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There’s little doubt that, once the dust settles, the post-collapse life is going to be tough. Most of the conveniences we take for granted today will be hard to acquire, regardless of whether or not money will still be worth anything. People who want them will say and do anything, people who sell them will come up with all sorts of strategies and you need to be prepared because, no matter how prepped you are, it’s still likely you’ll end up in desperate positions. That is why it is important to know how to barter.

In what follows I want to give you a few solid bartering and negotiation tactics and techniques that will help you get food, water or medicine when you’ll need them most. However, if you truly want them to work for you, you have to practice them. Reading them just isn’t enough, that’s why included a special section at the end where I suggest how you can do that.

Top 10 Barter Items To Stockpile

1. Bandages

First aid items are very valuable, especially care for larger wounds since they will require more dressing and frequent changes.

2. Batteries

AA and AAA are popular sizes for flashlights, headlamps, radios, and numerous other electronics. Batteries inevitably run out so these are a surefire need after SHTF.

3. MREs

Food. Need we say more? Keep in mind that someone desparate for food is very vulnerable and use caution when negotiating a deal.

4. Duct Tape

Infinite survival uses, including splinting a broken bone, repairing a tent, fletching an arrow, and marking a trail. An entire roll of duct tape should yield a high value in a trade.

5. Zip Ties

Versatile and strong, zip ties are great for hanging gear, securing shelter, fixing clothes and shoes, and more. It’s easy to carry a large number of them and separate into smaller bundles to trade.

6. Fish Antibiotics

Fish antibiotics can be purchased OTC and contain the same ingredients as human antibiotics. For more information on types and dosages, check out Fish Antibiotics For Humans: A Safe Option For Your Survival Kit?

7. Condoms

In addition to contraception, condoms have many survival uses such as carrying water (up to 2 gallons!), waterproofing gear, even a slingshot for hunting small game. They are also lightweight and easy to carry.

8. Water Purification Tablets

Since each tablet treats 16 oz of water, one bottle contains many bartering opportunities. Or trade the whole bottle for a larger item you need.

9. Waterproof Matches

Fire is essential to survival so waterproof matches can be a great bartering tool. You can also carry extra capsule lighters, such as the Everstryke Pro to add long-term value to your trade.

10. Button Compasses

Small and inexpensive yet very useful, especially in the absence of GPS or cell phone navigation. They can be used to find the way back to camp, locate family and friends, or to migrate to a new area.

Forget About Meeting The Other Person In The Middle

For some reason, many negotiations end before they begin. One of the parties gives a number, the other gives another and they both know they’ll agree to the sum of their offers divided by 2.

You can do better than that. The reason this happens is because they’re not taking into consideration other factors such as how bad one party needs what the other has to offer. Another thing you can do is find out as much as you can about your opponent beforehand.

The more you know about them and their situation, the more leverage you’ll have. And if you can’t find out much about them, it’s best to avoid doing any kind of post-SHTF deals. Those could be dangerous, anyway.

Start With A Lowball Offer

If you can do this and your opponent doesn’t turn around and leave, you just saved yourself a lot of money (or whatever you are using for currency). Starting really low means that the other party will eventually have to settle for a much lower price than if you’d started with something more reasonable.

Don’t Be Afraid To Walk Away From A Deal

Everything is a number’s game. Just because you need what the other person has to offer, this doesn’t mean you have to take it. You might find 5 or 10 other guys out there that will gladly take your deal and give you what you need, you just need to have the guts to end the negotiations and look for them.

Most people don’t see it this way, though. They might say:

What? You mean I have to go through the pain of finding someone else, especially since I have this guy right here who can give me what I need?

Yes, that’s exactly what I’m saying. The reason you don’t want to do it is because it’s painful to think you have to spend more energy to find other people. But that’s the thing. If you can train yourself to do it regularly, if you allow yourself to play the numbers’ game, walking away from bad deals will become second nature.

Throw In A Bonus

People love things they can get for free. If you feel you’re close to closing a deal but still not happy with it, how about giving away a small bonus? Maybe something from your get home bag that you already have plenty of at home. You never know what the other person needs besides your money or bartering items, this is why due diligence and talking to them are a must.

Say “No” To Lowball Offers

We talked about giving really low offers but what if someone does that to you? This puts you in a weak position so the best way to counteract it is to simply say:

No, this isn’t an offer I might consider. If you can come back with a more decent offer, I’m open to negotiation.

If they like it, fine. They’ll give you a more reasonable first offer. If they don’t, like I said, there’re plenty of other guys who might be interested in the deal.

Read the Whole Article

The post How To Barter When Money Fails in a Post-Collapse Society appeared first on LewRockwell.

Alex Karp, the CEO of the controversial military tech firm Palantir, is the coauthor of a new book, The Technological Republic: Hard Power, Soft Belief, and the Future of the West. In it, he calls for a renewed sense of national purpose and even greater cooperation between government and the tech sector. His book is, in fact, not just an account of how to spur technological innovation, but a distinctly ideological tract.

As a start, Karp roundly criticizes Silicon Valley’s focus on consumer-oriented products and events like video-sharing apps, online shopping, and social media platforms, which he dismisses as “the narrow and the trivial.” His focus instead is on what he likes to think of as innovative big-tech projects of greater social and political consequence. He argues, in fact, that Americans face “a moment of reckoning” in which we must decide “what is this country, and for what do we stand?” And in the process, he makes it all too clear just where he stands — in strong support of what can only be considered a new global technological arms race, fueled by close collaboration between government and industry, and designed to preserve America’s “fragile geopolitical advantage over our adversaries.”

Karp believes that applying American technological expertise to building next-generation weapons systems is not just a but the genuine path to national salvation, and he advocates a revival of the concept of “the West” as foundational for future freedom and collective identity. As Sophie Hurwitz of Mother Jones noted recently, Karp summarized this view in a letter to Palantir shareholders in which he claimed that the rise of the West wasn’t due to “the superiority of its ideas or values or religion… but rather by its superiority in applying organized violence.”

Count on one thing: Karp’s approach, if adopted, will yield billions of taxpayer dollars for Palantir and its militarized Silicon Valley cohorts in their search for AI weaponry that they see as the modern equivalent of nuclear weapons and the key to beating China, America’s current great power rival.

Militarism as a Unifying Force

Karp may be right that this country desperately needs a new national purpose, but his proposed solution is, to put it politely, dangerously misguided.

Ominously enough, one of his primary examples of a unifying initiative worth emulating is World War II’s Manhattan Project, which produced the first atomic bombs. He sees the building of those bombs as both a supreme technological achievement and a deep source of national pride, while conveniently ignoring their world-ending potential. And he proposes embarking on a comparable effort in the realm of emerging military technologies:

“The United States and its allies abroad should without delay commit to launching a new Manhattan Project in order to retain exclusive control of the most sophisticated forms of AI for the battlefield — the targeting systems and swarms of drones and robots that will become the most powerful weapons of the century.”

And here’s a question he simply skips: How exactly will the United States and its allies “retain exclusive control” of whatever sophisticated new military technologies they develop? After all, his call for an American AI buildup echoes the views expressed by opponents of the international control of nuclear technology in the wake of the devastating atomic bombings of the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki that ended World War II — the futile belief that the United States could maintain a permanent advantage that would cement its role as the world’s dominant military power. Nearly 80 years later, we continue to live with an enormously costly nuclear arms race — nine countries now possess such weaponry — in which a devastating war has been avoided as much thanks to luck as design. Meanwhile, past predictions of permanent American nuclear superiority have proven to be wishful thinking. Similarly, there’s no reason to assume that predictions of permanent superiority in AI-driven weaponry will prove any more accurate or that our world will be any safer.

Technology Will Not Save Us

Karp’s views are in sync with his fellow Silicon Valley militarists, from Palantir founder Peter Thiel to Palmer Luckey of the up-and-coming military tech firm Anduril to America’s virtual co-president, SpaceX’s Elon Musk. All of them are convinced that, at some future moment, by supplanting old-school corporate weapons makers like Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman, they will usher in a golden age of American global primacy grounded in ever better technology. They see themselves as superior beings who can save this country and the world, if only the government — and ultimately, democracy itself — would get out of their way. Not surprisingly, their disdain for government does not extend to a refusal to accept billions and billions of dollars in federal contracts. Their anti-government ideology, of course, is part of what’s motivated Musk’s drive to try to dismantle significant parts of the federal government, allegedly in the name of “efficiency.”

An actual efficiency drive would involve a careful analysis of what works and what doesn’t, which programs are essential and which aren’t, not an across-the-board, sledgehammer approach of the kind recently used to destroy the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), to the detriment of millions of people around the world who depended on its programs for access to food, clean water, and health care, including measures to prevent the spread of HIV-AIDS. Internal agency memos released to the press earlier this month indicated that, absent USAID assistance, up to 166,000 children could die of malaria, 200,000 could be paralyzed with polio, and a million of them wouldn’t be treated for acute malnutrition. In addition to saving lives, USAID’s programs cast America’s image in the world in a far better light than does a narrow reliance on its sprawling military footprint and undue resort to threats of force as pillars of its foreign policy.

As a military proposition, the idea that swarms of drones and robotic systems will prove to be the new “miracle weapons,” ensuring American global dominance, contradicts a long history of such claims. From the “electronic battlefield” in Vietnam to President Ronald Reagan’s quest for an impenetrable “Star Wars” shield against nuclear missiles to the Gulf War’s “Revolution in Military Affairs” (centered on networked warfare and supposedly precision-guided munitions), expressions of faith in advanced technology as the way to win wars and bolster American power globally have been misplaced. Either the technology didn’t work as advertised, adversaries came up with cheap, effective countermeasures, or the wars being fought were decided by factors like morale and knowledge of the local culture and terrain, not technological marvels. And count on this: AI weaponry will fare no better than those past “miracles.”

First of all, there is no guarantee that weapons based on immensely complex software won’t suffer catastrophic failure in actual war conditions, with the added risk, as military analyst Michael Klare has pointed out, of starting unnecessary conflicts or causing unintended mass slaughter.

Second, Karp’s dream of “exclusive control” of such systems by the U.S. and its allies is just that — a dream. China, for instance, has ample resources and technical talent to join an AI arms race, with uncertain results in terms of the global balance of power or the likelihood of a disastrous U.S.-China conflict.

Third, despite Pentagon pledges that there will always be a “human being in the loop” in the use of AI-driven weaponry, the drive to wipe out enemy targets as quickly as possible will create enormous pressure to let the software, not human operators, make the decisions. As Biden administration Air Force Secretary Frank Kendall put it, “If you have a human in the loop, you will lose.”

Automated weapons will pose tremendous risks of greater civilian casualties and, because such conflicts could be waged without putting large numbers of military personnel at risk, may only increase the incentive to resort to war, regardless of the consequences for civilian populations.

What Should America Stand For?

Technology is one thing. What it’s used for, and why, is another matter. And Karp’s vision of its role seems deeply immoral. The most damning real-world example of the values Karp seeks to promote can be seen in his unwavering support for Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza. Not only were Palantir’s systems used to accelerate the pace of the Israeli Defense Force’s murderous bombing campaign there, but Karp himself has been one of the most vocal supporters of the Israeli war effort. He went so far as to hold a Palantir board meeting in Israel just a few months into the Gaza war in an effort to goad other corporate leaders into publicly supporting Israel’s campaign of mass killing.

Are these really the values Americans want to embrace? And given his stance, is Karp in any position to lecture Americans on values and national priorities, much less how to defend them?

