità di argento rilevata nei campioni di acqua piovana raccolti era pari a una concentrazione di una parte su 10 miliardi.

“Tale concentrazione è ben al di sotto di quella accettabile di 50 microgrammi per litro, come stabilito dal Servizio Sanitario Pubblico degli Stati Uniti”, afferma il TDLR sul suo sito web. “Molte aree in cui viene praticata l'inseminazione delle nuvole presentano concentrazioni di argento nel terreno molto più elevate di quelle riscontrate nelle precipitazioni provenienti dalle nuvole inseminate”.

“Inoltre la concentrazione di iodio nel sale iodato utilizzato per condire gli alimenti è di gran lunga superiore a quella riscontrata nell'acqua piovana proveniente da una nuvola inseminata”.

La Divisione delle Risorse Idriche dello Utah, che opera sotto il Dipartimento delle Risorse Naturali dello Stato, afferma che l'inseminazione delle nuvole si è rivelata economicamente vantaggiosa. La divisione ha affermato che per aumentare la precipitazione media del manto nevoso del 5-15%, servono dai $5 ai $10 per acro-piede di acqua aggiuntiva.

L'inseminazione delle nuvole “non funziona ovunque”, ha affermato la divisione. “Le condizioni devono essere giuste. Fortunatamente la topografia, il clima e i bacini idrici dello Utah rendono l'inseminazione delle nuvole invernale conveniente”.

Secondo uno studio del 2019 pubblicato dal Dipartimento di Agroalimentare ed Economia Applicata della North Dakota State University, questa pratica si è rivelata vantaggiosa anche dal punto di vista finanziario nel Dakota del Nord. Lo studio ha dimostrato che le operazioni di inseminazione delle nuvole del North Dakota Cloud Modification Project hanno aumentato le precipitazioni nei terreni agricoli, ma hanno anche portato ulteriori benefici al settore agricolo se combinate con gli sforzi per ridurre la grandine che distrugge i raccolti in quantità annuali.

L'università ha studiato nove colture dal 2008 al 2017 e ha scoperto che l'inseminazione delle nuvole ha prodotto un beneficio annuo compreso tra i $12,20 e i $21,16 per acro piantato, con un costo di circa $0,40 per acro piantato.

“Un aumento delle precipitazioni del 10% e una riduzione del 45% della grandine per acro piantato producono un ritorno economico stimato di oltre $53 per ogni dollaro speso nel programma”, ha osservato lo studio.

Riducendo l'aumento delle precipitazioni al 5%, il ritorno è stato di circa $31 per ogni dollaro speso.

Scie di condensazione e geoingegneria

L'inseminazione delle nuvole è diversa dalle scie di condensazione, chiamate anche scie chimiche, e dalla geoingegneria.

Doricko ha citato la nuova pagina web dell'Agenzia per la protezione dell'ambiente (EPA), che spiega che le scie di condensazione sono un fenomeno normale degli aerei che volano in aria fredda.

La geoingegneria, d'altra parte, è una questione diversa. Un tipo di intervento è la modifica della radiazione solare, che consiste nell'immettere particelle riflettenti nell'atmosfera per attenuare i raggi solari e raffreddare la Terra. A differenza delle scie di condensazione, è un'attività che, secondo Doricko, va presa sul serio.

“Oscurare il sole in questo modo è un'altra tecnologia che dobbiamo prendere molto sul serio”, ha detto. “Non è inseminazione delle nuvole. Avviene anch'essa nell'atmosfera, ma per il resto non è in alcun modo correlata all'inseminazione delle nuvole”.

Ha affermato che mentre i piccoli cristalli utilizzati nell'inseminazione delle nuvole vengono rigettati sulla Terra dopo che le nuvole si sono dissipate e hanno effetto solo su un'area specifica per un breve periodo di tempo, queste altre particelle restano nell'atmosfera e hanno un effetto generalizzato immediato.

“Le persone preoccupate per questo fenomeno hanno ragione a esserlo, perché si tratta di una tecnologia reale che alcune persone sono interessate a implementare”, ha affermato.

Cambiare per sempre

In diversi stati si stanno ora muovendo azioni per vietare non solo l'inseminazione delle nuvole, ma anche la modifica del clima in generale e, come minimo, per riacquistare autorità su questa pratica.

