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Some topics are too easy, so I avoid them.

I like to discuss things that require me to exercise the ol’ melon.

But once in a while I have no choice.

Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, has a new book called Why Fascists Fear Teachers: Public Education and the Future of Democracy.

So the president of a national teachers’ union characterizes her opponents as “fascists.” Terrific.

I think dismantling a national education bureaucracy and turning authority over to localities might be something like the opposite of fascism. I wonder what ol’ Randi has to say about that. Probably nothing.

According to the book description, “Attacks on teachers are part of a larger, darker agenda — to undermine democracy, opportunity, and public education as we know it. After the Trump administration declared its intention to dismantle the Department of Education, that alarm became undeniable.”

When the Department of Education — an institution we got by just fine without for over 80 percent of our history — was proposed in 1979, the American Federation of Teachers itself opposed it, as did Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan (D-NY), who said we would thereby “risk the politicization of education itself.” The New York Times and the Washington Post, those bastions of fascism, ran editorials against it.

You already know what Randi’s book says: fascists hate knowledge and opportunity, so they hate teachers.

If the public were educated, the argument goes, the people would never fall for demagogues (at least not the kind of demagogues Randi dislikes).

They would be informed!

That’s a laugh. American schoolchildren emerge from high school as propagandized zombies, with the official version of every historical event seared into their heads.

Actually, scratch that. The brightest ones emerge with the official narrative in their heads. The rest know nothing at all.

Bryan Caplan, in his provocatively titled The Case Against Education, goes into much detail about how little Americans know about the most basic things, even after thirteen years of daily instruction.

For example:

Here are a few of the questions that American adults were asked not long ago, along with the possible answers (the correct answer will be in bold). Then I’ll share two figures: the percentage who got the correct answer, and the percentage who really knew the answer (in other words, correcting to account for people who got the question right simply by guessing).

(1) Which of the following is not protected by the Bill of Rights?
Freedom of speech
Trial by jury
The right to bear arms
The right to vote

39% got the correct answer; 21% really knew the answer

(2) Which of the following events came before the Declaration of Independence?
Foundation of Jamestown, Virginia
The Civil War
The Emancipation Proclamation
The War of 1812

49%, 26%

(3) The Bill of Rights explicitly prohibits
Prayer in public school
Discrimination based on race, sex, or religion
The ownership of guns by private individuals
Establishing an official religion for the United States
The president from vetoing a line item in a spending bill

26%, 8%

The questions continue, but you get the idea.

The vast majority of American adults are not even entitled to an opinion on major issues in American life.

Note also that Randi thinks we “fascists” oppose “opportunity.” This from a woman whose system does zero to prepare students for the world in 2025.

We hear nonstop complaints about young people that the deck is stacked against them, everything is too expensive, they can’t get a break, etc.

What has Randi done, exactly, to help them navigate that?

Never pay for a book again: TomsFreeBooks.com

The post Just Announced: Dumbest Book of 2025 appeared first on LewRockwell.

Recently, I wrote an article about the adulterous Coldplay couple caught on the kiss-cam, and I concluded my piece with some thoughts about the very public General Judgement that will occur when Christ returns to judge the living and the dead:

Whatever happens to the couple from now on, the justice and mercy afforded them in their moment (or lifetime) of exposure is similar to—and yet nothing approaching—the mercy and justice we will all face, together, at the General Judgement at the end of time, when every one of our sins will be exposed, with perfect clarity, to all others.…

Now, I expected that lukewarm or poorly catechized Catholics would be learning something new about this final judgement that will take place at the consummation of the world, but I was surprised to find that even some faithful Catholics are unaware of how things will go down.

For example, one woman stated with worry on my Facebook page: “I thought the sacrament of reconciliation actually blots out our sins and they are remembered no more (Please Lord).” Another was stunned: “Hold up…wait…what? Our sins will be seen by all? How? Where is this taught?” And still another confused commenter: “I thought the ones we confessed were not seen? Or did I misunderstand?”

To clear up the confusion, let’s look more closely at Church teaching.

It is true that in the course of the final, public judgement, presided over by Christ the King, every one of our sins—in thought, word, and deed—will be revealed to every other person who has ever been created. Yes, this even includes the sins that have been confessed and forgiven in a sacramental confession. While we can rest assured that each of those absolved sins are completely forgiven and no longer offend God, they will be seen two more times: first, at our particular judgement, which takes place at the moment of our death; and, second, at the General (or Final) Judgement at the end of time, when the old Heaven and Earth pass away, the universe is renewed, and the Kingdom of God is fulfilled. The first judgement by Christ the King is private and individual; the second is public and universal.

If this is shocking news to you, please don’t freak out; keep reading to understand why—if you are among the saved—you will not feel despair, shame, or humiliation when the Lord reveals all to all.

First let’s go to some familiar Scripture verses on this. Jesus tells us plainly and repeatedly that everything secret will ultimately be exposed: “For there is nothing hidden that will not become visible, and nothing secret that will not be known and come to light” (Luke 8:17).

There is nothing concealed that will not be revealed, nor secret that will not be known. Therefore whatever you have said in the darkness will be heard in the light, and what you have whispered behind closed doors will be proclaimed on the housetops. (Luke 12:2-3)

St. Paul echoes this truth when he writes to the faithful of Corinth, instructing them not to make judgements “until the appointed time, until the Lord comes [again], for he will bring to light what is hidden in darkness and will manifest the motives of our hearts” (1 Corinthians 4:5).

And, in St. John’s apocalypse (which translates to “a lifting of the veil”), he sees in the vision “the dead, the great and the lowly, standing before the throne, and scrolls were opened…. All the dead were judged according to their deeds” (Revelation 20:12-13).

The Catechism of the Catholic Church confirms all of the above when addressing the Last Day: “Then will the conduct of each one and the secrets of hearts be brought to light” (678).

In the presence of Christ, who is Truth itself, the truth of each man’s relationship with God will be laid bare. The Last Judgement will reveal even to its furthest consequences the good each person has done or failed to do during his earthly life. (1039)

The Baltimore Catechism teaches the same: “Every deliberate thought, word, deed, and omission of every person’s entire life will be manifested at the general judgement. The Lord Christ will be the judge” (No. 3, Lesson 14, 180).

In addition to Scripture and catechisms, the saints and theologians throughout the centuries have repeated the teaching on the General Judgement, including St. Bonaventure:

At the time of the judgement to come, when God is to weigh the secrets of hearts, fire will precede the arrival of the Judge; angels will be sent with trumpets to gather the elect from the four winds of heaven; all those who lie in their tombs will rise through the power of God’s command, and will stand before his judgement seat. Then the things hidden in darkness will be brought to light, and the counsels of hearts will be made manifest, and the scrolls of men’s consciences will be unrolled, and that scroll itself will be opened which is called the Book of Life. Thus, together and in a single flash, all the secrets of all men will be revealed to all with such clear certainty that, before the evidence of Truth testifying in the Person of Christ and corroborated by the testimony of every separate conscience, not a single path will be left open for denial or defense, for excuse or evasion, but every man will then receive according to his deeds…

Fr. Charles Arminjon, in his book The End of the Present World (the reading of which St. Thérèse called “one of the greatest graces of my life”), described it this way:

[This] judgement is called universal, because it will cover every crime and offense…. In the clarity of the light of God, all the crimes, public and secret, that have been committed in every latitude and in every age, will be seen clearly and in detail. The whole life of each human being will be laid bare. No circumstance will be omitted: no action, word, or desire will remain unknown. (p. 102)

And the Catholic Encyclopedia tells us that the final judgement “will embrace all works, good or bad, forgiven as well as unforgiven sins, every idle word, every secret thought.”

For those who have already died and been individually judged—whether that was days, years, centuries, or millennia before the Second Coming of Christ—the communal display of every thought, word, and deed, and the pronouncement of their sentence (saved or damned) will be identical to that of their previous particular judgement. The only difference is in the final judgement’s public nature. Because man is a social creature, the satisfaction of a social judgement conducted before all is fitting and just.

At that last divine tribunal, every awestruck and trembling soul, with all the choirs of angels and legions of demons on hand, will witness the unveiling and understand the final meaning of all that came before. This consummation of the world will be the Lord’s definitive word and will accomplish three main things.

Read the Whole Article

The post Final Judgement appeared first on LewRockwell.

This paper was written to give the reader a snap shot of money, real and imagined.

Our Constitution requires that we use real money, which is Gold and Silver. These have the required characteristics for real money: 1…medium of exchange,2…measure of value, and 3…store of value.

Our Fiat Dollars don’t comply with the Constitution  money” is decreed by authority, with no physical backing.) Which is why we have suffered inflation and the decline in relative value of fiat dollars for almost 100 years. It certainly is no store of value Congress just passed the Genius Act that authorized the issue of Fiat. Stablecoins which is another form of the Fiat dollar and redeemable on a one to one basis with the Fiat dollar. It is a plan to extend the life of the Fiat dollar. I think it will have an opposite effect and reduce value of Stablecoins and the Fiat Dollar.

To grow an economy, you must spend less than you produce, and new money can’t exceed production of goods and services. During my lifetime and for thousands of years, the value of gold has been relatively stable. But the price of gold in fiat dollars has increased from $35 to $3,400 an ounce in 90 years.

Our corrupt Congress refuses to use Constitutional real money, gold and silver, because they can’t print it to finance wars for profit and Foreign Aid, nor use it to impoverish the people with various schemes. The primary beneficiaries of corruption are the Parasitic Super-Rich Ruling Class and bureaucrats of the Administrative State functioning as a Criminal Enterprise within government.

Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC) is in the planning stages by the unconstitutional Federal Reserve Bank, and, if enacted, is a valid reason for revolution. In simple terms, CBDC would exist in digital form only; there would be no pocket cash, government would know where you spent money, government could control how you spent money, and could cut off your ability to spend money at any time. It would control your every move. Freedom would be a memory and impossible. CBDC represents total tyranny with absolute control of the people. CBDC could only be terminated by revolution. So stop it now.

Crypto Currencies like Bitcoin, Cardano and countless others remind me of The Dutch Tulip Mania in 1657. Prices rose precipitously. The best Tulip Bulbs sold for up to $750,000 at today’s prices. The bottom shortly dropped out, and many people were ruined. Tulips, like  Crypto Currencies, don’t have the required characteristics  of money, and due to its format, are subject to all kinds of unknown problems.

President Trump has established a Strategic Reserve for Bitcoin. This is a dangerous move because it is not money, and the Constitution only recognizes gold and silver as money. As an economist, I can foresee some serious shenanigans on the part of players.

The Federal Reserve Bank is privately-owned and Unconstitutional for good reason. It is a scam on the people of the United States. The money it prints is Fiat. Without the Federal Reserve Bank printing money out of thin air, wars for profit would not be possible and we would not have a $37 Trillion deficit. The Bank causes booms and busts which would not occur as often, if at all, with Constitutional money, gold and silver.

Money is the lifeblood of an Economy, and those who control money control the country, regardless of who is elected. The Federal Reserve Bank is privately-owned  and responsible for ups and downs in the Economy. If gold and silver was used rather than fiat dollars, things would be more stable without inflation.

The post Prosperity Requires Real Money, Not Fiat, CBDC, or Crypto…nor the Federal Reserve Bank! appeared first on LewRockwell.

International Man: Recently, we’ve seen the “Yellow Peril” escalate across media and politics. What’s your take on the sentiment towards China?

Doug Casey: There’s always been a fear of China, perhaps starting with the immigration of laborers to California in the 1860s, then Sax Rohmer’s Fu Manchu novels. It’s logical enough. China has always seemed alien to Americans—their language, their script, their clothing style, and their congregating together in Chinatowns. They were painted as inscrutable and devious. Mao’s Communist ideology and the Korean War, which was really a war between the U.S. and China, certainly didn’t help.

Now China’s newfound prosperity is seen as a threat. China, however, isn’t the problem; it’s the U.S. government’s attitude towards China, combined with visible U.S. decline, while China is advancing rapidly on every front. So, the U.S. Government is trying to suppress China and throw up roadblocks to its progress with sanctions and tariffs, while denying it imports and trying to pen it up militarily. As with Russia, the U.S. is provoking them on many fronts.

However, the current U.S. policy is not only doomed to failure, but is actively counterproductive.

International Man: Is China truly an existential threat to the U.S., economically, militarily, or ideologically, or is it just a manufactured enemy?

Doug Casey: China’s huge, with 1.3 billion people. And over the last 40 years, it has advanced from a poverty-stricken, even primitive, country to a very prosperous one. They’ve risen from nowhere to the top rung economically, scientifically, and militarily.

Why? Because Deng Xiaoping radically altered their economic system in 1980, by dumping communism for capitalism, while maintaining the charade that China was still Communist. Although it’s still called Communist China, the country is totally different from what it was in the days of Mao. It’s no longer communist. It’s simply an authoritarian country—not so different from most others in the world at this point. The Communist Party is nothing but a control mechanism, essentially a scam inuring to the sole benefit of its members.

Communism is an economic system where the State owns and controls everything. China is actually a model of state capitalism, also known as fascism, a marriage of the State and corporate interests. The fact is that (this will come as a shock to many) China is more free-market-oriented than most of the world’s countries. That’s certainly true of Europe these days. In fact, the Europeans are even talking about imitating China’s more regressive policies.

Will China keep growing at the rate they have been? It’s possible, but unlikely. For one thing, their government is retreating from the near laissez-faire policies that made them prosperous. For another, the huge savings of the average Chinese have been malinvested by their banks due to political pressures, with potentially catastrophic consequences. For another, their culture appears to have become less hard-working, softer, and more corrupt.

Are they a military threat? They’re approaching parity now, and at the rate they’re accelerating, they could be way ahead in a decade. But that doesn’t mean they’re necessarily a threat. That’s because the days of invading other nations to steal the gold, the artwork, and enslave the population are long gone. That’s apart from the fact that we don’t know what the nature of the next war will be. In other words, it’s foolish of Trump to bankrupt the U.S. on speculative military spending, while provoking the Chinese.

Do they want to start a nuclear war with the U.S.? No, they have nothing to gain from that. Can they invade the U.S.? No, that’s almost impossible to do. The U.S., not China, is the problem. It can see China rising rapidly while it’s declining, and may decide to strike while it still has the balance of power. The U.S. may use the internecine dispute between Beijing and Taipei, which is none of our business, as an excuse for starting a war.

The U.S. government is increasingly bankrupt. War power is built on economic power, and the U.S. government is not only bankrupt but becoming more so with Trump’s 20% increase in military spending. Meanwhile, it’s falling behind China in science and technology, which, like the military, depends on economic strength. I’m afraid the U.S. is like Wylie Coyote, who thinks he’s on firm ground chasing a Chinese Roadrunner, while he’s walking on air.

China is a non-threat. The problem is the U.S. itself; it’s collapsing from within and blaming China for its own problems.

International Man: During the previous Trump presidency, Democrats painted Russia as an omnipresent threat, almost cartoonishly so. Are Republicans now doing the same with China—and if so, why do both parties need an external boogeyman?

Doug Casey: Yes. After Russia, China is the Devil of the Month. Iran, Mexico, India, and maybe Turkey can join the party as needed. It’s starting to look like the U.S. against the rest of the world. It’s not just Trump, with his unpredictable whims and schizophrenic policy decisions. It’s the lack of any moral core in the U.S., which no longer stands for any principles. The U.S. Government is like a rickety, overly complex Rube Goldberg machine. The Deep Staters who control it want to cannibalize its parts as the thing comes unglued.

This is the nature of the State as an entity. The State, government, doesn’t create anything and never has. Its main activity throughout history has been war and conquest. It’s quite correct to say that war is the health of the State.

The kind of people who are drawn to government aren’t noble altruists. They’re mainly interested in building their personal wealth and power. And since the State is their playpen, they naturally want to make it a bigger playpen.

Both the Republican and the Democratic parties are equally guilty, and there’s no longer much difference between them.

What’s true of both parties is that, barring the senility of a Joe or dissipation on the scale of a Hunter, their leaders all become incredibly rich. The Clintons are worth hundreds of millions of dollars. The Obamas are probably worth $100 million. And their minions get even richer on government spending, as do well-positioned foreigners like Zelensky, who’s gone from being a second-rate actor to being a billionaire. As he has his sycophants.

International Man: What’s really going on behind this aggressive posture toward China? Is it trade, currency, tech dominance, or perhaps something deeper—like fear of a multipolar world?

Doug Casey: You might recall that Japan was the bogeyman before China. In the 80s, it seemed like they were going to take over the world. Now, China is being promoted as a dangerous threat. The fact is that they produce loads of consumer goods cheaper and better than in the U.S. The solution is not to bash China, but to free American entrepreneurs the way Deng freed Chinese entrepreneurs.

I don’t see them as a threat. I’d like to see the whole world be as prosperous as China. Will the Chinese currency, the yuan, replace the U.S. dollar? Unlikely. What’s certain is that the dollar is dying. Again, the problem isn’t the Chinese. The dollar needs to be replaced because it’s being inflated out of existence. The dollar, not soybeans or aircraft, is our major export these days. Of course, everyone wants to dump it. Instead of solving the problem, Trump prefers to threaten anybody who wants to dump dollars.

International Man: You’ve spoken about the collapse of empires and the cycles of history. Where are we now, and what role does the China narrative play in the story of America’s decline?

Doug Casey: The best way to avoid what’s known as “the fate of empires” is simply not to become an empire. That’s the real problem. The U.S. has turned from a country whose population was cohesive because they shared principles and traditions, into a multicultural domestic empire. And it’s an international empire too, with approximately 800 military bases in over 100 countries around the world. The U.S. has changed from a loosely governed middle-class republic into an empire with an ever more powerful executive.

And despite what passes for military power, with its gold-plated weapons and 800 bases, the U.S. really doesn’t have any allies. It only has parasitic client states.

None of this is China’s fault. But since the U.S. has become a danger to the rest of the world, you can expect other countries to take advantage of its problems.

Other countries still fear the U.S., but they no longer respect it.

Reprinted with permission from International Man.

The post China Hysteria: Manufactured Threat or Inevitable Rival? appeared first on LewRockwell.

Of course it’s all about Alaska. Here’s what’s in play. But it’s the shadowplay that’s even more exciting.

Of course it’s all about Alaska. Here’s what’s in play. But it’s the shadowplay that’s even more exciting.

Across the world, for those who grew up in the Cold War Swingin’ Sixties, the temptation is irresistible to cast Donald Trump as Goldfinger  (but who would play Oddjob? Hegseth?)

Goldfinger, after all, is a powerful, ruthless gambler. His 21st century motto would be “Obliterate & Plunder”. In fact, sequentially, an orgy of obliteratin’ and plunderin’ if the occasions present themselves. Everything subjected to the search for the Golden Deal. My way. The only way.

Yet now it’s possible that Goldfinger may have met its appropriate – collective – match.

This is what happened the last time a summit took place in Alaska, in this particular case US-China in a shabby hotel in Anchorage. That shook the geopolitical chessboard to the core. Trump-Putin might – but only under quite specific conditions.

There’s only one realistic, optimal endgame for Alaska: a joint declaration of intent, pointing to a follow-up, as in the next meeting to be held in Russian territory. A sort of starter for the long and winding road towards a real reset of US-Russia relations, including a possible settlement in the proxy war in Ukraine.

Essentially, they may agree to keep talking. Yet what really matters is what may be implied by the promise: Goldfinger refrains from imposing secondary sanctions on Russia’s partners.