Despite the fact that his company is in the business of enabling devastating conflicts, his own twisted logic leads Karp to believe that Palantir and the military-tech sector are on the side of the angels. In May 2024, at the “AI Expo for National Competitiveness,” he said of the student-encampment movement for a ceasefire in Gaza, “The peace activists are war activists. We are the peace activists.”

Invasion of the Techno-Optimists

And, of course, Karp is anything but alone in promoting a new tech-driven arms race. Elon Musk, who has been empowered to take a sledgehammer to large parts of the U.S. government and vacuum up sensitive personal information about millions of Americans, is also a major supplier of military technology to the Pentagon. And Vice President J.D. Vance, Silicon Valley’s man in the White House, was employed, mentored, and financed by Palantir founder Peter Thiel before joining the Trump administration.

The grip of the military-tech sector on the Trump administration is virtually unprecedented in the annals of influence-peddling, beginning with Elon Musk’s investment of an unprecedented $277 million in support of electing Donald Trump and Republican candidates for Congress in 2024. His influence then carried over into the presidential transition period, when he was consulted about all manner of budgetary and organizational issues, while emerging tech gurus like Marc Andreessen of the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz became involved in interviewing candidates for sensitive positions at the Pentagon. Today, the figure who is second-in-charge at the Pentagon, Stephen Feinberg of Cerberus Capital, has a long history of investing in military firms, including the emerging tech sector.

But by far the greatest form of influence is Musk’s wielding of the essentially self-created Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) to determine the fate of federal agencies, programs, and employees, despite the fact that he has neither been elected to any position, nor even confirmed by Congress, and that he now wields more power than all of Trump’s cabinet members combined.

As Alex Karp noted — no surprise here, of course — in a February 2025 call with Palantir investors, he’s a big fan of the DOGE, even if some people get hurt along the way:

“We love disruption, and whatever’s good for America will be good for Americans and very good for Palantir. Disruption, at the end of the day, exposes things that aren’t working. There will be ups and downs. There’s a revolution. Some people are going to get their heads cut off. We’re expecting to see really unexpected things and to win.”

Even as Musk disrupts and destroys civilian government agencies, some critics of Pentagon overspending hold out hope that at least he will put his budget-cutting skills to work on that bloated agency. But so far the plan there is simply to shift money within the department, not reduce its near-trillion-dollar top line. And if anything is trimmed, it’s likely to involve reductions in civilian personnel, not lower spending on developing and building weaponry, which is where firms like Palantir make their money. Musk’s harsh critique of existing systems like Lockheed’s F-35 jet fighter — which he described as “the worst military value for money in history” — is counterbalanced by his desire to get the Pentagon to spend far more on drones and other systems based on emerging (particularly AI) technologies.

Of course, any ideas about ditching older weapons systems will run up against fierce resistance in Congress, where jobs, revenues, campaign contributions, and armies of well-connected lobbyists create a firewall against reducing spending on existing programs, whether they have a useful role to play or not. And whatever DOGE suggests, Congress will have the last word. Key players like Senator Roger Wicker (R-MS) have already revived the Reaganite slogan of “peace through strength” to push for an increase of — no, this is not a misprint! — $150 billion in the Pentagon’s already staggering budget over the next four years.

What Should Our National Purpose Be?

Karp and his Silicon Valley colleagues are proposing a world in which government-subsidized military technology restores American global dominance and gives us a sense of renewed national purpose. It is, in fact, a remarkably impoverished vision of what the United States should stand for at this moment in history when non-military challenges like disease, climate change, racial and economic injustice, resurgent authoritarianism, and growing neofascist movements pose greater dangers than traditional military threats.

Technology has its place, but why not put our best technical minds to work creating affordable alternatives to fossil fuels, a public health system focused on the prevention of pandemics and other major outbreaks of disease, and an educational system that prepares students to be engaged citizens, not just cogs in an economic machine?

Reaching such goals would require reforming or even transforming our democracy — or what’s left of it — so that the input of the public actually made far more of a difference, and leadership served the public interest, not its own economic interests. In addition, government policy would no longer be distorted to meet the emotional needs of narcissistic demagogues, or to satisfy the desires of delusional tech moguls.

By all means, let’s unite around a common purpose. But that purpose shouldn’t be a supposedly more efficient way to build killing machines in the service of an outmoded quest for global dominance. Karp’s dream of a “technological republic” armed with his AI weaponry would be one long nightmare for the rest of us.

The post The New Age Militarists appeared first on LewRockwell.

Although Google Analytics and other standard third-party utilities show how much traffic my own articles on The Unz Review regularly receive, they fail to inform me exactly who is reading my work or how much influence these pieces may have. But every now and then a burst of external illumination suggests that at least some of my writings of the last dozen years have had a significant, perhaps even transformative impact.

Along with everyone else, I’ve been reading the media accounts of Elon Musk’s DOGE project. In that controversial effort, small teams of youthful engineers had been granted access to some of the most important systems of the federal government, resulting in widespread public claims of the massive waste and corruption that they had allegedly found and prompting the prospect of huge cuts in those gigantic bureaucracies. For example, the $40 billion USAID seems likely to be almost completely gutted by the Trump Administration, with plans to cut its 10,000 person staff by 97%.

One of the more prominent DOGE investigators has been 25-year-old Gavin Kliger, a 2020 graduate of UC Berkeley with degrees in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, who has been named a senior advisor to the Office of Personnel Management. His role at that agency and the IRS has been sufficiently important that the New York Times recently published a short article describing his activities.

These public attacks on enormous government agencies naturally inspired fierce counter-attacks by the many media outlets opposed to Musk’s project, and their journalists have sifted the background of those newly super-empowered twenty-somethings for controversial material.

Last week I’d noticed a sudden unexpected burst of new readership for “Our American Pravda,” an article that I had published a dozen years ago. This piece had eventually inspired my long series of a similar name.

• Our American Pravda
  Ron Unz • The American Conservative • April 29, 2013 • 4,500 Words

I soon discovered that this new attention had resulted from a wave of attacks against Kliger, including a hit-piece by Mother Jones, a prominent left-liberal investigative publication:

In a since-deleted Substack post, an engineer working for Elon Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) wrote about his radicalization, noting a key influence was an essay by Ron Unz…

The Substack post, titled “Why I Joined DOGE,” was written by DOGE engineer Gavin Kliger…

The post was published Friday and was still available online Sunday morning around 9:30 a.m. ET. It was deleted on Sunday. In the post, Kliger credits Unz’s “Our American Pravda“—a 2013 essay published in The American Conservative that railed against what Unz claimed were systemic media failures—with beginning the engineer’s “political awakening.”

“Reading it was like putting on glasses for the first time,” writes Kliger, whose LinkedIn says he is a senior advisor to the Director for Technology and Delivery at the Office of Personnel Management. “The issue wasn’t just bias—it was that entire narratives, the ones we took for granted as truth, were carefully curated illusions.” (Mother Jones saved a copy of Kliger’s Substack post before it was deleted.)

“Guilt by association” is a common media tactic employed to discredit political opponents. Someone else is somehow connected to the intended victim, and the argument is made that the massive iniquities of the former individual should carry over to the latter. The Mother Jones hit piece relied upon this doubtful approach.

After reporting Kliger’s declaration that he had been heavily influenced by my April 2013 article, most of the remaining text focused on some of the controversial or ultra-controversial pieces that I had written during the dozen years that followed, suggesting that these therefore tainted the young DOGE engineer. My lengthy American Pravda series runs well over 100 articles and nearly a million words, so the writers mined it for explosive quotations although Kliger claimed that he had remained unaware of that much larger body of work:

In an email to Mother Jones on Sunday, Kliger said he did not read the later “American Pravda” posts from Unz.

“I specifically referred to this 2013 article from The American Conservative, ‘Our American Pravda.’ Note the ‘Our’,” Kliger wrote. “I have neither referenced or read [the other work in the “‘American Pravda” series].” (The DOGE engineer also noted The Atlantic‘s Conor Friedersdorf recommended the 2013 Unz essay in a blog.)

• DOGE Worker Says He Was Radicalized by Reading Writer Who Later Denied Holocaust
  In a since-deleted Substack post, a member of Elon Musk’s team praised an essay by Ron Unz—who has called the Holocaust potentially a “hoax” and said Trayvon Martin was “a violent young thug.”
  Julianne McShane and Jacob Rosenberg • Mother Jones • February 16, 2025 • 1,100 Words

As Kliger explained, a writer at the very respectable Atlantic had strongly recommended my article when it first appeared. But if the journalists attacking him had further investigated, they would have found that the same had also been true of prominent free market economist Tyler Cowen, noted author Eamonn Fingleton writing in Forbes, and various other very mainstream writers and public intellectuals. Influential libertarian historian Tom Woods had heavily excerpted my article and Alexander Cockburn’s leftist Counterpunch publication had republished it in its entirety, as had ZeroHedge.

So if Mother Jones saw fit to interrogate and condemn Kliger for my far more controversial subsequent writings, why should all those other individuals and publications have escaped similar criticism? Indeed, my 2013 article became one of the most widely read pieces in The American Conservative that year, and as far as I recall almost nobody at the time had criticized or condemned it.

This underscores the extreme unfairness of the Mother Jones attack against Kliger.

Furthermore, this barely scraped the surface of the absurdities of the “guilt by association” argument used to tarnish Musk’s young DOGE protege.

Given their investigation of my body of work, the Mother Jones writers must surely be aware that just a few months before that 2013 article I had also published “The Myth of American Meritocracy” in that same publication. This exceptionally long and detailed 26,000 word analysis had documented the huge biases and unfairness in the admissions systems of Harvard and our other most elite American colleges.

New York Times Columnist David Brooks soon ranked my piece as probably the best magazine article published in America that year, a verdict strongly seconded by a top editor at the Economist.

One of my central findings had been the very strong quantitative evidence that Harvard and the other Ivy League schools were practicing racial discrimination by surreptitiously maintaining Asian Quotas in their admissions policies, and this soon prompted the New York Times to organize an important symposium on that explosive topic in which I eagerly participated. The Yale Political Union and the Yale Law School invited me to give a couple of public lectures on that controversial conclusion and the rest of my Meritocracy analysis. A very long list of other writers and public intellectuals commented on my article, an overwhelming majority of them quite favorably, with their discussions appearing in Forbes, The Atlantic, The Washington Monthly, Business Insider, and various other publications. These included such prominent public figures as Harvard Prof. Niall Ferguson and Fareed Zakaria.

So if Mother Jones is now raking Kliger over the coals for admitting that he had been heavily influenced by one of my articles from April 2013, why should they not do the same with David Brooks, Niall Ferguson, Fareed Zakaria, the editors of the New York Times, and all the others who had highlighted and strongly promoted a far longer article from November 2012?

Furthermore, in 2016 I published my first print collection, The Myth of American Meritocracy and Other Essays, a 700 page volume containing both those articles and many others, and it attracted strongly favorable comments by some very distinguished academic scholars and journalists:

With high intelligence, common sense, and advanced statistical skills, presented transparently and accessibly, Ron Unz has for decades been addressing key issues in a rapidly changing America, enlightening us on the implications and effects of bilingual programs in American schools, clarifying the issues around crime and immigration so often distorted in political and popular discussion, placing the question of an increased minimum wage effectively on the national agenda, and addressing most provocatively the issue of affirmative action and admission to selective colleges and universities, revealing some aspects of this ever disputed question that have never been noted or discussed publicly before. He is one of our most valuable discussants and analysts of public issues.—Nathan Glazer, Professor Emeritus of Education and Sociology, Harvard University, and author of Beyond the Melting Pot.