A maggio la Florida ha approvato una legge che vieta ogni forma di modificazione del clima all'interno dei suoi confini, sebbene in precedenza fosse consentita l'inseminazione delle nuvole, autorizzata dal Dipartimento per la protezione ambientale dello stato.

Il senatore dello stato, Jay Collins, ha dichiarato di aver votato a favore del disegno di legge “per garantire l'istituzione di garanzie legali contro tentativi non autorizzati e non regolamentati di alterare il clima all'interno dello Stato”.

“Ciò tutela ulteriormente la sovranità della salute pubblica e dà ai cittadini della Florida la certezza che le attività di modificazione del clima non possano procedere senza supervisione”, ha dichiarato Collins a The Epoch Times.

Tuttavia alcuni legislatori a livello federale, tra cui la deputata Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.), vogliono che questa pratica venga vietata del tutto.

“Voglio aria pulita, cieli puliti, acqua piovana pulita, falde acquifere pulite e sole proprio come Dio l'ha creato”, ha scritto in un  post su Twitter il 5 luglio. “Nessuna persona, azienda, entità o governo dovrebbe mai essere autorizzato a modificare il nostro clima con qualsiasi mezzo!”.

This is not normal.

I want clean air, clean skies, clean rain water, clean ground water, and sun shine just like God created it!!

No person, company, entity, or government should ever be allowed to modify our weather by any means possible!!

Honored to add @timburchett as a…

Ciononostante Doricko è determinato a promuovere una maggiore comprensione, accettazione e utilizzo dell'inseminazione delle nuvole in tutto il Paese. Vede la raccolta delle precipitazioni nell'oceano non solo come un mezzo per eliminare la siccità e l'essiccazione dei fiumi, ma anche per rendere più verdi i deserti e aumentare la superficie coltivabile negli Stati Uniti.

“Un tempo la Central Valley della California non era altro che deserto e palude, e abbiamo progettato canali, pompe e condutture per trasportare l'acqua e rifornire quelle fattorie, e ora è una delle regioni agricole più produttive al mondo”, ha affermato.

“Direi che sul letto di morte ciò che [vorrei] ricordare di aver fatto per i miei figli è l'estensione delle Grandi Pianure dal Texas attraverso il Texas occidentale, il Nuovo Messico, l'Arizona e la California: tutta quella terra è rigogliosa e verde”.

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

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

Lew,

November 2nd was Patrick Buchanan’s 87th birthday. Pat is a hero because he spoke truth to power, politically challenged the corrupt US Uniparty system when he ran for president three times, defended the sovereignty of America, and warned us about the collapse of Western Civilization in his book “Suicide of a Superpower.” In honor of this great man, I am sharing this devastatingly prescient interview he gave in 2012. Pat discusses his antiwar views, US interests vs. Israel’s interests, the need to bring manufacturing jobs back to the US, the cultural war in America, and the decline of Christianity. “We ain’t never gonna get back unity, cohesion and the sense of one nation and one people under God.”

The post Happy Birthday to the Great Pat Buchanan appeared first on LewRockwell.

Lew,

Del Bigtree, Informed Consent Action Network (ICAN) founder, host of The Highwire and documentary filmmaker, explained to Alex Jones how HHS Secretary RFK Jr. is making significant positive changes. While RFK Jr. fights off sabotage attempts by who knows how many of his 50,000 employees, he is taking on Big Pharma which has a stranglehold over the government and mainstream media. The removal of chemical dyes from food and lead and arsenic from baby food, and warning of the causal link between Tylenol and autism are a few of his accomplishments. Del says pharmakeia is a death cult, noting its symbol of two snakes replicating the double helix of human DNA. All the crazy ingredients in childhood vaccines – mercury, aluminum, eternal cancer and aborted baby DNA cells, are akin to a witch’s brew. See here.

Bigtree’s new documentary “An Inconvenient Study” is about the attempt to cover up a study by Henry Ford clinic Health concludes vaccinated children are six times more likely to suffer from autoimmune diseases than unvaccinated children. The secret study has since been published. See here.

The post RFK Jr.’s Success Taking on Big Pharma and An Inconvenient Study Documentary appeared first on LewRockwell.

