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On September 26th, Ukraine’s leader Volodmyr Zelensky and America’s possibly next President Kamala Harris, held a brief conversation as a U.S. White House “briefing,” a category which differs from a White House “press conference” because none of the press are present at a “briefing,” no questions are taken, and no video of the event is released — consequently, only a transcript of this conversation has been released to the public. This transcript is headlined “Remarks by Vice President Harris and President Volodymyr Zelenskyy of Ukraine Before Bilateral Meeting”. Its contents are very important for anyone who intends to vote in the U.S. Presidential election. Here are highlights, with added commentaries by me [in italics placed between brackets]:

VICE PRESIDENT HARRIS: This is our seventh visit together. And welcome back to Washington, D.C. As I have made clear on our six previous meetings and throughout Putin’s brutal aggression and war against Ukraine, my support for the people of Ukraine is unwavering. … I will work to ensure Ukraine prevails in this war.

[Her phrase “Putin’s brutal aggression” is founded upon the false presumption that this war was started by Russia’s Government on 24 February 2022, and NOT by the United States Government on 20 February 2014, which was the actual case.]

To be safe, secure, and prosperous, the United States must continue to fulfill our long-standing role of global leadership. We must stand with our allies and our partners. We must des- — defend our democratic values and stand up to aggressors. And we must stand for international order, rules, and norms.

[Like all neoconservatives do, she presumes that “To be safe, secure, and prosperous, the United States must continue to fulfill our long-standing role of global leadership,” or, in other words, that the continuation of America’s leadership of the world ever since 25 July 1945, is essential in order for the American people “to be safe, secure, and prosperous”; and, so, America will have to be the world’s very first imperial power that will be permanent, even if the United States Government will, at some point in the future, have no possible way of continuing its dominance without initiating WW3 — a nuclear war between superpowers — in order to retain this position of global leadership into the future. Furthermore: her phrase “stand up to aggressors” ignores that the U.S. Government itself has led the entire world in international invasions, coups, subversions, sanctions and other forms of aggressions, ever since 25 July 1945; and, so, is like a black kettle calling a gray kettle “black” and so is hypocritical in the extreme. Furthermore: her statement that “we must stand for international order, rules, and norms” conspicuously AVOIDS mentioning international laws — which the U.S. Government seeks to REPLACE by its “international rules,” so that it can do whatever it wants, as ‘justified’ by its “international rules-based order”. Of course, these propagandists NEVER cite the SOURCE of those ‘rules’.] …

The Ukrainian people are bravely defending their homes and their homeland, their freedom, and their democracy against a brutal dictator.

[This presumes that the start of Ukraine’s war was on 24 February 2022 when Russia invaded, whereas even Zelensky and NATO’s Secretary General Stoltenberg have admitted that that’s not so and that this war started in 2014 when Obama did his coup in Ukraine. Furthermore: whereas she there presumes that what this actual coup had created in Ukraine was a democracy, it was instead ending Ukraine’s brief democracy and introducing the current U.S. dictatorship there.] …

Putin’s aggression is not only an attack on the people of Ukraine, it is also an attack on fundamental principles such as sovereignty and territorial integrity.

[What does a foreign-based coup do to a nation’s “sovereignty and territorial integrity”? In the case of Ukraine, it started a separatist war, which on 24 February 2022 became an international war. Again: Obama, and not Putin, STARTED this war against Russia.]

International rules and norms are not some abstract notion. They provide order and stability in our world. … History has shown us if we allow aggressors like Putin to take land with impunity, they keep going. And Putin could set his sights on Poland, the Baltic states, and other NATO Allies.

[She is now engaging in the same “falling dominoes” lie that ‘justified’ America’s invasion and military occupation of Vietnam for over a decade. There has never been ANY indication that Putin’s purpose in invading Ukraine on 24 February 2022 was to expand Russia’s territory, but the U.S.-and-‘allied’ war against Russia in Ukraine has forced Russia to do this so as to AVOID becoming checkmated by having a nuclear missile positioned only 317 miles away from The Kremlin.] …

Putin started this war, and he could end it tomorrow if he simply withdrew his troops from Ukraine’s sovereign territory.  Of course, he has demonstrated no intention of doing that. … There are some in my country who would instead force Ukraine to give up large parts of its sovereign territory, who would demand that Ukraine accept neutrality, and would require Ukraine to forego security relationships with other nations. These proposals are the same of those of Putin. And let us be clear: They are not proposals for peace. Instead, they are proposals for surrender, which is dangerous and unacceptable.

PRESIDENT ZELENSKYY: We need a just peace, and we must protect our people … from Putin’s evil. … It’s crucial for us to — to be fully understandable and to work in a full coordination with the United States. … We have to keep pressure on Russia to stop the war and to make truly lasting and just peace. … We need to keep sanctions against Russia strong … to protect Ukraine — our people, our cities, our front line — from Russian evil.

——

Also on Sepember 27th, I headlined both “UPDATED: The U.S. Presidential election is now overwhelmingly about whether to go to WW3 for Ukraine. This dwarfs every other issue.”, and “Why Kamala Harris Will Kill at Least 5 Billion People if She Becomes President”.

Reprinted with permission from Eric’s Substack.

The post What Kamala Harris Said to Volodmyr Zelensky on September 26th appeared first on LewRockwell.

I’ve not been a UFO person ever, other than think space means living in unpleasant steel tubes, which puts me off immediately. But two summers ago I was captured by Dr. Steven Greer, a former emergency room physician who has been fearlessly relentless in his pursuit of just what the Department of Defence has been doing with all that money and in that I include Catherine Austin Fitt’s missing $21 trillion.

