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For many years, there have been those who have been prognosticating an economic crisis – not just a recession lasting a year or two, but a full-blown Greater Depression that would eclipse any major event we’ve seen in our lifetimes.

That may appear to be an overstatement, but historically, it’s the norm for a time of major upheaval to occur every eighty years or so. And although some of us began analysing and commenting on the Greater Depression many years ago, it’s clear to all of us that we’ve now entered the leading edge of the crisis.

All of the traditional warning signs are present, and although technology has changed considerably over the millennia, human behaviour has not. We are witnessing the same symptoms that were present in major collapses of the past, going back at least as far as the Roman Empire.

We are therefore seeing not only the initial stages of an economic collapse but the concurrent events, such as an almost total corruption of the political structure, a move toward totalitarian rule, the destruction of currencies, and a loss of faith in leadership across the board. Along the way, we’re also experiencing a decline in logic and morality and an eroding sense of humanity.

That’s quite a lot to take in, yet, sorry to say; we’re only in the first stages of collapse. It will get quite a bit worse before it gets better.

As the economy begins its collapse in earnest, what we shall witness will be a population that will be unable to adapt quickly to the symptoms of the crisis as they increase in frequency and magnitude. The reaction to each will be, first, shock (an inability to comprehend that the impossible has occurred), then fear (a state of confusion and inability to adjust to rapidly-changing conditions), and finally, anger.

This last development should give pause to us all, as it’s the stage when those who have been most strongly impacted realise that there’s precious little that they can do to regain normalcy. When they find that they can’t get their hands around the necks of those who actually are to blame, they’ll take out their anger on whomever is in their proximity – each other.

So, the questions arise: Where will these problems be most prevalent? Where will the situations exist that should be avoided as much as possible, in order to minimize the likelihood that we’ll become collateral damage of the crisis?

Having studied previous similar historical periods, I can attest that this is a question that, unfortunately, requires an extensive and complex answer. However, as a rough guide, there are three considerations that will be overarching.

Regardless of any other concerns that may affect the reader individually, all persons would do well to stay clear (as much as possible) from the following:

First World Countries

Since 1945, the First World countries (the US, UK, EU, Japan, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand) have led the world in both prosperity and power. Under the driving force of the US, they’ve created not only the advances of the last eighty years but also the rot that has led to the current crisis. As such, these countries are not only the countries where we’re seeing the most dramatic oppression of people; they will also experience the most precipitous fall economically, politically, and sociologically.

Although these countries have, until recently, seemed to be the most attractive locations in which to live, that condition has now begun a reversal, and in the coming years, they’ll represent the very nexus of decline. As such, they’ll become the most unpredictable and even the most dangerous places to be.

Conversely, the choicest countries in which to live will be those countries where change will be minimal. Those countries where the populations and governments have been relatively unambitious over the last half century or more, will be the locations that are the least likely to change dramatically during the crisis. That one fact speaks loudly to the reader’s economic, political, and social well-being in this period.

Cold Climates

The colder a location is, the less hospitable it will be in a crisis. When governments collapse economically and seemingly basic amenities can no longer be paid for, politicians will look after their own needs before those of the people they are meant to represent. Simple services such as snow ploughing may be dropped from city budgets that must experience cutbacks. More importantly, during an energy crunch, you’re likely to experience periods in which heat cannot be attained. This doesn’t mean that you will necessarily freeze to death, but it does mean that life will be much harder. In addition, produce cannot be grown in colder climates, which eliminates even the possibility of a kitchen garden in colder months.

Cities

By far, this is the riskiest of the three concerns. The more concentrated the population is the greater the risk. The larger your building, the less control you have over utilities. If the water, electricity, or heat is shut off due to energy shortages, you will have little or no recourse.

But, by far, the greatest risk in a city will be the inherent depersonalisation that exists even in the best of times. Even if you live in a very nice apartment building in a nice neighbourhood, you’re likely to be socially isolated from others. (You may not even know the people in the apartment across the hall.) People in cities tend not to help each other much at the best of times, but in a crisis, those around you can become a threat to your very existence.

Most importantly, food supplies are likely to be interrupted for indeterminate periods and, as Isaac Azimov stated, “After nine missed meals, a man will kill for food.” Even if you’re able to obtain a loaf of bread at a neighbourhood store, you may not be able to walk home with it without being waylaid. Even brief periods of interruption of food delivery to a population centre may result in a simple loaf of bread being worth killing for.