Few people on the planet are smarter than Ron Unz or have more intellectual curiosity. This fascinating and provocative collection of essays explores a remarkable range of topics, many of them high profile, some of them arcane. Unz’s analysis is always serious and invariably challenges prevailing wisdoms, which is to say there are a lot of controversial arguments in this book. No one is likely to agree with every one of his conclusions, but we would be better off if there were more people like Ron Unz among us. —John J. Mearsheimer, the R. Wendell Harrison Distinguished Service Professor of Political Science at the University of Chicago, and author of The Israel Lobby.

Ron Unz is a brilliant essayist. His interests run from ancient history and black holes to contemporary issues like racial quotas and the minimum wage. He moves swiftly to the heart of a subject with cogent analysis and limpid argument. This collection of essays sparkles with unexpected gems ranging from critiques of the mainstream press to appreciation of dissenters from common wisdom such as General Bill Odom and Alexander Cockburn. In every paragraph of these essays the reader enjoys a penetrating intelligence at work. —Nicholas Wade, former writer and editor for The New York Times, and author of Before the Dawn, The Faith Instinct, and A Troublesome Inheritance.

Over the past two decades as an original thinker and writer Ron Unz has tackled complex and significant subjects such as immigration, education, economics, race, and the press, pushing aside common assumptions. This book brings together in one volume these pieces from a variety of publications. Unlike other essayists on culture and politics, Unz shreds ideology and relies on statistical data to support his often groundbreaking ideas, such as his 2010 essay on “The Myth of Hispanic Crime.” And his 2014 efforts to put a $12 an hour minimum wage bill before California voters is an example of how the action of an individual can draw public attention to an issue he believes is necessary for the economic health of the Republic. Anyone reading this book will learn a great deal about America from an incisive writer and scholar who has peeled back layers of conventional wisdom to expose the truth on issues of prime importance today. —Sydney Schanberg, Pulitzer-Prize winning former reporter and editor for The New York Times, whose story inspired the 1984 film The Killing Fields.

Thus, Kliger seems to have had quite good company in his favorable reaction to my 2013 article, demonstrating that the attack against him on those grounds was entirely self-defeating.

Read the Whole Article

The post Guilt by Association for Elon Musk’s DOGE appeared first on LewRockwell.

Gail Appel wrote:

Lew,

Schlichter’s really funny, but he’s spot on. Get them ALL the hell out of here . It’s a damn shame we can’t send our home grown brain-washed, braindead spawn with them. Their parents ,or whatever the Woke/Marxist pronoun is , as well.

They hate us. They despise America. Doge  them all.

See here.

The post Boot the Ungrateful Foreigners the Hell Out of America appeared first on LewRockwell.

Gail Appel wrote:

Neera Tanden has long been problematic. Questionable. But you’re not allowed to question the Democrats. The immediate onslaught of “ Racist! Misogynist! Xenophobe! White Supremacist! Nazi! Right Wing Conspiracy Theorist! Antisemite( that ship has sailed)! “ shutdown any inquiry.

I may have figured out the real method behind the multicultural minority melange madness. To enable the accusations and squelch having to answer for criminal activity.

See here.

The post Is This the Aide Behind Biden’s Controversial Autopen Signings? appeared first on LewRockwell.

Tuesday Newsday is packed with bombshells! Trump is declassifying 80,000 JFK assassination files—but what will they reveal? Meanwhile, MS-13’s Most Wanted is captured, and Trump is pushing mass deportations under the Alien Enemies Act despite judicial pushback.

Also in this episode:

Hunter & Ashley Biden stripped of Secret Service protection—but Marco Polo tracks Hunter to South Africa, surrounded by government agents

Minnesota Republicans propose labeling ‘Trump Derangement Syndrome’ as a mental illness

Astronauts Butch Wilmore & Suni Williams finally return to Earth after 9 months stranded in space

Semisonic tells the White House to stop using ‘Closing Time’—‘You missed the point’

Mark Groubert & Eric Hunley break it all down—join America’s Untold Stories for the real story behind the headlines!

Like, share & subscribe!

The post America’s Untold Stories – 80,000 JFK Files Released, Trump Strips Hunter’s Security, & Space Crew Returning appeared first on LewRockwell.

The post From Yemen To Iran To Gaza To Russia – Is Trump Losing The Plot? appeared first on LewRockwell.

Il manoscritto fornisce un grimaldello al lettore, una chiave di lettura semplificata, del mondo finanziario e non che sembra essere andato "fuori controllo" negli ultimi quattro anni in particolare. Questa è una storia di cartelli, a livello sovrastatale e sovranazionale, la cui pianificazione centrale ha raggiunto un punto in cui deve essere riformata radicalmente e questa riforma radicale non può avvenire senza una dose di dolore economico che potrebbe mettere a repentaglio la loro autorità. Da qui la risposta al Grande Default attraverso il Grande Reset. Questa è la storia di un coyote, che quando non riesce a sfamarsi all'esterno ricorre all'autofagocitazione. Lo stesso è accaduto ai membri del G7, dove i sei membri restanti hanno iniziato a fagocitare il settimo: gli Stati Uniti.

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(Versione audio della traduzione disponibile qui: https://open.substack.com/pub/fsimoncelli/p/come-nvidia-e-diventata-lazienda)

Nvidia è diventata, all'improvviso, l'azienda più redditizia al mondo... o quasi.

Aggiungendo migliaia di miliardi alla sua capitalizzazione di mercato nel giro di pochi mesi nella primavera del 2024, con il prezzo delle sue azioni quasi triplicato quell'anno, da sola ha contribuito per quasi un quarto al rendimento dell'indice S&P500 (oggi Apple è di nuovo al primo posto, ma i prezzi delle azioni cambiano rapidamente).

Ciò non significa che questo rally sia stato un colpo di fortuna: era atteso da tempo.

Tutti noi ragazzi degli anni '90 con una propensione per i videogiochi abbiamo sentito parlare di Nvidia: eccellenti chip grafici per videogiochi di fascia alta e dalle prestazioni elevate. Ma ciò che ha veramente spinto Nvidia da una grande azienda di successo in questa nicchia originale è stata la rivoluzione dell'intelligenza artificiale.

Per la maggior parte di noi il software di deep learning/reti neurali che spesso chiamiamo in modo superficiale intelligenza artificiale è arrivato sulla scena mondiale qualche anno fa. Mentre all'inizio aveva alcune tendenze di un tipico ciclo di Gartner, ora sembra qui per restare, promettendo quasi ogni giorno di rinnovare questo o quel settore. Ciò che è così incredibile nella storia di Nvidia-AI è che l'amministratore delegato di lunga data di Nvidia, Jen-Hsun “Jensen” Huang, l'ha vista arrivare da un miglio di distanza, ben prima che chiunque, tranne gli informatici nerd e gli sviluppatori di motori virtuali per gli scacchi, sapesse cosa fossero le reti neurali.

Tae Kim, giornalista di una certa importanza su Barron's, ha trascorso il 2023 a immergersi nella storia della prodigiosa Nvidia, la quale aveva appena festeggiato 30 anni di attività. Il risultato, il libro The Nvidia Way: Jensen Huang and the Making of a Tech Giant, è un'eccellente impresa giornalistica. Si basa su centinaia di interviste che Kim ha realizzato a un ritmo vertiginoso nei 19 mesi trascorsi da quando l'editore lo ha contattato fino al prodotto finito arrivato sugli scaffali alla fine dell'anno successivo.

Come in un buon romanzo, c'è una serie di personaggi e più abbreviazioni di quante chiunque dovrebbe sopportare (benvenuti nella storia dell'informatica.) La scrittura è fluida; l'autore è riuscito a essere sia riconoscibile che minimamente personale. Non è completamente distaccato dalla voce narrante (Kim fa commenti personali di tanto in tanto), ma i lettori sono per lo più trasformati in una mosca sul muro nei vari uffici di Nvidia.

La storia che Kim intreccia è una di duro lavoro e della personalità eccentrica di Jensen. Come dice il titolo, il “modo di fare” Nvidia è il tentativo di Kim di caratterizzare ciò che la rende diversa dalle altre aziende. Identifica tre componenti: un impegno per l'eccellenza (e un'etica del lavoro piuttosto sorprendente, con settimane lavorative di 70-80 ore e un turnover dei dipendenti da record); pratiche di assunzione in cui Nvidia fa di tutto per attrarre e mantenere le persone migliori; programmi azionari generosi e diffusi, direttamente collegati ai risultati piuttosto che a un vago e generico bonus di fine anno. Incoraggiante per la rinascita della cultura aziendale americana è il fatto che tutte le persone con cui Kim ha parlato “hanno riferito che l'azienda era libera dalle politiche interne e dall'indecisione tipiche delle grandi organizzazioni”.

Molti capitoli si leggono come se fossero saggi lunghi, i primi riguardo la storia di Nvidia a volte si avvicinano a una voce su Wikipedia. Il risultato è qualcosa a metà tra una storia aziendale e un pezzo di propaganda del suo leader. È ovvio che Jensen costituisce una grande porzione del libro di Kim e che il suo peculiare stile di leadership (organizzazione agile, gerarchia piatta, dialogo aperto, comunicazione diretta con centinaia di dipendenti) è stato un fattore cruciale per il successo di Nvidia.

Nvidia è nata dall'esperienza dei co-fondatori Curtis Priem e Chris Malachowsky presso Sun Microsystems nei primi anni '90. In una spiegazione emblematica dell'ethos che sarebbe arrivato a dominare Nvidia, Priem “voleva solo realizzare buoni chip grafici e non aveva alcun interesse nelle lotte intestine aziendali”. Sia Priem che Malachowsky, entrambi in Sun da alcuni anni, diedero le dimissioni per protesta contro quello che consideravano l'approccio tecnico sbagliato alla creazione della grafica computazionale per una workstation.

La coppia raccolse un progetto scartato del loro ex-datore di lavoro e si rivolsero a Jensen, che nel 1992 gestiva una divisione della società di microchip LSI Logic e con cui la coppia aveva lavorato a un progetto di Sun. Volevano realizzare un chip dimostrativo per Samsung; nel modo tipico della futura leadership di Jensen, quest'ultimo un giorno si fermò e disse: “Perché lo stiamo facendo per loro?”

Tra le pagine che descrivono gli eventi e le personalità che hanno reso grande Nvidia, Kim si sofferma a parlare con il lettore di una meta-conversazione sulle virtù, la fortuna e il duro lavoro: “Per chi è al di fuori dell'azienda, l'ascesa fulminea di Nvidia sembra un miracolo. Quelli al suo interno, invece, la considerano un'evoluzione naturale […] Nvidia non è stata fortunata; è stata in grado di percepire l'ondata di domanda all'orizzonte anni prima e si era preparata per questo preciso momento”.

“La fortuna ha molto a che fare con il successo”, ricorda Jensen, “e la mia fortuna è stata quella di averli incontrati [Chris e Curtis]”.

Anche l'azienda è stata fortunata a superare i costanti problemi di finanziamento dei primi anni; fortunata a riprendersi dal fallimento dei chip NV1 e NV2 e dai problemi di produzione che circondavano RIVA 128: “Nvidia è sopravvissuta a malapena ai suoi primi dieci anni”, scrive Kim e riassumendo la seconda parte del libro. E questo ci porta alla penultima pagina per spiegare i temi che avevo in mente leggendo la maggior parte del libro: “Nello scrivere la storia di Nvidia, sono rimasto colpito dai momenti in cui ha sfiorato il fallimento e la distruzione totale. Se le cose fossero andate solo un po' diversamente in alcuni casi, l'informatica avrebbe preso un'altra strada”.

