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From the Tom Woods Letter:

Senator Lindsey Graham has been the target of criticism on the former Twitter for his recent trip to Ukraine.

The gist of it is that Graham seems to find more time for other countries than he does for his own people.

One user wrote:

Dear @LindseyGrahamSC,

Can you to explain why you still have NEVER visited western North Carolina since Hurricane Helene devastated our area…when you LIVE LESS THAN 1.5 hours from the worst disaster since Katrina…yet have found time to fly to Ukraine 9 times??!!

You do not need me to tell you, dear reader, that this is an entirely reasonable question.

There will always be tragedy and sorrow somewhere on earth. Your responsibility is still with those in your immediate circle of care: your family, your friends, your neighbors, and so on from there.

You may care for the indigent in Albania if you wish, but only after you have seen after those under your charge. This is the consensus not simply of Christian social thought, but is also the clear dictate of common sense.

In 2008, during the week that the execrable John McCain was to be officially nominated for president at that year’s Republican National Convention in St. Paul, Minnesota, Ron Paul held his Rally for the Republic at the Target Center in Minneapolis, the other of the Twin Cities. Speaking to those many thousands of people was one of the great moments of my life.

In preparation for that event Dr. Paul called and said: I want a good antiwar speaker. Do you have any suggestions?

I replied: Bill Kauffman, without a doubt.

Bill, one of the few writers whose prose I genuinely envy, wound up giving the best speech of the day.

I thought of it today as I contemplated Senator Graham’s priorities.

Bill went for the jugular in his attack on the military-industrial complex and the fake conservatives who betray every one of their stated principles — fiscal conservatism, small government, family values — in order to support it.

“The only foreign policy compatible with healthy family life,” said Bill, “is one of peace and nonintervention.”

Bill then spoke words that resonate with all normal people everywhere, describing his “love for my own place, the little postage stamp of ground on which I and my neighbors and family live, a piece of the world which means nothing to the empire, but means everything to me.”

“You can’t have a healthy home and a worldwide empire,” continued Bill. “They can’t coexist. You can’t care about Baghdad and your own backyard.

“McCain chooses Baghdad. We take our stand in our backyards, on our front porches, in neighborhood diners and sandlot baseball diamonds, and country churches, and rock and roll clubs, and volunteer fire departments, and all those preciously little voluntary institutions that are the lifeblood of this beautiful country….

“John Edwards liked to talk about the two Americas. Well, there are two Americas: the televised America, known and hated by the world, and the rest of us. Their America has shock and awe, but it has no heart, no soul, no connection to the thousand and one little Americas that produced Mother Jones and Laura Ingalls Wilder, Dizzy Dean and Booker T. Washington.

“I am of this other America. This unseen America. It is a smaller, homelier, peaceful country. And this alternative America is reasserting itself.”

Never pay for a book again: TomsFreeBooks.com

The post Lindsey Graham Is Getting Walloped appeared first on LewRockwell.

This was the mood in informed Moscow – only a few hours before the renewed Istanbul kabuki on Russia-Ukraine “negotiations”. Three key points.

1. The attack on Russian strategic bombers – part of the nuclear triad – was a US-UK joint operation. Especially MI6. The overall tech investment and strategy was provided by this intel combo.
2. It’s patently unclear whether Trump is really in charge – or not. This was confirmed to me at night by a top intel source; he added that the Kremlin and the security services were actively investigating all possibilities, especially who issued the final green light.
3. Near universal popular consensus: Release the Oreshniks. Plus waves of ballistic missiles.

Predictably, the Instabul kabuki came and went like a tawdry spectacle, complete with the Ukrainian delegation in military fatigues and Defense Minister Umarov incapable of speaking even mediocre English at a messy press conference after the brief 1h15 meeting. The Turkish Foreign Ministry epically described the kabuki as concluding “not negatively”.

Nothing strategic or politically substantial was discussed: only prisoner exchanges. The mood in Moscow, additionally, was that top Russian negotiator Medinsky should have presented an ultimatum, not a memorandum. It was, predictably, interpreted as an ultimatum by the Beggar of Banderastan; but what Medinsky actually handed out to the Ukrainians was a de facto road map memorandum, in 3 sections, with 2 options for the conditions for a ceasefire, and 31 points, a great deal of them expressed in detail by Moscow for months.

Examples: first option for a ceasefire should be a complete UAF withdrawal from DPR, LPR, Kherson and Zaporizhia, within 30 days; international recognition of Crimea, Donbass and Novorossiya as part of Russia; Ukraine neutrality; Ukraine holding elections and then signing a peace treaty – approved by a legally binding UN Security Council resolution (italics mine); and a ban on the receipt and deployment of nuclear weapons.

None of that, of course, will ever be accepted by the terror-infused set up in Kiev, the neo-nazi outfits that control it, and assorted, fragmented collective West warmongering backers. So the SMO will go on. Possibly all the way to 2026. Along with extra versions of the Istanbul kabuki: the next one should be held by late June.

The current kabuki, incidentally, composes the Last Chance Saloon for Kiev to retain some measure of – fractious – “sovereignty”. As Foreign Minister Lavrov has been reiterating, everything will be really decided in the battlefield.

How to destroy the New START Treaty

Now to the attack on a branch of Russia’s strategic triad – which mired Western propaganda media in layers and layers of stratospheric hysteria.

The point has been made over and over again on why Russia left its strategic bombers unprotected in the tarmac. Because that’s a New START Treaty requirement – signed in 2010 and extended until February next year (when it may go six feet under, considering what just happened).

The New START Treaty stipulates that strategic bombers should be visible to “national technical means (NTM) of verification, such as satellite imagery, to allow monitoring by the other party.” So their status – nuclear-armed or converted to conventional use – should be always verifiable. No chance of a “surprise” first strike.

This operation single-handedly blew up what was, up to now, a decent Cold War relic preventing the start of WWIII via a simple mechanism. The recklesness involved is off the charts. So there’s no surprise that the highest echelons of power in Russia – from the Kremlin to the security apparatus – are feverishly working to ascertain whether Trump was in the loop or not. And if he was not, who gave the final green light?

No wonder the highest echelon, so far, is mum.

A security source told me that it was US Secretary of State Marco Rubio that called Lavrov – and not the other way around, to offer condolences for the bridge-on-train terror attack in Bryansk. No word whatsoever about the strategic bombers. In parallel, the former platoon commander in Iraq then Fox News talking head turned head of the Pentagon followed the drone attacks on the Russian bases in real-time.

On the efficacy of such attacks – beyond the gleefully spun to death fog of war. Several conflicting estimates point to possibly three Tu-95MS strategic bombers – known as “The Bears” – hit at the Belaya base in Irkutsk, plus one of them partially damaged, and three other T-22M3s hit, with two of them irreparably. Of the three Tu-95MS, fires seem to have been localized, so they may be repaired.

At the Olenya base in Murmansk, other four Tu-95MS may have been hit, plus one An-12.

As it stands, Russia had 58 Tu-95MS up to this weekend. Even if five of them have been lost for good, that’s less than 10% of their fleet. And that does not count 19 Tu-160 and 55 Tu-22M3M. Of the five bases that were supposed to be attacked, success happened in only two.

These losses, as painful as they may be, simply will not affect further strikes by Russian aero-spatial forces.

Example: the standard weapon carried by a T-95MSM is the X-101 cruise missile. A maximum of 8 for each mission. In recent strikes, not more than 40 missiles have been launched simultaneously. That implies only 6 Tu-95s in action. So Russia in fact only needs 6 Tu-95MSM ready to fly to conduct strikes as intense as in the previous days and weeks. Tu-160s, moreover, are not even being used for the latest strikes.

Evaluating Maximum Strategy

At the time of writing, Russia’s inevitably devastating response has still not been green-lighted. This is as serious as it gets. Even if it’s true that POTUS was not informed – and that’s what the Kremlin and the security services want to be absolutely sure of before unleashing Hell from Above on Kiev – still the contours will be clear of a NATO op – US/UK – directly conducted by the CIA/MI6 intel combo, with Trump being offered plausible deniability and Ukraine breaking the START protocol big time.