And even for those who live in prosperous neighbourhoods where the neighbours tend to be civil, poorer neighbourhoods are not so far away that their residents, if desperate, will not make the short trip to where they think others have the essentials.

Such breakdowns, as described above, tend to occur slowly, then suddenly. Those of us who have lived through city riots understand that tension builds as people attempt to maintain normal decorum, then some small event sparks off rioting. A citywide riot can go off like popcorn spontaneously. In good times, police can quell a riot in a few days or weeks, but when rioting is citywide, and the cause cannot be quickly remedied, riots can last for extended periods, potentially turning formerly-safe city streets into the equivalent of a war zone.

Of course, there’s the tendency to say, “Don’t be ridiculous – it can’t get that bad.” However, history tells us that whenever a major crisis period occurs, the above conditions almost always occur.

The reader may wish to assess his exposure to the three conditions above. Ideally, he’ll find a location to sit out the crisis – a country that’s likely to be less affected by the events that are now unfolding. He may choose a location that’s warm year-round, where food is plentiful even in harder times. And he may try to locate himself in a community of lower population density, where neighbours habitually help each other.

But regardless of what the reader chooses to do, he should be aware that the future of his well-being and that of his family may hinge on the choices he makes in the very near future.

Reprinted with permission from International Man.

The post Where Not to Be in a Crisis appeared first on LewRockwell.

Brilliant Eurasian cultures converged, interacted and spread their wings on the Ancient Silk Roads.

DUNHUANG – Across History, the Silk Road – actually a network of roads – is the supreme Highway Star: the most important connectivity corridor ever, rolling across Ancient Eurasia, linking what Chinese scholars consensually define as the main civilization systems in the world: China, India, Persia, Babylon, Egypt, Greece and Rome, as well as showcasing several historical stages of economic and cultural exchanges between East and West.

Prof. Ji Xianlin, a top scholar of Dunhuang Studies, came up with a formulation certified to drive Western supremacists crazy for all eternity:

“There are only four, rather than five, influential cultural systems in the world: Chinese, Indian, Greek and Islam. They all met only on China’s Dunhuang and Xinjiang”.

Dunhuang’s prime geo-strategic position across History was inevitably bound to generate spectacular artistic achievements.

After years since my previous journeys, then the Covid shock, then China’s subsequent recovery, I have been privileged to finally embark on a renewed Journey to the West to retrace the original Ancient Silk Road, starting in Xian – the former imperial capital Chang’an – all the way through the Gansu corridor to Dunhuang.

Brilliant Eurasian cultures converged, interacted and spread their wings on the Ancient Silk Roads. Dunhuang – on the western end of the Hexi corridor in Gansu province – was the most vital hub in the eastern section of the Chinese Silk Road, framed by mountains to the north and south, the central plains to the east, and Xinjiang to the west.

Dunhuang, the “Blazing Beacon”, held a supremely strategic position controlling two passes – Yangguan and Yumenguan. Han Emperor Wu Di clearly understood that Dunhuang was the last major water source before the fear-inducing Taklamakan desert to the west, as well as sitting astride the three main Silk Road routes heading west.

Yumenguan was the all-important Jade Gate pass – set by the Han empire in the 2nd century B.C.: placed in the south Gobi and the western end of the Qilian mountains, actually marking the western limit of classic China.

The Jade Gate Pass. Photo: Pepe Escobar

I spent a whole blinding beautiful blue-sky day in the pass and its surroundings after striking a deal with a taxi driver in Dunhuang. It’s a thrill to admire how the Han dynasty organized their traffic management system, the beacon fire system, and the Great Wall defense system (remains of the Han Wall are still there) – guaranteeing the safety of the long-distance Silk Road connectivity corridor.

The remains of the Great Han Wall. Photo: P.E.

Talk to the caravan: the secret of “people to people’s exchanges”

At the impeccably organized Dunhuang Book Center, historical records refer to it as “a metropolis where the Han people and non-Han peoples meet”. Quite the antecessor to Xi Jinping’s “people to people’s exchanges.” The spirit remains, especially at the fabulous Night Market, a gastronomic feast with pride of place for Uyghur recipes.

Uyghur businesswomen at the fabulous Dunhuang Night Market. Photo: P.E. 

Silk and porcelain from the central plains, jewelry and perfume from “the western regions”, camels and horses from north China, grains from Hexi, everything was traded in Dunhuang. Merchant deals, migrations, military games, cultural exchanges, a profusion of literati, scholars, artists, officials, diplomats, religious pilgrims, military brought classic Chinese culture into an effervescent mix – Sogdian, Tibet, Uyghur, Tangut, Mongolia – all absorbed into what eventually became Dunhuang art.