That will constitute a tremendous BRICS victory (Iran excluded. Actually, two strategic allies of Russia would be excluded: Iran and the DPRK).

BRICS are actively building a coalition to stare down Goldfinger. The key players are Bear, Dragon, Toucan and Elephant – all four original founders of BRIC. Nightingale should be added later, as it is linked via geopolitical/geoeconomic strategic partnerships with Bear, Dragon and Elephant.

When it comes to the Alaska nitty gritty, the top Bear needs to consider all the ramifications of what is an imperative for the Russian General Staff and the vast intel apparatus in Moscow: unless Goldfinger minions stop weaponizing and providing precious intel to Ukraine is all its forms, the mythic “ceasefire” that Goldfinger and the pack of toothless chihuahuas in Europe desperately want will be just an intermission to allow Ukraine to rearm to the hilt.

That’s a tough call for the top Bear: he has to placate his domestic, radical critics who blast him for sitting down with the enemy, and at the same time he must deliver the goods to his under-siege BRICS allies.

BRICS counteract Goldfinger’s Plunder tactics

Bear, Dragon, Toucan and Elephant are involved in breathless telephone diplomacy to articulate their collective response to Goldfinger’s Tariff/Plunder drive.

Examples. Modi on Brazil: “A strong, people-centric partnership between Global South nations benefits everyone.”

Lula on India: “Brazil and India are, so far, the two most affected countries. We reaffirmed the importance of defending multilateralism and the need to address the challenges of the current situation.”

Xi to Lula: China backs Brazil to defend its national sovereignty; BRICS is “a key platform for building consensus in the Global South.”

Goldfinger’s Tariff Plunder works in several ways.

On India: because New Delhi refuses to open its vast agricultural market to tariff-free Made in USA imports (45% of India’s population directly depends on agriculture); and because India buys Russian oil at much-needed discount prices.

On Brazil: because the ultimate target is regime change and free reign to plunder Brazil’s natural wealth.

So far, Goldfinger’s Plunder antics have been stellar when it comes to engineering their own blowback: from allienating even allies – see abject European submission – to de facto burying multilateral trade, not to mention international law.

Example: just a few hours before the tariff “pause” on Made in China products was about to expire, Goldfinger signed an executive order extending the deadline for another 90 days. Translation: TACO, all over again. If the tariff “pause” went through, the economy of the $37 trillion-indebted “indispensable nation” would be in even more dire straits.

Then there’s Goldfinger’s possible Arctic gameplay, already examined here. There’s virtually no evidence Russia would allow the US to participate in the development of the Arctic-wide Northern Sea Route (NSR), or Arctic Silk Road in Chinese terminology.

The role of Russia’s Atomflot – 11 nuclear icebreakers, 9 of them in action, 2 being built, including Project 10510 Rossiya, a behemoth capable of navigating anywhere in the Arctic anytime – in parallel with Russia’s astonishing arsenal of new weapons systems, these are absolutely key variables on any serious discussion on any possible US-Russia partnership post-Alaska.

Goldfinger’s obsession to cage Nightingale

Now let’s look at Nightingale – an immensely complex case. Goldfinger has totally embarked on a multi-track maximum pressure/tension remix against Iran: forcing Hezbollah to disarm; forcing the collapse of Lebanon into factional war; legitimizing the “al-Qaeda R Us” dismemberment of Syria; forcing snapback UN-backed sanctions on Tehran.

Then came the Goldfinger-hailed “historic peace summit” with Azerbaijan’s Aliyev and Armenia’s Pashinyan.

Well, what Baku and Yerevan really signed under Goldfinger’s watchful eye is not a peace deal: it’s a mere memorandum of understanding (MOU).

Their Joint Declaration is extremely vague – and non-binding. What is promised is a “let’s keep talking” set up: “We acknowledged the need to continue further actions to achieve the signing and ultimate ratification of the [Peace] Agreement.”

It remains to be seen what happens with the much-ballyhooed 99-year American grip on the Zangezur corridor – trimphally named Trump Route for International Peace and Prosperity (TRIPP) – complete with grabbing 40% of its revenues (Armenia would get only 30%) and placing 1,000 American mercenaries to patrol Armenian territory, right south of Nightingale’s borders.

The big story is of course Goldfinger eager to snatch at least one connectivity corridor in southern Eurasia – in the strategic south Caucasus, using a gangster-minded MI6 asset (Aliyev) and a national traitor (meek Pashinyan), which will be discarded and/or sweetened in due time. Crucially, NATO membership was offered to both Armenia and Azerbaijan.

The Deep State’s game plan is total control: what really matters is the opening to establish a NATO corridor all the way to the Caspian.

There’s no way Nightingale will let that happen, not to mention Bear and Dragon: it would mean a direct NATO threat not only to the International North South Transportation Corridor (INSTC), which unites three BRICS (Russia, Iran, India) and crosses the Caspian, but also the Chinese Silk Roads, whose corridors traverse Iran with possible branch outs to the Caucasus.

Nightingale has already made it quite clear it will not allow any kind of change of status for the Zangezur corridor. And it has the necessary missile arsenal to back it up. IRGC Deputy Commander Yadollah Javani: Iran “will not allow an American corridor on its border.”

Wherever it comes from, Goldinger or the Deep State, the pressure by the Empire of Chaos is relentless. There will be no respite in the Hybrid – and otherwise – Wars on BRICS, especially on the new Primakov triangle (“RIC” as in Russia, Iran, China).

Alaska in principle should be about a reset of all US-Russia security matters – geopolitical, commercial, military, with Ukraine being just a subset. That will be a major stretch. It’s hard to imagine Putin being able to impress on Trump, on the same table, the finer points of NATO/US ceaseless plots to undermine, harass and destabilize Russia.

The most probable outcome is that the proxy war – and the SMO – will keep rollin’ on, but with the Deep State making extra bundles of euros by selling tons of weapons for NATO to dispatch to Kiev. But even without the promise of a new, serious, US-Russia security architecture, BRICS may still stand a chance to snatch a victory out of Goldfinger’s latest photo op.

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

The post Bear, Dragon, Elephant, Toucan, Nightingale Stare Down Goldfinger appeared first on LewRockwell.

“The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by an endless series of hobgoblins, most of them imaginary.”—H.L. Mencken

Let’s not mince words: every American should be alarmed by President Trump’s “Liberation Day” tactics, theatrics and threats.

What is unfolding in the nation’s capital is a hostile takeover of our constitutional republic.

This is no longer about partisan politics, wag-the-dog distractions from the Epstein debacle, or even genuine national security concerns.

This is martial law disguised as law-and-order—the oldest trick in the authoritarian playbook.

We have been traveling this slippery slope toward a police state for some time, but under Trump 2.0, the descent towards outright tyranny is accelerating.

Building on the expanded emergency powers he has claimed to wage war on immigration, wokeness and the economy, Trump is taking aim at yet another so-called “crisis”—this time, by waging war on crime in the nation’s capital, despite the fact that crime is at a 30-year low.

Under the guise of “restoring order” and “cleaning up” the streets, Trump has called in the National Guard, dispatched the FBI, and federalized the local police in order to take control of Washington, D.C.

This is how the Emergency State operates in the open.

A real but manageable problem—crime, homelessness, public disorder—is inflated into an existential threat.

Fear is manufactured, then exploited to seize more power. (In many cases, the “facts” fueling these crackdowns come directly from the president’s own disinformation machine—manufacturing the perception of danger to justify the expansion of control.)

Whether the trigger is terrorism, civil unrest, economic instability, or public health, the aim remains the same: expand the reach of federal authority, justify more militarized policing, and condition the public to accept the suspension of rights in the name of national security.

Once these powers are taken, they are never willingly relinquished.

Each time, Trump pushes the envelope a little, relying on military optics meant to intimidate.

For instance, on April 28, 2025, Trump signed an Executive Order authorizing mass round-ups of “violent criminals” and “gang members,” empowering federal agencies and military support for domestic law enforcement.

In June, Trump deployed the National Guard to California to quell protests over mass immigration arrests, treating political dissent as a security threat. A bench trial is currently underway to determine if Trump’s actions violated the Posse Comitatus Act, which prohibits the military from being used as a domestic police force.

By midsummer, a mental health detention directive allowed involuntary commitments of the homeless under “public health” grounds.

By August, Trump was deploying FBI agents and the National Guard into the nation’s capital in order to clear homeless encampments because the president says the city is “dirty” and “dangerous.”

At each stage, the scope of who could be targeted by these executive orders and emergency power operations grows wider.

These are not isolated decisions; they are part of a coordinated playbook for bringing local jurisdictions under direct federal control, one crisis at a time.

This is mission creep in action—by breaking the police state’s hostile takeover of the country and our Constitution into a series off incremental moves, the administration sidesteps the broad public backlash that a single, sweeping declaration of martial law would provoke.

Once the federal government claims the authority to override local control, put boots on the ground, and target a designated “dangerous class,” that authority inevitably broadens to sweep in new targets. What begins by targeting violent criminals quickly expands to hardworking immigrants, then the homeless.

Tomorrow those targeted could be protesters, journalists, or anyone deemed undesirable.

These executive orders constitute a war on the American people without a formal declaration of war. Once the definitions of “criminal,” “threat,” and “danger” are used interchangeably to advance political needs, there is no limit to who can be targeted next.

What begins with a narrow claim of emergency power is quickly normalized and made permanent.

We have seen this pattern before.

After 9/11, the Patriot Act’s surveillance powers—initially aimed at foreign terrorists—expanded to include mass monitoring of American citizens. The Transportation Security Administration began as an airport screening agency and now conducts random searches at train stations and sporting events. Predictive policing was sold as a way to stop violent crime, but it is now used to flag political activists and monitor protests.

In each case, a temporary, targeted security measure grew into a permanent tool of control.

The difference today is that the slope has become steeper and the slide faster. What once took years to creep into everyday life now happens in a matter of months.

Four months is all it took for the police state to pivot from “rounding up violent criminals” to patrolling the streets of the capital and forcibly removing the unhoused.

Today, the slope runs from undocumented immigrant sweeps to homeless sweeps.

Tomorrow, it could run from “restoring order” to suppressing lawful dissent in the same span of time.

This is the logical outcome of a formula that has been refined over decades: identify or invent a threat, stoke public fear, expand executive power to “solve” it, normalize the new level of control, then repeat with a broader definition of “threat.”

Each time the public accepts an expansion of authority in the name of security, the next expansion comes faster and goes further.

The dictatorial hunger for power, as Harvard’s Laurence Tribe has observed, is insatiable.

Every crisis becomes a test: of our willingness to let the government sidestep the Constitution, of our tolerance for militarized “solutions” to social problems, of whether the public will resist or comply, of whether those in authority can get away with moving the line yet again.

For decades—from Pearl Harbor to the Red Scare, from 9/11 to the pandemic lockdowns—we have failed that test. Each time, the line moves a little further, the slope gets a little slicker, and the public grows more accustomed to life under occupation.

The players change—Bush, Obama, Trump, Biden, and now Trump again—but the game remains the same: permanent crisis management, permanent power grabs, permanent erosion of liberty.

This is how constitutional limits die—not in one dramatic coup, but in a series of incremental “emergencies” that accustom us to living under permanent federal occupation.

By that measure, the takeover of Washington, D.C., is a chilling case study.

The issue is not whether Trump can seize control of DC. Under section 740 of the District of Columbia Home Rule Act, the president may do so for 48 hours without congressional approval and up to 30 days with notice to Congress.

It’s worth noting that this provision has never been invoked before, and certainly not for the purpose of cleaning up squalor. The law was envisioned for truly extraordinary crises—natural disasters, large-scale riots—not as a political tool for executive housecleaning.

So the question we must ask as the symbolic heart of the republic is transformed into a constitution-free zone is: Why? Why now—when crime is at its lowest level in three decades? And where do we go from here?

The federal takeover of Washington, D.C., is not the end of that slippery slope. It is merely the latest drop, and nothing in our present political climate suggests it will be the last.

The police state will always need another manufactured crisis.

Terrorist attacks, mass shootings, “unforeseen economic collapse, loss of functioning political and legal order, purposeful domestic resistance or insurgency, pervasive public health emergencies, and catastrophic natural and human disasters”: the government has been anticipating and preparing for such crises for years now.

As David C. Unger writes for the New York Times: “Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness have given way to permanent crisis management: to policing the planet and fighting preventative wars of ideological containment, usually on terrain chosen by, and favorable to, our enemies. Limited government and constitutional accountability have been shouldered aside by the kind of imperial presidency our constitutional system was explicitly designed to prevent.”

Given the rate at which the government keeps devising new ways to establish itself as the “solution” to all of our worldly problems at taxpayer expense, each subsequent crisis ushers in ever larger expansions of government power and fewer individual liberties.

Once the government acquires authoritarian powers—to spy, surveil, militarize police, seize funds, wage endless wars, censor speech, detain without due process, etc.—it does not willingly relinquish them.

The lesson for the ages is this: once any government is allowed to overreach and expand its powers, it’s almost impossible to put the genie back in the bottle.

History bears this out: as government expands, liberty contracts.

If the president can federalize the policing of the capital, override local control, and treat entire populations as security threats without meaningful resistance from Congress, the courts, or the public, then there is nothing to stop that same template from being applied to any city in America in the name of “security.”

What is happening in Washington today will be the model for what happens nationwide tomorrow.

Case in point: at Trump’s direction, the Pentagon—the military branch of the government—is looking to establish a “Domestic Civil Disturbance Quick Reaction Force,” made up of National Guard troops kept on standby at all times, which could be rapidly deployed to American cities “facing protests or other unrest.”

Indeed, Trump has already hinted that he plans to target Baltimore, Chicago, Los Angeles, New York and Oakland next.

This is straight out of the playbook used in that Pentagon training video created by the Army for U.S. Special Operations Command.

According to “Megacities: Urban Future, the Emerging Complexity,” the U.S. military plans to use armed forces to solve future domestic political and social problems. What they’re really talking about is martial law, packaged as a well-meaning and overriding concern for the nation’s security.

The training video is only five minutes long, but it says a lot about the government’s mindset, the way its views the citizenry, and the so-called “problems” that the government must be prepared to address in the near future through the use of martial law.

Even more troubling, however, is what this military video doesn’t say about the Constitution, about the rights of the citizenry, and about the dangers of locking down the nation and using the military to address political and social problems.

For years, the government has been warning against the dangers of domestic terrorism, erecting surveillance systems to monitor its own citizens, creating classification systems to label any viewpoints that challenge the status quo as extremist, and training law enforcement agencies to equate anyone possessing anti-government views as a domestic terrorist.

What the government failed to explain was that the domestic terrorists would be of the government’s own making, and that “we the people” would become enemy #1.

As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, “we the people” are already enemies of the state.

If we do not stop this dangerous trajectory now, the question will not be whether martial law comes to your city—it will be when, under what pretext, and whether we will have the courage and the wherewithal to resist.

This article was originally published on The Rutherford Institute.

The post The Police State Has a New Playbook: Martial Law, One City at a Time appeared first on LewRockwell.

Lots of misinformation is being spread about President Donald Trump’s decision to federalize law enforcement in Washington, D.C.  Much of it is the usual Trump Derangement Syndrome: “fascist” tendencies toward “authoritarianism” at the expense of “black and brown” people because of DJT’s “racism” and desire to bury the Epstein scandal.  There’s no “emergency” justifying the takeover.  The “solution” is to do what Democrats failed to do for decades: Make DC the 51st state so it need not undergo such “humiliation.”

Where to start?

My point of departure is political.  Washington is the “federal city.”  The Constitution is explicit.  Congress has exclusive jurisdiction over “the district constituting the seat of government.”

Washington was a political compromise — neutral territory between North and South, chosen as an uninhabited swamp between Maryland and Virginia (and conveniently upriver from George Washington’s Mount Vernon).  It was supposed to be apolitical.  Democrats want to make it hyper-political.

The reaction to the Trump federalization of D.C. law enforcement is to claim that “this proves we should have made D.C. a state!”  Well, no it doesn’t.  All it proves is your naked political ambitions to guarantee the left two senators and a bunch of congressmen.

There’s a lot of jabber about “home rule.”  There are two largely unmentioned facts about “home rule.”  First, it is an historical anomaly.  Nobody talked about D.C. “home rule” until 1974.  For nearly 185 years of the Republic, D.C. functioned under its constitutional identity as the “federal district.”  And don’t tell me that the string of illustrious nobodies leading D.C. for the past 50 years — including such a distinguished figure as Mayor Marion Barry, convicted for possession and use of crack cocaine — proves the merits of “home rule.”  It arguably demonstrates the opposite.

Second, whatever “home rule” D.C. has is whatever Congress gives it.  Its government has the powers Congress delegates — no more, no less.  It exists at the sufferance of Congress — i.e., the collective decision of the people of the United States (as the Constitution intended).  So all these claims about “denying home rule” are so much political smoke.

Congressional Democrats have been trying to hike Washington’s political clout for decades.  Back in the days of “home rule,” the Democrat Congress even thought of giving D.C. congressional seats as if it were a state.  Such a constitutional amendment was even proposed in 1978.  It passed the Senate with the bare minimum of votes and died in ratification, having been approved by only 16 (mostly blue) of the required 38 states.

Democrats learned their lesson: A constitutional amendment to give D.C. congressional seats would never be ratified, because small (especially small red) states were not going to lose seats to the District.  They understood the difference between a state and a district.  That’s when liberals switched to their “statehood” tactic — it avoids needing approval from those pesky states!

I’d argue that Congress cannot constitutionally make D.C. a “state.”  What would be the “State of Columbia” is land given by Maryland to create “the district constituting the seat of government of the United States.”  That bequest was for a specific purpose.  If Congress does not want to administer all that land, it cannot invent a new state.  The proper response would be to return the land to Maryland.  There’s precedent for that: Congress in the 19th century gave back the land Virginia had ceded for the capital, which is today’s Arlington.

That does not amplify Democrat political power in Congress, while it introduces a new squabble into very blue Maryland’s Democrat politics: the boys of Baltimore and Annapolis would now have to share power with the Washington crowd.

I make these points because, despite all the rhetoric about “home rule,” the truth is that Americans think of Washington first and foremost as our capital.  It is the nation’s capital, not the next oppressed victim stifled by the norms of the U.S. Constitution.  And as long as Americans as a whole regard Washington in a qualitatively different way from other places — as “our capital” — that aligns with the constitutional vision of a congressionally governed district and not the next blue political machine.

That leads me to my second point: crime.  Liberal apologists have fomented all types of excuses to claim that the president had no authority to federalize D.C. law enforcement, that it was discriminatory and diversionary, etc., etc.  Crime is supposedly on the way down.  Let’s talk.

In 2023, there were 274 murders in Washington, D.C.  That means one human being killed every 31 hours.  Every day and a half.

Senate Democrat whip Dick Durbin of Illinois claimed there’s no “emergency” justifying Trump’s action.  Does one dead human being every 31 hours not constitute an “emergency”?  In whose cosseted world?

Perhaps a murder every day and a half is “normal” or “statistically to be expected” in some people’s minds — but I suspect few of those holding that opinion have ever stood in front of the business end of a knife or gun.

A murder every day and a half is an emergency.  Maybe it’s not an emergency in Chicago or New York, but Washington is at root “the district constituting the seat of government of the United States,” and most Americans would think a murder every day and a half is an “emergency.”