Se uno dei fondatori avesse deciso di accettare offerte da aziende affermate invece di mettersi in proprio; se il finanziamento non fosse arrivato nell'estate critica del 1993; se la società rivale 3dfx fosse stata più aggressiva nel tentativo di acquisire Nvidia quando quest'ultima era in difficoltà finanziarie, o quando la prevista IPO (e l'iniezione di liquidità) fu ritardata; se il grande ordine per i RIVA 128 non fosse arrivato quando arrivò; ecc.

Come esemplifica il leggendario investitore Benjamin Graham, bisogna impegnarsi per raggiungere una posizione abbastanza buona in cui la fortuna può cambiare il proprio destino. Il successo, sebbene ovvio a posteriori, è delicato e vulnerabile. “In un certo senso”, scrive Kim, “Nvidia stava facendo ciò che aveva sempre fatto: individuare una grande opportunità e correre per immettere i suoi prodotti sul mercato prima che chiunque altro si rendesse conto che il potenziale c'era”.

Ci sono anche interessanti curiosità sparse nel libro, come l'origine del nome dell'azienda (una versione tecnologica della parola latina che sta per invidia) e come i profitti commerciali di ogni era dell'informatica abbiano seguito un principio di Pareto. Da WinTel ad Apple, da Google a Nvidia, gli attori dominanti hanno visto l'80-90% dei profitti del settore accumularsi in quello “che è in grado di sviluppare una piattaforma leader di mercato”. O la storia di Jeff Smith del fondo attivista Starboard Value, che vendette oltre 4 milioni di azioni Nvidia nel 2013 dopo un guadagno netto del 20%, perdendo circa 33.000% in ulteriori guadagni da allora (o il 27.300%, poiché le azioni Nvidia sono scese del 18% rispetto al giorno in cui ho iniziato a scrivere questo pezzo). “Non avremmo mai dovuto uscire da quella posizione”, dice Smith a Kim in un capitolo finale dolorosamente drammatico.

La storia di Nvidia parla di assunzione di rischi e di come un team dedicato, concentrato sulla missione di un'azienda, possa dare vita a imprese straordinarie, soprattutto se supportato da duro lavoro quotidiano.

Per il massimo simbolismo, nel novembre 2024 Nvidia ha sostituito Intel nell'indice Dow Jones, la stessa Intel che è stata un cliente e un rivale stabile di Nvidia, e per i cui prodotti ha realizzato chip alla fine degli anni '90 e all'inizio degli anni 2000. Anche nella tecnologia, il destino, a quanto pare, ha un certo senso dell'ironia.

Kim è orgoglioso di aver portato di corsa questa storia aziendale sugli scaffali, e sorpreso che sia stato scritto così poco su Nvidia (certamente rispetto alla miriade di biografie su Apple/Steve Jobs). Scansionando Amazon per libri nuovi e in uscita, questa non rimarrà una verità tanto a lungo.

Per gran parte della storia dell'informatica moderna, Nvidia è sempre stata lì, alimentando i dispositivi che utilizziamo ogni giorno e sfidando ripetutamente la concorrenza. Questo è ciò che l'ha resa, seppur brevemente, l'azienda più redditizia della storia.

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

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Over the weekend President Trump ordered a massive military operation against the small country of Yemen. Was Yemen in the process of attacking the United States? No. Did the President in that case go to Congress and seek a declaration of war against the country? No. The fact is, Yemen hadn’t even threatened the United States before the bombs started falling.

Last year, candidate Trump strongly criticized the Biden Administration’s obsession with foreign interventionism to the detriment of our problems at home. In an interview at the Libertarian National Convention, he criticized Biden’s warmongering to podcaster Tim Pool, saying, “You can solve problems over a telephone. Instead they start dropping bombs. Recently, they’re dropping bombs all over Yemen. You don’t have to do that.”

Yet once in office, Trump turned to military force as his first option. Since the Israel/Hamas ceasefire plan negotiated by President Trump’s special envoy Steve Witkoff, Yemen has left Red Sea shipping alone. However, after Israel implemented a total blockade of humanitarian relief to citizens of Gaza last week, Houthi leaders threatened to again begin blocking Israel’s Red Sea shipping activities.

That was enough for President Trump to drop bombs and launch missiles for hours, killing several dozen Yemeni civilians – including women and children – in the process.

After the attack, Trump not only threatened much more force to be used against Yemen, but he also threatened Iran. His National Security Advisor Mike Waltz added that the US may start bombing Iranian ships in the area, a move that would certainly lead to a major Middle East war.

Like recent Presidents Bush and Obama, candidate Trump promised peace after four years of Joe Biden’s warmongering and World War III brinkmanship. There is little doubt that with our war-weary population this proved the margin of his victory. Unfortunately, as with Bush and Obama, now that he is President, he appears to be heading down a different path.

The Republican Party is gradually becoming a pro-peace, America first party, but the warmongers and neocons of the old line in the Party are not going to let go so easily. Unfortunately many of these dead-enders have found their way to senior positions in Trump’s Administration, with voices of restraint and non-intervention nearly nowhere in sight among his top tier of advisors.

To solve the Yemen problem we must understand it: Russian and Chinese ships, for example, are not being threatened because they are not enabling the Israeli demolition of Gaza. The slaughter there has been facilitated with US money and US weapons. It is the US doing Israel’s bidding both in Gaza and in the Red Sea that is painting a target on us and unnecessarily putting our troops at risk of retaliation.

The US government, starting with Biden and continuing now with Trump, seems eager to make this our war even though, as Rep. Thomas Massie pointed out over the weekend, Red Sea shipping is of minor importance to the US economy.

In a real “America first” foreign policy we would be following the Russian and Chinese lead and staying out of the conflict. It’s not our war. End US military involvement in the Middle East and our troubles disappear. It really is that simple.

The post President Trump: Stop Bombing Yemen and Exit the Middle East! appeared first on LewRockwell.

Pope Francis has made headlines in recent months for expressing increasing concern about the death toll in Israel’s 16-month military incursion into Gaza, even invoking the specter of “genocide,” a term that has been used for many months now by international tribunals, jurists, U.N. officials, Holocaust historians, and human rights groups to describe Israel’s brutal military campaign in Gaza.

Francis’ statements are no less valid now that a temporary and fragile ceasefire has been declared between Israel and Hamas, the principal ruling party in Gaza. Israeli soldiers have continued to kill Palestinians in Gaza and now are effectively cutting off all humanitarian aid to the area, while launching a new and brutal invasion of the West Bank, where more than three million Palestinians live. Meanwhile, President Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu threaten a new invasion, while Francis continues to speak personally to the Catholics of the area from his hospital bed.

Many English-speaking Catholics may be inclined to look askance at the stance taken by Pope Francis, given his well-established reputation for expressing sympathy with political causes associated with socialist or leftist political ideologies. Large numbers of Catholics in the United States now habitually (and often unthinkingly) place themselves under the vague rubric of “conservative,” a largely secularist and Americanist ideology that is currently dominated by unquestioning pro-Israel sentiment, bolstered by a constant barrage of propaganda in social media.

However, Catholics should be aware that, whatever his personal motives, Francis’ position on Israel and Gaza is not founded on leftist ideological premises but traditional Catholic doctrine dating back centuries on the natural law principles regarding the doctrine of just war and the treatment of foreign nations by superior powers. They also represent the Church’s clear teachings on war found in the Catechism of the Catholic Church.

Pope urges investigation into genocide

In a new book based on interviews with the pope announced on November 17, Francis speaks about the plight of refugees, particularly “those who leave Gaza in the midst of the famine that has struck their Palestinian brothers and sisters given the difficulty of getting food and aid into their territory.”

“According to some experts, what is happening in Gaza has the characteristics of a genocide,” Francis continues in Hope Never Disappoints. “It should be carefully investigated to determine whether it fits into the technical definition formulated by jurists and international bodies.”

Francis’ statements, the strongest he had made to date, were consistent with repeated expressions of concern about the sky-high civilian death toll in Gaza dating back to the earliest weeks of the war. However, he has recently shown a new determination to push the point, despite expressions of outrage from neoconservative publications like The Wall Street Journal, as well as the Israeli government and radical Zionist organizations.

Francis doubled down repeatedly during December. On the 7th, Pope Francis was publicly presented with a Nativity scene as a gift from two Palestinian artists. The scene features the baby Jesus lying on a keffiyeh, a traditional scarf used by Palestinians. During the inaugural of the scene in the Paul VI Hall, Francis urged believers to “remember the brothers and sisters, who, right there [in Bethlehem] and in other parts of the world, are suffering from the tragedy of war.” He added, “Enough war, enough violence!”

During his annual Christmas Address to the cardinals on December 21, Francis noted bitterly that Israel was continuing to harm the Palestinian Christian community as well as the rest of the civilian population of Gaza. “Yesterday the [Latin] Patriarch [of Jerusalem] was not allowed into Gaza, as had been promised, and yesterday children were bombed,” said Francis. “This is cruelty! This is not war. I wanted to tell you this because it touches my heart.”

Israel responded the following day by allowing the Patriarch into Gaza, while claiming that it had never prohibited his entry.

Then, during the Christmas Eve Angelus, Francis again denounced the cruelty of Israel’s policy in Gaza. “With sorrow I think of Gaza, of so much cruelty, of the children machine-gunned, the bombing of schools and hospitals,” said the pope. “So much cruelty!”

Francis is personally aware of what is happening in Gaza—and particularly the fate of Christians there—because, according to him, he speaks “every day” with Gaza’s only Catholic parish, Holy Family, which has been devastated by deadly direct attacks by the Israeli military.

“They tell me ugly things, difficult things” about what is happening there, the pontiff said in a recent press conference. “Please, when you see the bodies of killed children, when you see that, under the presumption that some guerrillas are there, a school is bombed, this is ugly,” he added.

On January 9, in an audience with the diplomatic corps accredited to the Holy See—and despite bitter push-back from the State of Israel for his earlier comments—Francis again decried the mass killing of civilians in Gaza and the destruction of its vital infrastructure.

Calling for a return of hostages and a ceasefire, Francis noted,

War is always a failure! The involvement of civilians, especially children, and the destruction of infrastructures is not only a disaster, but essentially means that between the two sides only evil emerges the winner. We cannot in any way accept the bombing of civilians or the attacking of infrastructures necessary for their survival. We cannot accept that children are freezing to death because hospitals have been destroyed or a country’s energy network has been hit.

Elderly Catholic parishioners targeted by Israeli snipers

Holy Family Parish made headlines in late 2023 when Israeli snipers shot and killed an elderly Catholic parishioner, Nahida Anton, who was sheltering in the parish. They then shot her daughter Samar when she attempted to save her mother by dragging her back into the parish church.

“Around noon today, December 2023, 16, a sniper of the IDF murdered two Christian women inside the Holy Family Parish in Gaza, where the majority of Christian families have taken refuge since the start of the war,” stated the Latin Patriarchate of Jerusalem in a press release at the time. “Nahida and her daughter Samar were shot as they walked to the Sister’s Convent. One was killed as she tried to carry the other to safety.”