Were Trump to have authorized these strikes, this would constitute no less than a declaration of war by the United States on Russia. So the most probable scenario remains Trump blindsided by the neo-cons embedded in privileged silos scattered across the Beltway.

As much as the attack on the Voronezh-M early warning radar system last May, an attack on Russia’s strategic bombers fits the scenario of increasingly prodding the Russian system to enable disabling it ahead of a nuclear first strike. Aspiring Dr. Strangeloves do entertain this scenario in their wildest dreams for decades.

As sources carefully confirmed, the prevailing interpretation among the high echelons of power in Russia is that of a P.R. operation forcing a harsh – possibly nuclear – Russian response, coupled with Moscow’s withdrawal from the Istanbul kabuki.

So far, the Russian reaction is quite methodical: total silence, a wide-ranging investigation, plus going through the motions in Istanbul.

Yet there’s no question the – inevitable – response will require Maximum Strategy. If the response is in tune with Russia’s own updated nuclear doctrine, Moscow risks losing the Global South’s nearly unanimous support.

If the response is lukewarm, domestic blowback will be massive. There’s a near universal consensus on “Release the Oreshniks”. Russian public opinion is becoming seriously fed up with being the target of serial terror attacks. The hour of fateful decision is getting late.

Which bring us to the ultimate dilemma. Russian power is mulling how to defeat the collective warmongering West without launching WWIII. Inspired by China, a solution may be found via an alliance of remixed Sun Tzu coupled with Lao Tzu. There’s got to be a way – or layered ways – to destroy a strategy-deprived nihilistic enemy’s ability and will to wage endless war.

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

The post Waiting for the Oreshniks, While the Istanbul Kabuki Proceeds ‘Not Negatively’ appeared first on LewRockwell.

On Friday, President Donald Trump delivered a blistering attack on China accusing Beijing of breaking the terms of an agreement that was consummated just weeks earlier in Switzerland. Here’s what Trump posted on his Truth Social site on May 30, 2025:

Two weeks ago China was in grave economic danger! The very high Tariffs I set made it virtually impossible for China to TRADE into the United States marketplace which is, by far, number one in the World. We went, in effect, COLD TURKEY with China, and it was devastating for them. Many factories closed and there was, to put it mildly, “civil unrest.” I saw what was happening and didn’t like it, for them, not for us. I made a FAST DEAL with China in order to save them from what I thought was going to be a very bad situation, and I didn’t want to see that happen. Because of this deal, everything quickly stabilized and China got back to business as usual. Everybody was happy! That is the good news!!! The bad news is that China, perhaps not surprisingly to some, HAS TOTALLY VIOLATED ITS AGREEMENT WITH US. So much for being Mr. NICE GUY! Donald J. Trump@realDonaldTrump

Ignoring the fact that China is in no economic trouble at all (Note: China’s GDP grew by 5.4% in the first quarter of 2025 while Chinese exports soared by more than 12% in March 2025), there are a number of things wrong with Trump’s statement, the most obvious of which is that there is no formal treaty or binding contract between the Trump administration and China on the Tariffs issue. None. Trump even admitted as much on Truth Social on May 10 and 11, when he said, “much agreed to,” though he highlighted the need to “paper it” or formalize it in writing.

What happened is this: China generously offered to sign a joint statement following the confab in Geneva where Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent barged-in on a pre-scheduled meeting between Chinese and Swiss officials (that had nothing to do with US trade policy) and offered to slash Trump’s gigantic tariffs (to 30%) in exchange for nothing. (Bessent was obviously panicking over extreme market volatility on Wall Street and capitulated on the spot.) China made no concessions. Bessent basically put on sackcloth and ashes and publicly debased himself in front of the world for nothing. The only thing that was mutually agreed upon was “to establish a US-China trade consultation mechanism”. In other words, they agree to talk to each other in the future. Big deal.

And now Trump is saying China “has totally violated its agreement with us”?

What agreement, and what ‘violation’ is Trump talking about? No one even knows what he means??

In fact, his comments were so opaque, US Trade Representative Jamieson Greer had to clarify what he meant later in the day. On Friday, in an appearance on CNBC, Greer said that while China had reduced some tariff rates as agreed, it had not fully removed certain non-tariff countermeasures implemented during the trade war.

“They removed the tariff like we did but some of the countermeasures they’ve slowed on,” he said.

WTF? “Non-tariff countermeasures”? So, this isn’t even about the tariffs??

Nope. In fact, non-tariff barriers could refer to any number of things from sovereign regulations limiting foreign investment to subsidies to state-owned businesses. Here’s one explanation from analyst Arnaud Bertrand:

“This is why Trump is angry, as per the WSJ… after the talks in Geneva the U.S. decided to adopt new rules banning the use of Huawei’s new AI chips “anywhere in the world” (which, insanely, includes China), which China said “seriously undermined consensus reached at the high-level bilateral talks in Geneva.”

In response China is slow-walking approvals for export licenses of rare earths, and US automakers are warning the White House that “auto plants may have to idle in pandemic-style stoppages” as a result.

The WSJ report should help readers to see what is really going on below the surface. On the one hand, we have Trump and Co. trying to convince their MAGA supporters that the ‘tariffs war’ is all about “bringing manufacturing jobs back to the US” and “re-industrializing America”, while on the other, we have Trump using the talks in Geneva as a way to thwart China’s technological development while extracting concessions on the export of rare earths.

Naturally, China has responded to Trump’s claim that they “totally violated their agreement with us.”(although you wouldn’t know it by reading the western media.) On Saturday, China’s embassy spokesperson, Liu Pengyu, said that China has maintained communications on trade matters with the US, but expressed concerns about U.S. policies, saying, “China once again urges the U.S. to immediately correct its erroneous actions, cease discriminatory restrictions against China and jointly uphold the consensus reached at the high-level talks in Geneva.” This response highlights China’s position that the U.S. is engaging in “erroneous actions” and abusing export control measures, particularly in the semiconductor industry.

This is a very polite way of saying that China is not going to play Trump’s silly game. If the administration chooses to break WTO rules and unilaterally ban Huawei’s new AI chips “anywhere in the world”, then they can expect that China will retaliate. The US is not used to someone its own size, calling its bluff, but that is simply the new reality.

But we think there is more to these “non-tariff barriers” than meets the eye. We think Trump’s real target is something much more ambitious and lucrative. Check it out:

“They’ve agreed to open up China. … The biggest thing to me is the opening up. I think it would be fantastic for our businesses if we could go in and compete.” President Donald Trump, White House Press Conference, (on trade negotiations following talks in Geneva, May 12, 2025)

“Free up China and sell our product. Open China. But I’m not even sure I’m going to ask for it because they don’t want it open. But because of tariffs, I can possibly get that.” President Donald Trump, April 25, 2025

Does this sound like a man whose primary objective is to bring manufacturing jobs back to the United States or to reindustrialize the country?

No. This sounds like a man who wants to win the praise of his billionaire friends by providing access to the most behemoth mountain of surplus capital in the world today. China, the golden goose.

Keep in mind, Scott Bessent is a former hedge fund manager who was a partner at Soros Fund Management (SFM) and ….a leading member of the group that profited by $1 billion on Black Wednesday, the British Pound sterling crisis…..Bessent has advocated pushing for concessions from U.S. trading partners to restrict their economic relationships with China in order to isolate China and gain leverage over it in potential trade talks. (Wikipedia)

Trump and Bessent are a tag-team; they’re cut from the same cloth. They’re not interested in making America great again. They’re interested in accessing and liberalizing China’s financial markets, so the Wall Street banks can do to China what they have done to the United States, transform it into a poverty-stricken basket-case that is $35 trillion in debt and headed for Davey Jones locker. That is the overriding ambition of every financial parasite on Wall Street.