Because Washington stands in a unique relationship with congressional and executive power, it is also appropriate that the national capital be a showcase of law and order, not the morass of “restorative justice” and the latest liberal pipe dreams of “criminal justice reform” that exacerbate crime.  Therein lies the real liberal objection: If Donald Trump can make an example out of Washington, it calls into question the “policing reform” and “criminal justice” agendas of crime-ridden major cities, potentially auguring political realignments there that liberals do not want to see.

Yes, the talking heads attacking Trump cited other cities as being more crime-ridden.  You do have a better chance getting murdered in Detroit than D.C.  But national tourism to Detroit hardly mirrors D.C., and most Americans don’t want to die in either.  So let’s stop the “lies, damn lies, and statistics” and address the reality of what’s behind this opposition: pursuing political ambition and defending failed policies.

This article was originally published on Crisis Magazine.

The post What’s Really Behind Opposition to Trump’s Move in DC? appeared first on LewRockwell.

Yesterday President Trump in his public statements validated my conclusion that Trump does not know what the Russian position is and that he is going to the meeting to find out what the “parameters” are and that he sees the meeting as a “feel-out meeting” to see whether the conflict in Ukraine can be ended.  

In other words, no solution is expected from the meeting for which no preparatory work has been done.  So what are the high-blown expectations for the meeting based on?  Why build up such expectations when there is no proposal on the table?  Where is the “acceptable” offer that Yury Ushakov found in the non-proposal that convinced Putin to go to Alaska?

Is the answer that the purpose of the meeting is to put Putin on the spot by creating expectations of success that cannot be achieved?  French President Macron said that Trump told him that he intends to “obtain a ceasefire in Ukraine during the meeting with Putin.” When Putin doesn’t agree to halt Russia’s successful offensive, is the plan to blame Putin for wrecking the chance for peace? Will this help weaken BRICS by Putin being blamed for secondary tariffs imposed on India, China, Brazil, South Africa?   (From Bloomberg today: Raising the stakes. Donald Trump warned he would impose “very severe consequences” if Vladimir Putin didn’t agree to a ceasefire agreement, following a call with European leaders ahead of his meeting with the Russian president. But Tass reported that the two will hold a joint press conference after the talks. Meanwhile, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent told Europe it’s “put up or shut up time” when it comes to sanctions on nations that buy Russian energy.)

That is what it looks like.  The Ukrainian front is collapsing.  A ceasefire would halt the Russian advance and give the Ukrainian force time to stabilize and reinforce its positions.  This is important to the West, because once Russia completes the task of driving the Ukrainian forces out of all of the territory that has been reincorporated into the Russian Federation, there is no land in Ukrainian hands for Trump to swap with Putin.

As I have reported a number of times, a land-swap is not one of the conditions on Putin’s list. What Putin means by “the root cause of the conflict” is Russia’s sense of insecurity with NATO and US nuclear missiles on Russia’s border.  

When the Soviet Union put nuclear missiles in Cuba as an offset to the nuclear missiles Washington had put in Turkey on the Soviet Union’s border, Washington was intensely upset.  Today the US has missiles on Russia’s border and the opportunity to have missile bases on Russia’s borders ranging from Finland to the South Caucus, which is a large multiplication of the one Soviet missile base in Cuba.

So if one base in Cuba made the US uncomfortable, imagine how uncomfortable Russia is with the prospect of nuclear missiles along the border for thousands of kilometers. 

American and European politicians and policymakers have not acknowledged that the root cause of the conflict is NATO on Russia’s border.  The prospect of Ukraine joining NATO and being added to the territory hosting US missile bases was the straw that broke the camel’s back.  

Trump’s land swap and ceasefire do not address Russia’s security problem.  The root cause of the conflict is Russia’s sense of insecurity. That can only be solved by getting NATO off of Russia’s borders.

This is the purpose of the mutual security agreement that Putin has been trying to negotiate for a number of years only to be given the cold shoulder as by the Biden regime during December 2021-February 2022.  

Ask yourselves if you think Trump is in a sufficiently powerful position to override both the neoconservative doctrine of US hegemony and the interest of the American military/security complex.  

As long as the Wolfowitz Doctrine holds, and it has not been repudiated by President Trump, the Secretary of State, or Congress, the US is committed to “preventing the rise of any country that can serve as a constraint on American unilateralism.”  As this is the stated commitment, how can NATO be removed from Russia’s border?

President Eisenhower warned Americans in 1961 that the rise of the Cold War with the Soviet Union prevented the demobilization of the American war machine that normally followed the end of war.  Instead, a powerful military/industrial complex has risen with roots in nearly every state, which gives it enormous power in Congress and among state governors. 

That was 64 years ago.  Since that time the power of the military/security complex has multiplied.  Is this institutionalized power willing to take the hit to its budget and power from a mutual security agreement with its principal enemy?

The questions I am asking are the determining questions.  Nothing else that is said matters.  Yet, these essential questions are not a part of the discussion in Washington, in Europe, or in the Kremlin.  It is as if none of the participants in a growing conflict that could be terminable for life on Earth have any idea of the consequences of their decisions.

Why suddenly did Trump who a couple of days before yesterday said he didn’t want to meet with Putin demand a meeting within the week when Trump doesn’t even know what the “parameters” are?  How can a serious meeting be held when a principal participant doesn’t even know what the opponent’s position is?

Why did Putin agree to such a meeting with zero preparatory work that exposes him to tremendous pressure to capitulate?  This represents the total failure of Putin’s advisors.  It indicates to the West that Russia is a weak defender of its interest. Perhaps more pressure will be all it takes to bring Russia in line with US hegemony.

If Trump goes into the meeting with this attitude, Putin’s choice will be to capitulate or to bring down more demonization on him and Russia for blocking peace.

It does look like Kirill Demitriev and Steve Witcoff, both globalists, have succeeded in setting up Putin and Russia.

What is on test in Alaska is Putin’s mettle.

The post Can Putin Pass the Test? appeared first on LewRockwell.

The Greek geographer and historian Strabo told the famous story of Cleopatra committing suicide by holding an “asp”—i.e., Egyptian cobra—to her breast.

The “Death of Cleopatra” has been the subject of dozens of paintings, including the one by Guido Cagnacci that hangs in the Met.

Cobra venom is composed of a fascinating cocktail of toxic proteins, including the following:

• Three-finger toxins (3FTx):This is a dominant family of proteins in cobra venom, especially in elapids. They are neurotoxins that bind to nicotinic acetylcholine receptors at neuromuscular junctions, disrupting nerve signals and causing paralysis.
• Phospholipase A2 (PLA2):These enzymes contribute to various effects, including neurotoxicity, myotoxicity, and inflammation. They can also disrupt cell membranes and cause tissue damage.
• Snake venom metalloproteinases (SVMP):SVMPs can cause hemorrhaging by damaging blood vessels and disrupting blood clotting.
• Cytotoxins:These proteins are responsible for cell damage and death, leading to tissue necrosis.
• Other proteins:Cobra venom also contains enzymes like L-amino acid oxidase, serine proteases, and C-type lectins, as well as other bioactive peptides and molecules according to a study published by the National Institutes of Health (NIH).

If you are wondering how on earth all of these toxic proteins came about in snake venom, you’re not alone. It’s one of many millions of things in nature that we humans don’t really understand.

Cobra venom acts quickly on living cells and its deleterious effects are spectacular. However, as we are discovering, other proteins may act slowly and insidiously, gradually diminishing the health of the organism in a way that may be perceived as something akin to accelerated aging.

Scarcely a day goes by that I don’t receive the news of someone in my extended social network of friends in their forties and fifties being struck with a disease that we would normally expect to hit us in our seventies or eighties. In the last month I have received texts or calls about the following cases.

1). An old American ex-pat friend in Paris (53) developed excruciating chest pain and was diagnosed with myocarditis.

2). An old friend in London (43) detected a strange and rapidly growing mass in her rectus abdominis (“six pack” abdominal muscle). The NHS doctors with whom she has consulted suspect a sarcoma but can’t seem to find time to schedule a biopsy.

3). An old friend in New York (48) was recently diagnosed with breast cancer.

All of the above received the COVID-19 vaccine.

This morning I read a new manuscript by N. Nathaniel Mead, Peter A. McCullough, Paul Marik, Nic Hulscher, et al titled Compound Adverse Effects of COVID-19 mRNA Vaccination and Coronavirus Infection: A Convergence of Extensive Spike Protein Harms to the Human Body

It’s an astonishing fact only a small handful of senior academic doctors—Peter McCullough and Paul Marik being perhaps the most notable—are seriously investigating what has been done to the entire human race since 2020.

In recent years I have spoken with some of the wealthiest people in the country about what we are doing at the McCullough Foundation, and I often get the impression that they can’t quite bring themselves to believe the story that I tell them.

A few of them have themselves experienced rapidly accelerating cancer, Parkinson’s or Alzheimer’s since around the year 2021. When it comes to contemplating etiology, their doctors never say a word about those experimental gene therapy shots they received in 2021.

The most amazing thing of all is that our public health authorities still don’t want to talk about detecting and analyzing the foreign, toxic protein that has contaminated all of us, either through COVID-19 infection, vaccination with mRNA COVID-19 vaccines, or a combination of both.

Strangely enough, a long established standard method for protein detection—a test called ELISA (Enzyme-Linked Immunosorbent Assay)—can be used to detect the presence of SARS-CoV-2 spike protein in a given sample.

And yet, no one in the NIH is even talking about using this and other tests being developed to conduct large population studies on the presence of spike protein and its correlation with a host of syndromes and clinical diseases.

As a true crime author, I have seen this story again and again. The easiest way to conceal a crime is to avoid investigating it. As long as you don’t find any evidence, you will not be obliged to conceal what you have discovered—at least not actively.

Don’t lie about it; just avoid looking into it. When suspicions arise—even grave suspicions—the strategy is simply to refuse to investigate and hope that people grow weary of worrying about the problem.

The trouble for the concealers is that extremely damaging lies don’t go away. Like a suspected cancer that isn’t rapidly treated, such lies grow and become ever more malignant and metastatic.

We at the McCullough Foundation are weary with this catastrophe, but we’re not going to stop looking into.

Dr. McCullough frequently uses a test in his clinical practice to detect antibodies to the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein. He frequently detects very high spike protein antibody levels in patients, even in those who never received a vaccine and who have not had acute symptoms of COVID-19 for over a year. A high level of spike protein antibodies in the blood frequently correlates with the symptoms of so-called LONG COVID, which is often presents in individuals who have had multiple shots AND suffered multiple cases of COVID-19 illness.

One way or the other, all of us have been exposed to the toxic spike protein that Ralph Baric, Shi Zhengli, et al. developed in their laboratories. The only question is how long will it take our bodies to clear it.

Dr. McCullough pointed out that the spike protein is, like the pathogens that cause syphilis and Lyme Disease, able to resist being cleared from the body. Even if it does not cause obvious clinical diseases such as myocarditis, strokes, and blood clots, it is probably still affecting all of us to some degree in terms of diminished vitality.

We often think of poisons as substances that immediately result in spectacular distress and death—things like snake venom, ricin, botulinum, and cyanide. While the spike protein induced by the COVID-19 vaccines may indeed rapidly kill some people, for most of us, it is a “subtle thief of vitality” (to paraphrase Milton’s characterization of time as “a subtle thief of youth”).

Milton’s metaphor is useful because it appears that the spike protein is a poison that accelerates senescence, or aging.

For most of us, the symptoms range from ringing ears and sleep disturbances to a general diminishment of vitality. We are more inclined to feel fatigue and lethargy. We suffer brain fog, indecisiveness, and a depression of spirits. We don’t move as quickly, and we seem to experience aches and pains associated with inflammation.

In other words, the whole world has been poisoned.

Currently the greatest obstacle to finding a solution to this gigantic problem is that our entire medical establishment—with the exception of prominent dissidents like Paul Marik and Peter McCullough—advocated the shots and recommended them to their patients.

The situation reminds me of the essay “On Stupidity” by the German dissident, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who penned it in 1943 while incarcerated in the Tegel prison on suspicion of being involved in anti-Nazi activities. As he noted:

But it is also quite clear here that it is not an act of instruction, but only an act of liberation that can overcome stupidity. In doing so, one will have to accept the fact that, in most cases, real inner liberation is only possible after outer liberation has taken place.

In other words, it’s unlikely we’ll get any support from the official medical establishment until the current crop of institutional leaders is all gone. Only after they have retired will we be liberated from their stranglehold on inquiry and discourse about this catastrophe.

At this risk of sounding arrogant, I believe that our team at the McCullough Foundation—working together with other creative dissident researchers all over the world—could find a solution if we had even a millionth of the taxpayer resources given to the Vaccine Cartel.

This article was originally published on Courageous Discourse.

The post The Whole World Has Been Poisoned appeared first on LewRockwell.

Writes Tim McGraw:

This song is 13 years old, but it’s more true now than back then.

The post “We Can’t Make It Here”: James McMurtry appeared first on LewRockwell.

Click here:

Eric Zuesse

The post Why Orban’s “The Ukrainians have lost the war. Russia has won this war.” is True appeared first on LewRockwell.

Washington D.C. is spending America into oblivion — and you’re paying the price. In this episode of Ask Ron Paul, Dr. Paul takes your questions on the ever-growing national debt, the federal government’s crackdowns on liberty, the destructive effects of tariffs, and the hidden inflation tax eroding your savings.

From runaway spending to political overreach, Ron Paul breaks down what’s really driving these crises—and what a truly free society would do instead.

The post AskRonPaul: National Debt, D.C. Crackdowns, Tariffs & Inflation appeared first on LewRockwell.

From ancient Sumer to the present, all governments have been composed of elites. All states originate in conquest and exploitation, and as elite oligarchies, exercise a monopoly of crime over their subjects through war and taxation, indoctrination and propaganda, and the conscription of resources and persons.

The subject matter of “Establishment Studies” or “Power Elite Analysis” is understanding this struggle for power in its diverse open and covert forms between the rulers and the ruled, between the elite and the non-elite, between “the ins” and “the outs.”

The primary object of every ruling elite is to maintain its own power and privilege. The rule of the elite is based on force or fraud. This force may be hidden or threatened, and the fraud sustained by a political formula, usually expressed as a generally accepted state religion, ideology, or series of myths. But it is the physical force of the gun that lay behind it all. And it is at your mind that every government gun is ultimately aimed.

Respected observers such as Robert Barnes, Murray N. Rothbard, Ferdinand Lundberg, John McConaughy, Phillip H. Burch, Jr., Thomas R. Dye, Matthew Josephson, Kevin Phillips, Thomas Ferguson, and Carroll Quigley have detailed and cataloged the specific elite criminal elements behind previous presidential administrations.

After 50 years of intense study I believe the biggest critical issue confronting the American people is the elite’s New World Order of a corporatist Social Credit economy (based upon the Chinese model) with centralized political control in a totalitarian technocratic entity, with all pervasive mass surveillance by facial recognition databases and coercive regimentation. These invasive actions are running parallel with the transition to a cashless society with all financial transactions monitored through digitalized biometric identification using such technologies as fingerprints, hand geometry and retina scanning — ultimately a microchip electronic device implanted subcutaneously (subdermally). This is the global governance of the Great Reset.

An understanding of Power Elite Analysis is the “litmus test” separating real libertarians and populists from alternative lifestyle dilettantes dabbling in free market theory.

Sometimes labeled “Power Elite Analysis” or “Establishment Studies,” this examination of causal relationships regarding the nature and scope of political power, who has it and how it is exercised, is crucial to understanding the nexus of the State as organized crime.

Note the similarity between this analysis and what researcher Peter Dale Scott calls “Deep Politics,” the critical examination of the sub-rosa reality behind surface events, an attempt to unmask the true face of power, exposing the elite social, economic, and financial groups and individuals who benefit from the exercise of State coercion.

Contemporary events and the persons involved in them are not isolated random or static occurrences. There is a crucial backstory or history to them, the actual story behind the spurious or propagandist accounts put forth by the establishment “fake news” regime media or court academia.

Understanding the dynamics and interplay of power relationships is often not easy for it requires diligence and tenacious research in order to seek authoritative and definitive answers to what is going on in these events.

Fortunately, there are dedicated scholarly researchers who trace the often arcane and internecine networks and interlocking relationships of these actors – their backgrounds, conspiratorial action, mentors and criminal associates, who flesh out these events.

Let us examine the important question of American intervention in war over the past century.

As I pointed out above, history is not static but a dynamic course of study. Events, particularly surrounding savage wars and their origins, are not frozen in time but are constantly being reinterpreted, analyzed, and reassessed by new knowledge and archival revelations.

The question for someone in the present is not whether the US should have intervened in these conflicts but what have we learned from this previous century of war, destruction, and the needless death of millions?

What we now know concerning the horrific wars of the previous century, as well as 21st century conflicts such as Ukraine, Afghanistan, Iran, Iraq, Israel, Libya, and Syria, provides us with a historical template to guide us in making future principled decisions concerning intervention or non-intervention.

Briefly, working backwards, how has the exposed linkage of the insidious relationship behind the creation, recruiting, funding and enabling of the Taliban by Pakistani ISI intelligence (which in turn was funded and enabled by the US government), impact upon the willfully ignorant inhabitants of the United States of Amnesia’s cognitive dissonance narcosis of unreality, that both sides of the disastrous 20 year Afghanistan narco-state proxy war was waged and financed by the US — and yet once again they have been played as naïve suckers and rubes?

What have revelations concerning non-existent Weapons of Mass Destruction, deliberately falsified intelligence from the Pentagon’s Office of Special Plans, and an elaborately coordinated media disinformation campaign done for the case for US intervention in Iraq in 2003? For falsified (and/or still classified) information concerning the September 11th attacks leading to intervention against Al Qaeda, the Taliban, and Afghanistan?

What has declassified revelations from the archives of the former Soviet Union and the Venona files in the United States done to totally reshape the narrative story of espionage and the Cold War?

What has archival revelations concerning the Pentagon Papers and the deliberately contrived Gulf of Tonkin Incident done to spurious justification for the massive intervention in the Vietnam conflict?

What has fifty years of revelations concerning the November 22, 1963 coup d’état and brutal murder of President John F. Kennedy by Lyndon Johnson and the highest echelons of the National Security State done to totally reassess the dynamic behind the change in US policy toward Vietnam within days of JFK’s assassination? How have the powerful behind-the-scenes revelations concerning the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962 and the Bay of Pigs invasion of 1961 aided in seeing a more complete picture regarding Kennedy’s murder and the subsequent change of policy toward Vietnam?

How have incisive revelations concerning the birth of the National Security State in 1947 impacted the story of the Cold War? How have revelations concerning the use of former Nazi intelligence officers in the Reinhard Gehlen organization grafted upon US military intelligence and the CIA, been shown to have provided unreliable and provocative disinformation which fueled early Cold War tensions?

How have decisive revelations concerning the Japanese attack upon Pearl Harbor reshaped the narrative of US intervention into WWII?

How have revelations concerning the Hitler/Stalin Non-Aggression Pact and the joint German and Soviet invasion of Poland in September 1939 affected our historical portrait of the larger story of how the Second World War began?

How have revelations concerning American and British financial, corporate, and political elites substantially aiding and building the Nazi war machine in the years prior to WWII as a bulwark against the Soviets change our view of the deep historical background?

How have revelations of the decades of joint military training and cooperation by intelligence services between Germany (during the Weimar Republic and the Third Reich) and the Soviet Union impact upon the lead up to WWII?

How did the Treaty of Versailles and agreements such as Sykes-Picot affect the interwar course of events leading to the Second World War?