Itinerant Buddhism, Nestorianism, Zoroastrianism, Islam – the sophisticated aesthetic feel of Dunhuang was progressively influenced by architecture, sculpture, paintings, music, dance, weaving, dyeing techniques all the way from Central Asia and West Asia.

“Silk Road” terminology in Xi’s “moderately prosperous” modernized China is an extremely nuanced business. For instance, already in Xian, at the Small White Goose pagoda, we see it described as “Silk Roads: The Routes Network of Chang’an-Tian Shan corridor”.

That’s a geographically correct interpretation, stressing the Tian Shan mountains instead of the politically correct Xinjiang (which was essentially part of the “western regions”, not necessarily Chinese territory, for centuries).

As for how the Silk Road began, that now follows a single, scholarly accepted version: Han Emperor Wu Di, in 140 B.C. sent Zhang Qian as an envoy to the “western regions” on two business missions. The “Records of the Grand Historian” show that Zhang Qian, as the first official diplomat in Chinese history, de facto opened channels of communications with the “western regions” and then all the states in the northwest started trading with the Han, especially silk.

From Xian’s Shaanxi History Museum to the Dunhuang Academy, and including the Gansu museum in Lanzhou, in interactions with scholars and museum curators as well as in complement to formidable Silk Road exhibits, it’s fascinating to retrace the now established official narrative on the Silk Roads, according to which “the civilization of ancient China represented by silk started to impact the states in the western regions, Central Asia and West Asia.”

It was way more complex than that – as spices, metals, chemicals, saddles, leather products, glass, paper (invented in the 2nd century B.C.), everything was on the market, but the general drift applies: merchants from the central plains defying deserts and mountain peaks in caravans laden with silk, bronze mirrors and lacquerware from China, seeking to exchange them for commodities, while merchants from the western regions brought furs, jade, felts to the central plains.

Talk about multi-ethnic “people to people’s exchanges”. And by the way, no one ever used the term “Silk Road”; it was “the road to Samarkand” or just the “northern” or “southern” routes around the ominous Taklamakan desert.

About the Tang dynasty monetary system…

By the 3rd century, Dunhuang was already at the apex of Silk Road connectivity; and that’s when merchants and pilgrims started to sponsor the construction of the nearby Buddhist Mogao caves.

The main pavilion at the Mogao caves. Photo: P.E.

The Mogao Caves are part of what is known in Gansu province as the five Dunhuang grottoes. It’s the same system of caves – 813 surviving, with 735 in Mogao. To approach Mogao is a major thrill in itself: we need to be in an official park bus, crammed with zillions of Chinese tourists, rolling through the desert, and suddenly we are in the eastern foot of the Mingsha mountains, with the Dangquan river running right in front of us, facing the Qilian mountains to the east, with the caves set back against and cut into the cliff face, connected by a series of ramps and walkways.

The caves started to be built as early as in the 4th century – all the way to the 14th century (the earliest wall paintings are from the 5th); it’s a group of caves in four levels, 1,6 km from north to south along a cliff as much as 30 meters high. The 492 caves in the southern area house more than 45 km of wall paintings, over 2,000 painted statues, and five wooden eaves. They were originally used for worshipping Buddhas.

At the Dunhuang Academy museum: where the artists came from. Photo: P.E.

What we are still able to see takes our breath away. Highlights include a wrestling scene from Buddha’s life on cave 290; a girl apsara – mythic dancer – on cave 296; the Deer King on cave 257; a hunting scene on cave 249; a Garuda – defined in Chinese as “the Scarlet Bird” – on cave 285; parables of the Magic City from the Lotus Sutra, a masterpiece of High Tang dynasty, on cave 217; a sitting Boddhisattva on cave 196; impeccably preserved worshipping bodhisattvas on cave 285.

One of the Buddha highlights of the Mogao caves. Photo: P.E.

Rules are extremely strict: visit only to selected caves, with an official guide, no photos, only the guide’s torchlight to illuminate the grottoes. I was privileged to visit guided by Helen, who studied in Dunhuang University and is now doing her PhD in Archeology. After the visit she explained in detail the ground-breaking conservation work of the Dunhuang Academy.