Apart from the two women, “seven more people were shot and wounded as they tried to protect others inside the church compound,” reported the Latin Patriarchate of Jerusalem later. “No warning was given, no notification was provided. They were shot in cold blood inside the premises of the Parish, where there are no belligerents.” The Convent of the Sisters of Mother Teresa, which was staffed by nuns caring for disabled patients, was also hit by a rocket attack by an Israeli tank, rendering the mission home “uninhabitable” and damaging the electrical generator.

Over a year after the Latin Patriarchate’s protest, the Israeli government hasn’t offered an explanation for the shootings and bombing, which are far from unique; in fact, they are only one of many thousands of similar cases of sniper attacks on women and children, Muslim and Christian, that have been reported throughout the Gaza Strip on a daily basis during Israel’s 16-month incursion.

The New York Times, a publication with a documented history of pro-Israel bias in its journalism, has  collected testimonies and radiographic evidence from dozens of non-Palestinian doctors who treated numerous children in Gaza who were shot in the head and chest with high-power sniper rifles. The Israeli government has permitted almost no international journalists to enter, and Arab journalists have been repeatedly targeted by the military, so documenting such cases has been difficult. However, they are very much reflective of the murderous and genocidal rhetoric that has been repeatedly voiced by militant West Bank settlers, who are amply represented in Benjamin Netanyahu’s government, as well as by Netanyahu himself.

Disturbing statistics

According to statistics published by Gaza health authorities (whose estimates are generally accepted by Israeli intelligence sources), almost 58,000 Gazans, the majority women and children, have been either directly killed or are missing under the rubble following Israel’s 2023 invasion. However, a study published in the British medical journal TheLancet estimates that as of June 19, 2024, the indirect death toll caused by the destruction and blockades of food, water, electricity, and other goods had minimally reached 189,000. If the same factor of indirect deaths to direct deaths is applied to the current estimated direct death toll, the total number of deaths would now be well over 200,000, with countless more wounded, maimed, and traumatized.

The civilian population has been subject to embargoes of food and medicine resulting in countless deaths. All of the major hospitals in northern Gaza have been shut down, their patients force-marched out in freezing weather after being stripped down to their underwear, and their doctors taken off to prisons where they have been tortured, a fate that has also befallen countless other Palestinians taken prisoner by Israeli troops. The director of northern Gaza’s last hospital to be shut down, Dr. Hussam Abu Safiya, a pediatrician whose teenage son was killed at the gates of the hospital by an Israeli drone strike in October, was taken off to such a prison in December. According to his lawyer, Abu Safiya has been subjected to torture and denied medical care.

Israel’s indiscriminate bombing campaign has targeted apartment buildings, schools, and hospitals with 2,000-pound bombs, with an estimated total of over 75,000 tons of explosives, the equivalent of multiple atomic bombs, resulting in the damage or destruction of 90 percent of the housing, which proportionally exceeds the Allied bombing of Germany by a factor of nine, and also far exceeds the Allied bombing of Japan. “It is heartbreaking that many times more bombs were dropped on Gaza than on Tokyo in massive US air raids during World War II,” Japanese Prime Minister Shigeru Ishiba was quoted as saying by Japan’s NHK news service in October of last year.

Such figures are the latest and worst of a long series of atrocities and injustices against Arab Palestinians, both Christian and non-Christian, that have been denounced by the Latin Patriarchate for decades, with little interest shown from English-speaking Catholics.

Read the Whole Article

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Governments regularly claim that they favour tax reform. When this claim has been repeated so many times that virtually no one believes them anymore, they announce a tax reform, to show that they really mean it. They then reshuffle the existing taxes to give the appearance that taxation will actually be lowered.

When it becomes apparent that the reform is a sham, they often pull a rabbit out of a hat in the form of a “temporary” tax, that’s pre-legislated to end sometime in the future.

Sounds promising.

So, let’s have a look at one such temporary tax and see how things worked out.

The US government introduced the War Revenue Act of 1898—a tax on telephone use—under the claim that it was necessary to pay for the Spanish American War.

In what way does telephone use pertain to a government invading another country? Well, actually, one has nothing to do with the other. But, let’s leave that discussion for another day and see how this temporary tax played out.

The Act was repealed in 1902 but was reinstated, this time as the Emergency Internal Revenue Tax Act of 1914. The justification then given was that another war was on the way and increased taxation to pay for it couldn’t begin too soon. Telephone users needed to cough up.

It was decided by both parties to increase the tax on telephones and the War Revenue Act of 1917 was created. It hadn’t passed the debate stage until the war was over, but they decided that they’d implement it anyway, as the work had already been done. In the bargain, they introduced not only increased rates, but graduated rates.

This act was also repealed, in 1924, but was reinstated with the Revenue Act of 1932. Since that date, it has been reauthorised 29 times.

In 1941, an increase was put in place to pay for (you guessed it) another war—World War II. This was increased again in 1943, but people complained and the new law contained a provision that the increased rates would end six months after “the date of termination of hostilities in the present war.” However, the Excise Tax Act of 1947 was passed to assure that the tax would continue indefinitely.

Over the subsequent years, periodic changes were made. Although the rates went up and down like a bride’s nightie, most, not surprisingly, were upward.

As further (undeclared) wars came and went, taxation on telephone calls repeatedly needed to be increased and, regardless of the party in power, increases continued.

At long last, on 14 September, 2000, the House of Representatives took up legislation which included the repeal of the telephone excise tax. This measure passed both houses, but the fix was in. President Clinton vetoed the repeal. (The legislative branch and the executive branch have to take turns playing the bad cop, but the outcome is the same: increased taxation.)

Then, in 2006, a case was made (in the words of the Treasury Secretary), to amend the Internal Revenue Code “of an outdated, antiquated tax that has survived a century beyond its original purpose, and by now should have been ancient history.”

Finally, American citizens could wash their hands of a one-hundred-year theft of their earnings that, even at the start, was based upon a ludicrous concept.

Unfortunately… it didn’t happen.

The repeal was never enacted and Americans continue to pay for the Spanish American War today.

So, what’s the takeaway here?

Well, first off, this little history serves as a reminder that there’s nothing so permanent as a temporary government measure.

Second, although not a month goes by without one politician or another, from one party or the other, rising up in righteous indignation that a new tax or an expanded tax is absolutely necessary to continue the welfare of the American people, there is, in truth, no sincerity in their claim. They simply want more money.

Third, no amount of money is ever enough. Even if Washington, D.C., is the only part of the US that is enjoying prosperity, even if no congressman leaves office without more zeroes behind his net worth than when he went in, virtually every legislator will vote for increases in taxation.

And, fourth, there’s no such thing as tax reform. From time to time, legislators will need to trot out the idea of tax reform, and be seen to be arguing over the details, but will ultimately always do the same: the deck will be reshuffled, but somehow, taxes will rise once again.

But the overall lesson to be learned is that Government is, and has always been, a shell game. Its purpose is not to serve the electorate; it is to separate them from the fruits of their labours.

Full stop.

As former US Chief Justice John Marshall stated,

The power to tax involves the power to destroy.

More recently, Ron Holland offered the following:

Since the beginning of recorded history, the business of government has been wealth confiscation.

However, both these individuals were conservatives, and it would only be fair to ask for commentary from the liberal side. One such liberal political leader is none other than Vladimir Lenin, who stated,

The way to crush the bourgeoisie is to grind them between the millstones of taxation and inflation.

Of course, the reader may wish to consider relocating to a jurisdiction where the taxation is far lower, but if he chooses to remain in the US, EU, Canada, or other jurisdiction where the tax level is already oppressive, his plans should include temporary taxes that are unlikely to end in his lifetime.

Reprinted with permission from International Man.

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A geo-political reading of Israel’s incipient civil war

Israel is deeply fractured. The schism has become bitter and heated as both sides see themselves to be in an existential war for the future of Israel. The language used has become so venomous (particularly in reserved channels in Hebrew) that calls for a coup and for civil war are far from uncommon.

Israel is nearing the precipice and the seemingly irreconcilable differences may soon erupt into civil unrest – as Uri Misgav writes this week, the “Israeli spring” is on its way.

The point here is that President Trump’s utilitarian and determinedly transactional style may work effectively in the secular western hemisphere, but with Israel (or Iran) Trump may find little or no traction amongst those with an alternative weltanschauung that expresses a fundamental different concept of morality, philosophy and epistemology, to the classic western deterrence paradigm of material ‘carrots and sticks’.

Indeed, the very attempt to impose deterrence – and to threaten ‘all hell breaking out’ if his injunctions are not followed – may produce the opposite to that which he seeks: i.e. it may trigger new conflicts and wars.

An angry plurality in Israel (led for now, by Netanyahu) have taken the reins of power after a long march through the institutions of Israeli society, and now have their sights focussed on dismantling the ‘Deep State’ within Israel. Equally, there is a furious push-back to this perceived take-over.

What exacerbates this societal fracture are two things: Firstly, it is ethno-cultural; and second it is ideological. The third component is the most explosive – Eschatology.

At the last national election in Israel, the ‘underclass’ finally broke the glass ceiling to win election and to take office. The Mizrahi (Jews from the Middle East and North Africa) have been long treated as the poorer, lower order in society.

The Ashkenazi (European, largely liberal-secular Jews) form much of the urban professional (and until recently) the security class. These are the élites whom the coalition of National Religious and Settler Movement displaced at the last election.

This present phase to a long struggle to power perhaps can be put at 2015. As Gadi Taub has recorded,

“It was then, Israel’s Supreme Court judges removed sovereignty itself—that is, the power of final decision over the whole realm of law and politics—from the elected branches of government and transferred it to themselves. One unelected branch of government officially holds power, against which there are neither checks, nor balances, by any counterforce”.

In the optic of the Right, the self-awarded power of Judicial Review, gave to the Court power, Taub writes,

“to prescribe the rules of the political game – and not just its concrete results”. “Law enforcement then became the huge investigative arm of the press. As was true of the “Russiagate” hoax, The Israel Police and State Attorney were not so much collecting evidence for a criminal trial as they were producing political dirt for leaks to the press”.

The ‘Deep State’ in Israel is a consuming point of contention for Netanyahu and his cabinet: In a speech at the Knesset this month – as one example – Netanyahu savaged the media, accusing news outlets of “full cooperation with the deep state” and of creating “scandals”. “The cooperation between the bureaucracy in the deep state and the media didn’t work in the United States, and it won’t work here”, he said.

Just to be clear, at the time of the last general election, the Supreme Court was composed of 15 Judges, all of whom were Ashkenazi, bar one Mizrahi.

Nevertheless, it would be wrong to see the war of the rival blocs as some arcane dispute about the usurpation of executive power – and a lost ‘separation of state powers’.

The struggle is rooted rather, in a profound ideological dispute about the future and character of the State of Israel. Will it be a messianic, Halacha state obedient to Revelation? Or, in essence, will there be a democratic, liberal, largely secular ‘state’. Israel is shredding itself on the blade of this debate.

The cultural component is that the Mizrahim (loosely defined) and the Right view the European liberal sphere as barely truly Jewish. Hence their determination that the Land of Israel should be wholly immersed in Jewishness.

It was the events of 7 October that absolutely crystalized this ideological struggle, which is the second key factor largely mirroring the general schism.

Israel’s classical security vision (dating from the Ben-Gurion era) was configured to provide an answer to the enduring Israeli dilemma: Israel cannot impose an end to conflict on its enemies, yet at the same time, it cannot maintain a large army in the long term.