How did the internecine network of secret treaties, ententes cordiale, and clandestine military alliances drawn up prior to the First World War lead to this conflagration?

These are the type of interrogatives or pointed questions we must each ask and seek the answers to in order to understand the world at large.

Who Rules America: Power Elite Analysis, the Deep State, and American History — Article by Charles A. Burris
https://www.lewrockwell.com/lrc-blog/rules-america-power-elite-analysis-deep-state-american-history/

Hidden History: Where Organized Crime and Government Meet — Article by Charles A. Burris
https://archive.lewrockwell.com/burris/burris10.html

Our Establishment Church: Its Rules and Credo — Article by Charles A. Birris
https://archive.lewrockwell.com/burris/burris17.1.html

Wall Street, Banks, and American Foreign Policy — Book by Murray N. Rothbard
https://www.lewrockwell.com/assets/2015/08/Wall-Street-Banks-and-American-Foreign-Policy_2.pdf

A History of Money and Banking in the United States: The Colonial Era to World War II, Book by Murray N. Rothbard
https://cdn.mises.org/History%20of%20Money%20and%20Banking%20in%20the%20United%20States%20The%20Colonial%20Era%20to%20World%20War%20II_2.pdf

Robert Barnes on the Deep Background of the Deep State Up to the JFK Assassination and Beyond — Presentation
https://www.lewrockwell.com/lrc-blog/robert-barnes-on-the-deep-background-of-the-deep-state-up-to-the-jfk-assassination-and-beyond/

Elites in American History: The Federalist Years to the Civil War — Book by Phillip H. Burch
https://www.amazon.com/Elites-American-History-Federalist-Years/dp/0841905940

Elites in American History: From the Civil War to the New Deal — Book by Phillip H. Burch
https://www.amazon.com/Elites-American-History-Civil-Deal/dp/0841907056/ref=tmm_pap_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&dib_tag=se&dib=eyJ2IjoiMSJ9.UugC11WA-WURtal3cJMcVw.J6ONt9xEVQtmOV8EeVsZBf_h_R1Rcm0PqIM2cnc5iFQ&qid=1755172976&sr=8-1

Elites in American History: From the New Deal to the Carter Administration — Book by Phillip H. Burch
https://www.amazon.com/Elites-American-History-Carter-Administration/dp/0841905657

The Progressive Era — Book by Murray N. Rothbard
https://cdn.mises.org/The%20Progressive%20Era_0.pdf

The Anglo-American Establishment: From Rhodes to Cliveden — Book by Carrol Quigley
http://www.carrollquigley.net/pdf/The_Anglo-American_Establishment.pdf

Tragedy and Hope: A History of the World in Our Time — Book by Carrol Quigley
http://www.carrollquigley.net/pdf/Tragedy_and_Hope.pdf

The Rise of the House of Rothschild — Book by Count Egon Caesar Corti
the rise of the house of rothschild – count egon caesar corti.pdf

The Reign of the House of Rothschild — Book by Count Egon Caesar Corti
https://dn790003.ca.archive.org/0/items/in.ernet.dli.2015.89704/2015.89704.The-Reign-Of-The-House-Of-Rothschild-1830-1871.pdf

The House of the Rothschilds, Volume I — Book by Niall Ferguson
https://ia903409.us.archive.org/33/items/the-house-of-rothschild-ferguson-niall/The%20House%20of%20Rothschild%20-%20Ferguson%2C%20Niall.pdf

The House of Rothschild; The Worlds Banker 1849-1998, Volume II — Book by Niall Ferguson
https://ia903409.us.archive.org/33/items/the-house-of-rothschild-ferguson-niall/The%20House%20of%20Rothschild%20-%20Ferguson%2C%20Niall.pdf

The Ascent of Money: A Financial History of the World — Book by Niall Ferguson
https://ia600104.us.archive.org/12/items/the-ascent-of-money-a-financial-history/THE_ASCENT_OF_MONEY_A_FINANCIAL_HISTORY.pdf

America’s Secret Establishment: An Introduction to the Order of Skull & Bones — Book by Antony C. Sutton.
https://dn721909.ca.archive.org/0/items/americas-secret-establishment-an-introduction-to-skull-and-bones-antony-sutton-1-merged_202402/Americas%20Secret%20Establishment%20An%20Introduction%20to%20Skull%20and%20Bones%20Antony%20Sutton%20%281%29-merged.pdf

How Big Oil Conquered the World — Documentary.

Joe Rogan Experience #2237 – Mike Benz – YouTube

The post The Necessity of Power Elite Analysis in Understanding our World 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 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 la storia di un coyote, che quando non riesce a sfamarsi all'esterno ricorre all'autofagocitazione. Lo stesso accaduto ai membri del G7, dove i sei membri restanti hanno iniziato a fagocitare il settimo: gli Stati Uniti.

____________________________________________________________________________________

(Versione audio della traduzione disponibile qui: https://open.substack.com/pub/fsimoncelli/p/come-ha-fatto-satoshi-a-pensare-a)

Bitcoin viene spesso paragonato a Internet negli anni '90, ma credo che l'analogia migliore sia con il telegrafo degli anni '40 dell'Ottocento.[1]

Il telegrafo è stata la prima tecnologia a trasmettere dati codificati a velocità prossime a quella della luce su lunghe distanze. Ha segnato la nascita dell'industria delle telecomunicazioni. Internet, sebbene sia più grande in termini di dimensioni, più ricco di contenuti e molti-a-molti anziché uno-a-uno, è fondamentalmente una tecnologia di telecomunicazione.

Sia il telegrafo che Internet si basano su modelli di business in cui le aziende investono capitali per costruire una rete fisica e poi addebitano agli utenti l'invio di messaggi attraverso questa rete. La rete di AT&T ha storicamente trasmesso telegrammi, telefonate, pacchetti TCP/IP, messaggi di testo e ora TikTok.

La trasformazione della società attraverso le telecomunicazioni ha portato a maggiori libertà, ma anche a una maggiore centralizzazione. Internet ha ampliato la portata di milioni di creatori di contenuti e piccole imprese, ma ha anche rafforzato la presa di aziende, stati e altre istituzioni sufficientemente ben posizionate per monitorare e manipolare l'attività online.

Ma Bitcoin non è la fine di alcuna trasformazione: ne è l'inizio. Come le telecomunicazioni, Bitcoin cambierà sia la società umana che la vita quotidiana. Prevedere l'intera portata di questo cambiamento oggi è come immaginare Internet vivendo nell'era del telegrafo.

Questo saggio cerca di immaginare un tale futuro partendo dal passato. Inizieremo ripercorrendo la storia delle valute digitali prima di Bitcoin. Solo comprendendo i fallimenti dei progetti precedenti possiamo comprendere cosa determinerà il successo di Bitcoin e suggerire una metodologia per costruire i sistemi decentralizzati del futuro.

Sintesi

I. I sistemi decentralizzati sono i mercati

II. I mercati decentralizzati richiedono beni decentralizzati

III. In che modo i sistemi decentralizzati possono calcolare i prezzi?

IV. Gli obiettivi della politica monetaria di Satoshi hanno portato a Bitcoin

V. Conclusione

Un'affermazione centrale di questo articolo è che Bitcoin può essere considerato un adattamento del progetto b-money di Dai, il quale eliminava la libertà di creare denaro. Poche settimane dopo la pubblicazione di questo saggio, sono emerse nuove email in cui Satoshi affermava di non avere familiarità con b-money, pur ammettendo che Bitcoin inizia “esattamente da quel punto”. Alla luce di queste nuove prove, crediamo che questa affermazione, sebbene non storicamente accurata, sia comunque un modo utile per riflettere sull'origine di Bitcoin.

Come ha fatto Satoshi a pensare a Bitcoin?

Satoshi era brillante, ma Bitcoin non è nato dal nulla.

Bitcoin ha reiterato lavori esistenti in crittografia, sistemi distribuiti, economia e filosofia politica. Il concetto di Proof-of-work esisteva molto prima del suo utilizzo nel campo monetario e cypherpunk dato che Nick Szabo, Wei Dai e Hal Finney hanno anticipato e influenzato la progettazione di Bitcoin con progetti come Bit Gold, B-Money e RPOW. Si consideri che, nel 2008, quando Satoshi scrisse il white paper di Bitcoin, molte delle idee importanti per Bitcoin erano già state proposte e/o implementate:

• Le valute digitali dovevano essere su reti P2P

• La Proof-of-work è la base della creazione del denaro

• Il denaro viene creato tramite un'asta

• La crittografia a chiave pubblica viene utilizzata per definire la proprietà e il trasferimento delle monete

• Le transazioni vengono raggruppate in blocchi

• I blocchi vengono concatenati tramite Proof-of-work

• Tutti i blocchi vengono archiviati da tutti i partecipanti alla rete

Bitcoin sfrutta tutti questi concetti, ma Satoshi non ne ha ideato nessuno. Per comprendere meglio il suo contributo, dovremmo determinare quali principi di Bitcoin mancano dall'elenco.

Alcuni candidati ovvi sono l'offerta limitata, il consenso di Nakamoto e l'algoritmo di aggiustamento della difficoltà. Ma cosa ha apportato Satoshi a queste idee in primo luogo?

Questo saggio esplora la storia delle valute digitali e sostiene che l'attenzione di Satoshi per una sana politica monetaria è ciò che ha portato Bitcoin a superare le sfide che hanno vanificato progetti precedenti come Bit Gold e B-money.

I. I sistemi decentralizzati sono i mercati

Bitcoin è spesso descritto come un sistema decentralizzato o distribuito. Sfortunatamente i termini “decentralizzato” e “distribuito” vengono spesso confusi. Quando applicati ai sistemi digitali, entrambi i termini si riferiscono a modi in cui un'applicazione monolitica può essere scomposta in una rete di elementi comunicanti.

Ai nostri fini, la principale differenza tra sistemi decentralizzati e distribuiti non è la topologia dei loro diagrammi di rete, ma il modo in cui applicano le regole. Nella sezione seguente ci prenderemo del tempo per confrontare i sistemi distribuiti e decentralizzati e per motivare l'idea che i sistemi decentralizzati robusti siano i mercati.

I sistemi distribuiti si basano su autorità centrali

In questo lavoro per “distribuito” intendiamo qualsiasi sistema suddiviso in più parti (spesso chiamate “nodi”) che devono comunicare, tipicamente tramite una rete.

Gli ingegneri del software sono diventati esperti nella creazione di sistemi distribuiti a livello globale. Internet è composto da sistemi distribuiti che contengono collettivamente miliardi di nodi. Ognuno di noi ha un nodo in tasca che partecipa e si affida a questi sistemi.

Ma quasi tutti i sistemi distribuiti che utilizziamo oggi sono governati da un'autorità centrale, in genere un amministratore di sistema, un'azienda o uno stato, che gode della fiducia reciproca di tutti i nodi del sistema.

Le autorità centrali garantiscono che tutti i nodi aderiscano alle regole del sistema e rimuovono, riparano, o puniscono i nodi che non lo fanno. Sono affidabili per fornire coordinamento, risolvere i conflitti e allocare risorse condivise. Nel tempo le autorità centrali gestiscono le modifiche al sistema, aggiornandolo o aggiungendo funzionalità e assicurandosi che i nodi partecipanti si conformino alle modifiche.

I vantaggi che un sistema distribuito ottiene affidandosi a un'autorità centrale hanno dei costi. Sebbene il sistema sia robusto contro i guasti dei suoi nodi, un guasto della sua autorità centrale può causare l'interruzione complessiva del funzionamento. La capacità dell'autorità centrale di prendere decisioni unilateralmente implica che sovvertirla o eliminarla sia sufficiente per controllare o distruggere l'intero sistema.

Nonostante questi compromessi, se esiste il requisito che un singolo partito o una coalizione debba mantenere l'autorità centrale, o se i partecipanti al sistema si accontentano di affidarsi a un'autorità centrale, allora un sistema distribuito tradizionale è la soluzione migliore. Non sono richieste blockchain, token o simili accorgimenti decentralizzati.

In particolare, il caso di una crittovaluta supportata da venture capitalist o dallo stato, con requisiti che impongono a un singolo partito di monitorare o limitare i pagamenti e congelare i conti, è il caso d'uso perfetto per un sistema distribuito tradizionale.

I sistemi decentralizzati non hanno autorità centrali

Consideriamo “decentralizzato” un significato più forte di “distribuito”: i sistemi decentralizzati sono un sottoinsieme dei sistemi distribuiti privi di autorità centrale. Un sinonimo stretto di “decentralizzato” è “peer-to-peer” (P2P).

L'eliminazione dell'autorità centrale conferisce diversi vantaggi. Sistemi decentralizzati:

• Crescono rapidamente perché non presentano barriere all'ingresso: chiunque può espandere il sistema eseguendo un nuovo nodo e non è richiesta alcuna registrazione o approvazione da parte dell'autorità centrale.

• Sono robusti perché non esiste un'autorità centrale il cui fallimento possa compromettere il funzionamento del sistema. Tutti i nodi sono uguali quindi i fallimenti sono locali e la rete evita i danni.

• Sono difficili da catturare, regolamentare, tassare, o sorvegliare perché mancano punti di controllo centralizzati che gli stati possano sovvertire.

Questi punti di forza sono il motivo per cui Satoshi ha scelto un design decentralizzato e peer-to-peer per Bitcoin:

Tuttavia questi punti di forza presentano anche delle debolezze. I sistemi decentralizzati possono essere meno efficienti, poiché ogni nodo deve inoltre assumersi responsabilità di coordinamento precedentemente assunte dall'autorità centrale.

Anche i sistemi decentralizzati sono afflitti da comportamenti fraudolenti e ostili. Nonostante il riferimento di Satoshi a Gnutella, chiunque abbia utilizzato un programma di condivisione file P2P per scaricare un file che poi si è rivelato essere qualcosa di disgustoso, o dannoso, comprende i motivi per cui la condivisione file P2P non è mai diventata il modello di riferimento principale per il trasferimento di dati online.

Satoshi non l'ha menzionato esplicitamente, ma la posta elettronica è un altro sistema decentralizzato che è sfuggito ai controlli statali. E la posta elettronica è altrettanto nota per lo spam.

I sistemi decentralizzati sono governati da incentivi

Il problema di fondo, in tutti questi casi, è che il comportamento ostile (seminare file dannosi, inviare email di spam) non viene punito, mentre il comportamento cooperativo (seminare file validi, inviare solo email utili) non viene premiato. I sistemi decentralizzati che fanno affidamento sui loro partecipanti affinché siano buoni attori non riescono a scalare, perché non possono impedire ai cattivi attori di partecipare.

Senza imporre un'autorità centrale, l'unico modo per risolvere questo problema è utilizzare incentivi economici. I buoni attori, per definizione, rispettano le regole perché sono intrinsecamente motivati a farlo. I cattivi attori sono, per definizione, egoisti e antagonisti, ma adeguati incentivi economici possono reindirizzare i loro comportamenti scorretti verso il bene comune. I sistemi decentralizzati scalabili lo fanno garantendo che il comportamento cooperativo sia redditizio e quello antagonistico sia costoso.

Il modo migliore per implementare servizi decentralizzati robusti è creare mercati in cui tutti gli attori, buoni e cattivi, siano pagati per fornire quel servizio. L'assenza di barriere all'ingresso per acquirenti e venditori in un mercato decentralizzato incoraggia la scalabilità e l'efficienza. Se i protocolli di mercato possono proteggere i partecipanti da frodi, furti e abusi, allora i cattivi attori troveranno più redditizio rispettare le regole o attaccare un sistema diverso.

II. Decentralizzazione

I mercati decentralizzati richiedono beni decentralizzati

Ma i mercati sono complessi. Devono offrire ad acquirenti e venditori la possibilità di pubblicare offerte e richieste, nonché di individuare, abbinare e regolare gli ordini. Devono essere equi, garantire una forte coerenza e mantenere la disponibilità nonostante i periodi di volatilità.

Oggi i mercati globali sono estremamente capaci e sofisticati, ma utilizzare beni tradizionali e reti di pagamento per implementare incentivi in un mercato decentralizzato è un'impresa impossibile. Qualsiasi associazione tra un sistema decentralizzato e moneta fiat, asset tradizionali, o beni fisici reintrodurrebbe la dipendenza dalle autorità centrali che controllano chi processa i pagamenti, ovvero le banche e gli exchange.

Ciò significa che i sistemi decentralizzati non possono eseguire pagamenti denominati in beni tradizionali. Non possono nemmeno determinare i saldi dei conti dominati da moneta fiat, o la proprietà di immobili o beni fisici. L'intera economia tradizionale è completamente illeggibile all'interno dei sistemi decentralizzati.

La creazione di mercati decentralizzati richiede lo scambio di nuovi tipi di beni decentralizzati, leggibili e trasferibili all'interno di sistemi decentralizzati.

Il calcolo è il primo bene decentralizzato

Il primo esempio di “bene decentralizzato” è una classe speciale di calcoli proposta per la prima volta nel 1993 da Cynthia Dwork e Moni Naor.

A causa delle profonde connessioni tra matematica, fisica e informatica questi calcoli richiedono energia e risorse hardware reali: non possono essere falsificati. Poiché le risorse reali sono scarse, anche questi calcoli sono scarsi.

L'input per questi calcoli può essere qualsiasi tipo di dato. L'output risultante è una “prova” digitale che i calcoli sono stati eseguiti sui dati di input forniti. Le prove contengono una data “difficoltà” che è la prova (statistica) di una certa quantità di lavoro computazionale. Ancora più importante, la relazione tra i dati di input, la prova e il lavoro computazionale originale eseguito può essere verificata in modo indipendente senza ricorrere ad alcuna autorità centrale.

L'idea di trasmettere dati di input insieme a una prova digitale come prova del lavoro computazionale svolto nel mondo reale su tale input è ora chiamata “Proof-of-work”.[2] Essa è, per usare l'espressione di Nick Szabo, “costosa e non falsificabile”. Poiché la Proof-of-work è verificabile da chiunque, rappresenta una risorsa economica accessibile a tutti i partecipanti a un sistema decentralizzato. La Proof-of-work trasforma i calcoli sui dati in beni decentralizzati. Dwork e Naor hanno proposto di utilizzare i calcoli per limitare l'abuso di una risorsa condivisa, costringendo i partecipanti a fornire Proof-of-work con una certa difficoltà minima prima di potervi accedere:

Nella proposta di Dwork & Naor un amministratore di sistema di posta elettronica avrebbe impostato una difficoltà minima di Proof-of-work per la consegna delle email. Gli utenti che desideravano inviare email avrebbero dovuto eseguire un numero corrispondente di calcoli utilizzando quell'email come dati di input. La prova risultante sarebbe stata inviata al server insieme a qualsiasi richiesta di consegna dell'email.

Dwork & Naor si riferivano alla difficoltà di una Proof-of-work come a una “funzione di prezzo” perché, regolando la difficoltà, una “autorità di prezzo” avrebbe potuto garantire che la risorsa condivisa rimanesse economica da utilizzare per gli utenti onesti e medi, ma costosa per gli utenti che cercavano di sfruttarla. Nel mercato della consegna delle email, gli amministratori dei server sono le autorità di prezzo; devono scegliere un “prezzo” per la consegna delle email che sia sufficientemente basso per l'utilizzo normale ma troppo alto per lo spam.