The construction of the caves was a spectacular undertaking in terms of division of labor. Just imagine: chiselers to dig and excavate a cave out of the cliff; stonecutters, who also dug caves; bricklayers to build wooden or earthen structures; carpenters, who also repaired wooden tools; sculptors to create the statues; and painters to paint the caves and statues.

Mogao, as an aesthetic experience, is unequaled in its striking collection of Buddhist wall painting criss-crossing China, Persia, India and Central Asian art.

And then there’s what we cannot see: more than 40,000 scrolls found in the library cave, the largest deposit of documents and artifacts discovered anywhere along the Silk Road, with texts on Buddhism, Manicheism, Zoroastrianism and the Eastern Christian Church (from Syria) showing how cosmopolitan Dunhuang was. That’s part of the European scholarly – and otherwise – plunder of the Dunhuang wealth starting in the late 19th century, a completely different, complex, and long, story.

In geoeconomic terms, for nearly ten centuries Dunhuang was extremely wealthy, especially during the Tang dynasty (6th to 9th century). The Tang had a fascinating monetary system – with three different currencies: textiles (silk and hemp), grain and coins.

The central government, in the imperial capital Chang’an, used a single aggregate unit to represent all trade. The Dunhuang garrison was a key strategic post: payments came in no less than six different types of woven silk. Well, each place paid their taxes with their locally produced cloth. What the Tang did was to transfer all these textiles to Dunhuang. The garrison’s officers then converted the tax cloth into coins and into grain, to pay local merchants and to feed the soldiers.

So in a nutshell the Tang dynasty was all the time injecting a lot of money – via woven cloth – into the Dunhuang economy. Talk about a public-private state development model – which certainly did not escape Beijing planners when they came up, in 2013, with the concept of the New Silk Roads.

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

The post Art, Trade and State Power at the Heart of the Silk Road appeared first on LewRockwell.

A federal court in Virginia recently ruled that the name of Confederate General Stonewall Jackson, who is regarded as a great hero by many Americans, violates the free speech rights of black students. As summarized by the judge,

The complaint alleged that the name [Stonewall Jackson] created “an unlawful and discriminatory educational environment for Black students,” and accused the school board of violating the First and 14th Amendments of the U.S. Constitution, Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and the Equal Education Opportunities Act.

The judge’s reasoning was that where a school is named after a Confederate hero, families who consider Confederate history offensive have a cause of action against the school board for the violation of their First Amendment right to free speech because school names and symbols are “compelled speech.” Although the first amendment protects the right of anyone—including, in this case, a school in the Shenandoah Valley—to express freely their respect for their Confederate heritage, black people also have a free speech right not to be subjected to “compelled speech” and can get such symbols struck down. By what form of convoluted reasoning did the courts manage to turn the right to free speech into a power vested in civil rights activists to silence the expression of Confederate heritage?

This is where the Fourteenth Amendment comes in. Most people would not immediately associate the Fourteenth Amendment with free speech, which is better known as a First Amendment right. In this case, the judge relied on the case of Stromberg v. California, 283 U.S. 359, 368 (1931), which, according to the judge, held that “Plaintiffs have a cause of action for the violation of their federal rights, including those under the First Amendment as incorporated through the Fourteenth Amendment, under 42 U.S.C. § 1983” (emphasis added). The judge explained that the Fourteenth Amendment equal protection clause protects the right to free speech, and Confederate names, in his view, amount to compelled speech because students who attend the school cannot avoid “expressing” the school name and showcasing the school’s mascots. Hence, the judge ruled that,

By reinstating the name “Stonewall Jackson High School” and thereby compelling students to advance the School Board’s chosen message favoring “Stonewall Jackson” through the conduct of extracurricular activities rendered expressive by that name, the School Board has violated plaintiffs’ First Amendment rights, as incorporated by the Fourteenth Amendment, against compelled speech.

In this way, the Fourteenth Amendment bypasses the First Amendment, in cases involving complaints that the free speech rights of some (expressing Confederate heritage) violate the protection from compelled speech “as incorporated through the Fourteenth Amendment” for civil rights groups demanding the equal protection of the law. This is by no means an accidental outcome—thwarting the First Amendment is the hallmark strategy of those who believe that free speech does not include “hate speech,” meaning any speech they hate. The roots of this strategy lie in legislation from the Reconstruction era, when the aim of the Radical Republican government was to give the newly-enfranchised freedmen, who were the guarantors of Republican power and control in the post-war South, legislative tools to challenge hostile state authorities for violating federal law.