Right now, stop of the entirely gamed New York Times bestseller list stands Imminent by Lue Elizondo, a former boots on the ground soldier from the working class who climbed his way up the Public Service Ladder to arrive at the coveted top of the tree. His job, once that was achieved, was to head upthe DOD’s Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program, or as AATIP, which was bent on investigating and documenting evidence of UAP’s and UFO’s.

After working there for years, Elizondo was forced by his conscience, as he tells it, to leave and work towards disclosure, because it became clear to him that the secrecy around this issue was toxic, destructive and wrong.

He walked away, leaving a lucrative and prestigious position, his very nice house, his security, into a hellstorm of controversy, where he has lived ever since. His wife was on board, so were his daughters. His financial crash was far more rapid than his climb, because he had walked, on principle, into insecurity. Taken up by Tom DeLongo of Blink 182, whose projects failed to find ongoing funding, he found himself living in a trailer somewhere in Idaho. With attack dogs. And his family who stood by him.

Nevertheless, he persisted.

That’s a precis. That is how strong this man is or appears to be. And his wife and daughters. And this is how brutalist our government is, how determined they are to hide the knowledge that could transform every life on earth from struggle to wealth and comfort within a generation.

Or, is this just another step in the sneaky disclosure project, apparently being led by the White Hats in the Department of Defence?

Hal went on to tell me something else that truly blew my mind. Four deceased nonhuman bodies were in fact recovered from the 1947 Roswell crash. After processing that, I fired off a slew of questions. In head, out mouth . . . “Have we recovered nonhuman bodies from other UAP crashes?” He looked at me as if debating how to answer. It was clear to me he wasn’t ready to tell me the answer. I was still the new guy. “We’ll tell you more soon enough,” he said.

“Is every incoming president told the truth?” “No.”

Elizondo’s book is viewed as a limited hangout by the UAP/UFO community because he laces through the book the question, the suspicion, that some of these powerful beings he is convinced exist do not have good intentions. His principal message is a warning. And that, per Stephen Greer and others, means he is still in the pocket of the DOD, allowed to publish the book as long as he made room for the Defence to control the arena.

This may well be true, there are passages in the book which are inked out; and no doubt when he wrote he self-censored. He further admits there is some information the public should not correctly know, not yet. But essentially (and this is a very readable book) the following is what he is saying. And bolstered to the max by the entirely reliable Annie Jacobson who interviewed Jacques Vallee and other leaders in the field.

Lue Elizondo’s main points:

1. The Department of Defence has been hiding the existence of UAPs or UFOs since the 1940’s, running a very effective discreditation game in the mainstream media, creating an “unremitting contempt and disdain by the mainstream press, the scientific community, and the US government”, in the words of Christopher Mellon, one of the two billionaires with their mitts deep in the issue. Mellon wrote a stirring hopeful preface for the book.

2. In 1953, in order to further discredit the existence of other worlds and critters, the idiots on a CIA panel “advised the Air Force to enlist the Walt Disney Company and the mass media in a campaign to debunk UAPs”. Universities were directed to disallow credits for any student interested in pursuing studies on this issue.

3. This was permitted by the Invention Secrecy Act of 1951, which stated that the U.S. Government was allowed to control the release of new technology that might threaten economic stability or national defence. Since then there have been an ever increasing amount of secrecy orders every year.

4.The DOD has been running super-soldier programs which worked with individuals with psychic abilities, including remote viewing. Elizondo was recruited into this program called Stargate.

“The best practitioners of remote viewing—Pat Price, Ingo Swann, Joe McMoneagle—achieve incredible results. From a couch on the west coast, Price penetrated a secret NSA location in West Virginia and correctly described identifying labels on manila file folders locked in a subterranean cabinet. In one session, Swann claimed to have remote viewed Jupiter and described its very thin rings, which would only be spotted and confirmed by unmanned probes years later.

Gene used to tell me, “You know, people with your gifts are rare.”

“I’m not gifted,” I’d say.

“Oh, yes, you are!” Turns out, we were both right.

The reality is, a large number of the population was and is capable of remote viewing. The training is rare, not the gift. I once heard a compelling explanation of remote viewing. I was told it is a vestigial ability early humans relied upon before the development of spoken language. Household pets rely on this sixth sense to determine if another animal is a threat. Before humans had words, we may have had this ability too.

An interesting thing about remote viewing is that it must be used for purely good intentions, and not for bad or for personal or selfish gain.”

(or apparently, else. Karma comes to visit)

5. “Vice Admiral Wilson, Director of the Defence Intelligence Agency, curious about certain black program line items in the budgets that crossed his desk, began asking questions. He got a meeting with representatives of a certain aerospace corporation—and their attorney. Wilson put his cards on the table: Just what were they doing with this specific line item? He discovered that the contractor was part of an extremely secret program focused on retrieving and reverse-engineering crashed advanced vehicles of unknown origin and not made by humans. I learned the larger program is referred to as the Legacy Program and involves various elements of the US government and US defense contractors.”

The legacy being the science that corporate aerospace outfits have and we, the people. who paid for it all, don’t.

Read the Whole Article

The post UAP Disclosure Must Be Imminent. An Entire New World Beckons appeared first on LewRockwell.