Sebbene Dwork e Naor abbiano inquadrato la Proof-of-work come un disincentivo economico per combattere l'abuso di risorse, la terminologia “funzione di prezzo” e “autorità di prezzo” supporta un'interpretazione diversa, basata sul mercato: gli utenti acquistano l'accesso a una risorsa in cambio di calcoli a un prezzo stabilito dal controllore della risorsa.

In questa interpretazione una rete di distribuzione di posta elettronica è in realtà un mercato decentralizzato che scambia la consegna di posta elettronica con i calcoli. La difficoltà minima di una Proof-of-work è il prezzo richiesto per la consegna di posta elettronica denominato nella valuta dei calcoli.

La valuta è il secondo bene decentralizzato

Ma i calcoli non sono una buona valuta.

La Proof-of-work utilizzata per “scambiare” calcoli è valida solo per l'input utilizzato in quei calcoli. Questo legame indissolubile tra una Proof-of-work specifica e un input specifico significa che la Proof-of-work per un determinato input non può essere riutilizzata per uno diverso.

Questo vincolo è utile: può essere utilizzato per impedire che il lavoro svolto da un acquirente sul mercato venga riutilizzato da un altro. Ad esempio, HashCash, la prima vera implementazione del mercato per la consegna di email, includeva metadati come timestamp corrente e indirizzo email del mittente nei dati di input per i calcoli della Proof-of-work. Le prove prodotte da un dato utente per una data email non possono essere riutilizzate per l'invio di un'email diversa.

Ma questo significa anche che i calcoli della Proof-of-work sono beni su misura. Non sono fungibili, non possono essere riutilizzati[3] e non risolvono il problema della coincidenza dei desideri. Queste proprietà monetarie mancanti impediscono ai calcoli di essere considerati valuta. Nonostante il nome, non vi è alcun incentivo per un fornitore di servizi di posta elettronica ad accumulare HashCash, come ci sarebbe invece per il denaro reale.

Adam Back, inventore di HashCash, ha compreso questi problemi:

Non vogliamo scambiare calcoli personalizzati per ogni singolo bene o servizio venduto in un'economia decentralizzata; vogliamo una valuta digitale di uso generale che possa essere utilizzata direttamente per coordinare gli scambi di valore in qualsiasi mercato.

Costruire una valuta digitale funzionante pur rimanendo decentralizzata è una sfida ardua. Una valuta richiede unità fungibili di pari valore che possano essere trasferite tra gli utenti. Ciò richiede modelli di emissione, definizioni crittografiche di proprietà e trasferimento, un processo di scoperta e regolamento delle transazioni e un registro storico. Nessuna di queste infrastrutture è necessaria se si considera la Proof-of-work come un mero “meccanismo di controllo degli accessi”.

Inoltre i sistemi decentralizzati sono i mercati, quindi tutte queste funzioni di base di una valuta devono in qualche modo essere fornite tramite fornitori di servizi a pagamento... nelle unità della valuta che viene creata!

Come la compilazione del primo compilatore, un black-start della rete elettrica, o l'evoluzione della vita stessa, i creatori di valute digitali si sono trovati di fronte a un problema di bootstrapping: come definire gli incentivi economici alla base di una valuta funzionante senza avere una valuta funzionante in cui denominare o pagare tali incentivi.

Il primo mercato decentralizzato deve scambiare calcoli in cambio di valuta

Il progresso su questo problema di bootstrapping deriva dalla corretta definizione dei suoi vincoli.

I sistemi decentralizzati devono essere i mercati; essi sono costituiti da acquirenti e venditori che si scambiano beni; il mercato decentralizzato di una valuta digitale ha solo due beni leggibili al suo interno:

• Calcoli tramite Proof-of-work

• Unità della valuta che stiamo cercando di costruire

L'unico scambio di mercato possibile deve quindi essere tra questi due beni. I calcoli devono essere venduti per unità di valuta o, in modo equivalente, unità di valuta devono essere vendute per calcoli. Affermare questo è facile: la parte difficile è strutturare questo mercato in modo che il semplice scambio di valuta per calcoli attivi tutte le capacità della valuta stessa!

L'intera storia delle valute digitali, culminata nel white paper di Satoshi del 2008, è stata una serie di tentativi sempre più sofisticati di strutturare questo mercato. La sezione seguente esaminerà progetti come bit-gold di Nick Szabo e b-money di Wei Dai. Comprendere come questi progetti abbiano strutturato i loro mercati e perché hanno fallito ci aiuterà a comprendere perché Satoshi e Bitcoin hanno avuto successo.

III. In che modo i sistemi decentralizzati possono prezzare i calcoli?

Una delle funzioni principali dei mercati è la determinazione del prezzo. Un mercato che scambia calcoli per valuta deve quindi determinare il prezzo del calcolo stesso, espresso in unità di quella valuta.

In genere non attribuiamo un valore monetario ai calcoli. In genere diamo valore alla capacità di eseguire calcoli perché diamo valore all'output dei calcoli, non ai calcoli stessi. Se lo stesso output può essere eseguito in modo più efficiente, con meno calcoli, questo viene solitamente definito “progresso”.

La Proof-of-Work rappresenta calcoli specifici il cui unico output è la prova che sono stati eseguiti. Produrre la stessa prova eseguendo meno calcoli e meno lavoro non sarebbe un progresso, ma un bug. I calcoli associati alla Proof-of-Work sono quindi un bene insolito e nuovo da valutare.

Quando la Proof-of-Work è considerata un disincentivo contro l'abuso di risorse, non è necessario valutarla in modo preciso o coerente. Ciò che conta è che il fornitore di servizi di posta elettronica imposti difficoltà sufficientemente basse da essere impercettibili per gli utenti legittimi, ma sufficientemente alte da essere proibitive per gli spammer. Esiste quindi un'ampia gamma di “prezzi” accettabili e ogni partecipante agisce come propria autorità di determinazione dei prezzi, applicando una funzione di prezzo locale.

Tuttavia le unità di una valuta sono concepite per essere fungibili, avendo ciascuna lo stesso valore. A causa dei cambiamenti tecnologici nel tempo, due unità di valuta create con la stessa difficoltà di Proof-of-work – misurata dal numero di calcoli corrispondenti – possono avere costi di produzione reali radicalmente diversi, misurati in termini di tempo, energia e/o capitale necessari per eseguire tali calcoli. Quando i calcoli vengono venduti in cambio di valuta e il costo di produzione sottostante è variabile, come può il mercato garantire un prezzo costante?

Nick Szabo ha identificato chiaramente questo problema di prezzo descrivendo bit gold:

Le prime valute digitali tentavano di prezzare i calcoli cercando di misurare collettivamente il “costo del calcolo”. Wei Dai, ad esempio, propose la seguente soluzione approssimativa con b-money:

Purtroppo Dai non spiegò come gli utenti di un sistema presumibilmente decentralizzato dovrebbero concordare sulla definizione di un “paniere standard”, su quale computer risolva un dato problema “nel modo più economico”, o sul costo di elaborazione sul “mercato aperto”. Raggiungere il consenso tra tutti gli utenti su un set di dati condiviso variabile nel tempo è il problema essenziale dei sistemi decentralizzati!

Per essere onesti con Dai, anche lui stesso lo capì:

Dai avrebbe poi proposto un meccanismo di determinazione dei prezzi basato su aste più sofisticato, che Satoshi avrebbe poi definito il punto di partenza delle sue idee. Torneremo su questo schema d'asta più avanti, ma prima passiamo a bit gold e consideriamo le intuizioni di Szabo sul problema.

Utilizzare i mercati esterni

Szabo sosteneva che la Proof-of-work doveva essere “datata in modo sicuro”:

Szabo rimandava a una pagina di risorse sui protocolli di marcatura temporale sicura, ma non descriveva alcun algoritmo specifico per la marcatura temporale sicura. Le espressioni “in modo sicuro” e “in modo distribuito” hanno un peso notevole in questo contesto, eludendo le complessità dell'affidarsi a uno (o più) servizi “esterni al sistema” per la marcatura temporale.[4]

A prescindere dalla vaghezza dell'implementazione, Szabo aveva ragione: il momento in cui viene creata una Proof-of-work è un fattore importante nella determinazione del prezzo, perché è correlato al costo di elaborazione:

“Dedurre” il costo di produzione era importante perché bit gold non aveva alcun meccanismo per limitarne la creazione. Chiunque poteva creare bit gold eseguendo i calcoli appropriati. Senza la possibilità di regolamentarne l'emissione, era simile a un oggetto da collezione:

Bit gold richiedeva un ulteriore processo esterno per creare unità di valuta fungibili:

Parafrasando Szabo: “Per valutare il valore di [...] bit gold, un commerciante controlla e verifica la difficoltà, l'input e il timestamp”. I commercianti che definiscono le “unità più grandi di valore approssimativamente uguale” forniscono una funzione di determinazione del prezzo simile al “paniere standard di materie prime” di Dai. Le unità fungibili non vengono create in bit gold quando vengono prodotte le Proof-of-work, ma solo in seguito, quando queste ultime vengono combinate in “unità più grandi di valore approssimativamente uguale” da commercianti in mercati esterni alla rete.

A suo merito, Szabo riconobbe questo difetto:

Ancora una volta, pur non essendo arrivato a quella che oggi conosciamo come la soluzione, Szabo ce la stava indicando: poiché il costo del calcolo cambia nel tempo, la rete deve rispondere alle variazioni dell'offerta di calcolo aggiustando il prezzo del denaro.

Utilizzare mercati interni

I commercianti di Szabo avrebbero costituito un mercato esterno che definiva il prezzo di (pacchetti di) bit gold dopo la sua creazione. Era possibile implementare questo mercato all'interno del sistema invece che al suo esterno?

Torniamo a Wei Dai e a b-money. Come accennato in precedenza, Dai propose un modello alternativo basato su aste per la creazione di b-money. Il progetto di Satoshi per Bitcoin migliora direttamente il modello d'asta di bmoney:

«Quindi propongo un sottoprotocollo alternativo per la creazione di moneta, in cui [gli utenti] [...] decidono e concordano la quantità di b-money da creare in ogni periodo, con il costo di creazione determinato da un'asta. Ogni periodo di creazione di moneta è suddiviso in quattro fasi, come segue.

Pianificazione. Gli [utenti] calcolano e negoziano tra loro per determinare un aumento ottimale dell'offerta di moneta per il periodo successivo. Indipendentemente dal fatto che la [rete] riesca o meno a raggiungere un consenso, ognuno di loro trasmette la propria quota di creazione di moneta e qualsiasi calcolo macroeconomico effettuato a supporto di tali cifre.

Offerta. Chiunque voglia creare b-money trasmette un'offerta nella forma in cui X è la quantità di b-money che desidera creare e Y è un problema irrisolto di una classe di problemi predeterminata. Ogni problema in questa classe dovrebbe avere un costo nominale (ad esempio, in MIPS-anni) che viene concordato pubblicamente.

Calcolo. Dopo aver visto le offerte, coloro che le hanno presentate possono risolvere i problemi a esse allegati e diffondere le soluzioni.

Creazione di denaro. Ogni [utente] accetta le offerte più alte (tra coloro che hanno diffuso le soluzioni) in termini di costo nominale per unità di denaro creato e le accredita sui conti degli offerenti.» ~ Dai, 1998

B-money compì passi significativi verso la corretta struttura di mercato per una valuta digitale. Cercò di eliminare i commercianti esterni di Szabo e consentì agli utenti di impegnarsi nella determinazione del prezzo facendo offerte dirette tra loro.

Ma implementare la proposta di Dai così come era stata formulata sarebbe stato impegnativo:

• Nella fase di “Pianificazione”, gli utenti avevano l'onere di negoziare “l'aumento ottimale dell'offerta di moneta per il periodo successivo”. Non viene descritto come debba essere definito “ottimale”, come gli utenti debbano negoziare tra loro e come vengano condivisi i risultati di tali negoziazioni.

• Indipendentemente da quanto pianificato, la fase di “Offerta” consentiva a chiunque di presentare un'offerta per creare b-money. Le offerte includevano sia una quantità di b-money da creare sia una quantità corrispondente di Proof-of-work, quindi ogni offerta rappresenta un prezzo, ovvero il numero di calcoli che un determinato offerente era disposto a eseguire per acquistare una determinata quantità di b-money.

• Una volta presentate le offerte, la fase di “Calcolo” consisteva negli offerenti che eseguivano la Proof-of-work per la quale presentavano la propria offerta e trasmettevano le soluzioni. Non era previsto alcun meccanismo per abbinare gli offerenti alle soluzioni. Ancora più problematico, non era chiaro come gli utenti potessero sapere che tutte le offerte erano state presentate: quando terminava la fase di “offerta” e iniziava la fase di “calcolo”?

• Questi problemi si ripresentavano nella fase “Creazione di denaro”. Data la natura della Proof-of-work, gli utenti potevano verificare che le prove ricevute nelle soluzioni fossero reali. Ma come potevano concordare collettivamente sull'insieme delle “offerte più alte”? Cosa succedeva se utenti diversi sceglievano insiemi diversi, per preferenza o per latenza di rete?

I sistemi decentralizzati faticano a tracciare i dati e a fare scelte coerenti, eppure b-money richiedeva il tracciamento delle offerte di molti utenti e la scelta consensuale tra di loro. Questa complessità ne impedì l'implementazione.

La radice di questa complessità era la convinzione di Dai che il tasso “ottimale” di creazione di b-money dovesse fluttuare nel tempo in base ai “calcoli macroeconomici” dei suoi utenti. Come Bit Gold, B-money non aveva alcun meccanismo per limitare la creazione di denaro. Chiunque poteva creare unità di B-money trasmettendo un'offerta e quindi eseguendo la corrispondente Proof-of-work.

Sia Szabo che Dai proposero di utilizzare un mercato per lo scambio di valuta digitale per i calcoli, ma né Bit Gold né B-money definirono una politica monetaria per regolare l'offerta di valuta all'interno di quel mercato.

IV. Gli obiettivi della politica monetaria di Satoshi hanno portato a Bitcoin

Al contrario, una solida politica monetaria era uno degli obiettivi principali di Satoshi per il progetto Bitcoin. Nel primissimo post della mailing list in cui fu annunciato Bitcoin, Satoshi scrisse:

Satoshi avrebbe poi descritto altri problemi delle valute fiat, come il rischioso sistema bancario a riserva frazionaria, la mancanza di privacy, i furti e le frodi dilaganti e l'impossibilità di effettuare micropagamenti; ma partì dal problema della svalutazione da parte delle banche centrali, con una preoccupazione per la politica monetaria.

Voleva che Bitcoin raggiungesse un'offerta circolante finita, non diluibile nel tempo. Il tasso “ottimale” di creazione di bitcoin, per Satoshi, avrebbe quindi dovuto essere pari a zero.

Questo obiettivo di politica monetaria, più di qualsiasi altra caratteristica che possedeva personalmente (o collettivamente!), fu la ragione per cui Satoshi “scoprì” Bitcoin, la blockchain, il consenso di Nakamoto, ecc., e non qualcun altro. È la risposta breve alla domanda posta nel titolo di questo articolo: Satoshi pensò a Bitcoin perché era concentrato sulla creazione di una valuta digitale con un'offerta finita.

Un'offerta finita di Bitcoin non è solo un obiettivo di politica monetaria, o un meme. È la semplificazione tecnica essenziale che ha permesso a Satoshi di creare una valuta digitale funzionale, mentre b-money di Dai è rimasto solo un affascinante post sul web.

Bitcoin è b-money con l'ulteriore requisito di una politica monetaria predeterminata. Come molte semplificazioni tecniche, vincolare la politica monetaria consente il progresso riducendo l'ambito. Vediamo come ciascuna delle fasi della creazione di b-money viene semplificata imponendo questo vincolo.

Tutti i 21 milioni di bitcoin esistono già

In b-money ogni “periodo di creazione di moneta” includeva una fase di “Pianificazione” in cui gli utenti dovevano condividere i loro “calcoli macroeconomici” giustificando la quantità che desideravano creare in quel momento. Gli obiettivi di politica monetaria di Satoshi, ovvero un'offerta finita e zero emissioni di coda, erano incompatibili con la libertà concessa da b-money ai singoli utenti. Il primo passo nel percorso da b-money a Bitcoin è stato quindi quello di eliminare questa libertà. I singoli utenti non possono creare bitcoin. Solo la rete può crearli e lo ha fatto esattamente una volta, nel 2009, quando Satoshi inaugurò il progetto Bitcoin.

Satoshi riuscì a sostituire le ricorrenti fasi di “Pianificazione” di b-money in un unico programma predeterminato in base al quale i 21 milioni di bitcoin creati nel 2009 sarebbero stati immessi in circolazione. Gli utenti sottoscrivono volontariamente la politica monetaria di Satoshi scaricando ed eseguendo il software Bitcoin Core, in cui tale politica monetaria è codificata.

Questo cambia la semantica del mercato per i calcoli: i bitcoin pagati ai miner non sono di nuova emissione, vengono invece emessi da una riserva esistente.

Questa inquadratura è radicalmente diversa dall'ingenua affermazione secondo cui “i miner creano bitcoin”. I miner non creano bitcoin, li acquistano. Bitcoin non ha valore perché “i bitcoin sono fatti di energia”: il valore è dimostrato dal fatto che viene venduto in cambio di energia.

Ripetiamolo ancora una volta: Bitcoin non viene creato tramite Proof-of-work, Bitcoin viene creato tramite consenso.

Il prezzo di Bitcoin viene determinato tramite consenso

La libertà concessa agli utenti di creare denaro si traduceva in un corrispondente onere per la rete b-money. Durante la fase di “Offerta", essa doveva raccogliere e condividere le “offerte” di creazione di denaro da molti utenti diversi.

Eliminare la libertà di creare denaro alleggerisce la rete Bitcoin da questo onere. Poiché tutti i 21 milioni di bitcoin esistono già, la rete non ha bisogno di raccogliere le offerte degli utenti per creare denaro, deve semplicemente venderli secondo il programma prestabilito da Satoshi.

La rete Bitcoin offre quindi un prezzo di richiesta consensuale per i bitcoin che vende in ogni blocco. Questo prezzo unico viene calcolato da ciascun nodo in modo indipendente utilizzando la propria copia della blockchain. Se i nodi hanno il consenso sulla stessa blockchain (un punto su cui torneremo più avanti), offriranno tutti un prezzo di richiesta identico a ogni blocco.[5]

La prima metà del calcolo del prezzo di consenso determina quanti bitcoin vendere ed è stabilito dal programma di rilascio prestabilito da Satoshi. Tutti i nodi Bitcoin nella rete calcolano lo stesso importo per un dato blocco:

La seconda metà del prezzo richiesto è il numero di calcoli per cui viene venduto il sussidio attuale. Anche in questo caso tutti i nodi Bitcoin nella rete calcolano lo stesso valore (riprenderemo questo calcolo della difficoltà nella prossima sezione):

Insieme il sussidio e la difficoltà della rete definiscono l'attuale richiesta di bitcoin denominata in calcoli. Poiché la blockchain è basata sul consenso, questo prezzo è un prezzo di consenso.

Si presumeva anche che gli utenti di b-money avessero una “blockchain” di consenso contenente la cronologia di tutte le transazioni, ma Dai non pensò mai alla semplice soluzione di un prezzo di richiesta univoco e consensuale per la creazione di nuovi b-money, determinato esclusivamente dai dati presenti in quella blockchain.

Dai diede invece per scontato che la creazione di moneta dovesse continuare all'infinito. I singoli utenti avrebbero quindi dovuto avere il potere di influenzare la politica monetaria, proprio come nelle valute fiat. Questa esigenza portò Dai a progettare un sistema di offerte che impedì l'implementazione stessa di b-money.