If you judged the modern financial order by its behavior rather than its press releases, you’d think it had no conscience at all. When entire nations are crushed under debt, when pensioners are wiped out by “innovations,” and when bubbles enrich the few while immiserating the many, the institutions responsible respond with a shrug and a bonus cycle. We can’t say that bankers are monsters; yet the system itself has evolved—or been designed—to reward those who can act as though they had no empathy.

A System That Selects for Detachment

Clinical psychopathy is rare—perhaps one person in a hundred—but the behaviors that mimic it are everywhere on Wall Street and in the ministries of finance. Decades of psychological research show that corporate hierarchies amplify traits such as dominance, charm, and moral detachment. In a 2010 study by Babiak, Neumann, and Hare, roughly four percent of executives scored in the psychopathic range—four times the base rate. Similar experiments by Paul Piff at UC Berkeley found that the wealthier and more competitive the participant, the more likely they were to cheat for advantage. The lesson is simple: design a game that rewards cold calculation, and you will eventually fill it with cold calculators.

The Birth of the Moral Vacuum

Modern money creation finished the job. When money ceased to represent savings or substance and became a ledger entry created as debt, it also ceased to carry moral weight. A banker who issues a loan today doesn’t transfer stored value; he types new digits into existence. Interest then turns those digits into a claim on someone else’s future labor. The greater the leverage, the greater the bonus—until the defaults cascade and governments rush in to socialize the losses.

Mises and Rothbard warned that credit expansion unbacked by real savings plants the seeds of its own collapse. In their Austrian view, sound money rooted in market discipline is the only safeguard against the cartelization of banking and politics. But the modern order did the opposite: it merged the two (state politics and private banking) into a single machine. The result is an economy that behaves as though empathy were a design flaw.

As I explored in my book The Debt Machine: How Private Banks Engineered Global Control, this transformation wasn’t accidental; it was the logical outcome of allowing private credit creation to replace honest money. Once money became debt, conscience became optional.

Purchase here

Case Study: The 2008 Financial Crisis

Take the mortgage bubble. Banks created trillions in loans to borrowers who could never repay them, sliced those loans into derivatives, sold them to pension funds, and then insured the packages with more derivatives. When the system imploded, the same institutions were rescued with public money while millions lost homes and savings. Not one major executive went to prison.
A genuinely psychopathic person shows three traits: lack of remorse, refusal to accept responsibility, and the ability to rationalize harm. The 2008 rescue ticked all three boxes—but at the institutional, not individual, level.

Central Banking: The Cartel With a Flag

As Rothbard observed, the Federal Reserve functions as a “governmentally sponsored cartel” — a partnership of state and banking interests that privatizes profit while socializing losses. By controlling the price of money—interest rates—the Fed rewards leveraged speculation and punishes prudence. Every cycle ends the same way: excessive credit, asset inflation, collapse, bailout, repeat. Yet each new bailout is sold as “stability.” When European banks were drowning in 2011, the European Central Bank created over a trillion euros in new liquidity to buy time.

Never Let a Crisis Go to Waste

When the “COVID emergency” arrived, central banks simultaneously printed trillions and called it salvation. The same “experts” who assured us that money printing was harmless assured us that lockdowns would save the economy, that experimental mandates were acts of public virtue, and that dissent was a threat to safety.

The institutions that engineered the largest wealth transfer in history called it a public-health response. What began as a “crisis” became a test of obedience—and those who passed it were rewarded, not for wisdom, but for compliance.

Over $9 trillion was conjured in the United States alone, inflating assets for the rich while eroding the real wages of everyone else. The establishment called it stimulus; in truth, it was lucrative triage for a system already in cardiac arrest. The moral feedback loop is gone — those who cause the damage never feel the pain, and so the pathology only deepens. If 2008 revealed moral detachment, 2020 revealed something much deeper.

Psychopathy by Design

A true market punishes mistakes. A cartelized financial system eliminates punishment through political capture. Once losses are socialized and profits are private, recklessness isn’t a flaw—it’s a strategy. From the point of view of the participants, empathy, restraint, or moral hesitation are competitive disadvantages. The incentive is to externalize harm and internalize gain—precisely what a psychopath does when left unchecked.

Debt-based money ensures that this pattern is permanent. Because all money is issued as interest-bearing credit, new debt must constantly be created to service the old. If credit creation slows, defaults rise and the political class panics. Hence the endless call for “growth,” however hollow, and the refusal to confront the costs it imposes on both nature and society. A system that must expand or die will behave like a shark—efficient, unreflective, and indifferent to collateral damage.