Bessent believes that China should remove restrictions on foreign financial institutions and allow U.S. banks to operate freely in its $18.6 trillion economy, particularly in banking, asset management, and securities. He thinks this would integrate China into global finance, reducing trade imbalances… (April 23, 2025, Institute of International Finance).

JPMorgan, StanChart Approved for Fully-Owned China Ventures. US financial firm can buy 49% stake in its joint venture; JPMorgan expands further

Bloomberg article summary: On January 19, 2023, Bloomberg reported that JPMorgan Chase & Co. gained full control of its China mutual fund joint venture, acquiring a 49% stake in China International Fund Management Co. from Shanghai International Trust Co., as approved by the China Securities Regulatory Commission (CSRC). This move aligned JPMorgan with rival Manulife Financial Corp. in securing 100% ownership of a business in China’s 26 trillion yuan ($3.8 trillion) market. JPMorgan’s asset management arm, established in 2016, will be integrated under the JPMorgan Asset Management (JPMAM) brand in China. Similarly, Standard Chartered received CSRC approval to set up a wholly-owned securities brokerage in China, with a registered capital of 1.05 billion yuan, offering services like underwriting and asset management. This follows China’s accelerated approvals for foreign firms, with Manulife and others gaining clearances in late 2022, boosting competition in the market (Grok)

Banks like JPMorgan, Goldman Sachs, and Morgan Stanley seek greater market share in China’s $55 trillion financial sector (2024, including banking and securities). Currently, foreign banks hold only 1.3% of China’s banking assets ($59 trillion) and face caps on ownership….

Benefit: Opening markets would allow Wall Street to compete with Chinese banks, tapping into China’s $19-20 trillion household savings…

Wall Street banks—major U.S. financial institutions like JPMorgan Chase, Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, and Citigroup—play a significant but complex role in Bessent’s demands. They stand to benefit from China’s market opening, particularly in financial services and capital markets, but their involvement also raises concerns about financial extraction and geopolitical tensions…

(according to Bessent) China should relax capital controls, allowing freer flows of foreign investment and yuan convertibility, integrating its $3.1 trillion foreign exchange reserves and $12 trillion bond market into global finance. Bessent sees this as part of “restoring equilibrium” to global markets. (Note—China is being asked to trust its national savings with the crooks who blew up the financial system in 2008 costing the world over $50 trillion.)

Here’s the former Soro’s fund manager, Scott Bessent in his own words:

“Our goal is not to decouple from China, but to open markets and restore balance. We’ll continue trading with China, especially in non-strategic goods, and at lower tariff levels.” Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent wrote on X, May 18, 2025

China’s market opening is a condition for de-escalating the trade war… Financial market access is a key U.S. demand in talks(Q3 2025 target, per Reuters). (Note—There it is in black and white; ‘Open up or the war continues.)

Check out these quotes from Trump’s statement delivered in the White House on May 12, and you’ll understand what’s going on:

On the Agreement and China’s Actions:

We achieved a total reset with China after productive talks in Geneva. China agreed to open itself up to American business. They’ve agreed to suspend or remove the non-tariff countermeasures they imposed on the United States since April 2, 2025. This is maybe the most important thing to come out of these high-level trade talks between the two superpowers in Geneva, Switzerland, over the weekend.

On the Importance of Opening Markets:

The best part of the deal was that we opened up China. China agreed to open itself up to American business. We have to get it papered, but they’ve agreed to open up China.

On the Process and Future Steps:

China deal ‘not the easiest thing to paper.’ We have to get it papered, but they’ve agreed to open up China. We achieved a total reset with China after productive talks in Geneva. I didn’t rule out raising tariffs on China again if a final agreement isn’t reached in 90 days

This is pure fiction. Yes, China has lifted some restrictions on foreign banks and liberalized parts of its financial system, but the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) still exerts absolute control over China’s banking and finance sectors as well as the nation’s Central Bank which is led by the CCP. (“The PBOC sets monetary policy, interest rates, and reserve requirements, aligning financial policy with party goals like economic stability and growth.”)

There is no chance that China will follow the same path as the United States and put its future in the hands of the voracious miscreants who have taken everything of value and left the country drowning in red ink. Even so, there is reason for concern. As one Chinese analyst put it:

The most dangerous time for China is when the decline of the U.S. reaches terminal velocity & parasitic Western/Zionist billionaires look for a new host.

— 倪明达 (Ni Mingda) (@NiMingDa_888) November 15, 2023

Reprinted with permission from The Unz Review.

The post Trump Orders China To ‘Open Up’ to Wall Street Looting appeared first on LewRockwell.

I have to confess to being a lifelong “denier.” At a very tender age, I recognized that pretty much every authority figure I interacted with was deeply flawed. When you’re a critical thinker, your curiosity being countered with “ours is not to question why, ours is just to do and die” or “do as I say, not as I do,” will not satisfy your intellect.

As I’ve alluded to here before, my brother’s traumatic high school incident, which occurred when I was just seven years old, and for extra dramatic effect took place on the same day as the JFK assassination- November 22, 1963, triggered my skepticism about all authority. I heard my father rage against the injustice system, and how he had no chance at fighting the forces aligned against my hapless brother. I didn’t really understand politics yet, but I became a second grade radical. I started questioning teachers, most of whom I had little respect for. I disputed most of my grades, which were never good enough in my eyes. My mother, always my steadfast defender, would faithfully stand behind me. My father was preoccupied with drinking heavily and losing his long battle with the world. I quickly learned that questioning teachers, like questioning anyone in a position of power, did not win you any popularity contests.

I noticed, once I hit middle school, how popularity was baked into the hierarchy of the school system. The teachers fawned over the most popular kids. This was even more obvious in high school, where popular kids become de facto celebrities in their little ponds. Thus, it was only natural that I would eventually write a book like Bullyocracy: How the Social Hierarchy Enables Bullies to Rule Schools, Workplaces, and Society at Large. Researching all those sad stories reinforced my earliest negative impressions of teachers and school administrators. I was never a bullied child, but I don’t know how any of those tragic victims of bullying and a system that refuses to hold bullies accountable, could help but become School Deniers. I was certainly an early School Denier myself. Sure, lack of ambition contributed as well, but that’s the primary reason I didn’t apply to a genuine four year college. I denied the value of “education.”

As I drifted aimlessly at a dead end blue collar job, I relished in my unsuccessful status. I wore it as some kind of twisted badge of honor. I bonded with the truly diverse cast of characters, toiling in obscurity in the basement of a huge hospital system. I quickly contracted Supervisor Denial. Management Denial. Director Denial. Administrator Denial. They hadn’t invented the term “CEO” yet, or I would perhaps have been the Patient Zero for CEO Denial. I complained incessantly, and showed absolutely no respect for any of my “superiors.” I rightfully objected to the term “superior.” So because someone is a higher “grade” than me, and makes more money, he is “superior” in some sense? When some supervisory figure told me to tuck my shirt in, I’d roll my eyes, tuck it in briefly, then tuck it out again when he was out of sight. I was a pathfinder in the untucked shirt movement. Now everyone does it.

Because I worked around so many of them, and found them generally to be a rather haughty bunch, I developed real Nurse Denial. This became awkward because I was engaged to a registered nurse at the time. She didn’t really appreciate all my snide comments about nurses being stuck up, lazy, and uncaring. It’s a good thing we didn’t marry. Even worse was my Doctor Denial. I despised every one of them. They literally would not acknowledge the existence of the blue collar basement dwellers like me. We were as invisible as Bigfoot to them. Eventually these two would meld into Hospital Denial. Although I worked in one for many years, I came to view hospitals as prisons, with the patients playing the role of inmates. There’s obviously an extensive death row in every hospital. But I really enjoyed my fellow low level workers. We weren’t divided really by race or anything else, as we scoffed at our very real common enemy.