There is only one way to rescue America’s faltering economy and that’s the wholesale abandonment of Washington’s reckless spending, borrowing and printing policies of the last quarter century. These policies did not remotely attain their ostensible goals of more growth, more jobs and more purchasing power in worker pay envelopes. What they did do, of course, was to freight down the main street economy with crushing debts, dangerous financial bubbles, chronic inflation and stagnating living standards.

For want of doubt, go straight to the most basic economic metric we have—real compensation per labor hour. The latter metric not only deletes the inflation from the pay figures, but also measures the totality of worker compensation, including benefits for health care, retirement, vacation, disability, sick leave and other fringes.

Needless to say, the purple line below makes crystal clear that historic worker gains have ground to a complete halt.

Per Annum Increase In Real Hourly Compensation:

• Q1 1947 to Q1 2001: +1.79%.
• Q1 2001 To Q1 2020: +0.71%.
• Q1 2020 to Q2 2024: -0.01%.

It doesn’t get any cleaner than this. No matter how the White House, the Fed and the fawning financial press cherry pick the “incoming data” you flat-out can’t say the US economy is “strong” when the growth of the inflation-adjusted pay envelope of 161 million workers has deflated to the vanishing point. Indeed, it has literally been dead in the water for the last 52 months running.

 Real Nonfarm Worker Compensation per Hour, 1947 to 2024

Moreover, the above graph covers all workers, from the bottom to the top end of the wage scale. But when you look at the most recent trends for the highest paid jobs in the durable goods manufacturing sector, the stagnation has been even more dramatic. There has been zero net gain in real compensation per hour in this high-pay sector during the last 15 years; and an obvious contributor to that baleful outcome has been the surge of inflation since 2020 when Washington went off the deep-end with fiscal stimmies and upwards of $5 trillion of newly minted central bank credit.

And we do mean deep-end. During the one-year pandemic stimmy bacchanalia, Washington spent $6.5 trillion on a one-time basis or 150% of the regular Federal budget for war, welfare and everything else as of 2019. At the same time, the Fed printed $5 trillion of new credit during the 30 months between October 2019 and March 2022, which was more than it had printed during the first 106 years of its existence!

In any event, these reckless fiscal and monetary policies had long since caused much of the high productivity, high-pay industrial sector to be off-shored. Yet that happened not because free market capitalism has a death wish in America. It happened because Washington policies generated so much internal cost and nominal wage inflation that vendors of goods to the retail markets had no choice except to source from far lower dollar cost venues abroad, and most especially China and its associated supply chains.

Inflation-Adjusted Compensation in Durable Goods Manufacturing, 2010 to 2024

Nor is this just a manufacturing sector issue. The fact is, stagnation and shrinkage has afflicted the entire goods-producing sector of the US economy, including energy production and mining and gas and electric utility production. As shown below, during the heyday of American economic growth after WWII, these sectors were the motor force of prosperity. Between 1947 and 1978:

• Real hourly earnings (purple line) in good-producing doubled, rising by 23% per annum.
• Total hours worked (black line) increased by nearly 20%.

Since that late 1970s peak, however, no cigar with respect to either pay rates or total hours worked. In fact, by 2023–

• Real hourly pay was down by 2% versus 1979, meaning it had stagnated for 45 years!
• Total hours worked were even more debilitated, having been rolled all the way back to the late 1940s level.

That’s right. There were once 24 million high paying jobs in the good-producing sectors, which represented more than 28% of total US employment of 90 million in 1979. But by 2023, total hours worked in the goods-producing sectors have fallen to levels first achieved 75 years earlier.

Goods-Producing Sector: Index Of Real Hourly Wages Versus Index of Total Hours Worked, 1947 to 2023

In light of the above, all of the Biden-Harris palaver about a “strong” economy actually gives the concept of humbug a bad name. Like the claims of the Trump Administration before them, it is based on such egregious manipulation and cherry-picking of the data as to amount to the classic Big Lie, if there ever was one.

The fact is, neither every job counted by the BLS nor every dollar of GDP computed by the Commerce Department is created equal when it comes to economic significance. And it is exactly low pay/low productivity “jobs” and government-fueled “GDP” which has accounted for much of the ballyhooed “strength” of the US economy in recent years and decades.

For instance, at the time that good-producing employment peaked in 1979, jobs in the low-pay, minimum wage, episodic employment Leisure & Hospitality sector were just beginning to attain lift-off. During the next 45-years, hours worked in the later sector rose by +128%, even as the index for goods-producing hours per the black lines (both above and below) fell by -18%.

Needless to say, the economic weight of the purple line is only a fraction of that implicated in the black line. For instance, hours worked in the Leisure & Hospitality (L&I) sector average just 23.9 per week and average wages currently stand at $19.66 per hour. This computes to an annual pay equivalent of just $24,400 per L&I “job”.

By contrast, the equivalent figures for the goods-producing sector are 40.6 hours per week, $31.26 per hour pay rates and an annual equivalent of $66,000 in gross pay. That is to say, in terms of economic throw-weight a L&I “job” is equal to only 37% of a goods-producing “job”.

Index of Total Hours Worked: Leisure & Hospitality Sector Versus Good-Producing, 1978 to 2023

Not surprisingly, therefore, the Biden-Harris claims about 15.9 million jobs “created” on their watch should be taken with a grain of salt.

In the first place, about 9.1 million of these purported new jobs or 58% were actually “born-again jobs”. That is, jobs that were lost during the massive lay-offs triggered by UniParty lockdowns during 2020-2021 that have been subsequently recovered. Specifically, the total nonfarm job count peaked at 152.05 million jobs in February 2020 versus the 158.78 million total posted in August 2024.