Examples Hiding in Plain Sight

• Student-loan portfolios securitized and sold to investors while graduates drown in obligations that can’t be discharged in bankruptcy.
• Corporate buybacks funded by cheap debt, enriching executives even as companies slash long-term investment.
• Sovereign bailouts in the developing world that transfer public assets to foreign creditors under the banner of “stability.”

Each example follows the same pattern: abstract profit at the top, human cost below, and a press release assuring us it was necessary.

What Real Reform Would Look Like

Real reform begins by restoring moral feedback to money creation. That means ending the privilege of private credit creation and re-anchoring currency issuance in public accountability. The 1930s Chicago Plan, drafted by leading economists at the University of Chicago, proposed full-reserve banking—stripping private banks of their power to create money and returning that sovereign function to the people. Its logic was simple: end the privilege, end the cycle of boom and bailout. Whether through full-reserve banking, sovereign digital credit, or competing private currencies is less important than the principle: those who create money must also bear the risk of loss.

Transparency is the second pillar. No more secret facilities, no more alphabet-soup bailouts. The plumbing of money should be public knowledge, not priestly code. And finally, ethics must return to economics—not as moral posturing, but as the recognition that a society that turns every value into a price will, in time, discard every value that cannot be sold.

The Moral of the Machine

The late psychologist Hervey Cleckley defined the psychopath as a person who “knows the words but not the music.” Our financial order knows the language of prosperity but not its meaning. It can model markets to six decimal places yet cannot tell the truth about who benefits and who pays. The spreadsheets are perfect; the souls are missing.

As I examine in the book The Debt Machine, this isn’t about hating bankers or glorifying poverty—it’s about recognizing that the very architecture of money has been built to reward the traits of a machine: speed, aggression, and detachment. Unless we redesign that architecture to reward stewardship instead, we will keep mistaking the cunning of greed for intelligence or wisdom.

This is what it means to return from illusion to reality — to build an economy that serves life rather than consumes it.

Sound money, honest credit, and transparent risk are not nostalgic slogans; they are the minimum conditions for sanity in an economy. Until we recover them, we will remain ruled not by men of reason, but by a system that acts—coldly, efficiently, and predictably—like a psychopath.

The post The Psychopathic Machine: How Modern Finance Learned To Live Without Conscience appeared first on LewRockwell.

Once upon a time, in the not so distant past, Vladimir Putin wanted to join NATO. It was early in his Presidency in 2000 when he expressed interest in Russia becoming part of NATO.

In a March 2000 BBC Interview, when asked if Russia could join NATO, Putin then-Acting President, said:

“Why not? I don’t rule out such a possibility”.

Later the same year, Putin apparently raised the idea with then-President Bill Clinton, saying something to the extent, “Let’s consider an option that Russia might join NATO.” And Clinton replied, ”Why not”.

To make this accession talk even more serious, Putin raised the point with then-NATO Secretary General George Robertson. According to Robertson, Putin even insisted that Russia should be invited to join NATO as he felt Russia was too important for having to stand in line with other countries, waiting for a possible accession.

Eventually Putin was told that this was not the way it worked, that a country wanting to join needed to file a formal application.

As we all know, Russia did not join NATO. As some say, Putin felt “snubbed” having to apply as other “minor countries”. He wanted to be treated as an “equal” partner, whatever that meant. Maybe, he felt Russia should be treated as “more equal” than others.

Well, that did not work out. But not just for this minor reason. The Kremin and of course President Putin himself started realizing that NATO was expanding ever more eastwards, despite the promises made in 1990 by the Allies, when German Unification was discussed:

“NATO will move not one inch east of Berlin”, said then-US Secretary of State James Baker. He said it in February 1990 to then-Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev.

Though not in writing, such a political verbal commitment has legal standing.

Early in the first decade of the current millennium, President Putin began seeing NATO’s continued eastward expansion – despite the 1990 promise – as an increasing threat to Russia’s security. The Russian Security forces, from which Putin then and now, receives a lot of support, viewed already then membership in a western alliance as a betrayal of Russia.