Therefore, Israel – in this optic – had to rely on a reserve army that needed adequate security warning before any war occurred. Advance intelligence warning of coming war therefore, was a paramount requirement.

And that key presumption blew apart on 7 October.

The shock and sense of collapse arising from 7 Oct led many to think that the Hamas attack had irrevocably broken the Israeli concept of security – the policy of deterrence had failed and the proof of that was that Hamas was not deterred.

But here, we approach the crux of the Israeli internal war: What was destroyed on 7 Oct was not just the old security paradigm of the Labour Party and the old security elites. It did that; but what arose from its ashes was an alternative weltanschauung that expressed a fundamentally different concept in philosophy and epistemology to the classic deterrence paradigm:

“I was born in Israel; I grew up in Israel … I served in the IDF”, says Alon Mizrahi;

“I was exposed to it. I was indoctrinated this way, and for many years of my life I believed it. This represents a serious Jewish problem: It is not just [a matter of one mode of] Zionism … How can you teach your children – and this is almost universal – that everyone who is not Jewish wants to kill you. When you put yourself in this paranoia, you give yourself permission to do anything to everyone … It is not a good way to create a society. It is so dangerous”.

See here in the Times of Israel an account of a High School presentation (post-7 Oct) on the Morality of Wiping out Amalek: A student raises the question: “Why do we condemn Hamas for murdering innocent men, women, and children – if we are commanded to wipe out Amalek?”

“How can we have normality tomorrow”, Alon Mizrahi asks, “if this is who we are today”?

The National Religious Right is leading the charge for a radical change to the Israeli concept of security; they no longer believe in the classic Ben Gurion paradigm of deterrence – particularly in the wake of 7 October. Nor does the Right believe in reaching any settlement with the Palestinians – and absolutely does not want a bi-national state. In the concept of Bezalel Smotrich, Israel’s security theory henceforth must include a continuous war against Palestinians – until they are expelled or eliminated.

The Old (Liberal) Establishment is outraged – as one of its members, David Agmon (former IDF Brigadier-General and former bureau chief to Netanyahu), articulated this week:

“I accuse you, Bezalel Smotrich, of destroying religious Zionism! You are leading us to a state of Halacha and Haredi Zionism, not religious Zionism … Not to mention the fact that you joined the terrorist Ben Gvir, who diverts lawbreakers, hillbilly boys, to continue breaking the law, who attacks the government, the judicial system, and the police under his responsibility. Netanyahu is not the solution. Netanyahu is the problem, he is the head of the snake. The protest should act against Netanyahu and his coalition. The protest should demand the overthrow of the malicious government”.

Netanyahu is in one sense secular; but in another, he embraces the Biblical mission of Greater Israel – with all its enemies annihilated. He is, (if you like a label) a neo-Jabotinskyist (his father was private secretary to Jabotinsky), and, in practice, exists in a relationship of mutual dependency with figures like Ben Gvir and Smotrich.

“What do these people want?”, asks Max Blumenthal; “What is their ultimate goal?”

“It is apocalypse”, warns Blumenthal, whose book Goliath traces the rise of Israel’s eschatological Right:

“They have an eschatology that is based on the Third Temple ideology – in which the Al-Aqsa Mosque will be destroyed and be replaced with a Third Temple and traditional Jewish ritual will be practiced”.

And in order to bring that about, they need a ‘Big War’.

Smotrich always has been frank about this: The project of ultimately removing all the Arabs from the ‘Land of Israel’ will require an emergency – a ‘big war’ – he has said.

The big question is: Do Trump and his team grasp any of this? For it has profound implications for Trump’s methodology of transactional deal-making. ‘Carrots and Sticks’ and secular rationality will carry little weight amongst those whose epistemology is quite different; those who take Revelation literally as ‘truth’, and who believe it commands complete obedience.

Trump says he wants to end the conflicts in the Middle East, and bring about a regional ‘peace’.

His secular, transactional approach to politics, however, is wholly unsuited to resolving eschatological conflict. His bravura style of threatening ‘all hell will break out’ if he doesn’t get his way will not work, when one or other party actually wants Armageddon.

“All hell break out”? ‘Bring it on’, might well be the response Trump gets.

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

The post The Kingdom of Judea vs. The State of Israel appeared first on LewRockwell.

It’s as simple as this: the orgy of judicial lawfare put on by blob-adjacent Democratic Party seditionists trying to make the USA ungovernable is looking to get swatted. Hubris is a harsh mistress, but Nemesis is more like the gods’ re-po man, and he comes to the door with attitude, meaning bidness. Blob judges will get flushed out of their humid conclaves naked and find themselves, astoundingly, in the FO zone of FAFO-land.

Do you think AG Bondi is playing tiddlywinks in Main Justice or that Kash Patel is just sitting there buffing his nails over at 935 Pennsylvania Avenue NW? Where did we get the idea that federal judges can just act with impunity, jerking around the public interest like some show-off with a yoyo?

Case in point: Judge James Boasberg, head honcho of the DC federal district court stepped into the FAFO waiting room over the weekend when he ordered two planeloads of deported toxic human trash known as Tren de Aragua, bound for jail in El Salvador, to return to the USA. Mr. Trump’s White House refused, saying the planes were already over international waters, outside the judge’s jurisdiction. Dem-blob lawyer Mark Zaid made the predictable next move, claiming that the matter will be grounds for Impeachment No. 3 against Mr. Trump post the 2026 midterm election. But, of course: strategery!

The general purpose in this latest phase of lawfare is to choke the federal courts with so many restraining orders and injunctions that the White House lawyers find themselves locked into an endless Chinese fire drill of counter-filings, motions, writs, and appearances. It’s all that the so-called “resistance” has left, what with DOGE breaking up the racketeering operation that has funded the Dem’s defense of the blob for a decade. By which I mean the government funding of non-governmental orgs (ha!) to distribute payola to Dem foot-soldiers who do all the dirty work of protecting the rogue bureaucracy in a circle-jerk of power and payoffs. This includes the dirty work of Dem-blob lawyers such as Mark Zaid, Norm Eisen, Mary McCord, Marc Elias, Barbara McQuade, Joanna Lydgate et al.

The history of Judge Boasberg in particular presents a disturbing picture of a tool covering-up every act of the shadowy blob’s war against American citizens. Boasberg presided in the FISA court that fraudulently enabled the FBI’s Crossfire Hurricane operation to attempt ousting newly-elected Donald Trump in 2017, and the many RussiaGate pranks that followed. As chief judge of the DC District, he oversaw the Jack Smith Special Counsel op and all the cases associated with it, including the Mar-a-Lago raid and the J-6 case in Tanya Chutkan’s crooked court. Boasberg allowed the prosecution of J-6ers under the unlawful use of the corporate fraud obstruction statute, 18USC§1512c2, a.k.a. the Enron law. He presided over the trial of Ray Epps, the shady character recorded on video repeatedly urging J-6 protestors to “go into the Capitol.” Boasberg gave Epps a suspended sentence while grandmothers who merely “paraded” through the rotunda between velvet ropes that day got sent to jail.

What can be done about judges like Boasberg? The prevailing view is: not much. I’m not so sure that’s true. While Rep. Brandon Gill (D-TX) announced last week that he will file articles of impeachment against Boasberg, a two-thirds majority would be required to convict him in any eventual Senate trial, so fuggeddabowdit. But federal judges are not immune from criminal investigation and prosecution, which is where AG Bondi and FBI Director Patel ought to come in. What’s probably standing in plain sight is a RICO conspiracy involving the aforesaid lawfare artists — Norm Eisen & Co — and the federal judiciary to deliberately bury the executive branch under burdensome fraudulent process, impede the executive branch’s ability to carry out its constitutional duties, and to obstruct justice.

Would you like to know if correspondence exists between these parties? Mr. Patel can ask them to produce it, and if they fail to, there’s a strong possibility that DNI Director Tulsi Gabbard can root it out of the NSA’s server farm. Depositions can be demanded. The lawfare lawyers will have to hire lawyers — just as all the targets of “Joe Biden” and Merrick Garland were obliged to lawyer-up when they were systematically persecuted from January, 2021 to January, 2025. The meters will run, ka-ching, ka-ching. It will be interesting to see who is footing the bill for that. You can be sure that it will be found out. Reid Hoffman? George and Alex Soros? Note: Dan Bongino was sword in as Deputy Director of the FBIat 8:00 o’clock this morning. Nemesis is open for bidness.

The lawfare gang would love all of this to ramp into a king-hell constitutional crisis. Could happen. Let them try. They don’t hold any of the levers of power the way they used to. A lot could go wrong for them. Welcome to FAFO-land.

Reprinted with permission from JamesHowardKunstler.com.

The post Welcome to FAFO-Land appeared first on LewRockwell.

Here is from the transcript by MSNBC, of their broadcast on 17 January 2025 of President Joe Biden’s final interview (which was the prior day, by the Democrat Lawrence O’Donnell, on his “The Last Word” show) — it included one of the decrepit Biden’s ever-increasing number of unintentional slip-ups saying the truth that he never had intentionally revealed during his prior and less-decrepit period (and, of course, his interviewer, this Democrat, O’Donnell, simply ignored what the President had just said, instead of diving into it so as to perhaps get more details about this crucially important matter):

“The Last Word With Lawrence O’Donnell – Jan. 16 | Audio Only”

21:42

[O’DONNELL]: WHEN THIS WAR STARTED, THERE WAS A TREMENDOUS TENSION ABOUT THE POSSIBILITY OF NUCLEAR CONFRONTATION,

21:48

THE POSSIBILITY OF VLADIMIR PUTIN USING NUCLEAR WEAPONS. DID YOU HAVE ANY DIRECT COMMUNICATION

21:55

WITH VLADIMIR PUTIN TO DETER HIM FROM USING NUCLEAR WEAPONS?

[BIDEN]: WELL, I DID.

22:00

WHEN HE STARTED TALKING ABOUT TACTICAL, I THOUGHT THIS GUY WANTS TO USE TACTICAL NUCLEAR WEAPONS. NO.

22:06

I DON’T WANNA DO THAT. I DON’T DO THAT. NUCLEAR WEAPONS,

22:11

TACTICAL NUCLEAR WEAPONS IN EUROPE SCARES THE HELL OUT OF EVERYBODY, INCLUDING THE RUSSIANS, INCLUDING THE RUSSIANS.

22:18

AND SO WHAT I, I MADE IT CLEAR TO HIM, LOOK,

22:23

HE SAID TO ME THAT WHAT HE WANTED WAS: HE WANTED TO MAKE SURE THAT THERE WERE NO NUCLEAR WEAPONS IN EUROPE,

22:30

I MEAN, IN, UH, IN UKRAINE; THAT, UH, THERE WAS, THEY WEREN’T A MEMBER OF NATO;

22:36

AND, UH, THAT, UH, THEY WOULD NOT BE, UH, UH — AND HE,

22:41

HE STARTED OFF ONE OF THE CONVERSATIONS BY SAYING: I KNOW YOU CAN TAKE ME OUT TOMORROW. I KNOW YOU CAN TAKE THEM OUT TOMORROW FROM UKRAINE.

22:48

YOU CAN STRIKE MOSCOW. YOU CAN STRIKE. I SAID, THAT’S NOT A PROBLEM. WE’VE ALREADY TAKEN THE NUCLEAR WEAPONS OUT.

22:55

SO I TOOK THEM ALL OUT.

Ukraine is far nearer to The Kremlin than ANY other country is: around 300 miles or 500 kilometers away; and THIS is the reason why Russia will not allow Ukraine to be in NATO: It has the closest of all borders to The Kremlin.