Questa ulteriore complessità è stata eliminata dal requisito di Satoshi di una politica monetaria predeterminata.

Il tempo chiude tutti gli spread

Nella fase di “Calcolo” di b-money, i singoli utenti avrebbero eseguito i calcoli che si erano impegnati a fare nelle loro offerte precedenti. In Bitcoin l'intera rete è il venditore, ma chi è l'acquirente?

Nel mercato dell'invio delle email, gli acquirenti erano individui che desideravano inviarne una. L'autorità di determinazione dei prezzi, il fornitore di servizi di posta elettronica, avrebbe fissato un prezzo considerato economico per gli individui ma costoso per gli spammer. Ma se il numero di utenti legittimi aumentasse, il prezzo potrebbe comunque rimanere invariato perché la potenza di calcolo dei singoli utenti rimarrebbe invariata.

Nel sistema b-money, ogni utente che contribuiva alla creazione di moneta avrebbe dovuto successivamente eseguire autonomamente il numero corrispondente di calcoli. Ogni utente agiva come autorità di determinazione dei prezzi in base alla propria conoscenza delle proprie capacità di calcolo.

La rete Bitcoin offre un unico prezzo richiesto in termini di calcoli per l'attuale sussidio. Tuttavia nessun singolo miner che trova un blocco ha eseguito questo numero di calcoli.[6] Il blocco vincente del singolo miner è la prova che tutti i miner hanno eseguito collettivamente il numero richiesto di calcoli. L'acquirente è quindi l'industria globale del mining.

Una volta raggiunto un prezzo richiesto consensuale, la rete Bitcoin non modificherà tale prezzo finché non verranno prodotti altri blocchi. Questi blocchi devono contenere Proof-of-work al prezzo richiesto corrente. L'industria del mining non ha quindi altra scelta se vuole “eseguire una transazione” se non pagare il prezzo richiesto corrente in calcoli.

L'unica variabile che l'industria del mining può controllare è quanto tempo ci vorrà per produrre il blocco successivo. Proprio come la rete Bitcoin offre un unico prezzo di richiesta, l'industria del mining offre quindi un'unica offerta: il tempo necessario per produrre il blocco successivo che soddisfi il prezzo di richiesta corrente della rete.

Satoshi sta descrivendo con modestia l'algoritmo di regolazione della difficoltà, spesso citato come una delle idee più originali nell'implementazione di Bitcoin. Questo è vero, ma invece di concentrarci sull'inventiva della soluzione, concentriamoci sul motivo per cui risolvere il problema era importante per Satoshi in primo luogo.

Progetti come Bit Gold e B-Money non avevano bisogno di limitare il ritmo di creazione di moneta, perché non avevano un'offerta fissa o una politica monetaria predeterminata. I periodi di creazione di moneta più rapida o più lenta potevano essere compensati con altri mezzi, ad esempio commercianti esterni che inserivano token di Bit Gold in bundler più o meno grandi o utenti di B-money che modificavano le loro offerte.

Ma gli obiettivi di politica monetaria di Satoshi richiedono che Bitcoin abbia una frequenza predeterminata con cui i token vengono immessi in circolazione. Limitare la frequenza (statistica) di produzione dei blocchi nel tempo è naturale in Bitcoin, perché la frequenza di produzione dei blocchi è la frequenza con cui la fornitura iniziale di bitcoin viene venduta. Venderne 21 milioni in 140 anni è una proposta diversa dal consentirne la vendita in 3 mesi.

Inoltre Bitcoin può implementare questa limitazione perché la blockchain è il “protocollo di marcatura temporale sicura” di Szabo. Satoshi descrive Bitcoin prima di tutto come un “server di marcatura temporale distribuito su base peer-to-peer” e le prime implementazioni del codice sorgente di Bitcoin utilizzano il termine “timechain” anziché “blockchain” per descrivere la struttura dati condivisa che implementa il mercato Proof-of-work di Bitcoin.

L'algoritmo di riaggiustamento della difficoltà di Bitcoin sfrutta questa capacità. La blockchain di consenso viene utilizzata dai partecipanti per enumerare le offerte storiche effettuate dall'industria del mining e riaggiustare la difficoltà per avvicinarsi al tempo di blocco target.

Un ordine permanente crea consenso

La catena di semplificazioni causata dalla richiesta di una politica monetaria forte si estende alla fase di “Creazione di moneta” di b-money.

Le offerte inviate dagli utenti in b-money soffrivano del problema del “nulla in gioco”. Non esisteva un meccanismo che impedisse agli utenti di inviare offerte con un'enorme quantità di b-money con pochissimo sforzo. Ciò richiedeva che la rete tenesse traccia delle offerte completate e accettasse solo le “offerte più alte [...] in termini di costo nominale per unità di b-money create” in modo da evitare le offerte indesiderate. Ogni partecipante a b-money doveva tenere traccia di un intero portafoglio di ordini di offerte, abbinarle ai propri calcoli successivi e liquidare solo gli ordini completati con i prezzi più alti.

Questo problema era un esempio del problema più generale del consenso nei sistemi decentralizzati, noto anche come “Generali bizantini”, o talvolta problema della “doppia spesa” nel contesto delle valute digitali. La condivisione di una sequenza identica di dati tra tutti i partecipanti è complessa all'interno di una rete decentralizzata e avversaria. Le soluzioni esistenti a questo problema, i cosiddetti “algoritmi di consenso Byzantine-fault tolerant” (BFT), richiedono un coordinamento preventivo tra i partecipanti o una maggioranza qualificata (>67%) dei partecipanti per evitare comportamenti avversari.

Bitcoin non deve gestire un ampio portafoglio ordini di offerte, perché la sua rete offre un unico prezzo di richiesta di consenso. Ciò significa che i nodi Bitcoin possono accettare il primo blocco (valido) che vedono che soddisfa il prezzo di richiesta corrente della rete: le offerte di disturbo possono essere facilmente ignorate e rappresentano uno spreco di risorse per un miner.

La determinazione del prezzo consensuale dei calcoli consente di abbinare rapidamente gli ordini di acquisto/vendita in Bitcoin, in base al principio “primo arrivato, primo servito”. A differenza di b-money, questo abbinamento di ordini significa che il mercato di Bitcoin non ha fasi: funziona ininterrottamente, con un nuovo prezzo di consenso calcolato dopo ogni singolo ordine abbinato (blocco trovato). Per evitare biforcazioni causate da latenza di rete, o comportamento avversario, i nodi devono anche seguire la regola della catena più pesante. Questa regola garantisce che solo le offerte più alte vengano accettate dalla rete.

Questo algoritmo, in cui i nodi accettano il primo blocco valido che vedono e seguono anche la catena più pesante, è un nuovo algoritmo BFT che converge rapidamente sul consenso sulla sequenza dei blocchi. Satoshi dedica il 25% del white paper di Bitcoin a dimostrare questa affermazione.[7]

Abbiamo stabilito nelle sezioni precedenti che il prezzo di richiesta di consenso di Bitcoin dipende dal fatto che la blockchain sia in consenso, ma a quanto pare l'esistenza di un singolo prezzo di richiesta di consenso è ciò che consente al mercato di abbinare prontamente gli ordini, che è ciò che porta al consenso in primo luogo!

Inoltre questo nuovo “consenso di Nakamoto” richiede solo che il 50% dei partecipanti non sia avversario, un miglioramento significativo rispetto allo stato dell'arte precedente. Un cypherpunk come Satoshi ha compiuto questa svolta teorica nell'informatica, al posto di un tradizionale ricercatore accademico o industriale, grazie alla sua focalizzazione sull'implementazione di una moneta sana/onesta piuttosto che su un generico algoritmo di consenso per il calcolo distribuito.

V. Conclusione

B-money era un framework potente per la creazione di una valuta digitale, ma era incompleto perché privo di una politica monetaria. Vincolare B-money a un programma di rilascio predeterminato ha ridotto la portata e semplificato l'implementazione, eliminando l'obbligo di tracciare e scegliere tra le offerte di creazione di moneta inviate dagli utenti. Preservare il ritmo temporale del programma di rilascio ha portato all'algoritmo di aggiustamento della difficoltà e ha reso possibile il consenso di Nakamoto, ampiamente riconosciuto come uno degli aspetti più innovativi dell'implementazione di Bitcoin.

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

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

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Note

[1] Il titolo di questo saggio è stato ispirato dal primo messaggio col telegrafo della storia, inviato da Samuel Morse nel 1844: “Cosa ha fatto Dio?”.

[2] Nonostante l'idea iniziale Dwork & Naor non inventarono la “proof-of-work”, termine che fu coniato più tardi, nel 1999, da Markus Jakobsson e Ari Juels.

[3] Il progetto RPOW di Hal Finney è stato un tentativo di creare una Proof-of-work trasferibile, ma Bitcoin non utilizza questo concetto perché non tratta i calcoli come valuta. Come vedremo più avanti, quando esamineremo bit-gold e b-money, i calcoli non possono essere valuta perché il valore dei calcoli cambia nel tempo, mentre le unità di valuta devono avere lo stesso valore. Bitcoin non è calcoli, è valuta venduta in cambio di calcoli.

[4] A questo punto alcuni lettori potrebbero credere che io disprezzi i contributi di Dai o Szabo perché sono stati poco articolati o vaghi su alcuni punti. La mia opinione è esattamente l'opposto: Dai e Szabo avevano sostanzialmente ragione e il fatto che non abbiano articolato ogni dettaglio come ha fatto successivamente Satoshi non sminuisce il loro contributo. Anzi dovrebbe accrescere il nostro apprezzamento nei loro confronti, poiché rivela quanto sia stato impegnativo l'avvento della valuta digitale, anche per i suoi migliori esperti.

[5] Qui vengono fatte due semplificazioni:

1. Il numero di bitcoin venduti in ogni blocco è influenzato anche dal mercato delle commissioni di transazione, il quale esula dall'ambito di questo saggio, ma si rimanda a lavori successivi.
2. La difficoltà segnalata da Bitcoin non è esattamente il numero di calcoli previsti; bisogna moltiplicarlo per un fattore di proporzionalità.

[6] Almeno non dai vecchi tempi in cui Satoshi era l'unico miner sulla rete.

[7] Satoshi ha commesso un errore sia nella sua analisi nel white paper, sia nella successiva implementazione iniziale di Bitcoin, utilizzando la regola della “catena più lunga” invece della “catena più pesante”.

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Who can be an icon of Christ? The question haunts me. Documents of the Second Vatican Council teach that all good people who are part of the Church…all these good people relying on the exquisite promise of Christ’s resurrection are the Body of Christ. It would stand to reason, then that ‘all good people’ means precisely that. ‘All good people’ means all good men and…women. 

Yet the Catholic Church has excised half its members from the fold. Cut free are all women. How? Women cannot be ordained to Church ministry, even though the clearest and most complete church histories include ordained women. What is the argument against ordaining women? The reduction of the complex reasoning is that women do not image Christ. Women cannot symbolize Christ. Women are not icons of Christ…It’s a scandal. It’s more than a scandal; it’s a disfigurement on the entire body of Christ by those who would deny both history and theology…that it is probably formally heretical.

The above indictment is from Women: Icons of Christ, authored by Phyllis Zagano. This well-respected scholar is arguably the leading advocate for the ordination of women to the diaconate, an issue to which she has devoted her theological career. She was a member of the 2016 Commission for the Study of the Diaconate of Women established by Pope Francis, which was reconvened in 2020. However, the final reports of both commissions have not been made public; and regarding the outcome of the 2016 commission, Francis commented during a 2019 in-flight press conference that “all had different positions, sometimes sharply different, they worked together and they agreed up to a point. Each one had his/her own vision, which was not in accord with that of the others, and the commission stopped there.” One can reasonably assume, due to its lack of publication, that the 2020 commission also failed to reach a consensus.

There are many in the Church who consider the ordination of women as deacons to be an unsettled question and are hopeful that perhaps newly-elected Pope Leo XIV will admit women to the diaconate. The fact is, during the early centuries of the Church women served as deaconesses—with the earliest reference found in St. Paul’s Letter to the Romans when he acknowledges the service of Phoebe “who is a deaconess of the Church of Cenchreae” (Romans 16:1). The question is what exactly was the function and ecclesial status of deaconesses in the early centuries of the Church. Under the pontificate of John Paul II, the International Theological Commission (ITC) produced an exhaustive study of the permanent diaconate, titled: From the Diakonia of Christ to the Diakonia of the Apostles—published in 2002.

The study provides a detailed examination of the history of the diaconate focused on New Testament evidence, the Apostolic Fathers, and early Church documents that include actual rites of ordination. According to this Commission, the three grades of the clergy—bishop, priest, and deacon—were already recognized by Pope Clement of Rome by the end of the first century. St. Ignatius of Antioch, who was martyred no later than 117, also acknowledged the three grades of the ecclesiastical hierarchy in his “Letter to the Trallians” (3, 1): “Let everyone revere the deacons as Jesus Christ, the bishop as the image of the Father, and the presbyters as the senate of God and the assembly of the Apostles. For without them one cannot speak of the Church.”

The three grades of the hierarchy, the “unicity of orders,” was also recognized by St. Cyprian, the third-century bishop of Carthage, when in Letter 15 he had to admonish deacons not to take the place of priests, as deacons “came in third in the order of the hierarchy.”1 This shows that the “unicity of orders”—in other words, the three grades of deacon, priest, and bishop—was not a late development and hardly a “modern accretion” as Zagano claims.2

It will not be possible in the space of this article to provide a full summary of early Church history on women deacons. If anyone wishes to delve more closely into the history of deaconesses in the Church, I recommend the monumental work of Aimé Georges Martimort, Deaconesses: An Historical Study. But what follows will at least give readers an understanding of the nature of the role of deaconesses in the Church’s early centuries. Outside of the New Testament, the Apostolic Tradition of St. Hippolytus, written no later than 220, contains instruction on the “installation” of widows—as widows were recognized as entering a kind of order within the assembly.

The Apostolic Tradition states that widows were “installed” and “not ordained” and there was no “laying on of hands because she does not offer the sacrifice [προθύματα] and she does not have a liturgical [ λειτουργία] function. Ordination [χειροτονία] is for clerics destined for liturgical service.”3 While this passage concerns the installation of widows, it serves as an indication that women set aside for ministry were not ordained because they were not clerics at the service of the altar. The Apostolic Tradition also verifies that male deacons were ordained by the imposition of hands by the bishop, meaning that the “unicity of orders” was also recognized in this third century document.

The institution of deaconesses was more prevalent in the Eastern Church than in the West. The Eastern Church document the Didascalia Apostolorum, dating from the first half of the third century, gives evidence of female deacons. The ultimate issue regarding the possibility of ordaining women to the diaconate, as Zagano rightly notes, has to do with whether women can sacramentally image Christ. To this point, it is interesting to note that the Didascalia teaches that while the bishop “is to be honored by you as God himself” it is the deacon “who stands in the place of Christ.” And as for deaconesses “they are to be honored by you as the Holy Spirit”—most probably because in Semitic languages spirit is a feminine noun.”4 In any case, according to this document, deaconesses did not represent Jesus.

The Didascalia provides detailed information on the exact duties of deaconesses, and it appears that they were needed to fulfill practical pastoral needs. Women ministered to other women as it was unseemly for men to do so. Deaconesses assisted in the baptismal ceremony of women who were indeed naked during the rite. Deaconesses anointed their bodies, as well as their heads. The deaconess would hold up a screen or drape to hide the body of the woman about to be baptized while the bishop, executing the baptismal rite, extended his hand over the drape to avoid seeing the woman.

It is important to note that deaconesses could not perform the actual sacrament of baptism. According to the Didascalia, this could only be done by a bishop, priest, or male deacon.5 After the baptism, deaconesses continued to instruct the women, nurturing them in the Faith. Indeed, for the sake of modesty and to avoid scandal, only women could instruct other women, and this ministry was conducted by female deacons.

An Eastern Church fifth-century document called The Testament of Our Lord Jesus Christ reveals the duties of widows as well as deaconesses. Indeed, widows actually performed many of the tasks associated with deaconesses—assisting in the baptism of women and instructing women. Oddly, in this document, the ministry of widows took precedence over that of deaconesses “occupying a very humble place in the scheme of things.”6

Were women actually ordained as deacons? The rite of installation of widows according to the Apostolic Tradition of St. Hippolytus states: “The ordination…of widows is to be carried out in the following manner….” However, he is very clear that this “ordination” did not employ “laying on of hands.” And The Testament, following Hippolytus, indicates that the laying on of hands was restricted to the three sacerdotal orders.7

According to another fifth-century document—The Ordo and Canons Concerning Ordination in the Holy Church—the bishop laid his hand on the woman about to become a deaconess—but for the purposes of praying for her. The document states that this prayer “in no way resembles the prayer used in the ordination of a deacon. The deaconess should not approach the altar; her task lies principally in assisting with the anointing at baptisms.”8 There are occasions when the Greek terms “installation” and “ordination” were used interchangeably when it came to the ceremonies for widows and deaconesses.

According to the Apostolic Constitutions, a text dependent on the Didascalia, dated between 375 and 380, deaconesses were forbidden to teach even other women, nor could they conduct baptisms, as could male deacons.9

The Catechism of the Catholic Church teaches:

Holy Orders is the sacrament through which the mission entrusted by Christ to his apostles continues to be exercised in the Church until the end of time: thus it is the sacrament of apostolic ministry. It includes three degrees: episcopate, presbyterate, and diaconate. (1536)

Article 1538 states: “Today the word ‘ordination’ is reserved for the sacramental act which integrates a man (vir) into the order of bishops, presbyters, or deacons.” Article 1577 is especially significant. Here we see, quoting Canon 1014 directly, that

“Only a baptized man (vir) validly receives sacred ordination.” The Lord Jesus chose men (viri) to form the college of the twelve apostles, and the apostles did the same when they chose collaborators to succeed them in their ministry. The college of bishops, with whom the priests are united in the priesthood, makes the college of the twelve an ever-present and ever-active reality until Christ’s return. The Church recognizes herself to be bound by this choice made by the Lord himself. For this reason, the ordination of women is not possible.

It can safely be said that at this point in the development of the Church’s doctrine regarding the role and ministry of deacons, women are excluded from participating in Holy Orders. What must be realized is that the reservation of Holy Orders to males is ontologically ordered, meaning that there is an objective relation between what it means to be male and the reception of an “indelible spiritual character” that causes those receiving ordination to sacramentally image Christ.

Read the Whole Article

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The forced expulsions of students at Harvard, Columbia, and other universities who had organized student demonstrations against Israel’s ongoing genocide to eliminate Gazans, and the U.S. Government’s penalizing of (such as withdrawal of research contracts with) those universities for having allowed those demonstrations to take place, are well known examples of the totalitarian thought-control by the U.S. regime. But less well known is the U.S. regime’s enforcement of this censorship upon its vassal regimes, such as Germany, which consequently impose similar mass thought-control, though under their own legal systems.