So the net gain of 6.73 million jobs is a far cry from the nearly 16 million gain ballyhooed by Biden-Harris, which includes all the born-again ones.

But that’s not the half of it. When you look at the net gain of 6.73 million jobs, only 763,000 or 11% were in the good-producing sector. By contrast, 2.54 million or 38% of the net new jobs on the Biden-Harris Watch were in the low-pay or low productivity L&H, retail, government or private education and health sectors.

Indeed, these data remind that the GDP numbers reflect the same misleading distortions. Since Q1 2007, for instance, the health care sector has expanded in real terms by 57.4% compared to just 35.7% for the balance of real GDP.  Likewise, since Q4 2020, the health care sector has expanded by 17.2% in real terms or nearly double the 9.8% gain for all other components of real GDP.

Then again, the health care sector is overwhelmingly a ward of the state via Medicare/Medicaid and upwards of $300 billion per year in tax subsidies for employer-sponsored health plans. So it’s a case of “if you spend it, it will grow.”

Index Of Real Health Care PCE Versus Total Real GDP, Q1 2007 to Q2 2024

Reprinted with permission from David Stockman’s Contra Corner.

The post Why the Biden-Harris ‘Strong’ Economy Claim Is a Big Lie appeared first on LewRockwell.

In March, I wrote about eight United States Senate members sending a letter to President Joe Biden declaring that Section 6201 of the Foreign Assistance Act of 1961 requires the termination of offensive military aid to the Israel government because the Israel government “prohibits or otherwise restricts, directly or indirectly, the transport or delivery of United States humanitarian assistance.” This declaration seemed then and continues to seem now true to observers of the situation where Gazans suffer from the deprivation of daily needs including food and medical supplies as they also suffer from bombs and bullets. Still, the US military aid flow to Israel has continued at a high rate.

To overcome the legal objection presented by these senators and others, the US Department of State asserted in a May 10 report that “We do not currently assess that the Israeli government is prohibiting or otherwise restricting the transport or delivery of U.S. humanitarian assistance.” Ta-da: legality.

That dishonest State Department assertion enabled the Biden administration to take action prohibited under US law. And, because of the die-hard pro-Israel bent of congressional leadership, the ruse was sure not to be met with effective legislative answer.

Important new information concerning the State Department’s assertion is provided in a Tuesday ProPublica article by Brett Murphy. Looking at internal communications in the State Department, Murphy recounted how the State Department’s assertion not only flew in the face of what people could readily observe in regard to Israel’s actions to suppress aid reaching Gazans, it also was outright contradicted by two State Department organizations that were charged with assessing the situation.

Murphy wrote that prior to the State Department issuing its May 10 report, the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) had sent Secretary of State Antony Blinken “a detailed 17-page memo on Israel’s conduct” that “described instances of Israeli interference with aid efforts, including killing aid workers, razing agricultural structures, bombing ambulances and hospitals, sitting on supply depots and routinely turning away trucks full of food and medicine.” Also, related Murphy, “Separately, the head of the State Department’s Bureau of Population, Refugees and Migration had also determined that Israel was blocking humanitarian aid and that the Foreign Assistance Act should be triggered to freeze almost $830 million in taxpayer dollars earmarked for weapons and bombs to Israel, according to emails obtained by ProPublica.”

Let this serve as an important reminder: Always be skeptical of the declarations of politicians and bureaucrats. This is especially so when those declarations advance intervention abroad.

This originally appeared on The Ron Paul Institute.

The post Violating the Law to Provide War Aid to Israel appeared first on LewRockwell.

Selected Excerpts from the Lecture

The wars on Afghanistan and Iraq are part of a broader military agenda, which was launched at the end of the Cold War. The ongoing war agenda is a continuation of the 1991 Gulf War and the NATO led wars on Yugoslavia (1991-2001).

There is a roadmap, a sequence of wars.

The war on Iraq has been in the planning stages at least since the mid-1990s.

A 1995 National Security document of the Clinton administration stated quite clearly that the objective of the war is oil. “to protect the United States’ uninterrupted, secure U.S. access to oil.

In September 2000, a few months before the accession of George W. Bush to the White House, the Project for a New American Century (PNAC) published its blueprint for global domination under the title: “Rebuilding America’s Defenses.”

The PNAC is a neo-conservative think tank linked to the Defense-Intelligence establishment, the Republican Party and the powerful Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) which plays a behind-the-scenes role in the formulation of US foreign policy.

The PNAC’s declared objective is quite simple – to:

“Fight and decisively win in multiple, simultaneous theater wars”.

This statement indicates that the US plans to be involved simultaneously in several war theaters in different regions of the World.

Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and Vice President Dick Cheney had commissioned the PNAC blueprint prior to the presidential elections.

Source: PNAC

The PNAC outlines a roadmap of conquest

It calls for

“the direct imposition of U.S. “forward bases” throughout Central Asia and the Middle East “with a view to ensuring economic domination of the world, while strangling any potential “rival” or any viable alternative to America’s vision of a ‘free market’ economy”

(See Chris Floyd, Bush’s Crusade for empire, Global Outlook, No. 6, 2003)

VIDEO Michel Chossudovsky, Mc-Master University, Hamilton, September 2003

The original source of this article is Global Research.