The belief, at the time, was that state authorities in the South were “white supremacist” and the only way freedmen could enjoy the equal protection of the law would be through federal law enforcement. Based on this belief, the power of the federal government was enhanced to give it greater oversight over what were seen as “racist” state governments. Civil rights activists still view this as a major tool in their endless war against “white supremacy”:

The tool is known as Section 1983 of Title 42 of the U.S. Code. It originally was Section 1 of the Civil Rights Act of 1871, better known as the Ku Klux Klan Act, one of the most important civil rights laws in U.S. history. That act was intended to protect Black Americans from white supremacist violence in the post-Civil War South.

Section 1983 allows an individual to sue a state or local government official [in this case a public school board] who has violated his or her constitutional rights. A violation could involve freedom of speech, freedom of religion, due process, and more.

Readers will be familiar with Murray Rothbard’s argument that civil rights—which he pointedly referred to as “phony civil rights”—violate the rights of self-ownership and private property. There could be no clearer example of this than people claiming a “civil right” to destroy anything which, in their opinion, is an emblem of “white supremacy.” In the Virginia case, the complainants relied on a long list of previous cases in which schools had been held to have the right to ban Confederate-themed apparel on grounds that it would provoke racial conflict among the students. While that may, arguably, fall within the discretion of the school authorities, it is a long way from saying the school authorities have discretion over what is necessary to keep order in the school to saying that students have a veto power over the school name if they consider the name offensive. The self-defined “victims” of civil rights violations argue that under the “equal protection” clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, they are entitled to be protected from psychological “harm.” In this case they complained that Confederate names are “discriminatory and harmful.”

When Black students are compelled to attend schools that glorify the leaders and ideals of the Confederacy, they are subject to a racially discriminatory educational environment, which has significant psychological, academic, and social effects.

When students are required to identify as members of student bodies or teams named to honor Confederate leaders in order to participate in school activities, they are required against their will to endorse the violent defense of slavery pursued by the Confederacy and the symbolism that these images have in the modern White supremacist movement.

Leaving aside the partisan view of history exhibited by the complaint, and the fact that psychological “harm” could easily be avoided by going to a different school whose name is more pleasing to the complainants, the result of courts upholding these complaints is that the civil rights regime effectively gives its protected groups a veto over the liberties of others. This is yet another reason why there are good grounds to argue that the Fourteenth Amendment should be abolished:

The Fourteenth Amendment has had precisely the effect that its nineteenth-century Republican party supporters intended it to have: it has greatly centralized power in Washington, DC, and has subjected Americans to the kind of judicial tyranny that Thomas Jefferson warned about when he described federal judges as those who would be “constantly working underground to undermine the foundations of our confederated fabric.”

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

The post How Civil Rights Activists use the Fourteenth Amendment to Bypass the First Amendment appeared first on LewRockwell.

These days the Wall Street Journal probably ranks as America’s most influential and credible print outlet, so Friday morning’s front-page story describing a sudden new escalation in our episodic trade war with China caught my attention.

As emphasized in the first several paragraphs, the Chinese had suddenly imposed an unprecedented new wave of licensing requirements on the import and use of the rare earths that they mine and refine, as well as the vital small magnets produced from those compounds. These extremely severe restrictions would now apply to any companies around the world whose goods contained as little as 0.1% of their value in that category, apparently encompassing an enormous range of major industries including cars, solar panels, and chip-making equipment. The entire supply-claim for phones, computers, data-centers, and AI systems would be covered, requiring individual permissions from the Chinese authorities for their use to continue on a case-by-case basis.

China’s newest restrictions on rare-earth materials would mark a nearly unprecedented export control that stands to disrupt the global economy, giving Beijing more leverage in trade negotiations and ratcheting up pressure on the Trump administration to respond.

The rule, put out Thursday by China’s Commerce Ministry, is viewed as an escalation in the U.S.-China trade fight because it threatens the supply chain for semiconductors. Chips are the lifeblood of the economy, powering phones, computers and data centers needed to train artificial-intelligence models. The rule also would affect cars, solar panels and the equipment for making chips and other products, limiting the ability of other countries to support their own industries. China produces roughly 90% of the world’s rare-earth materials.

Global companies that sell goods with certain rare-earth materials sourced from China accounting for 0.1% or more of the product’s value would need permission from Beijing, under the new rule. Tech companies will probably find it extremely difficult to show that their chips, the equipment needed to make them and other components fall below the 0.1% threshold, industry experts said.

The article emphasized that China has control over 90% of the refining and production of these small but vital technological components, with no obvious substitutes available. One quoted source described it as the “economic equivalent of nuclear war” and something that could “destroy the American AI industry.”