In the German case, it is essential background to know that the German Government’s renewed obsession to conquer Russia is largely a restoration of Hitler’s regime but not yet at the active stage of the largest military battle in all of history, which was his Operation Barbarossa invasion of Russia during World War Two (WW2). Germany’s top objective at that time was to exterminate Jews and other ‘inferior races’, and its second objective was to enslave all citizens of the Soviet Union (especially Russians) after stealing their land and repopulating it by “Aryans” (purebred non-Jews) as the expansion of Germany’s “Lebensraum” or living-space, so that the German ‘master-race’ (German-Government certified “Aryans”) can then proceed to conquer all other lands, in their “Thousand-Year Reich” of enslaving all other peoples. It is essential to know that this was what the German version of racist-fascist-imperialist-supremacism, or the ideology of the Nazi Party, nazism, was aiming to do — because Germany has now declared itself yet again to be at war against Russia (though not yet in the hot war phase). But, of course, that version of nazism ended because Germany lost WW2; so, the present version of Germany’s (now subordinate to America’s) nazism is considerably modernized, and has no anti-Semitism (hatred of Jews), at all. Now, the number one enemy is openly declared to be Russians.

On 25 July 1945, the U.S. President, Harry Truman, had accepted the advices both of his personal hero General Dwight Eisenhower and of the UK’s Winston Churchill, that if the U.S. Government would not take over the world, then the Soviet Union would; and, so, that decision by Truman started the Cold War. His decision on that day, which he communicated to the Soviet leader Josef Stalin, was that though the countries the U.S. and UK had conquered from Hitler will be no business or concern of the Soviet Union, the countries that the Soviet Union had conquered from Hitler will be very much a concern of the U.S. and UK Governments and will not be recognized by them as legitimate unless and until the U.S. and UK Governments will have an effective veto-power over those Governments’ policies. Of course, Stalin rejected that demand; and, so, from that moment forward, the Cold War has existed. It even continued to exist after 1991 when the Soviet Union ended but America’s anti-Russian military alliance, NATO didn’t. However, all of this is among the U.S. empire’s basic truths that it does not allow to be published — that America started the Cold War and refused to end it.

Another basic fact that the U.S. empire does not allow to be published is that America’s President Barack Obama started the war in Ukraine in a coup that grabbed its neutralist Government and replaced it by an intensely anti-Russian government that immediately went to war against Ukraine’s Russian-speaking population, which constituted around 30% of Ukrainians, basically in Ukraine’s southeast, which was the area that revolted against the Obama-imposed new and rabidly anti-Russian government.

So, the war in Ukraine started as a civil war that resulted from the U.S. coup in Ukraine. (Here is the smoking gun evidence, the recording of Obama’s agent, Victoria Nuland, actually choosing whom to be appointed as the new — and rabidly anti-Russian — leader of Ukraine.) All of that is likewise prohibited to be published in Germany. Instead, as a judge in the case of the German subject Heinrich Bücker said in his ruling against Bücker, Russia was the aggressor in the war in Ukraine — had staarted that war. Bücker was prosecuted for “publicly approving a crime of aggression” (referring to Russia’s response on 24 February 2022 to Obama’s 2014 coup in Ukraine). Buecker was charged with approving in his speech what the judge called “Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in violation of international law, the illegality of which you knew.” (It WASN’T “illegal.” Article 51 of the U.N.’s Charter says that “Nothing in the present Charter shall impair the inherent right of individual or collective self-defence.” That was the provision which America’s President JFK had been relying upon in his actions during the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis, and which Putin likewise does in the Ukraine matter.)

On 31 January 2023, WSWS headlined “Peace activist sentenced for criticizing German war policy in Ukraine”, and reported:

The Berlin-Tiergarten District Court sentenced peace activist Heinrich Bücker in January for speaking out in public against Germany’s war policy in Ukraine. The verdict is a massive attack on the basic democratic rights of freedom of speech and assembly. …

Bücker is a member of the Association of the Persecuted of the Nazi Regime–League of Anti-Fascists (VVN-BdA) and the Left Party. …

On June 22, 2022, he gave a speech at the Soviet Memorial in Berlin’s Treptow Park on the 81st anniversary of Nazi Germany’s invasion of the Soviet Union, in which he condemned the cooperation of German politicians with former Nazi collaborators in Ukraine and expressed understanding for the views of the Russian president.

As a result, the judge at the local court, Tobias Pollmann, sentenced Bücker to a fine of €2,000, or 40 days imprisonment. His criminal offence under Section 140 of the Criminal Code had consisted of “publicly approving a crime of aggression (Section 13 of the International Criminal Code) in a manner likely to disturb the public peace at a meeting.”

The verdict was issued as a summary penalty order, which does not provide for an oral hearing of the defendant and examination of witnesses. The defendant can appeal within two weeks of the issuance of the penalty order, which Bücker reportedly did. If he had not done so, the penalty order is considered a final judgment, and appeals against it are then no longer possible. …

In the quoted paragraph, Bücker opposes cooperation with far-right forces in Ukraine:

“It is incomprehensible to me that German politicians are again supporting the same Russophobic ideologies on the basis of which the German [Nazi] Reich found willing helpers in 1941, with whom they closely cooperated and jointly carried out murder. All decent Germans should reject any cooperation with these forces in Ukraine against the background of German history, the history of millions of murdered Jews and millions and millions of murdered Soviet citizens in World War II. We must also vehemently reject the war rhetoric emanating from these forces in Ukraine. Never again must we as Germans be involved in any form of war against Russia. We must unite and oppose this madness together.” …

He opposed a renewed war by Germany against Russia and the support of a regime that hardly concealed its place in the tradition of Hitler’s Ukrainian allies at the time. …

The district court reasoned in convoluted and barely comprehensible language thus:

“Your speech has the potential—as you at any rate accept—to shake confidence in the rule of law and to inflame the psychological climate in the population, in view of the considerable consequences that the war will also have for Germany, the threats on the part of the Russian leadership specifically against Germany as a NATO member in the event of support for Ukraine, and not least in view of the presence of hundreds of thousands of people from Ukraine who have found refuge in Germany.”

Translated into understandable language, this means that anyone who criticizes German war policy shakes the confidence in the state and agitates the population. That is why they must be punished. …

It is meant to intimidate and silence any opposition and protest against German militarism. …

This was shortly followed by a ban on all Palestinian demonstrations on Nakba Day. A few months later, the Bundestag (federal parliament) tightened up the incitement of the people paragraph; now, anyone who questions alleged war crimes committed by a country that has just been demonized faces punishment. …

On 17 March 2023, The Gray Zone’s Max Blumenthal interviewed Bücker, and summarized and linked to the interview by saying:

——

14:23

Right now, in terms of the German

14:25

government, the German government loves

14:27

nazis. Now, yeah, they thought they

14:29

conquered the ghosts of their past, but

14:30

check out my [8 March 2023] interview with the veteran

14:32

anti-war activist Heinrich Buecker up at

14:35

the youtube channel. Heinrich gave a speech last year in

14:41

which he denounced the German government

14:43

for giving military aid to a government

14:45

that renamed the road to Babi Yar, where

14:48

tens of thousands of Jews were

14:49

slaughtered in the Holocaust by bullets,

14:51

after the man responsible, Stepan

14:54

Bandera. Yeah they literally renamed the

14:57

road to Babi Yar then, “Bandera

15:00

Boulevard.” And for him [Buecker] complaining, about it,

15:02

a lawyer issued a complaint and he [Buecker]

15:06

now faces a 2,000 Euro fine or 40 days

15:10

in prison at the hands of the German

15:12

State that’s arming these characters [Ukrainian nazis] and

15:14

giving them Leopard thanks.

15:17

I mean, this is one of the most

15:19

outrageous historical episodes, and to to

15:22

quote Sarah Wagenknecht, uh, we don’t want

15:26

to see

15:28

German weapons being used to kill

15:32

the grandchildren of the Russians who

15:35

were slaughtered by Germans in World War

15:37

II. Do you have historical Amnesia? Yes!

15:40

Yes, it’s not going to make up for it,

15:42

Germany, if you just give Israel some uh

15:46

fast boats so they can enforce the siege [starving to death]

15:48

of the ghettoized population of Gaza.

15:50

That doesn’t make up for the Holocaust.

15:52

It would make up for the Holocaust if

15:54

you stopped arming nazis and actually

15:56

condemned them.

15:57

——

On 2 May 2023, John Helmer headlined “BERLIN JUDGE RELEASES HEINRICH BUECKER BUT RULES RUSSIA IS WAGING AN “ILLEGAL WAR”, RESTRICTS THE GERMAN CONSTITUTION’S FREEDOM OF SPEECH TO PRIVATE, NOT PUBLIC AUDIENCES”, and reported that Germany decided not to punish what he did, because the size of his audience was too small to be significant. In other words: the prosecution had been only to warn others NOT to have a significant-sized audience. The judge ignored Germany’s constitution or “Basc Law” (drafted by the U.S. Government) whose Article 5 says “There shall be no censorship.” (Of course, the U.S. Government rampantly does likewise with regard to its First Amendment.) But this was how they now are censoring anyone who violates the Government’s line: by telling everyone that if it’s done effectively, the person definitely WILL be punished.

However, the case against Buecker was continued. Then, on 23 July 2024, Helmer headlined “THE BERLIN WALL FALLS AGAIN, THIS TIME ON THE STATE PROSECUTION OF HEINRICH BUECHER”. He quoted Buecker: “The court case against me was finally discontinued in July 2024. The acquittal is therefore final. This means that I will no longer be prosecuted for my speech on 22 June 2022 on the occasion of the anniversary of the so-called Operation Barbarossa in June 1941. The public prosecutor’s office has now withdrawn the appeal against the acquittal, which was already issued in February 2024. As the operator of the COOP Anti-War Café, I was initially sentenced to pay a fine of 2,000 euros, alternatively 40 days in prison. The charge was ‘rewarding and approving crimes’ under Section 140 of the Criminal Code. We had appealed against the penalty order. The first public main hearing took place at the end of April 2023 at the Tiergarten District Court and ended with an acquittal. The public prosecutor’s office appealed against this. This meant that the case went to the next court level. The new trial took place on February 26, 2024 at the Berlin Regional Court and the court decided on acquittal. The public prosecutor’s office had initially appealed the verdict again, but has now withdrawn it after several months.”

This article was originally published on Eric’s Substack.

The post The U.S. Empire’s Total Censoring-Out of the Basic Truths appeared first on LewRockwell.

After reaching an agreement with President Trump, David Ellison—the son of the second-richest man in the world, Larry Ellison—has acquired Paramount Global, the media giant that owns CBS News.

Larry Ellison, the largest private funder of the Israel Defense Forces, is deeply tied to the Israeli national security state and counts Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu among his closest friends.

David has already announced significant changes at CBS, promising “unbiased” news coverage and “varied ideological perspectives,” which are widely understood to signal a shift toward right-wing, pro-Trump coverage. Worse still, Bari Weiss, a journalist with a long history of zealous pro-Israel advocacy, is being considered as the network’s new ombudsman, shaping its political direction, precisely because of her “pro-Israel stance.”

MintPress News examines Ellison’s close ties to both Trump and Israel, Weiss’s extensive career as Israel’s most vocal supporter in the U.S., and what this means for the future of free and diverse speech in America.

Israel’s Man In Silicon Valley

Although Skydance, Ellison’s media empire, is officially headed by David, it is well understood that father Larry holds both the purse strings and the reins of power. With a net worth of $301 billion, placing him second on the Forbes Real-Time Billionaires Rankings, Larry made his fortune by founding tech giant Oracle.

Oracle started as a project for the Central Intelligence Agency. Indeed, it is named after Project Oracle, a 1970s CIA operation on which Ellison worked. For some time, the CIA was Oracle’s only customer, until it began to win contracts with other agencies of the U.S. national security state. Today, although Oracle’s customer base is much wider, it maintains its role as the privatized face of the CIA.

Yet if Oracle is close to Washington and Langley, it is perhaps even more intimately tied to the State of Israel. An avowed Zionist, Ellison has worked tirelessly to advance Israel’s political project. Among his closest personal friends is Benjamin Netanyahu, with whom he vacationed on his private island in Hawaii. Ellison was so impressed and confident in the Israeli prime minister that he offered him a seat on his company’s board, replete with a salary of $450,000.

While Oracle has signed multiple lucrative contracts with the Israeli national security state, Ellison himself has personally bankrolled the Israeli Defense Forces, giving tens of millions of dollars to the Friends of the IDF, an organization that purchases equipment for the Israeli military. This included a $16.6 million pledge (the largest single donation the group has received) to build a new training facility for soldiers defending what he called “our home.” As Ellison explained:

In my mind, there is no greater honor than supporting some of the bravest people in the world, and I thank Friends of the IDF for allowing us to celebrate and support these soldiers year after year. We should do all we can to show these heroic soldiers that they are not alone.”

Oracle sees itself as an activist organization, one whose goal is the advancement of the Israeli colonization project. Safra Catz, the company’s Israeli-American CEO, bluntly explained that any employees uncomfortable with supporting a genocide should simply quit. “We are not flexible regarding our mission, and our commitment to Israel is second to none,” she said, adding:

This is a free world and I love my employees, and if they don’t agree with our mission to support the State of Israel, then maybe we aren’t the right company for them. Larry and I are publicly committed to Israel and devote personal time to the country, and no one should be surprised by that.”

For a deep dive into Oracle and its connections to both U.S. and Israeli power, read the MintPress News investigation, “Openly Pro-Israel Tech Group Now Has Control over UK’s Most Sensitive National Security Data.”

CBS’s New Censor

Thus, the news that the son of the world’s second-richest man – one with such close connections to U.S. and Israeli state power – is purchasing one of America’s most influential news outlets should already worry anyone who cares about a free and independent press.

However, the news that the Ellisons are planning to buy out Bari Weiss’ publication, The Free Press, and give her control over the newsroom at CBS is even more startling. As part of the package to rubber-stamp the deal, Skydance had promised to hire Weiss as an ombudsman to address political bias and stamp out diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) practices.

Weiss is a highly controversial figure in the media world, known primarily for her stridently pro-Israel views and for attempts to popularize reactionary, anti-woke thinkers and opinions into the American mainstream. Her positions on the Middle East appear to have landed her the job. As The Financial Times noted, “Weiss has won over Ellison partly by taking a pro-Israel stance, according to people familiar with the matter.”

Weiss will be a “key voice” at CBS News, with one insider source telling The New York Times that she will have “an influential role in shaping the editorial sensibilities” at the outlet.

The news of what some fear will amount to a pro-Israel censor mirrors recent events at TikTok. The social media giant has recently hired former IDF soldier and Israel lobbyist, Erica Mindel, to oversee its online hate speech policy, with particular regard to antisemitism.

Mindel is far from the first former Israeli official parachuted into a position of power at the company, however. A MintPress News investigation revealed that in November 2023, TikTok hired Reut Medalion, a former Israeli intelligence commander, as its global incident manager. Considering what Israel was doing at that time in Gaza, it is fair to wonder what sorts of “global incidents” the ex-spy was working on.

These moves appear to be attempts to placate the Trump administration, which banned TikTok in no small part due to the effect viral videos of Israeli war crimes were having on public support for Palestine. Trump himself tried to force through a sale of TikTok to an American buyer. His close friend, Larry Ellison, was his preferred candidate. “I’d like Larry to buy it,” he said.

Bari Weiss’s Long, Controversial Career

Weiss first came to notoriety while still in college, where she founded an organization that accused Muslim and Arab professors of anti-Jewish racism, attempting to have them fired. Chief among these was renowned Jordanian scholar Joseph Massad, whom Weiss accused of intimidating her and other pro-Israel students during classes. The attempt failed, but it put Weiss’ name on the map. After finishing college, she secured prestigious jobs in Israeli media and managed to parlay those into columnist positions at The Wall Street Journal and, later, The New York Times.

It was at The Times where Weiss introduced reactionary academics to a broader, liberal audience. In an influential article entitled “Meet the Renegades of the Intellectual Dark Web,” she profiled a number of individuals, including Jordan Peterson, Sam Harris, Dave Rubin, Douglas Murray, and Bret Weinstein, all of whom have pushed conservative or even far-right ideas, and nearly all of whom have been passionate supporters of Israel’s actions in Gaza and beyond.

In 2020, however, she spectacularly left her New York Times sinecure, claiming that the organization was an echo chamber of leftist views. The following year, she started a Substack blog that would later be renamed “The Free Press.”

Since its beginnings, journalist Branko Marcetic has noted, The Free Press has been among the loudest supporters of Israeli actions, spreading what he calls “insidious propaganda” and “outright disinformation.”

In 2021, Weiss defended the slaughter of over 50 Palestinian civilians, including children, as “Zionism’s dream turned into the reality of self-determination,” by a state “surrounded by enemies making hard decisions about how to protect its citizens.” She had previously blamed rising antisemitism in Europe on Muslim immigration.

In May 2024, The Free Press falsely reported that the United Nations had “admitted” that Gaza’s civilian death toll was vastly lower than previously claimed. It wrote that mass starvation is “pro-Hamas propaganda,” despite even President Trump acknowledging the reality. And it claimed that an Israeli massacre of Palestinian aid seekers did not happen.

It has also repeatedly attempted to shield Israel from blame over its attacks on health centers, claiming that Hamas itself might have destroyed the al-Ahli Hospital. Yet Weiss herself appeared to justify attacks on other Gaza clinics.

“Every Palestinian knows [the al-Shifa hospital] is full of [armed militants], but nobody can talk,” she wrote on Twitter, referencing a Free Press interview purporting to be with an anonymous Gaza resident.

Targeting Palestinians, Wikipedia

It is even possible that Weiss’s actions resulted in deaths. In October 2023, Weiss singled out a joke from Gazan writer and educator Refaat Alareer made in response to the outlandish (and debunked) claim that Palestinian militants had burned an Israeli baby alive during the October 7 attacks.

“Here is Refaat Alareer joking about whether or not an Israeli baby, burned alive in an oven, was cooked ‘with or without baking powder,’” Weiss wrote.

Alareer was subject to a torrent of abuse and stated that Weiss’s words had put a target on his back. “If I get killed by Israeli bombs or my family is harmed, I blame Bari Weiss,” he said, adding, “Many maniacal Israeli soldiers already bombing Gaza take these lies and smears seriously and act upon them.” Barely one month later, Alareer was assassinated in a deliberate Israeli airstrike.

Another target in Weiss’s sights is Wikipedia. Since the online encyclopedia labeled the pro-Israel pressure group the Anti-Defamation League as an unreliable source, The Free Press has been on a campaign against it. Calling it a “propaganda site,” The Free Press has joined forces with Trump’s Department of Justice to remove Wikipedia’s nonprofit status to pressure it into becoming more pro-Israel.

“Bari could not have chosen a more Orwellian term for her authoritarian news outlet taking a wrecking ball to Western institutions on behalf of Israel,” wrote journalist Ryan Grim.

The Free Press certainly has many powerful backers, having drawn investment from venture capitalists such as Marc Andreessen and David Sacks, as well as from former Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz.

Yet the price being quoted to Skydance for the sale of what remains little more than a Substack blog is remarkable: between $200 million and $250 million. For context, in 2013, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos paid $250 million for The Washington Post, one of the world’s most widely read and most influential news outlets.

Major Changes at CBS

While Weiss’s mission at CBS News appears straightforward, the organization is far from a hotbed of pro-Palestine sentiment. The network repeated highly dubious Anti-Defamation League claims of a supposed wave of antisemitism sweeping across America, and constantly uses Israeli talking points, such as adding the label “Hamas-run” when describing the Gaza Health Ministry.

A MintPress News investigation found that it has also hired a myriad of former Israeli soldiers and lobbyists to produce its news. Gili Malinsky, for example, was a commander in the IDF’s public relations department, leading a unit dedicated to communicating the Israeli military’s story with the outside world. She also worked at the Friends of the IDF before accepting a job as a staff writer at CBS.