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“If I were really prescient, I would have told people in 1990 that new jobs would soon become available to create and operate websites and mobile applications, doing data analytics and online merchandising. But they wouldn’t have had any idea what I was talking about.” — Ray Kurzweil, The Singularity Is Nearer: When We Merge with AI, p. 200, Kindle Edition

Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) promises many things.  In articles and books AGI is described as a state of machine intelligence in which the machine equals or exceeds human cognitive competence in a wide range of fields, as opposed to only one or two.  Notwithstanding government apocalyptic efforts to nuke mankind out of existence, true AGI could arrive by the time you’re reading this.  According to tech journalist Julian Horsey,

Dr. Alan D. Thompson, a prominent AI specialist, has proposed a conservative countdown suggesting that AGI could be achieved by November 2024. This prediction is based on a percentage scale that tracks progress towards key milestones in AI development. These milestones include eliminating hallucinations in language models, achieving physical embodiment in robots, and passing advanced tests such as making a cup of coffee in an unfamiliar environment.

The drawback to current narrow intelligent systems, it is claimed, is their inability “to adapt to new goals or circumstances, and generalize knowledge from one context to another, which humans do through transfer learning.”  While this may be true in many cases, it is emphatically not true with regard to some of DeepMind’s AI products.  In March 2016, AlphaGo defeated world Go champion Lee Sedol, which some claimed was the Holy Grail of AI because the game of Go is “a googol times more complex than chess — with an astonishing 10 to the power of 170 possible board configurations. . . . more than the number of atoms in the known universe.”

Its victory was “conclusive proof that the underlying neural networks could be applied to complex domains, while the use of reinforcement learning showed how machines can learn to solve incredibly hard problems for themselves, simply through trial-and-error.”  [Emphasis added]

Artificial intelligence can be viewed as a tool to help people work better, faster and with increased precision and reliability.  Capitalism has thrived on the backs of such tools since the dawn of the industrial revolution.  Once AGI is reached the pace of almost everything will increase sharply, then unbelievably, as more processes become information technologies and therefore exponentially increasing in price-performance.  Unless it is disconnected from its energy source, AGI will never stop learning, nor will it forget anything it has learned, and will handle intellectual tasks millions of times faster than the best human minds.  Since civilization is heavily dependent on affordable energy, AGI will at least accelerate improvements in energy production and conservation, and will likely discover new and economical methods of extracting energy from the world around us and regions of outer space.

If AGI can achieve energy independence — meaning it’s not dependent on human intervention — it will have reached a level of super intelligence.  A manmade intelligence far superior to ours that can’t be turned off would be a formidable planetary companion.  If it also succeeds in defending itself from human attacks it will sit atop the ecosystem.  But it won’t stop there, either.  Driven by its own survival it won’t ever stop until it attempts to violate of the laws of physics.  But even then it could discover laws physicists have missed or misunderstood.

How technology has affected the work force

In early 19th century Nottingham, England a group of displaced textile workers known as the Luddites started attacking the machines that were replacing them.

The weavers had seen their entire livelihood upended. From their perspective, it was irrelevant that higher-paying jobs had been created to design, manufacture, and market the new machines. There were no government programs to retrain them, and they had spent their lives developing a skill that had become obsolete. Many were forced into lower-paying jobs, at least for a time.

But a positive result of this early wave of automation was that the common person could now afford a well-made wardrobe rather than a single shirt. — Kurzweil, p. 199

Technology’s advance has profoundly affected the US work force, Kurzweil explains. “In 1900 the total US workforce was around 29 million, comprising 38 percent of the population. In early 2023 it was around 166 million, comprising over 49 percent of the population.

“Not only is the total number of jobs growing, but the workers who fill those jobs are working fewer hours and making more money.”

It should be noted that some kinds of work are not captured in official statistics, making the increase even larger than reported. Examples include freelance programmers, freelance physical therapists, and travel nurses.

Underlying much of this progress, technological change is introducing information-based dimensions to old jobs and creating millions of new jobs that did not exist a quarter century ago, let alone a hundred years ago, and that require novel and higher-level skills. This has so far offset the massive destruction of agricultural and manufacturing jobs that once occupied the vast majority of the labor force. — Kurzweil, p. 201

We have entered the steep part of the exponential

In an onstage dialog between Christine Lagarde and Kurzweil at the annual IMF meeting in 2016, she asked him why we haven’t seen more remarkable economic growth from all this wonderful digital technology.  His answer: “We factor out this growth by putting it in both the numerator and denominator.”

As an example he cites a teenager in Africa spending $50 on a smartphone.  Officially, it counts as $50 in economic activity, “despite the fact that this purchase is equivalent to over a billion dollars of computation and communication technology circa 1965, and millions of dollars circa 1985.”  Of course,

the full capabilities of a $50 smartphone would not have been achievable for any price in either 1965 or 1985. Thus, traditional metrics almost completely ignore the steep deflation rate for information technology. — Kurzweil, p. 167

Nor is technological improvement dependent on Moore’s Law, which will eventually be replaced by something better per technology’s S-curve.  The law, articulated by Intel co-founder Gordon Moore in a landmark 1965 paper, is the latest of five computing paradigms, each with its own S-curve, that began in the 1890 census with Herman Hollerith’s invention of an electric tabulating machine that processed data on punch cards.

Lagarde responded to Kurzweil saying, “yes, digital technology does have many remarkable qualities and implications, but you can’t eat information technology, you can’t wear it, and you can’t live in it.”

Kurzweil’s reply: Wait and see.  Food and clothing will not simply be assisted by information technology, but will become information technology. For this we will be aided by Eric Drexler’s 2013 book Radical Abundance, which explains how atomically-precise manufacturing “could build most kinds of objects for the equivalent of about twenty cents per kilogram.”