The 2002 US withdrawal from the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty (ABMT) further exacerbated Russian distrust of the west. The last bits of trust went down the drain with the 2005 Orange Revolution in Ukraine, clearly initiated and fueled by the west.

Later the western (US)-sponsored Coup d’État in February 2014 in Ukraine – the beginning of the current conflict between Ukraine and Russia, accompanied by the ever-closer movement of NATO troops to the reaches of Moscow. Now (unofficially) in Kiev. And the rest is ongoing history.

Nevertheless, the question may be asked, what if Russia joined NATO in or around the year 2000?

President Putin is a clever statesman. Did he just test the waters when he asked President Bill Clinton and had apparently serious talks with NATO’s Secretary General about joining?

Or was he serious, because he foresaw what eventually happened, the breaking of the 1990 James Baker promise, and the steady eastward movement and encirclement of Russia by NATO, and hoped, as a member, as he said, a strong, “more equal” member, he could have stopped this move?

And, if it would have come down for NATO to decide on a Russian application, would the NATO Generals have accepted it? Would Russia eventually have accepted NATO membership, in a movement that became ever-more aggressive against Russia?

It is doubtful because with the fall of the Berlin Wall, NATO officially ceased to be a necessary defense force for Europe against possible (imaginary) aggressions from the Soviet Union / Russia.

NATO was never designed to be a “defense force”, but one of aggression – aggression primarily against the Soviet Union / Russia. The same as the two World Wars – their purpose was to conquer the Soviet Union / Russia, her riches, her immense territory. Still today, this is the key purpose of NATO, eventually taking over and conquering Russia, come hell or high water, or both. And in the process, destroying Europe, beginning with the neo-fascist armed to the teeth Germany and France following closely in Germany’s footsteps.

It will not happen. But this never-ending attempt may again destroy Europe, as a potential “hot” WWIII – conventional or nuclear – would most likely be fought again on European soil.

So, let us dwell a bit more on the “What if…” question.

Assuming, in a weak moment of NATO management, the top generals would have said yes to Russian accession. Where would the world stand today? Dominated by a super, unimaginable military force under one roof? A One-World Dictatorship exacerbating current Globalism to the brink… of world collapse?

Or else, would Russia have been the NATO member to convert NATO into a peace-seeking force, basically replacing the useless UN Blue Helmets and more?

Or would Russia have divided NATO into East and West – an equilibrium without an interest in fighting each other but rather in cooperating? Converting NATO into a non-armed “League of Nations”, seeking peace, not war?

Today, we have NATO and the West against the Global South, Russia, China, the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO), the BRICS-plus and the entire Global South. The west which is 15% of world population against the Global South’s 85% of world population, economically about of equal strength right now, both with more than 40% of the world’s GDP.

But financially? Who is running the world’s finances, banks, central banks, Bank for International Settlement (BIS), the Cities of London, Zurich, the Vatican?

Would a NATO-Russia alliance have dismantled NATO and the financial behemoths pulling the strings behind the organizations and institutions we see and fear? And we would have lived in a safer world? Or would we be on the way to a safer world?

Financial equality, based on sovereign national economic output, is a key element to convert the world into a chessboard of more equals, less poverty, more fair opportunities? More space for peace-based growth?

Today, a non-NATO Russia with China and the Global South – can they do it?

Point and counter-point.

Weight and Counter-weight.

What if….?

The original source of this article is Global Research.

The post ‘What If’ Russia Joined NATO? appeared first on LewRockwell.

Steele Creek Presbyterian Church.

Somehow the news that the city of Charlotte, North Carolina, would soon pass the one million mark in population did not surprise me. For the past half century the city, the largest in the Tar Heel State, has longingly looked to Atlanta as something of a model, actually hoping one day to surpass it in importance and influence commercially and financially…and to leave behind forever any semblance of its history and memories as a characteristically “Southern” city.

What this has meant is that huge areas of the surrounding county, Mecklenburg, have been literally swallowed up by the encroaching metropolis. Most all traces of its rich rural history and the hardy citizens who once populated it—many whose families settled there before the Revolutionary War—seem to have disappeared, except for an occasional historical highway marker or a random mention in some business promo.

That news put me in mind of my many boyhood days in the 1950s spent with my father’s relatives in what was then a largely still-rural, still-agricultural countryside, where reminders of an earlier history yet dotted the landscape, and where folks lived on the same plots of land that their grandparents and great-grandparents had farmed.