These new Chinese economic sanctions even extended to all the technologies and equipment related to the mining, refining, and fabrication of rare earth products. Such steps were obviously aimed at preventing any foreign competitors from developing alternate future supply chains able to weaken China’s current stranglehold. The total extraterritorial scope of China’s new restrictions was also dramatic.

As the MoA blogger brought to my attention, these issues were set forth most forcefully by Arnaud Bertrand, a longtime China observer based in that country:

This is actually big, potentially huge, notably because China’s new rare earth export controls include a provision (point 4 here: https://mofcom.gov.cn/zwgk/zcfb/art/2025/art_7fc9bff0fb4546ecb02f66ee77d0e5f6.html) whereby anyone using rare earths to develop advanced semiconductors (defined as 14nm-and-below) will require case-by-case approval.

Which effectively gives China de-facto veto power over the entire advanced semi-conductor supply chain as rare earths are used at critical steps throughout – from ASML (who use rare earths for magnets in their lithography machines: https://asml.com/en/news/stories/2023/6-ingredients-robust-supply-chain) to TSMC.

The export controls are also extra-territorial: foreign entities must obtain Chinese export licenses before re-exporting products manufactured abroad if they contain Chinese rare earth materials comprising 0.1% or more of the product’s value.

So China is effectively mirroring the US semiconductor export controls that were used against them, with its own comprehensive extraterritorial control regime, except with rare earths.

Naturally, the response of President Donald Trump was volcanic, and he quickly declared:

“It is impossible to believe that China would have taken such an action, but they have, and the rest is History.”

By late Friday the Journal reported that Trump had declared his plans to impose new, 100% tariffs on all Chinese trade goods, above and beyond the tariffs he had previously levied, along with sweeping new software export controls. These huge new tariff rates would amount to reestablishing a near embargo on Chinese imports so the result was a heavy selloff in the S&P 500, the worst since the president’s original tariff announcement in early April.

In recent weeks, trade relations between China and America had seemed to stabilize, so this sudden Chinese announcement might have seemed like a bolt from the blue. Only towards the bottom of the original article did the Journal writers explain that the new Chinese restrictions were in direct retaliation for similarly sweeping American export restrictions against Chinese technology companies imposed a dozen days earlier but given much less attention in our mainstream media outlets.

This merely continued the pattern of the last few years, with American economic sanctions suddenly imposed against China followed by waves of national outrage after the latter country responded with retaliatory measures.

For example, the Journal mentioned:

Vice Premier He Lifeng believed an informal “freeze” on new export controls had been agreed upon following recent talks in Madrid, according to people familiar with the discussions. But that understanding was shattered when the U.S. introduced new controls on foreign-owned companies.

According to the Journal, Chinese President Xi Jinping had grown weary of this endless game, and decided to hit back extremely hard, as indicated by the severity of the new retaliatory sanctions.

The Journal writers noted that earlier this year, American automakers warned that they would be forced to cease production in many of their factories if the supply of Chinese rare earth magnets were halted, stoppages as extreme as those caused by the Covid-19 outbreak, but that the current round of Chinese export restrictions could be even more severe.

Last month I updated the standard international estimates of the economic power of the world’s major countries and blocs to incorporate the latest 2024 financial statistics. These figures merely confirmed that the Real Productive size of China’s economy—sometimes considered the most reliable measure of true international economic strength—was now considerably larger than that of the entire West, even augmented by our Japanese vassal state:

In that same article, I also emphasized how the latest round of Trump’s outrageous international demands and tariff policies had finally driven populous, fast-growing India into the opposing camp, further strengthening the unfavorable correlation of forces arrayed against America and perhaps emboldening China’s new retaliation against the antics of our President Trump and his sycophantic subordinates.

I think that these potentially momentous developments illustrate the extreme recklessness of the Trump Administration and the tremendous risks that a country faces if its economic and trade policies continue to be governed by the autocratic whim of a Mad Emperor rather than carefully hammered out in public legislation. As I wrote soon after Trump’s original April tariff announcements:

Across thousands of years, the world has seen many important countries ruled by absolute monarchs or all-powerful dictators, with some of these leaders even considered deranged. But I can’t recall any past example in which a major nation’s tax, tariff, or tribute policies have undergone such rapid and sudden changes, moving up and down by huge amounts apparently based upon personal whim. Certainly Caligula never did anything so peculiar, nor Louis XIV nor Genghis Khan nor anyone else who comes to mind. Lopping off the heads of a few random government officials was one thing, but drastic changes in national financial policies were generally taken much more seriously. I don’t think that Tamerlane ever suddenly raised the tribute he demanded from his terrified subjects by a factor of ten, then a few days later lowered it back down by a factor of two.