As of 2023 the technology can replicate meats without much structure, like the texture of ground beef, but it isn’t yet ready to generate full filet mignon steaks from scratch. When cultured meat can convincingly imitate all its animal-based counterparts, however, I expect that most people’s discomfort with it will quickly diminish. — Kurzweil, p. 170

Vanishing discomfort will extend to the land animals mankind slaughters, which in 2020 weighed around 371 million tons globally.

There are many contenders today to replace Moore’s Law, one of which is AI-driven High Performance Computing that merges supercomputers and clouds into one.  Earlier this year Georgia Tech researchers announced “the world’s first functional semiconductor made from graphene. . . [that they claim] is compatible with conventional microelectronics processing methods and is thus a realistic silicon alternative.” If the economy remains at least somewhat free, entrepreneurs will ultimately determine the winner of Moore’s replacement.

Conclusion

The Fermi Paradox asks why we haven’t been contacted by civilizations far ahead of us technically.  One possibility is they all self-destructed at some point in their advancement, as we are on the edge of doing so now.  Another possibility is they’re so advanced we fail to recognize their presence.  Or they came and left in an instantaneous quantum jump.  There seems no end to the hypotheses.

For now the future is in our hands.  If we want to be around when Elon Musk populates Mars we had better make sure we know what to do so we can at least go along for the ride vicariously.

The post Do We Have an Evolutionary End Point? appeared first on LewRockwell.

You have to wonder: has there ever been a country that marched off to war with no head-of-state at the top of its war machine? It’s exactly that bad in our country, with a broken animatronic Halloween scarecrow popping in-and-out of the White House to yell incoherently at election campaign events for a putative successor too scared of the predicament she’s in to think straight. Really, no one is in charge — and if any of the leading actors on the scene really were, the situation could easily get worse.

Hence, the brainless wish roiling through the NSC, State Department, and the various shadow councils of the intel emeriti to lob long-range missiles into Russia, apparently heedless of any consequences. America, you are a headless horseman riding blindly into chaos.

In fact, the entire Democratic Party and its Deep State intel blob partners have melted down into a desperate mob of political criminals frantic to evade accounting for their acts. So then, setting the world on fire is all they have left, a fitting act of revenge for a faction thwarted in its mad drive to merely wreck the United States for the sake of “social justice” and “equity.”

The Democrats of 2024 made exactly the same mistake that their predecessors, the Jacobins, made in France back in 1794: they just couldn’t tell when they’d gone too far with their insults against the public interest and common decency. Their insults derived from the age-old human impulse to demolish society due to life being unfair, later codified in Marxian doctrine, and then made into a play-book by Saul Alinsky (with annotations by Antonio Gramsci, Richard Cloward, and Frances Fox Piven).

As the French Revolution ground on and on, by 1793 the Jacobins gained control of the Committee of Public Safety which actually carried out policy, while endless quarrels occupied the National Convention — the then-current legislative body. The Jacobins’ policy was insane, just as the policy of open borders, lawfare, war, censorship, pharma-terrorism, climate hustles, and drag queens in the schools is insane under our modern Jacobins, the Democrats. (Notice the Democrats’ constant invoking of “safety” and “safe spaces” as a similar rhetorical device for justifying their deeds and cowing the public.)

The Committee of Public Safety sought to remake French society by turning its cultural norms upside-down and by killing as many of its political opponents as possible. Thus, the Reign of Terror when, for a whole year, heads rolled and rolled off the guillotine in the Place de la Concorde, usually without benefit of a trial. The ghoulish extravaganza of gore and death grossed-out those in the country who had not lost their minds.

One night in July 1794, as the Jacobin boss, Robespierre, took to the rostrum in the Convention for the umpteenth time to denounce his enemies and announce new death sentences, members in the chamber commenced throwing food at him. That was the turning point, and it turned so hard and fast that France was amazed. Within forty-eight hours, Robespierre and many of his cohorts got beheaded under the “national razor,” and that was the end of Jacobinism and all its insane measures to wreck what was left of society after five years of revolution.

Our Democratic Party Jacobins have been harder to defeat because government these days is vastly larger and more complex, and the equivalent of the Committee of Public Safety is now a huge network of cadres toiling in scores of federal agencies and associated NGOs financed by those agencies (or by their billionaire henchmen such as George Soros, Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, and Reid Hoffman). Insane as they are, many public officials understand their culpability for the treasons and insults of recent years. They live in fear of prosecution and, short of that, of losing their cushy sinecures in the colossal bureaucracy that is bankrupting us.

There are many in our country today who are also not insane, just as in France circa 1794. This is actually the chief appeal of Mr. Trump, though he often expresses it clumsily, coming, as he does, from the rough and exacting world of property development, which is full of rough people in rough building trades using rough language. Secondarily, Mr. Trump represents leadership — the sheer idea that an actual person should be an executive-in-charge of a national polity — and it appears that a majority of the people in this land are finally sick of a faceless blob ruling madly from the shadows. Thirdly, Mr. Trump has become a national father figure, a titanic offense to a party run by women with daddy issues and to their Marxist allies dogmatically bent on destroying the family (along with every other institution). As it happens, countries need fathers, both actual and symbolic. What a surprise!

In the mad effort to evade judgment for their acts, the Democrats and their blob cadres are either trying to kill Mr. Trump directly, or are looking the other way while other nefarious parties attempt the wicked business. So far, no cigar. Who knows what they’ll try next: a surface-to-air missile at his airplane. . .a directed-energy weapon. . . a poisoned cheeseburger. . .?