When I passed the real estate board exams, and became a realtor, I entered a different world. The white collar crowd. I was still the same, but my personality didn’t quite click with the top selling agents and hardcore brokers. I grew to see that much of real estate business is pure luck. Attractive older women, very often former high school cheerleaders, turning their natural bubbliness and wealthy husband’s backing into quick sales. One wife of an army general put up about a dozen sales and listings in her first month at our company- more than I’d had all year. But then I didn’t have a general with a whole pyramid of “underlings” who would be anxious to curry favor by hiring the general’s wife to buy or sell their home. I grew naturally resentful, having to deal with the most desperate and dubious buyers, gleaned from phone desk duty. None of my friends could buy any home. So I contracted Million Dollar Agent Denial.

When I entered the world of Information Technology, I really didn’t fall victim to any new case of Denial. The IT world was certainly closer to real estate than my physical labor job in the hospital basement had been, but most of the people were pretty cool. Sure, there was always my chronic Management Denial, but that is going to follow me everywhere. I’ve just found very few management types that were worth listening to. Most of the time, it was difficult not to burst into laughter at their ridiculous babbling. I told myself that it was no accident that things were so screwed up wherever you looked, because the wrong people seem to be in charge all over the world. As Charles Dickens described them over 150 years ago; Experts in How Not to Get it Done. Dickens would have a field day with any modern corporation or government agency. He would have been a real asset to DOGE.

Yes, I probably have more Denial syndromes than most people. Well, maybe almost all people. But this whole labeling of a particular opinion as a “denial,” to categorize it as some kind of mental illness, should trouble us all. It began with Holocaust Denial. People in other countries have been imprisoned for “denying” the Holocaust. That is, for disputing the official narrative by questioning the numbers and Hollywoodish extermination program. I’m no Nazi, but it seems like it would have been a lot easier, and cheaper, just to shoot them all. Then, with the advent of the Greatest Psyop in the History of the World, and the 2020 election, two new maladies took center stage. COVID Denial, which I of course was guilty of from the moment they first started talking about Chinese pedestrians dropping dead in the street. And then came Election Denial. That’s a strange one, because the “denial” only applies to that particular election. Which was the “most secure” one in history, they assure us.

Sometimes, they mix it up with absurd “phobias,” rather than invent another “denial.” Homophobia was the first. I never understood that. Sure, it’s easy to be prejudiced against homosexuals in terms of not necessarily wanting to be friends with them. Or to cringe when two middle-aged men cuddle or French kiss in a movie or commercial. But “phobia” means fear. I don’t know many men who are scared of homosexuality. Well, except perhaps for all those conservative Republican elected officials, who turned out to be gay themselves. So maybe it’s a rare disorder confined to those who shield their own sexual preferences by lashing out at gays. And now we have “transphobia.” Now I do kind of understand the fear there. I’m scared of seeing this kind of real mental illness be mainstreamed. I fear seeing photos of smiling little girls with their insane mothers and evil doctors, flashing their Frankenstein chest scars. Luckily, I haven’t seen any photos of little boys with their scars. I couldn’t handle that.

Read the Whole Article

The post ‘Denying’ the Wild, Woke World appeared first on LewRockwell.

In a new program with Peter Koenig, one of our most prominent and longstanding authors, we explored several key topics, including Ukraine, the Middle East, and the World Health Organization. He touched upon these with pinpoint precision and erudition, as evidenced by his regular writing on our platform. Koenig’s fascinating breakdown is available in seven languages.

The original source of this article is Global Research.

The post Ukraine, Middle East, WHO — Analysis of the Current Situation appeared first on LewRockwell.

Joan Didion’s 1968 Slouching Towards Bethlehem reflected on fragmentation of society and morality.  Slouching, the idea of reluctantly and somewhat aimlessly getting to a “better place” is often referenced, not by realists or sincere critics, but by unhappy progressives, terribly concerned that we aren’t getting there soon enough.

When it comes to totalitarianism and its mass rape of communities and continents to increase state surveillance, state control, and state power, slouching is nowhere to be found.  In pursuit of war and promotion of the state’s own welfare, we can identify not a single slouch, not a lazy man or woman in the bunch driving the statist train, the totalitarian globalist vision.

On the other hand, the masses employed by, and receiving temporary benefits from the state – through war employment, fascist corporate capitalism, and welfare statism – are never particularly productive.  Their time, talent and energy is always misdirected and malformed, wasted at best and monstrous at worst.  Unlike in a free society, where producers and consumers seek an ever-shifting balance to please themselves and others, driving production and innovation in a civil, tolerant and friendly way – state economies depend on war and fear of war to drive the majority into panicked groups, desperate to live for one more day, into smaller and smaller control systems or chutes, as it were.

We literally see this in Gaza today, the brutal trend unchanged since 1948.  Intentionally starved, impoverished, and injured communities herded to and fro, into smaller and smaller pens, for the inevitable slaughter.  If you cannot read or comprehend what is happening by design in Gaza, we have images and maps that summarize this process. It is not experimental; it is policy.

State extermination of Palestinians is also US policy, and it benefits the US kakistocracy.  Zionists have many excuses for their institutionalized theft and murder, their ongoing genocide of Palestine’s non-Jews.  God said we could steal it, bulldoze it, rape it, and kill the owners of it.  Individuals who believe and act on this nonsense are found mainly in asylums and prisons; it’s good to be a state.  Political Zionism is embedded with unsubtle European-style colonial racism, of the kind well-documented in George Orwell’s first novel, Burmese Days.  United States government has actively perpetuated this racism and colonialism in lockstep with Israel for seven decades – even as most of the planet now condemns it.

There is no slouching here.  Only ambition and hurriedness of the state, and sneakiness and deceit of the global politicians who serve it.

Ukraine recently attacked the most recallable, and thus most important leg, of the “nuclear deterrent.”  As in the US, Russia has a nuclear triad consisting of ground-based missiles, nuclear-armed submarines, and long-range nuclear-capable bombers. Ukraine attacked these long range bombers on their runways deep inside Russia via a long planned, deceptive use of commercial truckers, leveraging Ukraine’s Russian language and cultural knowledge.  The nature of the attack, and western celebration of it afterward, echoes Mossad’s September 2024 booby-trapped pager attack against Hezbollah.

There is debate over what is, and is not, a booby trap, because UN conventions specifically prohibit them in a doomed attempt to make war more humane.  However, using modern supply chains and the interconnected world of commerce to conceal and conduct attacks is not uncommon – we saw it with the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995 using a Ryder truck, in the 9-11 attacks, fundamentally engineering both a terrorist attack using commercial passenger planes for the people, and saving Manhattan for real estate investors, instantly eliminating all the asbestos laden World Trade Center buildings with a double indemnity insurance payout for the rebuilding.  In the era of information network and energy grid hacking, whole new departments of warfare have grown up on the back of how commerce is done.  New and ongoing wars are conducted and funded through malware and ransomware, while the propaganda is easily created, broadcasted, and seamlessly adapted worldwide.

The acts of war through deceit and booby trapping are concerning, yet completely historical and entirely predictable.  Moral chiding and political admonishment of such tactics is ludicrous, a Bandaid for a leg blown off, an aspirin given prior to a field amputation.  We ought to be more interested in whether this tool is more likely to be used by a desperate and inevitable loser, as we see in the case of Ukraine versus Russia, or it is more likely to be the tool of the imperial authoritarian state against “the rebels” as we saw with Israel’s pager attack?  What can we learn about the reality of power from booby trapping?

Given that what we have in Ukraine is not and never was “Ukraine” versus Russia, but rather a Western alliance led by the US and its key European dependents in an imperial play against Russia, the smart analysis may be that these kinds of tactics – appearing ingenious and “rebel-like” – are actually desperate moves of a losing Empire.