This potentially devastating Chinese economic response would be bad enough but it came just after some new information revealed the extreme fragility of the American economy.

An October 7th article in Fortune described the important economic calculations of Harvard’s James Furman, echoed by other experts. According to his estimates, if we excluded investment in data centers and other information processing technology, American GDP growth during the first half of 2025 was almost nil, only 0.1% on an annualized basis. Consider also that probably almost all of this data investment has been due to the ongoing AI and Crypto booms, and that these have probably provided other major contributions to GDP growth, as the Financial Times argued:

The hundreds of billions of dollars companies are investing in AI now account for an astonishing 40 per cent share of US GDP growth this year. And some analysts believe that estimate doesn’t fully capture the AI spend, so the real share could be even higher.

AI companies have accounted for 80 per cent of the gains in US stocks so far in 2025. That is helping to fund and drive US growth, as the AI-driven stock market draws in money from all over the world, and feeds a boom in consumer spending by the rich.

Since the wealthiest 10 per cent of the population own 85 per cent of US stocks, they enjoy the largest wealth effect when they go up. Little wonder then that the latest data shows America’s consumer economy rests largely on spending by the wealthy. The top 10 per cent of earners account for half of consumer spending, the highest share on record since the data begins.

But without all the excitement around AI, the US economy might be stalling out, given the multiple threats…

Foreigners poured a record $290bn into US stocks in the second quarter and now own about 30 per cent of the market — the highest share in post-second world war history. Europeans and Canadians have been boycotting American goods but continue buying US stocks in bulk — especially the tech giants…

What that suggests is that AI better deliver for the US, or its economy and markets will lose the one leg they are now standing on.

Taken together, these results suggest that except for the torrid pace of AI and Crypto investments, America might have already fallen into recession during the first half of this year, and there are very widespread concerns that our AI/Crypto economy constitutes a classic bubble, only one far larger than the dot-com bubble of a quarter-century ago.

Late last week, a lengthy post on the Naked Capitalism blog cited much of this evidence, quoting a critical analysis by Ed Zitron:

Where we sit today is a time of immense tension. Mark Zuckerberg says we’re in a bubble, Sam Altman says we’re in a bubble, Alibaba Chairman and billionaire Joe Tsai says we’re in a bubble, Apollo says we’re in a bubble, nobody is making money and nobody knows why they’re actually doing this anymore, just that they must do it immediately.

And they have yet to make the case that generative AI warranted any of these expenditures.

Indeed, according to one recent MIT study, 95% of the AI pilot projects at companies are currently failing.

Others have noted that although many past investment bubbles have collapsed, most of the investment value was eventually recovered, with the over-built railways of nineteenth century Britain later getting use and the same also being true for the huge quantities of fiber-optic cable laid in the late 1990s.

However, a large fraction of all the current AI investment is going into cutting-edge AI chips, and within just a few years these tend to be supplanted by newer generations of much more powerful chips, so their value rapidly declines. This suggests that if and when the bubble bursts, a major portion of that invested value will be permanently lost.

The following day another lengthy Naked Capitalism post by an academic argued that the strong Trump endorsement of Crypto-based “Stablecoins” and other related derivatives has probably been fueling the growth of a huge and uninsured new “Shadow Banking” sector whose volatility could easily produce a new crisis along the same lines of the sub prime financial crisis of the 2000s, adding a financial bubble to the one possibly inherent in current stock valuations.

Read the Whole Article

The post Donald Trump as Our Mad Emperor of the Bubble appeared first on LewRockwell.

Ron Unz tells us the consequence of Trump’s Diplomacy by Threat.

The Chinese have “suddenly imposed an unprecedented new wave of licensing requirements on the import and use of the rare earths that they mine and refine, as well as the vital small magnets produced from those compounds. These extremely severe restrictions would now apply to any companies around the world whose goods contained as little as 0.1% of their value in that category, apparently encompassing an enormous range of major industries including cars, solar panels, and chip-making equipment. The entire supply-claim for phones, computers, data-centers, and AI systems would be covered, requiring individual permissions from the Chinese authorities for their use to continue on a case-by-case basis.