Here is — with full documentation in its links, so that you can immediately see the evidence for any assertion you might doubt — the actual history of how the war in Ukraine actually started on 20 February 2014 and ultimately produced Russia’s invasion of Ukraine on 24 February 2022 — and all of it has to do with America’s determination to place its nukes a mere five minutes away from Moscow, and Russia’s determination to prevent that from ever being able to happen. Putin has done a terribly poor job of making clear to the public the reason why he invaded Ukraine on 24 Febuary 2022; but, as you will see from the evidences that are linked-to in the following, this — the distance to Moscow — is the reason why he did. Ukraine was far too close to Moscow. Putin needed to do this in order to protect Russia from the United States — to prevent a 5-minute blitz nuclear attack decapitating Russia’s central command. And it ALSO was the reason why the U.S. Government was so determined, for so many decades, to get Ukraine into its NATO military alliance against Russia. Putin didn’t only need Biden to remove America’s nukes from Ukraine — he knows that American Presidents come and go — he needed something irrevocable. Biden isn’t saying there that NATO will formally announce “Ukraine is banned from ever entering NATO.” Putin and all of Russia NEED that public and formal commitment. The historical truth is the exact opposite of what has been (and still is) touted by the media in the U.S. and in its colonies, as having been the case; America has been the aggressor, all along. This history is the exact opposite of the U.S.-empire myth about it; so, here it is — this is the historical truth about the matter:

The Ukrainian war started after the democratically elected President of Ukraine (an infamously corrupt country), who was committed to keeping his country internationally neutral (not allied with either Russia or the United States), met privately with both the U.S. President Barack Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in 2010, shortly following that Ukrainian President’s election earlier in 2010; and, on both occasions, he rejected their urgings for Ukraine to become allied with the United States against his adjoining country Russia. This was being urged upon him so that America could position its nuclear missiles at the Russian border with Ukraine, less than a five-minute striking-distance away from hitting the Kremlin in Moscow.

The war in Ukraine started in 2014, as both NATO’s Stoltenberg and Ukraine’s Zelensky have said. This war was started in February 2014 by a U.S. coup which replaced the democratically elected and neutralist Ukrainian President, with a U.S. selected and rabidly anti-Russian leader, who immediately imposed an ethnic-cleansing program to get rid of the residents in the regions that had voted overwhelmingly for the overthrown President. Russia responded militarily on 24 February 2022, in order to prevent Ukraine from allowing the U.S. to place a missile there a mere 317 miles or five minutes of missile-flying-time away from The Kremlin and thus too brief for Russia to respond before its central command would already be beheaded by America’s nuclear strike. (As I headlined on 28 October 2022, “NATO Wants To Place Nuclear Missiles On Finland’s Russian Border — Finland Says Yes”. The U.S. had demanded this, especially because it will place American nuclear missiles far nearer to The Kremlin than at present, only 507 miles away — not as close as Ukraine, but the closest yet. This shows how crucial to the U.S. Government’s strategic planning it is, that America must place its nukes into position for a decapitating first-strike blitz annihilating Russia’s central command so as to prevent any retaliation. It displays how crazy with power-lust America’s Deep State actually are. As America’s leading expert on nuclear weapons, the physicist Theodore A. Postol, of MIT, had argued on 20 December 2014, the U.S. Government was developing a radical new technology strictly for the purpose of enabling a decapitating blitz first-strike against The Kremlin. Then, on 1 March 2017, he announced that it was now operational and being installed, and that “it creates exactly what one would expect to see, if a nuclear-armed state were planning to have the capacity to fight and win a nuclear war by disarming enemies with a surprise first strike.” Furthermore, the Government was lying about it to the public, portraying it “to the public as an effort to ensure the reliability and safety of warheads in the US nuclear arsenal, rather than to enhance their military capabilities” to first-strike-annihilate The Kremlin.)

Ukraine had been neutral between Russia and America until Obama’s brilliantly executed Ukrainian coup, which his Administration started planning by no later than June 2011, culminated successfully in February 2014 and promptly appointed a rabid anti-Russian to impose in regions that rejected the new anti-Russian U.S.-controlled goverment an “Anti-Terrorist Operation” to kill protesters, and, ultimately, to terrorize the residents in those regions in order to kill as many of them as possible and to force the others to flee into Russia so that when elections would be held, pro-Russian voters would no longer be in the electorate.

The U.S. Government had engaged the Gallup polling organization, both before and after the coup, in order to poll Ukrainians, and especially ones who lived in its Crimean independent republic (where Russia has had its main naval base ever since 1783), regarding their views on U.S., Russia, NATO, and the EU; and, generally, Ukrainians were far more pro-Russia than pro-U.S., pro-NATO, or pro-EU, but this was especially the case in Crimea; so, America’s Government knew that Crimeans would be especially resistant. However, this was not really new information. During 2003-2009, only around 20% of Ukrainians had wanted NATO membership, while around 55% opposed it. In 2010, Gallup found that whereas 17% of Ukrainians considered NATO to mean “protection of your country,” 40% said it’s “a threat to your country.” Ukrainians predominantly saw NATO as an enemy, not a friend. But after Obama’s February 2014 Ukrainian coup, “Ukraine’s NATO membership would get 53.4% of the votes, one third of Ukrainians (33.6%) would oppose it.” However, afterward, the support averaged around 45% — still over twice as high as had been the case prior to the coup.

In other words: what Obama did was generally successful: it grabbed Ukraine, or most of it, and it changed Ukrainians’ minds regarding America and Russia. But only after the subsequent passage of time did the American billionaires’ neoconservative heart become successfully grafted into the Ukrainian nation so as to make Ukraine a viable place to position U.S. nuclear missiles against Moscow (which is the U.S. Government’s goal there). Furthermore: America’s rulers also needed to do some work upon U.S. public opinion. Not until February of 2014 — the time of Obama’s coup — did more than 15% of the American public have a “very unfavorable” view of Russia. (Right before Russia invaded Ukraine, that figure had already risen to 42%. America’s press — and academia or public-policy ‘experts’ — have been very effective at managing public opinion, for the benefit of America’s billionaires.)

Then came the Minsk Agreements (#1 & #2, with #2 being the final version, which is shown here, as a U.N. Security Council Resolution), between Ukraine and the separatist region in its far east, and which the U.S. Government refused to participate in, but the U.S.-installed Ukrainian government (then under the oligarch Petro Poroshenko) signed it in order to have a chance of Ukraine’s gaining EU membership, but never complied with any of it; and, so, the war continued); and, then, finally, as the Ukrainian government (now under Volodmyr Zelensky) was greatly intensifying its shelling of the break-away far-eastern region, Russia presented, to both the U.S. Government and its NATO military alliance against Russia, two proposed agreements for negotiation (one to U.S., the other to NATO), but neither the U.S. nor its NATO agreed to negotiate. The key portions of the two 17 December 2021 proposed Agreements, with both the U.S. and with its NATO, were, in regards to NATO:

Article 1

The Parties shall guide in their relations by the principles of cooperation, equal and indivisible security. They shall not strengthen their security individually, within international organizations, military alliances or coalitions at the expense of the security of other Parties. …

Article 4

The Russian Federation and all the Parties that were member States of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization as of 27 May 1997, respectively, shall not deploy military forces and weaponry on the territory of any of the other States in Europe in addition to the forces stationed on that territory as of 27 May 1997. With the consent of all the Parties such deployments can take place in exceptional cases to eliminate a threat to security of one or more Parties.

Article 5

The Parties shall not deploy land-based intermediate- and short-range missiles in areas allowing them to reach the territory of the other Parties.

Article 6

All member States of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization commit themselves to refrain from any further enlargement of NATO, including the accession of Ukraine as well as other States.

And, in regards to the U.S.:

Article 2

The Parties shall seek to ensure that all international organizations, military alliances and coalitions in which at least one of the Parties is taking part adhere to the principles contained in the Charter of the United Nations.

Article 3

The Parties shall not use the territories of other States with a view to preparing or carrying out an armed attack against the other Party or other actions affecting core security interests of the other Party.

Article 4

The United States of America shall undertake to prevent further eastward expansion of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and deny accession to the Alliance to the States of the former Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.

The United States of America shall not establish military bases in the territory of the States of the former Union of Soviet Socialist Republics that are not members of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, use their infrastructure for any military activities or develop bilateral military cooperation with them.

Any reader here can easily click onto the respective link to either proposed Agreement, in order to read that entire document, so as to evaluate whether or not all of its proposed provisions are acceptable and reasonable. What was proposed by Russia in each of the two was only a proposal, and the other side (the U.S. side) in each of the two instances, was therefore able to pick and choose amongst those proposed provisions, which ones were accepted, and to negotiate regarding any of the others; but, instead, the U.S. side simply rejected all of them.

On 7 January 2022, the Associated Press (AP) headlined “US, NATO rule out halt to expansion, reject Russian demands”, and reported:

Washington and NATO have formally rejected Russia’s key demands for assurances that the US-led military bloc will not expand closer towards its borders, leaked correspondence reportedly shows.

According to documents seen by Spanish daily El Pais and published on Wednesday morning, Moscow’s calls for a written guarantee that Ukraine will not be admitted as a member of NATO were dismissed following several rounds of talks between Russian and Western diplomats. …

The US-led bloc denied that it posed a threat to Russia. …

The US similarly rejected the demand that NATO does not expand even closer to Russia’s borders. “The United States continues to firmly support NATO’s Open Door Policy.”

NATO-U.S. was by now clearly determined to get Ukraine into NATO and to place its nukes so near to The Kremlin as to constitute, like a checkmate in chess, a forced defeat of Russia, a capture of its central command. This was, but in reverse, the situation that America’s President JFK had faced with regard to the Soviet Union in the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis, when the U.S. would have invaded Cuba if Khrushchev wouldn’t agree to a mutually acceptable settlement — which he did, and so WW3 was averted on that occasion. But whereas Khrushchev was reasonable, Obama and Biden were not (they wanted to checkmate Russia); and, so, we again stood — and under Trump might still stand — at the brink of WW3, but this time with a truly evil head-of-state (Biden — no better than Obama), who might even be willing to go beyond that brink in order to become able to achieve world-conquest.

Russia did what it had to do: it invaded Ukraine, on 24 February 2022 (just as America would have invaded and taken over Cuba if Khrushchev had not agreed to the deal that JFK proposed during the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis).

On 29 October 2022, I headlined “NATO wants to place nuclear missiles on Finland’s Russian border — Finland says yes”; and reported that if Finland hadn’t said yes, then the U.S. would have made sure that at least one of NATO’s member-nations would have said no to (i.e., vetoed) Finland’s joining. The U.S. Government controls NATO, and would have been able to do that (and routinely does wrangle votes within NATO for a U.S. objective). This Government started the war in Ukraine because a blitz decapitation-strike annihilating Russia’s central command is what the war in Ukraine (only 317 miles away from The Kremlin) has been about, ever since the war in Ukraine started on 20 February 2014.