And I also recalled the old church that had been the center around which my father’s people had gathered. For although I am a traditional Latin Mass Catholic, my Dad’s folks were hardy Scots Presbyterians who first landed in Pennsylvania in the early 1700s and then ventured south to Piedmont North Carolina. They brought with them their Protestant faith and established early on houses of worship, which became centers of their communities.

One of those was Steele Creek Presbyterian Church. Steele Creek, the second oldest church in Mecklenburg County, was founded in 1760—265 years ago.Early in the summer of 2018 Steele Creek Church closed its doors for good. The church had decided to merge with another Presbyterian Church in the area, Pleasant Hill. The Gothic revival-style brick structure was abandoned, purchased by nearby expanding Charlotte Douglas International Airport.

As late as the early 1970s Steele Creek counted 1,000 members, but the encroaching airport and the constant deafening roar of supersonic jets every moment of the day speeding off to Munich, London, Latin America and all points in between, plus the precipitous decline in the Presbyterian Church USA, which has gone the way of all mainstream Protestant denominations and embraced the liberal woke social gospel, had brought the membership down to around 350, many of them adults who held on to the memory of a Presbyterianism that once boasted of a Reverend Robert Lewis Dabney…but now could only grasp for scraps from a barren Progressivist table.

Next to the historic 1889 building is the Steele Creek Cemetery, one of the more historic burial grounds in Piedmont North Carolina, holding over 1,700 graves, the earliest from 1763, twelve years before the onset of the Revolutionary War [See: The History of Steele Creek Presbyterian Church, 1745-1978; Third Edition, Charlotte, 1978].

Steele Creek Presbyterian Church cemetery.

In that cemetery are laid veterans of every conflict and war that the American nation has engaged in: those who served during the Revolution when the then-tiny hamlet of Charlotte served as an unwelcoming “hornet’s nest” for General Lord Cornwallis; a few who went off later to fight in Mexico or against Britain again in the early Nineteenth Century; many more who joined Confederate ranks to defend the independence and rights of North Carolina in 1861-1865; then, others who fought in the great world wars and conflicts since then. But there are others, also: husbands and wives, and children, of those who had formed up until recently a close-knit, church-oriented farming community like many spread over the Tar Heel State and the South.

Since 1777 over sixty members of my father’s family have been buried in Steele Creek’s sacred ground. Six of them are direct ancestors, including my grandfather and grandmother Cathey, my War Between the States great-grandfather, Henry Cathey [13th North Carolina Regiment], and my eight-greats grandmother, Jean, who was born in County Monaghan, Ulster, in 1692, a descendant of Scots who migrated there from Ayrshire in the early 1600s.

As a young boy I recall vividly attending the funeral of my grandfather, Charlton Graham Cathey (1958), in the old sanctuary and the impressive minister John McAlpine who comforted my grandmother who would pass on four years later in 1962, aged almost 98.

Those events remain engraved in my memory, even to the point of recalling the Protestant hymns sung—“How Firm a Foundation” and “Blessed Assurance,” two of granddad’s favorites.

But most of all, I remember that remarkable church, its strong and impressive brick structure, that aura associated with and radiated by it, which deeply connected it to the history of old Mecklenburg County, to North Carolina, and to the land and families who settled nearby, and for which it was the center of their lives for generations.

The cemetery remains in church hands, despite the shrinking congregation having departed. It is too historic, so despite some earlier efforts by the airport authority to have the graves moved, it will remain where it is for the foreseeable future. But the old 1889 structure, its brick walls and interior now silent, is deserted, owned by the airport, serving only as a disappearing memory for those who care to recall what it once meant to so many. Although the city originally designated the remaining church structure a protected historical landmark, just recently the city altered that status and expropriated twenty-three nearby acres for industrial development.