“China’s newest restrictions on rare-earth materials would mark a nearly unprecedented export control that stands to disrupt the global economy, giving Beijing more leverage in trade negotiations and ratcheting up pressure on the Trump administration to respond.

“The rule, put out Thursday by China’s Commerce Ministry, is viewed as an escalation in the U.S.-China trade fight because it threatens the supply chain for semiconductors. Chips are the lifeblood of the economy, powering phones, computers and data centers needed to train artificial-intelligence models. The rule also would affect cars, solar panels and the equipment for making chips and other products, limiting the ability of other countries to support their own industries. China produces roughly 90% of the world’s rare-earth materials.

“Global companies that sell goods with certain rare-earth materials sourced from China accounting for 0.1% or more of the product’s value would need permission from Beijing, under the new rule. Tech companies will probably find it extremely difficult to show that their chips, the equipment needed to make them and other components fall below the 0.1% threshold, industry experts said.

“The article emphasized that China has control over 90% of the refining and production of these small but vital technological components, with no obvious substitutes available. One quoted source described it as the “economic equivalent of nuclear war” and something that could ‘destroy the American AI industry.’

“These new Chinese economic sanctions even extended to all the technologies and equipment related to the mining, refining, and fabrication of rare earth products. Such steps were obviously aimed at preventing any foreign competitors from developing alternate future supply chains able to weaken China’s current stranglehold. The total extraterritorial scope of China’s new restrictions was also dramatic.  As the MoA blogger brought to my attention, these issues were set forth most forcefully by Arnaud Bertrand, a longtime China observer based in that country:

“This is actually big, potentially huge, notably because China’s new rare earth export controls include a provision (point 4 here) whereby anyone using rare earths to develop advanced semiconductors (defined as 14nm-and-below) will require case-by-case approval.

“Which effectively gives China de-facto veto power over the entire advanced semi-conductor supply chain as rare earths are used at critical steps throughout – from ASML (who use rare earths for magnets in their lithography machines) to TSMC.

“The export controls are also extra-territorial: foreign entities must obtain Chinese export licenses before re-exporting products manufactured abroad if they contain Chinese rare earth materials comprising 0.1% or more of the product’s value.

“So China is effectively mirroring the US semiconductor export controls that were used against them, with its own comprehensive extraterritorial control regime, except with rare earths.

“Naturally, the response of President Donald Trump was volcanic, and he quickly declared: ‘It is impossible to believe that China would have taken such an action, but they have, and the rest is History.’”

The post The White House Fool’s Provocations of China Finally Produces a Response appeared first on LewRockwell.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This article was originally published on Crisis Magazine.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

—

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Dutch have effectively stolen a big Chinese owned company.

The background via Pekingology:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Internal Legal Actions Are a Malicious Extension of External Pressure

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

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

We strongly condemn such politically motivated attempts to seize control.

We Will Resolutely Defend Our Lawful Rights
…

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Reprinted with permission from Moon of Alabama.

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

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

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

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

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

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

3. expanding workforces increased income and consumption.

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

5. energy supply kept up with rising consumption.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Physical, chemical and cost limits will matter.

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

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

Read the Whole Article

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Click here:

Ron Paul

 

The post Zelensky Back To White House – Again! Will He Get The Tomahawks? appeared first on LewRockwell.

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Click Here:

Eugyppius

 

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

The post Conclusive Proof that Hoppe and Other Milei Critics were Right appeared first on LewRockwell.

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

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di Barry Brownstein

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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The federal government should have four-day work weeks.

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

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

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

1.) October 14 — Charlie Kirk Day

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

But Let’s Not Stop There

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

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

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

3.) November 11 — Mayflower Compact Day

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

4.) February 24 — Marbury v. Madison Day

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

5.) November 2 — James K. Polk Day

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

6.) January 6 — Patriots’ Day

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

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

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

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

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

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

7.) December 20 — Secession Day

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

8.) June 30 — Thomas Sowell Day

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

10.) Late November — Family Day

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

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

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

12.) August 23 — Dolly Madison Day

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

The White House Historical Association writes:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Furthermore”, Professor Mearsheimer adds:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The post Waiting on Images of Abject Submission That Don’t Appear appeared first on LewRockwell.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This article was originally published on American Thinker.

The post Bureaucrats Aren’t Presidents appeared first on LewRockwell.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

We should leave Venezuela alone.

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

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

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

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

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

❖

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

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

❖

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

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

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

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

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

❖

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

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

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

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

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

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

❖

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

❖

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

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

_____________

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