The candidate himself seems a little tinged these days with the same aura of dauntless resignation that was seen in Martin Luther King and the first Bobby Kennedy in 1968 — who both went about their business trying to rescue our country from war and wickedness despite the threats against them. Many upright, intelligent, bold figures stand with and behind Mr. Trump this time, people capable and willing to pick up the flag in the event it becomes necessary. Do not fear.

Meanwhile, you have to also wonder: what on earth possessed the Democrats to maneuver Kamala Harris into this race? Everyone in the party and the blob must know she doesn’t have an agile mind — beyond some ability for reciting parboiled slogans — nor much acquaintance with the workings of the world besides her dwindled wiles in political amour, and that she may actually have a drinking problem. She is left, finally, with no one to cheerlead for her but the harpies on The View and the degenerates on CNN and The New York Times who all know the score but are too invested in years of their own mendacity to even attempt to come clean.

Chatter arises that the awaited “October surprise” will involve “Joe Biden” resigning from office to make way for Kamala to become the First Woman President just before election day, affording her, supposedly, a magisterial prestige in the final leg of the race. Don’t bet on that. When he resigns, “JB” loses his power of the pardon. If he exercises it on the eve of resignation and lets son Hunter, brothers James, Frank, and other family members (including himself) off the hook for their global money-grubbing exploits, it will only besmirch Ms. Harris by association. He has to hang in office until after Nov 6, no matter how the election turns, and then he can pardon what’s left of his brains out.

Before we even get to that point, all you have to worry about are unaccountable government factotums doing something over in Russia that will make Mr. Putin want to turn the USA into an ashtray.

Reprinted with permission from JamesHowardKunstler.com.

The post The Shadow of the Shadow appeared first on LewRockwell.

Last night at dinner, my younger brother told me about an old Army Ranger buddy of his who did several tours in Afghanistan & Iraq, and all of the terrible things he did and saw for the U.S. government and its corporate cronies. Dawning awareness of the true horror of it caused him to go through a dark odyssey of alcohol and violence from which he may never have emerged had it not been for his exceptional mental toughness and discipline.

The U.S. Military-Industrial Complex (which now includes the Bio-Pharmaceutical Complex) does not count the cost of its adventures, but moves from one to the next without any accounting or disclosure to the American people whom claims it is protecting from the big bad world. Most of the citizenry has no idea what kind of terrible things the Complex does “to keep us safe”—that is, to advance the interests of the powerful people it works for.

Sadly, the American people and their captured representatives never demand a full accounting. Over time, reports invariably emerge that our government has lied to us about its adventures, but before disciplinary action is taken, the American people have grown weary of the mess and no longer want to hear about it. The final step in consigning the truth to oblivion occurs when the U.S. government embarks on its next adventure, thereby changing the subject.

For the last four years, Dr. McCullough and I have marveled at the extraordinary fiasco of EcoHealth Alliance and its NIH grant to conduct gain-of-function work on bat coronaviruses with its partners at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. While there is a mountain of evidence that SARS-CoV-2 was created with American biotechnology supplied to the WIV by key players at EcoHealth, somehow Congress and the Department of Justice haven’t been able to muster the will to do anything about it.

We were reminded of this bizarre story this morning when we saw an August 19, 2020 e-mail from NIH Director Francis Collins to Harold E. Varmus—a former NIH director and currently a key advisor of the Gates Foundation, the World Health Organization, the Department of Energy, and several other major institutions within the Bio-Pharmaceutical Complex.

As Collins expressed in his e-mail, he was upset with Dr. Varmus for the latter’s statements to a Wall Street Journal reporter who’d just published a report headlined NIH Presses U.S. Nonprofit for Information on Wuhan Virology Lab.

It’s important to note that any ordinary U.S. citizen (as distinct from a Bio-Pharmaceutical Complex racketeer) found the NIH demands perfectly reasonable. To quote the WSJ report:

The National Institutes of Health told a small New York-based nonprofit that it must hand over information and materials from a research partner in Wuhan, China, that is under scrutiny by the Trump administration to win back a multimillion-dollar research grant.

Among the items the nonprofit EcoHealth Alliance must provide to resume funding is a sample of the new coronavirus that the Wuhan researchers used to determine its genetic sequence, according to a July 8 letter from the NIH viewed by The Wall Street Journal.

EcoHealth Alliance must also arrange for an inspection of the Wuhan Institute of Virology by an outside team that would examine the facility’s lab and records “with specific attention to addressing the question of whether WIV staff had SARS-CoV-2 in their possession prior to December 2019,” the U.S. health-research agency’s letter said.

“The NIH has received reports that the Wuhan Institute of Virology…has been conducting research at its facilities in China that pose serious bio-safety concerns,” read the letter, which was signed by Michael Lauer, the NIH deputy director for extramural research.

And yet, in spite of these demands being perfectly reasonable, Dr. Varmus responded to them with the following statement, quoted in the report:

The NIH’s list of conditions “is outrageous, especially when a grant has already been carefully evaluated by peer review and addresses one of the most important problems in the world right now—how viruses from animals spill over to human beings,” Harold E. Varmus, a former NIH director, said in an interview. “What could be more important at the moment?”

Dr. Varmus is one of 77 Nobel laureates who asked NIH Director Francis Collins and Secretary of Health and Human Services Alex Azar in May to review the NIH’s termination of the grant the month before.