The investigative historian Carleton Meyer presented, on March 15th, an excellent 12-minute video history of the U.S. Government’s hiring of Nazis and ‘former’ Nazis after World War Two in order to ultimately achieve what the U.S. Government and its European colonies almost achieved but now appear extremely unlikely to achieve (and you can also see about this my 7 April 2024 article “How & Why the UK, U.S., and Canada, Governments imported Nazis into Canada”): the usage of the former pro-Nazi organizations in Ukraine so as to enable the U.S. empire to add Ukraine to the U.S., Govenment’s list of colonies — and the closest border of them all to Russia’s central command. The title of Meyer’s video is : “Provoking Russian Intervention – Part 26 of The Anglo-American War on Russia”. That brief video places into the broader historical context of post-WW2 American history, the more-recent detailed history of the Ukraine war that I have documented in the present article (and, differently, in my 7 April 2024 article just referred-to).

All of this must be understood within the even broader context of the way that the U.S. empire functions; and this was brilliantly explained in a 16-minute video, by the author of the 2004 confessional book I Was an Economic Hit Man, “John Perkins at Thistle Hotel London in 2012”, which video summarizes and goes even beyond that best-selling and by-now-classic book. Natural resources have, thoughout history, been craved by imperialists and caused them to invade foreign countries; and no country is even nearly so rich in natural resources as Russia is. That’s what the phrase “natural resources curse” actually refers to, but imperialistic Governments define it instead as being the corruption within the unacquired-but-sought-after lands themselves, though this corruption is usually to a large extent greatly spurred-on by (or even mainly created by) the imperialist power itself, in the process of its acquiring the colony. And Russia is refusing to become acquired. Putin is refusing to be checkmated by the U.S. Government — refusing to allow Russia to be exploited by its enemies (such as John Perkins describes, from his personal experience, having carried out in other countries).

The U.S. regime knows that it is evil, and merely lies about it. The reason why it always lies about itself is that it ‘justifies’ its aggressions by saying that it is a democracy and the leader of ‘the free world’, while the nation it’s targeting for ‘regime-change’ is instead an “autocracy” or a “dictatorship.” But the truth is that, regardless of what the targeted-for-takeover country is, the aggressor is actually the U.S. Government itself, not the one it’s trying to take over. It is the U.S. Government that needs to be “regime-changed” and replaced by a totally new Government that ADHERES TO the U.S. Constitution — instead of (like the one we’ve had since 1945) routinely violating or even ignoring it.

The problem in America isn’t the Democrats versus the Republicans (such as the billionaires’ media portray it) but the billionaires versus the public; and it is the billionaires who must be pulled down and replaced by authentic democracy if ever Constitutional rule is to become restored in America.

This originally appeared on Eric’s Substack.

The post Biden Admitted That America Had Been Planning To Blitz-Nuke the Kremlin. appeared first on LewRockwell.

What has happened to the Western World that causes it to deny and bury its successes because the successes allegedly embarrass nonwhites? See this.

For decades the majority of Western intellectuals, “artists,” and university professors have worked assiduously to demonize Western accomplishments as accomplished via looting of superior non-white cultures.  Not long ago a Swedish anti-white activist made a “documentary” “proving” that the original inhabitants of Sweden were black. How blacks survived such low vitamin D absorption from such weak sunshine he did not say.  

It did not matter.  The Western intellectual world was delighted at this “proof” that the accomplishments attributed to whites were really an appropriation of black accomplishments.

The problem with this satisfaction is that there are no black or non-white precedents for Shakespeare from whom Shakespeare can be said to have stolen his work.  The solution is to deep-six Shakespeare for being a racist for embarrassing non-whites with the sublimity of his art.

We have reached the point in Western Civilization to the extent it still exists at which success is equated with “white supremacy.” As the Western intellectuals have arranged it, the only way the West cannot be racist is to be a failure.  This is why everywhere in the West the governments are making the Western countries into Sodom and Gomorrah Towers of Babel. 

For decades  Shakespeare, who in my student days was the example of the best use of the English language, is today portrayed in university courses as a racist, sexist, homophobic, white supremacist.

In Shakespeare’s day there was no such thing as a white supremacist. But facts are not a component of Western “scholarship” today.  The purpose of Western scholarship is denunciation of “racist” Western civilization.

Anti-western intellectuals use criticism as a weapon. Its object is an enemy it wants not to refute but to destroy.  Criticism is no longer an end in itself but simply a means. It essential pathos is indignation. Its essential task, denunciation. Criticism is hand to hand combat, and in such a combat the point is not whether the opponent is noble, equal or interesting, the point is to strike him.

Those of you who are well educated will recognize that I am quoting Karl Marx on the purpose and use of criticism. My use of Marx does not mean that I am a Marxist.  It is my illustration that Western intellectual and liberal-left professors are, whether they have sufficient education to realize it, utilizing Marx’s tools for overturning a society.

For years American and British universities that are homes to Woke academics have refused to teach Shakespeare, thus depriving an English B.A. degree of content. Shakespeare, say the dumbshit professors, is racist, because he allegedly links beauty with whiteness.

The London theater  has initiated “anti-racist” seminars to discuss “decolonizing” Shakespeare’s plays.

So, what are white ethnicities confronted  with?  

They are confronted with being coerced by their own governments and intellectuals into accepting white inferiority. Whites can only justify their existence by submitting to the rule of non-whites. Jean Raspail correctly described Europe’s demise in 1973 in The Camp of the Saints.

If you haven’t read this book, you do not know your future.  It is independent of Trump, Macron, Putin, Zelensky. It is happening despite any Trump regime deportations of immigrant-invaders.

The simple fact is that white people are doomed, because their intellectuals, schools and governments have convinced them that they are racists guilty of racism, and that justice requires white ethnicities to accept second class citizenship in law.

The post The British Repudiate Shakespeare Because His Success ‘Benefits the Ideology of White Supremacy’ appeared first on LewRockwell.

On May 4 2014 I wrote about the February coup aftermath in Ukraine:

Two days ago a mob, supported by the fascists Right Sektor, killed over 30 federalist Ukrainians in Odessa by pushing them from their camp into a building and then setting fire to it. Those who escaped the massacre, not the perpetrators, were rounded up by police. Today pro-federalism people besieged the police headquarter in Odessa until the police released those it had earlier arrested.
…
The U.S. plan for Ukraine seems to be to bait Russia into an occupation. This would destroy EU-Russia relations, embolden NATO and help the U.S. to keep the EU as a secondary partner under its control. There would be lots of economic upsides for the U.S. in such a situation. Selling more arms and increasing energy market shares are only the starters.

There are two reasons to believe that this plan will fail:
…
Without Russian intervention and without German support the U.S. campaign against Russia is unlikely to reach its secondary target of isolating Russia. The primary target, Sevastopol harbor in Crimea, was already lost when Russia reunified with the island.

What is left to do then for Washington is to create more chaos in Ukraine and to hope that somehow out of total chaos some new chance may arise to stick it to Russia. For lack of real direction that strategy is also unlikely to succeed.

I was unfortunately wrong with the last sentence though it took the U.S. eight more years to succeed.

But it is the first paragraph I what to refer to today. The current two most popular pieces on the website of Strana are echoing it (machine translation):

From the first story (machine translation):

Demyan Ganul, who was killed today in Odessa, is a well-known radical activist, a native of the “Right Sector”. Later he founded his own organization “Street Front”.

Ganul was known since 2014, when he participated in the events of May 2, when dozens of people were killed in the House of Trade Unions. Later, he organized actions against Odessa residents, who laid flowers in honor of the burned-out anti-Maidan activists.
…
Ganul is also widely known for fighting in Odessa with “imperial” and Soviet monuments – to Catherine, Pushkin, and Soviet soldiers. He disrupted concerts of Russian performers, and also harassed residents of the city who spoke out for the Russian language.

Recently, Ganul actively “fought” against those who criticized the mobilization.

The most scandalous case occurred this summer, when Ganul beat up an Odessa fitness trainer after he criticized the recruiting office. After that, the coach disappeared and ended up, presumably, in the ranks of the Armed Forces of Ukraine, where he was bullied and probably raped.

Ganul himself, as far as is known, did not fight and was engaged in volunteering. But not without scandals. In 2023, he was beaten up, as reported, by the military of the “Foreign Legion” – because Ganul collected money for a car, but did not give it away.

Ganul celebrated each anniversary of the May 2 massacre by posting pictures of himself eating a shashlik, i.e. burned flash.

The guy was a Nazi, a brute and a thug.

He was shot on the street with a pistol. When he was down on the ground the killer put another bullet into his head (vid) to make sure that he was dead. The murderer then walked away.

There are many such Nazis in Ukraine who are too coward to take part in the war but ‘volunteer’ in support of police. They are the muscles needed to run various extortion rackets.

During his lifetime, Ganul was a scandalous person and had numerous conflicts. And not only with pro-Russian circles.

The motives for Ganul’s murder may not lie in the political sphere at all.

The victim has been engaged in volunteering since 2014, and also worked part-time as an “activist”, organizing actions against Odessa businessmen, politicians and city authorities.

For example, he actively supported the Odessa businessman Degas, who is in conflict with the Mayor’s office.

In addition, there have long been rumors in the city that Ganul is actually engaged in reket – looking for “victims” – cafes, restaurants, fitness clubs where you can find fault with something, for example, the staff speaks Russian. And then “helps” the owners of establishments.

In other words, he had many enemies. And not only for ideological reasons.

The other most popular news item at Strana relates to yesterday’s judgment by the European Court for Human Rights against the authorities of Ukraine:

In the case of Vyacheslavova and Others v. Ukraine the Court held that there had been violations of the right to life/investigation on account of the authorities’ failure to do everything that could reasonably be expected of them to prevent the violence in Odesa on 2 May 2014, to stop that violence after its outbreak, to ensure timely rescue measures for people trapped in the fire, and to institute and conduct an effective investigation into the events. It also held that there had been a violation of the right to respect for private and family life in respect of one applicant concerning the delay in handing over her father’s body for burial.

The courts press release describes the struggle that led to the case:

Maidan activists started setting fire to the tents. A group of pro-Russian protesters on the roof of the Trade Union Building threw Molotov cocktails at the crowd below; pro-unity activists retaliated by throwing Molotov cocktails at the building. Gunshots were reportedly fired from both sides.

Despite numerous calls to the fire brigade, which was less than 1 km away, the fire service regional head instructed his staff not to send any fire engines to Kulykove Pole without his explicit order.

At 7.45 p.m., a fire broke out in the Trade Union Building. The fire extinguishers in the building did not work. The police called the fire brigade, to no avail. Some of the people in the building including Mr Dmitriyev (application no. 59339/17) tried to escape by jumping from the upper windows. He survived the fall and was taken to an ambulance. A number of people fell to their deaths, including the son of Ms Radzykhovska (application no. 59339/17) and the son of Ms Nikitenko (application no. 47092/18). Video footage shows pro-unity protesters making makeshift ladders and platforms from a stage in the square and using them to rescue people trapped in the building. Other video footage shows pro-unity protesters attacking people who had jumped or had fallen.

The regional head of the fire service finally ordered fire engines to be sent to the scene. Fire ladders were used to rescue people from the upper-floor windows. Firefighters entered the building at around 8.30 p.m. and put out the fire. The police arrested 63 anti-Maidan activists who were still inside the building or on the roof. They were released two days later, when a group of several hundred anti- Maidan protesters stormed the local police station where they were being held.

The fire claimed 42 lives.

There are several others well know perpetrators of the May 2 massacre, like Demyan Ganul, who are still running free in Ukraine. Their unrestricted activities underline the necessity of denazification in Ukraine.

May the ECHR judgment and the death of Demyan Ganul give some solace to the victims of the May 2 2014 massacre.

Reprinted with permission from Moon of Alabama. 

The post Echoes of the May 2, 2014, Odessa Massacre appeared first on LewRockwell.