As Heraclitus observed, one can never step in the same river twice. Once a booby trap is exposed, the battlefield is irreversibly altered, and the new understanding makes the “enemy” wiser, and the perpetrator more endangered.  Zelensky publicly celebrates his brilliance, in a way we saw last September in DC and Tel Aviv.  Perhaps we shall see shiny paperweights depicting trucks with drones emerging throughout the capitols of Europe, much as we see gold and silver pager “replicas” left on the nightstands of Israel’s DC prostitutes.  These evil touchstones, as with similarly celebrated extra-judicial assassinations, are part and parcel of Western politicians ritual adoration of war in the name of empire.

Once revealed and celebrated, once the toasts are made and the backs slapped, the problem of vengeful blowback from the targeted enemy nags like a coming migraine, or the inevitable hangover.  Allies and enemies alike begin to think about how booby traps using modern economies and technologies can occur deep inside our own borders.  Beyond that, subjects of empire everywhere begin to suspect that their own governments might be capable of shifting the “target,” to use a biblical phrase, in a blink of an eye.  Is the rebel enemy lying in wait in our own back yard – or is that spidey sense telling us it’s really our own government, and its imperial allies, lying in wait?

Human intuition is individual, thus state efforts to reduce, ridicule, and overrule it are always a priority.  The COVID exercise, with economic and educational lockdowns, state agitprop, and mass-mandated injections, corresponds very well to Phase III software testing, to “determine the overall efficiency of the units as they run together…because the program’s overall functionality relies on the units operating simultaneously as a complete system, not as isolated procedures.”  When every population on earth wants peace, but every ruling political party and their sponsors want war, the outlines of the real battle become clear.  Actual people must act according to either their orders, or their intuition.

Upon learning of the Ukrainian truck delivery of drones to strategic bomber airfields, the reaction of some in the USAF was alarm, not of WWIII starting, but of their own vulnerability to such attacks, by an enemy, or as one of many false flags planned and conducted on American soil, against Americans, to push the state agenda forward.

Continued war in both Israel and in Ukraine is not wanted by any rational person, and indeed could be stopped by immediate elimination of Washington’s massive logistics, intelligence sharing, weapons, cash and political support.  However, the state sneaks toward global war – envisioning a “limited” nuclear exchange that they believe will aid their own causes, and be immensely useful.

The post Sneaking, Not Slouching, Into World War III appeared first on LewRockwell.

In Ed Curtin’s collection of essays that I recently reviewed, he explains in an essay, “Opening the CIA’s Can of Worms,” who created and maintains the fictionalized narrative-controlled world in which Americans live in ignorance of the real operating agendas. 

Curtin says it is the CIA, not the media or the Internet companies or the politicians, who controls the narratives.  The CIA’s own overlords are the powerful financial and corporate interests on which American success depends. Curtin’s account parallels US Marine Commander General Smedley Butler’s confession that he and his US Marines were the enforcers in Latin America for the United Fruit Company and the New York Banks.

There is endless documented evidence for Curtin’s conclusion.  Much has been written about the CIA’s “Operation Mockingbird,” now described by CIA media assets, such as Wikipedia, as “alleged operation.”  Beginning in 1950 the CIA began using bribes, such as “leaks” to American media that were designed to influence American and foreign opinion with controlled narratives that advanced secret agendas.  The CIA’s “leaks” made the careers of reporters who could attest to their editors “CIA source” and make the front page if not the headlines. Most journalists regarded as influential are CIA assets.

More recently, Udo Ulfkotte’s book, Bought Journalism, revealed that he, an editor at Germany’s largest newspaper, and most significant journalists in Europe are CIA assets.  This was confirmed by Otto Schulmeister, editor-in-chief and publisher of Austria’s Die Presse. His own CIA connections were revealed. See here.

We know it also from Stephen Kinzer’s book, The Brothers, which gives us the story of how US Secretary of State John Foster Dulles and CIA Director Allen Dulles used the State Department, CIA, and American and foreign journalist to serve the corporate clients of their powerful law firm.

Today, of course, the many proven facts are dismissed by the whore media and Wikipedia as conspiracy theory.  The CIA’s assets continue to do their assigned job of controlling the narratives.

Curtin endorses Douglas Valentine’s statement in his revealing book, The CIA As Organized Crime: “The CIA and the media are part of the same criminal conspiracy.”  In his own words, Curtin adds:

“The corporate mainstream media are stenographers for the national security state’s ongoing psychological operations aimed at the American people, the same as they have done for an international audience.  We have long been subjected to this ‘information warfare,’ whose purpose is to win the hearts and minds of the American people and pacify them into being victims of their own complicity, just as it was practiced by the CIA in Vietnam and by the New York Times, Washington Post, CBS, etc, on the American people over the years as the American warfare state wages endless wars, coups, false flag operations, and assassinations at home and abroad.  . . .  the roles that the CIA and the corporate mainstream media play cannot be distinguished from each other.”  

And still millions of dumbshit Americans sit in front of TV “news” and submit to their indoctrination. A people this stupid cannot survive in freedom.

In The Secret Team, Fletcher Prouty documented that the CIA has placed operatives in every agency of the US government.  Frances Stonor Saunders (The Cultural Cold War) and Joel Whitney (Finks) explained how CIA officers Cord Myer and Frank Wisner operated secret programs that converted supporters of the First Amendment into voices for censorship. We have seen the results.  We have a fake tale of 9/11, fake tales of our wars in the Middle East, a fake tale of Covid and the Covid “vaccine,” a fake tale of “Russia’s invasion of Ukraine,” a fake tale of “Iranian nukes” but not a word about Israeli nukes.  We are victims of a massive lie machine.  

Curtin reminds us that not long ago the New York Times gleefully reported that Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., who has been documenting for years the adverse effects on children of vaccines, was “barred from Instagram over false virus claims.” The woman, Jennifer Jett, who wrote the line did not use the word “alleged.”  How would Jennifer Jett or Instagram have the slightest qualification to know Kennedy’s claims are false?  

What we see here is media being used by Big Pharma to discredit a highly knowledgable source.  For years I have been watching highly credible experts discredited by media operatives of zero accomplishment. Nobodies of whom no one has ever heard become the experts.

As far as I can tell, the last two generations of graduates of the US educational–in reality brainwashing–system were not taught to read. They can recognize a limited number of words, but they cannot master the meaning of the words on the page.  This is partly by design and partly the results of integrated schools that demand equal racial performance outcomes.  The ruling elite finds it much easier to deceive and to control people who cannot understand what they read. As it is not permissible for white and Asian ethnicities to perform better as a group than blacks and Hispanics, standards are reduced to the point that everyone can have the same grade.

I recently attended a high school graduation ceremony in north Florida. 41% of the graduating class were Summa Cum Laude, Magna Cum Laude, and Cum Laude.  What do you think the explanation is?  A hot spot of genius genes, or standards dropped to hide racial differences in educational performance?  In a few more years, 100 % of the graduating class will be Summa Cum Laude, and the distinction will mean nothing.

In the Autumn 2023 issue of City Journal, Renu Mukherjee reports the destruction of America’s elite high schools, such as Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology in northern Virginia, Stuyvesant High School, and Bronx High School of Science. The schools had strict entrance tests to ensure that the students admitted were capable of benefitting from the expensive and demanding experience.  As Asians and Whites comprised most of the student bodies, educational standards based on merit have been declared racist by the DEI tyrants that rule us and have control over American education.  

In place of entrance tests, each middle school in the geographic area is allowed a share of the admissions. Perhaps from there it becomes a lottery. Whatever, the result is to drop the percentages of the most qualified and to raise the percentages of the least qualified. For the least qualified to graduate with an equal share of the honors, the standards must be lowered.  In the interests of DEI the elite preparatory high schools are being destroyed.  The fact that elite high schools succumbed to the propaganda that merit is racist foretells the demise of American science and engineering. As time passes the US will become dependent on Chinese, Indian, and Russian immigrants for its science and technology.