Malinsky is not alone. Erica Scott, CBS News’ editorial producer, was formerly the Anti-Defamation League’s media and communications specialist. Betsy Shuller, another CBS News producer, previously worked as a public relations associate at Hillel International, a pro-Israel group.

Nevertheless, it appears that placating Trump by promising a more right-wing editorial line was part of the deal to secure the administration’s approval of the gigantic media acquisition. In addition to Weiss, Skydance has vowed to end all DEI policies at the company. Furthermore, it agreed to pay Trump a $16 million settlement regarding a defamation lawsuit he launched last October against its flagship news and politics show, “60 Minutes.” Many have seen this action as little more than a payoff. Liberal comedian and talk show host Stephen Colbert described the move as a “big fat bribe.” Just days afterward, Paramount announced it was canceling Colbert’s long-running CBS show.

Others have chosen to jump before they were pushed. Citing a loss of journalistic independence, “60 Minutes” editor Bill Owens stepped down in April. More recently, CBS News chief, Wendy McMahon, left, citing an impossible work environment and a changing political outlook.

“Resistance” Media Embrace MAGA

The Ellison CBS acquisition reflects broader developments in a rapidly changing U.S. media ecosystem, as the Trump administration’s hardline tactics prompt the press to bow to its demands. Earlier this year, CNN executives announced they would shift their political outlook from pro-Democrat to more centrist, explicitly instructing their employees not to criticize Trump. In January, the network’s CEO, Mark Thompson, held multiple meetings with editors, instructing them to be “fair-minded” with Trump and not to “pre-judge” his second term in office. Anchors were also told not to “express outrage” during Trump’s inauguration. Several key CNN faces, including anchor Jim Acosta (who lost his White House press credentials after a spat with Trump), left the network.

MSNBC hosts Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski, often seen as the faces of the Democratic “resistance” to Trump during his first term in office, publicly stated that they were changing their editorial stance towards the president. “Joe and I realized it’s time to do something different,” Brzezinski explained to their viewers. “That starts with not only talking about Donald Trump, but also talking with him,” she added, revealing that the pair had traveled to Mar-a-Lago to meet with the incoming president personally.

Other networks that have not adapted have perished. Earlier this week, the Trump administration cut its funding to NPR and PBS, with both networks facing closure in the near future. A similar Trump power play also led to the shutdown of Voice of America, only for it to be reborn in June under different leadership and a new political outlook.

Likewise, social media has gone through a similar transformation. In January, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced that his platforms (Facebook and Instagram) would be “prioritizing free speech,” and would move their content moderation operations from California to Texas, where there is less concern about “the bias of our teams.”

He also noted that former U.K. Liberal Democrat Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg was being replaced as the company’s President of Global Affairs by Trump loyalist and former White House Deputy Chief of Staff Joel Kaplan. Close Trump confidant Dana White, the CEO of the Ultimate Fighting Championship, was appointed to Meta’s board of directors, a move that was almost universally seen as a very public bending of the knee to the MAGA movement.

Facebook’s transformation into a more overtly right-wing platform mirrors that of Twitter, which was acquired in 2022 by Elon Musk, a top Trump supporter and unofficial cabinet member. Musk’s moves, including openly encouraging far-right and other racist sentiment on the platform, led to millions of liberal users leaving it, migrating to smaller sites, such as Bluesky or Mastodon.

TikTok, meanwhile, despite hiring State Department officials and Israeli spies and soldiers to run its internal affairs, continues to be in the Trump administration’s crosshairs.

Ultimately, the news that the son of the world’s second-richest billionaire is hiring such a zealously pro-Israel provocateur – one who has built a career advancing dubious narratives and stoking anti-Muslim sentiment–to help steer one of the country’s most influential newsrooms should raise serious concerns for anyone who values independent journalism.

The CBS News/Bari Weiss saga underscores the twin threats of oligarchic media control and the expanding influence of pro-Israel lobbying on public discourse. It marks a troubling point in the broader decline of journalistic independence in the U.S., as state-aligned interests work to suppress dissent and sustain support for Israel’s actions in Gaza.

This article was originally published on MintPress News.

The post Israel’s Biggest US Donor Now Owns CBS appeared first on LewRockwell.

I started to feel guilty, in reacting on social media to New York City Democratic nominee Zohran Kwame Mamdani: to this immediate legacy-media darling, this Uganda-born, collectivization-advocating, smugly smiling, beautifully beard-groomed Bowdoin graduate, whose expensive, cleverly packaged Mayoral race launched him into our collective consciousness a few months ago, out of thin air. I try never to be personal, in my political assessments, and I feel guilty because my reaction to Mamdani is so personally aversive.

It is aversive because of the lie-and-deception factor.

Mamdani, as I will reveal, is a nepo son dressed as a communist — but a communist takeover of NYC is not what really motivates this man, not what is really behind this campaign.

Apart from the full-spectrum communist agenda which Mamdani superficially offers, one reason for my sense of personal queasiness when I consider this candidate in various settings is because I know guys like this. Though I am of another generation, some things do not change.

I went to school with guys like this. They are Jaspers. Let’s call that archetypal guy, Jasper.

Here is Jasper with the classic graphic Marxist raised fists and the Chinese communist graphic sun rays:

Jaspers are smarmy legacy rich young men, who never had to work for money in their lives; who have that one darling, costume-y thing – that raffish curl over the forehead; or who wear that quirky fisherman’s cap, or that Palestinian jelabiya, though they hail from Darien, Connecticut — and who embrace the cause of “the workers,” abstractly, or, in my day, say, of the Marxists in El Salvador.

“The people! United! Will never be defeated!” That’s for the march on the campus green. Then — let’s all go have a latte at the dining club.

This cosplay lasts just so long, before they go back to scooping up the vast privileges of their perches on the better-paid edges of the visual arts, or of filmmaking, as they let the interest in their trust funds compound.

In my experience, when it comes down to their personal wellbeing and comfort, I have learned that Jaspers will, right-on pronouncements or no, personally sacrifice nothing.

That’s why I was not surprised when the news broke that Zohran Mamdani lives in a rent-stabilized $2300 a month one-bedroom apartment in Queens. His supporters flocked to defend this situation, stating that there are no income caps for rent-stabilized apartments. That is true now, but was not true from 2011 to 2019; if Mamdani’s $142,000 plus salary, in addition to any other income he had, rose above the cap of $200,000 a year, or if his now-wife or another household member was living with him then, and earning income over $58,000, Mamdani would have been in violation of the program regulations, which were obviously designed to help struggling middle- and working-class New Yorkers: “Between July 1, 2011, and June 13, 2019: [the limit for rent-stabilized housing was] household income above $200,000 for two consecutive years, with the rent at or above $2,500 initially, then adjusted to $2,700 and increasing annually.”

Why am I nitpicking about this? It matters.

One reason is economic unfairness. The average Queens market rate one-bedroom is $4216 a month. So if Mamdani is now living in a rent-stabilized apartment he secured in violation of the pre-2019 rules, he is saving $1916 a month, or $22,992 a year. Now, imagine that you are a trust fund kid and don’t need those savings to live on. Watch it compound. Watch your money, in contrast, — if you need it to live on from month to month — not compound.

Mamdani’s privileged smarminess in taking up an apartment, in violation of the regulations or not, that was clearly intended to benefit people who can’t afford to pay more — and then his defending that decision by hairsplitting — is typical of how these rich young men behave. The Jaspers are always letting others pick up the check. They are always finding the loophole, the tax write-off, the way around the rules, that does not apply to the boring, hardworking rest of us. And their hypocrisy in doing so, even while presenting themselves as champions of the downtrodden, is never, ever evident to them.

I saw the same character pattern when it came to Mamdani’s application to Columbia University. Now, all of us overachievers heading to elite universities, at 19, desperately tried to see if there were ways to get an advantage in the application process. There is nothing unusual about that. But Mamdani’s Columbia University application is a kind of Mobius Strip of wokeness, twisting in upon itself and ending up on an indeterminate plane: Mamdani’s father was a Columbia University professor, so already his application would have garnered favorable attention not available to non-faculty kids. So he is already privileged as a “legacy.” Plus he descends from wealthy parents, which counts, as Ivies are expensive. But no! He sought to compound his actual double privilege with purported double victimization/oppression. So he checked “Black or African American” and “Asian” on his application, and wrote in “Ugandan.”

The New York Times reported:

“Asked to identify his race, he checked a box that he was “Asian” but also “Black or African American,” according to internal data derived from a hack of Columbia University that was shared with The New York Times.

Columbia, like many elite universities, used a race-conscious affirmative action admissions program at the time. Reporting that his race was Black or African American in addition to Asian could have given an advantage to Mr. Mamdani, who was born in Uganda and spent his earliest years there.”

When The New York Times sought a response, Mamdani “said his answers on the college application were an attempt to represent his complex background given the limited choices before him, not to gain an upper hand in the admissions process […]

“Most college applications don’t have a box for Indian-Ugandans, so I checked multiple boxes trying to capture the fullness of my background,” said Mr. Mamdani, a state lawmaker from Queens.’“‘

He could, of course, have written in “Indian-Ugandan” rather than checking “Black or African American”. He is neither Black nor African American.

But no.

And it is Jasper’s language too that sets my teeth on edge, with that flourish of “the fullness of my background.” Do we of whiteness have no “fullness of background”?

(As it happened, Mamdani did not get into Columbia. He went to Maine’s liberal arts college Bowdoin, in which he majored in “Africana Studies.” He also wrote several student pieces attacking “Zionists” and criticizing his own newspaper for its lack of “diversity of opinion,” calling that omission of viewpoints the action of “white supremacists”.

He may deeply believe all these things. But New Yorkers, who actually are diverse, deserve to understand that Jasper/Zohran, who declines to condemn the term “globalize the Intifada”, sees their rich, multicultural city, as if it is divided into warring race- and religion-based factions; not as a melting pot in which we all are individuals, and in which we all become New Yorkers.)

Lastly, there is Jasper’s purchase or inheritance (unclear) of what he calls raw land in Uganda. The New York Post states that Mamdani owns four acres of unimproved raw land, valued at $150,000-200000. Where is it? No location disclosed.

“A quarter of a century after moving to the U.S., Mamdani’s net worth today is still based in the East African country from which he emigrated. According to the financial disclosures he filed as a state assemblyman in 2023, he acquired four acres of land in Jinja—a region of Uganda bordering Lake Victoria that contains the source of the Nile River—in 2012. He lists the land’s value as between $150,000 and $250,000. On the disclosure he filed as a mayoral candidate earlier this year, he says that he acquired the land in 2016 and that it remains vacant and unimproved. Whether he purchased it, was gifted it, inherited it or otherwise is unclear, as is the reason for the discrepancy in the date, and his campaign did not immediately reply to a request for comment.”

This is a weird business deal, because here is what you can get for $144,000 in Uganda. This is the Cadenza luxury apartment building, presented by Vaal Real Estate: you can get a one-bedroom luxury apartment with a barbecue area, track, swimming pool, gym, paddle court, restaurant, concierge and “aroma garden.” “Nestled in the vibrant heart of Nakasero, Cadenza Residence is a living composition of Studios, 1 and 2 bedrooms that redefines the meaning of luxury living in Kampala. Neighboring several embassies, and with the Parliament of Uganda, State House, and the United Nations office nearby, Cadenza Residence’s location in this blue zone area guarantees security and prestige”:

Leaving aside the issue of why there is so much murkiness (two purchase dates, huge valuation) around these four mystery unimproved acres of Ugandan land, and of what all that may mean in entrusting Mamdani, who was a rapper before he was an Assemblyman, who has had almost no jobs (one was for his mom), who has no business background at all, — a man who passed only three bills as an Assembly member and who was absent half of the time, with the highest absentee rate in the Assembly – with the management of the most valuable real estate infrastructure in America, and with a $2.1 trillion dollar economy, the largest metropolitan economy on earth —

Why are almost all of this candidates’ assets still located in a foreign country?

Mamdani became a naturalized citizen only in 2018, the year before he ran for office. Indeed, he is not solely an American citizen. He is a dual citizen.

His marriage is offshore, his land is offshore.

Why would you come to America at 7 and only become a naturalized citizen decades later, just before you run for office in America? If you believe in New York City, why not bring your assets to New York City? Of you really care about America, why do you need two passports?

Why not give one up and just be — an American?

Are you so attached to an identity as citizen of one of the worst regimes on earth — one that engages in arbitrary arrest and detention, assassinates activists, restricts freedoms of speech, and has some of the worst laws on earth against homosexuality — that you would rather cling to being a national of that country, than simply an American?

Why?

In only 2023, Uganda got rid of the death penalty in general for homosexuality, but, according to Amnesty International, “The court upheld provisions in the law that discriminate against LGBTI people and carry harsh penalties, including the death penalty, for “aggravated homosexuality” and up to 20 years’ imprisonment for the “promotion of homosexuality”. “

Seriously.

Seriously Jasper.

Why not just be an American? Why not just be an actual New Yorker?

Are you proud of this?

Zohran Mamdani is like a socially acceptable drug for guilty affluent white people.

I remember when I first saw his campaign material. It seemed so lulling and seductive — like a hunk of excellent hashish wrapped up in the trappings of a political campaign. But when you drill into it, it really amounts to: free everything.

Read the Whole Article

The post Why Don’t I Like Him? appeared first on LewRockwell.

The common denominator is India’s rivalry with China.

Trump recently made a show of doubling his 25% tariffs on India as punishment for its continued purchase of Russian energy and military-technical equipment. Influenced by Lindsey Graham, he expected that India would dump Russia after the costs of doing business with it spiked, the Kremlin would thus lose this important foreign revenue flow, and then Putin would make concessions to Ukraine in exchange for lifting these secondary sanctions in to avoid bankruptcy. Here’s why India defied the US:

———-

1. The “Voice Of The Global South” Can’t Bow To US Demands

India has presented itself as the “Voice of the Global South” since it hosted the first of these namesake summits in January 2023. It’s sought to play this role by virtue of being the most populous among them, commanding the largest economy of them all, and having the fast-growing one too. India is also one of the founders of the Non-Aligned Movement. If it bows to US demands, then it’ll cede leadership of the Global South to China, which India doesn’t consider to be part of this category of countries anymore.

2. Discounted Russian Energy Accelerates India’s Economic Rise

India is the world’s fastest-growing major economy and on pace to become the third-largest by 2028 due in no small part to its massive import of discounted Russian energy. Not only would India scramble to replace Russia’s one-third share of its oil supplies, which would lead to a surge in global prices that would decelerate its growth, but Russia would probably sell more oil to China at an even steeper discount to replace some of its lost revenue. That would be doubly bad for India’s objective interests.

3. India Can’t Defend Itself From China & Pakistan Without Russia

Most of India’s military equipment is still Soviet/Russian despite the decade-long trend of diversifying its defense suppliers and promoting indigenous production. India is therefore still reliant on Russian ammo and spare parts. Accordingly, it wouldn’t be able to defend itself from China and Pakistan without Russia, which is an unacceptable position to be in. In fact, some in India might suspect that the US wants to leave them at their mercy, perhaps as part of a Machiavellian deal to contain or even dismember India.

4. Trump Is Hellbent On Derailing India’s Rise As A Great Power

Building upon the above, this eponymous analysis here explains Trump’s geostrategic machinations vis-à-vis India as of late, which are predicated on subordinating it as vassal state. Frankly speaking, India is rising too fast and becoming too independent of a force to be reckoned with in global affairs for the US’ comfort, which fears that this will hasten the decline of its unipolar hegemony. Attempting to place India in a permanent position of dependence and vulnerability is one way to possibly avert this scenario.

5. India Can’t Allow Russia To Become China’s “Junior Partner”

The earlier points contextualize this one by highlighting the importance that Russia plays in India’s grand strategy. Even if India maintained military-technical ties with Russia, if it curtailed or cut off oil imports, then Russia would still likely become China’s “junior partner” due to the even greater economic-financial role that China would play for it. That could lead to the dangerous scenario of China pressuring Russia to curtail or cut off arms, ammo, and spares to India, thus placing it at China’s and Pakistan’s mercy.

———-

As can be seen, the common denominator between these five reasons why India defied US pressure to dump Russia is its rivalry with China, which India calculated would inevitably benefit if it complied. The grand strategic costs of allowing that to happen are considered to be much greater than the financial ones imposed by the US. In fact, the US might even lift some of the latter as part of a compromise with Russia during the upcoming Putin-Trump Summit, which would be an indisputable victory for India.

This article was originally published on Andrew Korybko’s Newsletter.

The post India Defied US Pressure To Dump Russia for These Five Reasons appeared first on LewRockwell.

In 1687, Isaac Newton published his monumental book, Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica, often shortened to Principia, in which he presented the foundation for classical mechanics and universal gravitation. The book dazzled natural philosophers all over Europe and the British American colonies, and was a milestone in the so-called “Scientific Revolution” of observing and analyzing the natural world.

Shortly thereafter, natural philosophers began to contemplate the possibility that Newton’s method for observing and measuring bodies in motion could be applied to the human body, mind, and society.

It didn’t take long for some critical observers—most notably Jonathan Swift—to note that this endeavor could quickly become preposterous and pernicious. In his Gulliver’s Travels, published in 1726, Swift depicted the scientists and astronomers on the Island of Laputa as having completely taken leave of common sense and practical knowledge due to their obsession with abstract theories and their pursuits that are often more harmful than beneficial.

In 1936, the Austrian-Czech philosopher, Edmund Husserl, published The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology in which he pointed out that, in our world of “lived experience,” we rarely apply scientific principles.

For example, when someone smiles at you, you don’t see the person’s facial nerves and muscles working together to contort the face— you see an expression of joy or sympathy, tenderness, or desire. Only a moronic weirdo would try to reduce the experience of receiving a smile to the measurement and action of nerves and muscles.

Such was the sort of dummy that Evelyn Waugh satirized in the character of Professor Otto Silenus—a young German architect— in the 1928 novel Decline and Fall. As Professor Silenus describes “the problem of architecture”:

The problem of architecture as I see it,’ he told a journalist who had come to report on the progress of his surprising creation of ferro-concrete and aluminium, ‘is the problem of all art—the elimination of the human element from the consideration of form. The only perfect building must be the factory, because that is built to house machines, not men. I do not think it is possible for domestic architecture to be beautiful, but I am doing my best. All ill comes from man,’ he said gloomily; ‘please tell your readers that. Man is never beautiful; he is never happy except when he becomes the channel for the distribution of mechanical forces.’

The result of commissioning guys like Otto Silenus—a thinly veiled caricature of Walter Gropius—to design major buildings is that no one wants to walk around and hang out in cold modernist cityscapes in which the human element has been eliminated. Instead, tens of millions of tourists flock to the old cities of Europe that were built in accordance with the “lived experience” of their inhabitants, and not abstract “scientific” principles.

To understand why, compare the way you feel when sitting on an old piazza in Rome, surrounded by Baroque buildings, to the way you feel sitting in a modern airport.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, when the world was de facto governed by a group of so-called “scientific experts,” I often thought about the idiot scientists on the Island of Laputa and of Professor Otto Silenus.

Generally speaking, I believe that “scientific experts”—with their God of Scientism—should never be given positions of executive authority when it comes to making decisions about complex public policy issues. The scientists should have one seat at the table, along with people who understand the limitations of empirical science in managing human affairs.

This article was originally published on Courageous Discourse.

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