In 1904 essayist and polyglot Henry Adams, scion of the fastly extinguishing Adams family of Massachusetts, authored a marvelous little volume, Mont Saint Michel and Chartres. In it he contrasted the accomplishments of the modern age, its spirit and objectives, with those of the high Middle Ages, in particular the great works of sublime architecture created during that period. While for modernity its symbol was the dynamo, the unthinking, whirring and cold mechanical devices increasingly dominating the landscape, for the Middle Ages its endearing symbol was the Blessed Virgin, Holy Mary, whose sublime tenderness and inexhaustible love for the Faithful inspired such miraculous structures as Chartres Cathedral. Adams expresses this with a certain irony, contrasting our modern fascination with and hypnotization by machines (and now with an inhuman, impersonal technology) with the Blessed Virgin as Heavenly Queen whose centrality, reality and endless bounty are manifested exuberantly in such cathedrals. Noting the devotion to Her as our champion before the Throne of God he writes: “True it was, although one should not say it jestingly, that the Virgin embarrassed the Trinity; and perhaps this was the reason, behind all the other excellent reasons, why men loved and adored her with a passion such as no other deity has ever known …” And why she sparked such incredible creativity which mirrored that devotion and faith.

Steele Creek Church still stands as the supersonic machines speed off overhead from Douglas airport to Europe, Latin America, or maybe Cancun. In a way, like Chartres compared to the modern dynamo, there is no greater contrast than what has happened to the million-person city of Charlotte, and the remembrance of a heritage and inheritance that Steele Creek incarnated and reminds us of. Modern Charlotte and its airport make stark comparisons with the haunted walls and ancient graveyard of Steele Creek. For in the bustle of the metropolis and the incessant noise of the jets there is little memory of who we were as a people, little connection to our rich historic culture.

In the late 1950s “the Queen City” that I remember as a boy was where older families yet predominated, where my father’s people were neighbors to the families of Billy Graham and Randolph Scott, where folks could recall the area’s history. Charlotte and Mecklenburg County were still linked strongly to their traditions. Now Charlotte rivals Atlanta as a mega-metropolis, and a soul-less anthill of business, banking and international commerce, with little room for heritage, except as a veneer to attract an occasional tourist not going to a Carolina Panthers game or to some big event at the coliseum.

I forget who said it—perhaps Faulkner, maybe Louis Rubin, I cannot remember—but that if he had known what Atlanta would become today, then he would wish that Sherman had torched it more thoroughly. Given what Charlotte has become, perhaps the same sentiment might be uttered?

The last major portions of farmland out near the Catawba River that had belonged to my dad’s family since 1750 are now sold to developers and strip malls. The pre-Revolutionary War house that my father was born in back in 1908 (the last of his family to do so) is now, thankfully, preserved at the Historic Latta Plantation. But the whole region has changed radically, altered and almost unrecognizable and discordant to my memories of sixty-five years ago. Hundreds of thousands of transplants (many from up North) now make Charlotte and its suburbs home and live—if you can call it that—the frenzied life of our tawdry, commercialized age.

I am put in mind of the great Southern Regionalist writer, Donald Davidson, in his epic poem, “The Tall Men”:

This is Rupert of the House
Of Rupert, famed in history,
Pondering on his income tax,
Deducting genealogy.
Great-grandfather from a loophole
Potted Choctaws in the thicket;
Rupert, menaced by the Reds,
Scratches the Democratic ticket.
[….]
Rupert, mounting in his car
Zooms up to God in Rotary.
Grandma Rupert had ten children;
Rupert’s father begot five.
All of Rupert’s stocks and bonds
Are strained to keep one son alive.
Democracy, a fuddled wench,
Is bought from tousled bed to bed.
Bass voices in white vests defile
The echoes of great voices dead.

There are remnants of the old culture that survive, a few, but they are fast being overtaken by a triumphant “Yankee” culture which Robert Lewis Dabney warned about 150 years ago, the fear that we would, as he said, become like our conquerors of 1865. Dabney, the Old Light Presbyterian divine that he was, declared that his role was like that of Cassandra at Troy, to prophesy and speak truth, but not to be believed until too late.

My mentor Russell Kirk once told me while we were discussing the old South and the changes being inflicted on her from both without and within that “it is hard to love the gasoline station where the honeysuckle used to grow.”

Steele Creek Church and its cemetery remind us who we are and who we have been. Despite being passed by and deserted, those gravestones cry out to those who would listen and take heed.

Perhaps, then, for those who do, our watchword could be from Spanish philosopher, Miguel de Unamuno in his volume, The Tragic Sense of Life: “Our life is a hope which is continually converting itself into memory and memory in its turn begets hope.”

Is this not, then, our challenge, to keep both memory and hope alive?

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