Just as cum laude distinctions are losing their meaning, so are US presidential appointments.  It formerly meant something to be appointed an Assistant Secretary.  It no longer does.  After Biden’s DEI appointments, which included sexual perverts, the honor that was associated with the appointment and its Senate confirmation is no longer there.  The same has happened to the judiciary.  The incompetent two-bit punk ideologues that Congress has appointed to the bench are hardly to be respected.  They are the enemies of justice and the American people.  They are currently busy at work overturning the presidential election.  Little wonder the ruling establishment let Trump win.  They knew that they could stop him cold with the judiciary and move him in their direction with advice that gives him “broader perspectives.” 

Maga-Americans should consider that if President Trump refuses to accommodate the ruling establishment, he faces the possibility that the mid-term elections will be stolen for the Democrats.  Again in charge of Congress, they will impeach and convict Trump.  Then indict him and his government, terrorize his supporters, and establish DEI Woke Truth over America.

The end of the Founding Fathers experiment could be very near.

But don’t expect dumbshit Americans to realize that. They are easy pickings because they are implicated by their own complicity.

The post American Democracy Is a Hoax — The Rulers of America Are Not the People appeared first on LewRockwell.

This post started with my decision to comment on this note:

This is so satisfying to watch….

– elizabeth nickson

Read on Substack

What I wanted to stay was that “what I would find satisfying is seeing her (Sara Levin) on trial, along with every other government official abusing their power for personal or political gain.”

Then I realized that this is a subject that just does not want to leave me alone.
The point that no state actor ever gets punished for crimes committed under the protective mantle of the state.

In my post “The fifth moment” I mentioned that I received the 300 page file of the Hungarian State Security Archives on myself. I found none of the information in it I was hoping for. Nothing from, or about the state actors involved. I wanted to write about it, but a year and a half later, I still couldn’t make myself to do it. The crimes of the communists are safely in the books of history, whitewashed, redacted, sanitized.

I mentioned in my post Emily and the House of Terror that on that building there are hundreds of pictures of the victims who were killed there. There are no pictures, no names of the perpetrators. As I pointed out in “Hate is a big word”, I have good reasons to think that my stepfather was one of them.

We seem to be desperately hanging onto the idea that justice exists. However much we may dislike lawyers, we still give them immunity for the crimes they may and do commit in their official capacity.
I already wrote several posts demanding accountability for, but at least full exposures of the crimes of various state actors.
I searched for the must severe punishment for prosecutorial misconduct in the US.
Make a wild guess what it is…. I will give it to you in a minute.

elizabeth nickson

, the poster of the video above, has a painful family history with MK-Ultra.
Just like the Tuskegee experiment, it is now also in the history books. Nobody ever has been investigated, tried or punished for them. None of the criminals responsible for them has even been exposed. Being ‘safely in the history books’ means that they never will be.

As are, and will be the crimes of the CIA, the FBI and Big Pharma or any other agency you care to add to the list.

When Trump was running in the 2016 election, the crowds at his rallies were chanting “Lock her up”.
Eight years later, there is still no attempt to investigate Hillary Clinton, let alone putting her on trial.
She has been implicated in over 100 premeditated/suspected murders. Several books have been written about their criminal enterprise with Bill. The writer of one of those books, just like Jeffrey Epstein got (officially) suicided. ‘Officially’ means that they will NOT be investigated.

Barak Obama ordered the spying on the Trump campaign. That is an impeachable offense, yet it was Trump who got impeached; more than once under bogus charges.

Joe, ‘the big guy’ Biden was openly bragging about blackmailing the Ukrainian government. It is common knowledge that he is a corrupt criminal with the involvement of his whole family. No justice in sight.

On Jan 6th 2021 there were hundreds of ‘agent provocateurs’ on the streets. None has been investigated.

But I am just repeating myself, I discussed this already in my post “There can be no peace without justice”

So let me give you the answer to the question I asked above, “what was the most severe punishment for prosecutorial misconduct in American history”

The answer is ten days in jail, only five served. This prosecutor was also disbarred and had to pay a $7,500 dollars fine. This was the only case the AI engines were able to find.
But the kicker is this: the state, meaning you, the taxpayer, had to pay $2,000,000 in damages for the wrongful conviction.

“Prosecutors enjoy absolute immunity from civil lawsuits for actions taken in their official prosecutorial duties”

“Prosecutorial immunity shields prosecutors from most civil lawsuits, limiting financial penalties. Criminal charges are rare due to high legal thresholds and institutional reluctance to prosecute prosecutors.” (From a Grok search result; emphasis mine)

Isn’t it grand to be a lawyer?
The documentary on patent trolling, linked in my post Shakedowns, clearly exposes a criminal enterprise made possible by corrupt lawyers and judges using the law and its procedures as weapons to shake down small businesses. Just the legal costs amount to 29 billion dollars per year.
The only thing that is needed is the willingness to prosecute these criminals. Which leaves us with the most important question: why is it not happening?

The only answer I can come up with is that the state needs to protect its own legitimacy, irrespective of political colors or any transgression, corruption, even crimes.

Lavrentiy Beria, probably the worst of the Soviet communist scumbags, was responsible for the elimination of 1.5-2 million innocent people. He personally executed hundreds, including over a hundred women whom he raped before killing them. Yet, when he was finally executed, it was not because of his crimes, but because he, and his knowledge, represented a very real danger to the lives of the rest of the scumbags in the communist party leadership. It was not justice, it was internecine murder.

Nuremberg was not about justice, it was a political statement and a strategic move to eliminate potential political opposition. Nazi politics was on trial, not war-crimes.

The lawfare against Donald Trump had nothing to do with whatever he did or did not; it was attempted political assassination. Lawfare is about power, not justice.

When politicians want to drag Putin or Netanyahu to the ICJ, that’s not about justice, but politics. In both cases, their adversaries are far more guilty of the same crimes than the accused are themselves.

The self-preservation instinct of the state cannot afford justice, as it must maintain the illusion of its infallibility.

The illusion that the law is above itself, meaning that it can break its own rules to protect itself and its reputation as the custodian of justice. It’s all for the greater good. In this perception, any attack on the agents of the state and its institutions are seen as an attack on the state itself that will weaken its legitimacy. The legitimacy of the state must be absolute, we cannot allow its reputation to be tarnished by some bad actors.

This is a conundrum I cannot see the way out of. I would like to believe that such self policing, the weeding out of corruption and bad actors could increase respect for the system, but this is clearly not the way the system sees itself. I am not quite comfortable with this anthropomorphizing of the state, but the tendency is so universal, that I have no other way to explain it.

The gravest injustice is protecting injustice itself, but waiting for justice for the crimes of the state is like watching Buñuel’s Exterminating Angel.

John Adams said that

“Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other”

I am afraid, that the whole Western civilization became that ‘any other’.

This article was originally published on Politics is Personal.

The post There Is No Justice for Its Miscarriage appeared first on LewRockwell.

Whatever one may think of the Catholic Pope’s religious authority, the fact remains that the Papacy—also known as the Holy See—in spite of several centuries of decline in prestige, is an international institution that is difficult to ignore. There are good reasons, after all, why the heads of state from major global powers choose to meet with the Pope and with his representatives. In spite of lacking any significant military force or sizable territory, the Papacy exercises what the Americans like to call “soft power.”

With the election of a new Pope—the American-born Pope Leo XIV—the Holy See has an opportunity to wield this soft power in a way that enhances the freedom and human rights of individual persons. This is also an opportunity to change direction. This is important and necessary because during the twelve years of Pope Francis’s pontificate, the Holy See largely employed its power and influence to ill effect. Under Francis, the Holy See chose to chase popularity with global intellectuals and states while sowing disunity and confusion within the Church itself. At that time, the Holy See also chose to sacrifice the Church’s own independence—as with Francis’s China deal. In short, the Church became an instrument supporting the current and morally debased international status quo, rather than one that demanded its reform.

Pope Leo, however, can change this, and there are at least three key ways that he can do so. The first is to defend the family with force and clarity. The second is to foster peace among states and within them. The third is to both unify the Church and assert its independence from state power.

Defend the Family

The family exists today as the most important non-state institution, and as an institution that competes with the state. Even in our modern era, family ties continue to foster loyalties and affections among individuals, and direct those affections away from the state. As such, the family represents one of the last few obstacles that stands in the way of the state’s efforts to reduce every person to an atomistic individual with no binding or lasting relationship other than the relationship with the state.  As the great French liberal Benjamin Constant noted, non-state institutions like the family “contain a principle of resistance which government allows only with regret and which it is keen to uproot. It makes even shorter work of individuals. It rolls its immense mass effortlessly over them, as over sand.”

More fundamentally, as a previous pope, Pope Pius XII, noted the family precedes the state and ought not be measured according to the needs or priority of the state. That is, the family is “natural” and not an adjunct of the state. He writes:

[T]here would be danger lest the primary and essential cell of society, the family, with its well-being and its growth, should come to be considered from the narrow standpoint of national power, and lest it be forgotten that man and the family are by nature anterior to the State, and that the Creator has given to both of them powers and rights and has assigned them a mission and a charge that correspond to undeniable natural requirements.

Not surprisingly, totalitarian states and the revolutionary Left have long sought to abolish the family, redefine it, or otherwise reinvent it in an image more suitable to the needs of regimes. From the French Revolution to the modern Left of today, the natural family remains under almost constant attack.

For his part, Pope Leo is off to a good start on this matter. At his May 16 audience with the Holy See’s diplomatic corps, Pope Leo stated in no uncertain terms that  “It is the responsibility of government leaders to work to build harmonious and peaceful civil societies. This can be achieved above all by investing in the family, founded upon the stable union between a man and a woman.” Leo then quotes his predecessor Pope Leo XIII, recounting, like Pius XII, that the family has precedence over civil governments. The family is, according to Leo XIII: “a small but genuine society, and prior to all civil society.”

On this matter, Leo’s predecessor Pope Francis was timid and often contradictory. He often sacrificed clarity in an effort to pander to global elites and win friends among members of the press. Pope Leo, hopefully, will be different, and stick to his own comments in which he stated: “For her part, the Church can never be exempted from speaking the truth about humanity and the world.”

Promote Peace

There are few greater threats to the family than war. Some will argue that wars are inevitable, but even in those cases—assuming the “inevitable” cases even exist—the proper response always is to seek ways to both shorten wars and lessen their severity. This, of course, has always been the point of international law—such as the Geneva Conventions—designed to make wars less terrible, even when they occur. The longer wars last, and the more the belligerents ignore the rights of noncombatants, the more disastrous will the outcomes be for families and individuals. The greatest beneficiaries of wars have long been states, which can use wars as a means of extending the state’s despotism both in time and space.

A primary goal of Popes must always be to encourage negotiations with warring parties and to offer forums and resources for rapprochement. This, of course, has a long history within the Church itself, dating philosophically at least as far back as Augustine’s just war theory, and later coalescing as a mass movement in the form of the Peace and Truce of God movement of the early Middle Ages, which worked to limit feuds among nobles in the Middle Ages.

Pope Leo would do well to continue this tradition, and he has already signaled an effort to do so. He has condemned the war crimes committed by the State of Israel against innocents in Gaza, and he has offered Vatican City as a venue for negotiations between Russia and Ukraine. He should continue on this path. Indeed, in doing so, he follows the lead of Pope John Paul II who vehemently opposed the American invasion of Iraq, ostensibly justified by the Bush administration’s lies about “weapons of mass destruction.” Indeed, Pope Leo has also signaled an affinity for John Paul’s efforts in this regard. At his May 11 address, Leo stated “never again war,” a phrase employed by John Paul against the American war on Iraq, and other conflicts.

In contrast to this, the “diplomacy” of Pope Francis—if it can be called diplomacy at all—was not so much focused on alleviating the costs of war as it was focused on promoting a certain ideological agenda. Under Francis, calls for peace tended to be vague, non-specific and generally served as a vehicle for Francis to push “social justice” and environmentalism.

Assert the Church’s Independence from the State

In his history of political thought, historian Ralph Raico—following Lord Acton—notes that the idea of freedom in the West owes much to the fact that the West’s political institutions were formed during a period of competition between Church and state throughout the Middle Ages.

As Raico notes, Europe was formed out of incessant conflict between civil authorities and Church authorities, each of which sought to assert its own prerogatives against the other. AThis conflict established the idea that some institutions are simply not subject to the authority of states and—more importantly—that states are limited in who and what they can legally or morally dominate. In many ways, then, Church and state—at least in the West, in contrast to the Caesaropapism of the East—are natural enemies. The byproduct of this conflict paved the way for other institutions—cities, guilds, nobles, etc.— to assert their own independence from the state as well.

Clearly, the modern Church enjoys only a tiny fraction of the independence it enjoyed prior to the rise of the modern sovereign state, but it is essential that Pope Leo continue to assert the Church’s independence overall.

Most pressing in this matter is a repair of Pope Francis’s disastrous China policy which granted far greater control over Church prerogatives that was thought acceptable under Francis’s predecessors. As noted by the heroic Cardinal Zen, Francis essentially threw in the towel on maintaining Church independence from Beijing.

Leo needs to assert the Church’s independence once again in China, and in so doing engage in the same battle for independence that characterizes—as with, for example, the investiture controversy—centuries of Church-state conflict.

This general attitude also ought to be expressed not just in explicit assertions of independence, but also in a policy of refusing to allow the Church and the papacy to be caught up in the minutiae of modern domestic policy conflicts in the world’s current states.  Moreover, no state ought to be treated as indispensable or exceptional. It is good that Pope Leo gave no special attention to J.D. Vance during Vance’s recent visit to the Vatican, nor has Leo pledged to visit the United States any time soon. The Papacy is uniquely equipped to send this message since the Holy See predates every state on earth by many centuries.

It is far too early to know the details of how Pope Leo will address these matters, but in these three areas he can do much to confront the nearly untrammeled powers of modern states which have done so much to destroy the freedoms and the dignity of families and individuals across the world.

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

The post What the World Needs Now From Pope Leo XIV appeared first on LewRockwell.

Murray Rothbard’s Man, Economy, and State (MES) is one of the two greatest books on free market economics of the twentieth century. The other, of course, is Ludwig von Mises’s Human Action. Rothbard at first intended his book to be an easier-to-understand guidebook to Human Action, but it soon turned into a major treatise in its own right. Rothbard was too much of a creative genius to be limited to summarizing someone else’s book. In this week’s article, I’ll explain some of the reasons why MES is great, and why you need to read it.

First, let’s look at what Mises said about MES. He said that it made an “epochal” contribution to economics and that it made many important theoretical innovations: “In every chapter of his treatise, Dr. Rothbard, adopting the best of the teachings of his predecessors, and adding to them highly important observations, not only develops the correct theory but is no less anxious to refute all objections ever raised against these doctrines. He exposes the fallacies and contradictions of the popular interpretation of economic affairs. Thus, for instance, in dealing with the problem of unemployment he points out: in the whole modern and Keynesian discussion of this subject the missing link is precisely the wage rate. It is meaningless to talk of unemployment or employment without reference to a wage rate. Whatever supply of labor service is brought to market can be sold, but only if wages are set at whatever rate will clear the market. If a man wishes to be employed, he will be, provided the wage rate is adjusted according to what Rothbard calls his discounted marginal value product, i.e., the present height of the value which the consumers — at the time of the final sale of the product — will ascribe to his contribution to its production. Whenever the job seeker insists on a higher wage, he will remain unemployed. If people refuse to be employed except at places, in occupations, or at wage rates they would like, then they are likely to be choosing unemployment for substantial periods. The full import of this state of affairs becomes manifest if one gives attention to the fact that, under present conditions, those offering their services on the labor market themselves represent the immense majority of the consumers whose buying or abstention from buying ultimately determines the height of wage rates. Rothbard’s work is an epochal contribution to the general science of human action, praxeology, and its practically most important and, up to now, best-elaborated part, economics. Henceforth all essential studies in these branches of knowledge will have to take full account of the theories and criticisms expounded by Dr. Rothbard.”

One of the greatest things in MES is that Rothbard classifies all the possible types of government interference with the free market and shows what is wrong with them. If you read the book, you will be equipped to refute any opponent of the free market that you get into an argument with. He brilliantly explains how he classifies types of intervention: “What types of intervention can an individual or group commit? Little or nothing has so far been done to construct a systematic typology of intervention, and economists have simply discussed such seemingly disparate actions as price control, licensing, inflation, etc. We can, however, classify interventions into three broad categories. In the first place, the intervener, or ‘invader,’ or ‘aggressor’—the individual or group that initiates violent intervention—may command an individual subject to do or not do certain things, when these actions directly involve the individual’s person or property alone. In short, the intervener may restrict the subject’s use of his property, where exchange with someone else is not involved. This may be called an autistic intervention, where the specific order or command involves only the subject himself. Secondly, the intervener may compel an exchange between the individual subject and himself or coerce a ‘gift’ from the subject. We may call this a binary intervention, since a hegemonic relation is here established between two people: the intervener and the subject. Thirdly, the invader may either compel or prohibit an exchange between a pair of subjects (exchanges always take place between two people). In this case, we have a triangular intervention, where a hegemonic relation is created between the invader and a pair of actual or potential exchangers. All these interventions are examples of the hegemonic relation—the relation of command and obedience—in contrast to the contractual, free-market relation of voluntary mutual benefit.”

Let’s look at an example of how Rothbard explodes arguments for intervention. Many people claim that the ordinary consumer lacks enough information to make purchases in his own interest, Consumers thus need to be guided by “experts.” Rothbard pulverizes this objection: “Consumers also take entrepreneurial risks on the market. Many critics of the market, while willing to concede the expertise of the capitalist-entrepreneurs, bewail the prevailing ignorance of consumers, which prevents them from gaining the utility ex post that they had expected ex ante. Typically, Wesley C. Mitchell entitled one of his famous essays: ‘The Backward Art of Spending Money.’ Professor Mises has keenly pointed out the paradox of interventionists who insist that consumers are too ignorant or incompetent to buy products intelligently, while at the same time proclaiming the virtues of democracy, where the same people vote for or against politicians whom they do not know and on policies which they scarcely understand. To put it another way, the partisans of intervention assume that individuals are not competent to run their own affairs or to hire experts to advise them, but they also assume that these same individuals are competent to vote for these experts at the ballot box. They are further assuming that the mass of supposedly incompetent consumers are competent to choose not only those who will rule over themselves, but also over the competent individuals in society. Yet such absurd and contradictory assumptions lie at the root of every program for ‘democratic’ intervention in the affairs of the people. In fact, the truth is precisely the reverse of this popular ideology. Consumers are surely not omniscient, but they have direct tests by which to acquire and check their knowledge. They buy a certain brand of breakfast food and they do not like it; and so they do not buy it again. They buy a certain type of automobile and like its performance; they buy another one. And in both cases, they tell their friends of this newly won knowledge. Other consumers patronize consumers’ research organizations, which can warn or advise them in advance. But, in all cases, the consumers have the direct test of results to guide them. And the firm which satisfied the consumers expands and prospers and thus gains ‘good will,’ while the firm failing to satisfy them goes out of business. On the other hand, voting for politicians and public policies is a completely different matter. Here there are no direct tests of success or failure whatever, neither profits and losses nor enjoyable or unsatisfying consumption. In order to grasp consequences, especially the indirect catallactic consequences of governmental decisions, it is necessary to comprehend complex chains of praxeological reasoning. Very few voters have the ability or the interest to follow such reasoning, particularly, as Schumpeter points out, in political situations. For the minute influence that any one person has on the results, as well as the seeming remoteness of the actions, keeps people from gaining interest in political problems or arguments. Lacking the direct test of success or failure, the voter tends to turn, not to those politicians whose policies have the best chance of success, but to those who can best sell their propaganda ability. Without grasping logical chains of deduction, the average voter will never be able to discover the errors that his ruler makes. George J. Schuller, in attempting to refute this argument, protested that: ‘complex chains of reasoning are required for consumers to select intelligently an automobile or television set.’ But such knowledge is not necessary; for the whole point is that the consumers have always at hand a simple and pragmatic test of success: does the product work and work well? In public economic affairs, there is no such test, for no one can know whether a particular policy has ‘worked’ or not without knowing the a priori reasoning of economics.”

Another vital point in MES is that the level of the income tax is much more important than whether the tax is “proportional” or “progressive’: While the progressive principle is certainly highly destructive of the market, most conservative, pro-free-market economists tend to overweigh its effects and to underweigh the destructive effects of proportional taxation. Proportional income taxation has many of the same consequences, and therefore the level of income taxation is generally more important for the market than the degree of progressivity. Thus, society A may have a proportional income tax requiring every man to pay 50 percent of his income; society B may have a very steeply progressive tax requiring a poor man to pay 1/4  percent and the richest man 10 percent of his income. The rich man will certainly prefer society B, even though the tax is progressive—demonstrating that it is not so much the progressivity as the height of his tax that burdens the rich man. 1/4 Incidentally, the poor producer, with a lower tax upon him, will also prefer society B. This demonstrates the fallacy in the common conservative complaint against progressive taxation that it is a means ‘for the poor to rob the rich.’ For both the poor man and the rich man have, in our example, chosen progression! The reason is that the ‘poor’ do not ‘rob the rich’ under progressive taxation. Instead, it is the State that ‘robs’ both through taxation, whether proportional or progressive.”

Let’s do everything we can to encourage people to read MES— a great masterpiece by one of the greatest thinkers of the twentieth century.

The post The Greatness of Man, Economy, and State appeared first on LewRockwell.

Writes George Giles:

Not to mention the witches brew of toxic chemical pollution that the USSR spread on its workers. Then there are the thousands of ‘workers’ that died horrific if secret deaths from nuclear weapons production. Then there is capitalism where the US only killed three, two by there own mistakes.

Then there are the 16 identical Chernobyl style air cooled graphite nuclear reactors still in operation witnout containment vessels of any kind.

Socialism is horrific threat to the world.

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Ginny Garner wrote:

Lew,

My Pillow CEO and leader of the nationwide election integrity movement Mike Lindell wants to get rid of all the electronic voting machines and meld them down to prison bars. 132 countries got rid of their machines and hand count their ballots. Why can’t the US?

See here.

The post Mike Lindell’s Jury Trial Started Today: Why It’s So Important appeared first on LewRockwell.

Tim McGraw wrote:

Back-to-Back Cannabis Murders Rock Back Country of NoCal

Why does anyone need a license to grow a plant? Growing and imbibing marijuana should be the same as with tomatoes.

The post Back to Back Murders in Pot Growing Country; Northern California appeared first on LewRockwell.

Thanks, John Smith. 

HAARETZ

The post What Every IDF Soldier Serving at Notorious Sde Teiman Knows Is Happening to Its Palestinian Detainees appeared first on LewRockwell.

Thanks, John Smith

Middle East Eye

The post Israel destroys north Gaza’s sole kidney dialysis facility appeared first on LewRockwell.

Thanks, John Smith. 

AP News

The post China slams Hegseth for calling the country a threat appeared first on LewRockwell.

Thanks, John Smith. 

Mondoweiss

The post Meet the Palestinian Bedouin community that no longer exists appeared first on LewRockwell.

Thanks, John Frahm.

Reason

The post How Palantir is expanding the surveillance state appeared first on LewRockwell.

Click Here:

Matt Taibbi

The post Ending the World to Own Trump appeared first on LewRockwell.

Thanks, Johnny Kramer. 

 The Gateway Pundit | by Jim Hoft

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