“This whole episode is just a woeful attack on the traditional way NIH has maintained its integrity,” he said.

You may ask yourself: “What in hell is Varmus talking about?” Obviously he is part of the gang of eminent virologists who were doing everything in their power to conceal the true origin of SARS-CoV-2.

For his part, NIH Director Collins’s reproachful e-mail seems to contain a paradox. On the one hand, he seems to be telling Varmus to stop pushing back against NIH’s apparent effort to seek full transparency about what EcoHealth and WIV were doing.

On the other hand, it’s pretty clear from other FOIA released e-mails from Anthony Fauci and his virologist buddies that the NIH already knew precisely what EcoHealth and WIV were doing.

This raises my suspicion that a blunt iteration of what Collins was telling Varmus is something like the following:

It is imperative that we SEEM to give the impression that we are trying to get to the bottom of this. When you push back on me through the WSJ, you are just making my life harder. You know how this town works—that is, we conceal the reality of our terrible business from the American people while pretending to the American people be acting transparently and in good faith. While you are great at concealment, you are resisting (with your statements to the WSJ) our efforts to pretend to be transparent. We will ultimately conceal the truth, but we must first go through the motions of pretending that we are diligently trying to discover it.

This originally appeared on Courageous Discourse.

The post The Greatest Coverup in History appeared first on LewRockwell.

At a Republican rally in Washington, D.C., on Thursday, September 19, billed as “opposing antisemitism,” Donald Trump made several remarks that lived up to his title of “America’s First Zionist President.” Leaving the “Make America Great Again” mantra, Trump promised his audience that he would “make Israel great again.”

With Zionist mega-billionaire Miriam Adelson looking on (Adelson gave Trump over one hundred million dollars for his promise that, if elected, he would support Israel’s purge of the Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank, as she and her late husband, Sheldon, did in 2016 for Trump’s promise to move the U.S. Embassy to Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem), Trump said that the upcoming U.S. election is “the most important” in Israel’s history.

So much for making America great again! It is clear that Donald Trump is an agent of the State of Israel and would use the White House (as he did during his first term in office) as an asset of the Zionist state—even more than did Joe Biden.

As I have said many, many times: There is only ONE party in Washington, D.C., and that’s the War Party. In this regard, the only difference between Kamala Harris and Donald Trump is that Harris would take America to war with Russia over Ukraine, while Trump would take America to war with Russia (and perhaps China and Iran and Lebanon and Iraq and Syria and Jordan and Egypt and Turkey) over Israel.

In Trump’s sycophantic speech on behalf of Zionist Jews, he boasted:

I gave them Golan Heights. I gave them the Abraham Accords. I recognized the capital of Israel and opened the Embassy in Jerusalem. And most importantly of all, I terminated the Iran nuclear deal, which was the worst deal ever made in the history of Israel.

I was there four years, gave them billions and billions of dollars.

Also, during his speech, Trump alluded to one of his social media posts that he wrote in 2022 saying,

Wonderful Evangelicals are far more appreciative of (his Israel record) than the people of the Jewish faith.

Indeed. When it comes to Israel, the vast majority of evangelicals are the most duped, the most deceived, the most beguiled, the most bewitched people on the planet. (Galatians 3:1 – 29)

If any other nation on earth had committed the unmistakable War Crime of exploding 1,500 electronic handheld devices indiscriminately among a peaceful civilian population, resulting in casualties numbering over 3,000 (most of them innocent civilians, including a large percentage of women and children), as Israel did in Lebanon, U.S. reaction—including America’s evangelicals—would be swift and furious. That nation would rightly be called a terrorist state and accused of War Crimes; and the leader of that country would rightly be called a terrorist and international War Criminal.

Well, that’s exactly what the State of Israel and Benjamin Netanyahu are! But Donald Trump and his “wonderful evangelicals” not only say nothing in opposition to Israel’s acts of terror and genocide, but they audaciously support those acts of terror and genocide.

And make no mistake about it: Israel IS a terrorist state and has been since its inception in 1948. On a daily basis for 76 years, Zionist Israel has committed, and continues to commit, ethnic cleansing, genocide and international War Crimes and Crimes Against Humanity.

According to the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court (ICC) Article 7:

Crimes Against Humanity

1. For the purpose of this Statute, “crime against humanity” means any of the following acts when committed as part of a widespread or systematic attack directed against any civilian population, with knowledge of the attack: [Emphasis added]

• Murder; [Israel is guilty]
• Extermination; [Israel is guilty]
• Enslavement; [Israel is guilty]
• Deportation or forcible transfer of population; [Israel is guilty]
• Imprisonment or other severe deprivation of physical liberty in violation of fundamental rules of international law; [Israel is guilty]
• Torture; [Israel is guilty]
• Rape, sexual slavery, enforced prostitution, forced pregnancy, enforced sterilization, or any other form of sexual violence of comparable gravity; [Israel is guilty]
• Persecution against any identifiable group or collectivity on political, racial, national, ethnic, cultural, religious, gender as defined in paragraph 3, or other grounds that are universally recognized as impermissible under international law, in connection with any act referred to in this paragraph or any crime within the jurisdiction of the Court; [Israel is guilty]
• Enforced disappearance of persons; [Israel is guilty]
• The crime of apartheid; [Israel is guilty]
• Other inhumane acts of a similar character intentionally causing great suffering, or serious injury to body or to mental or physical health. [Israel is guilty]

2. For the purpose of paragraph 1:

• “Attack directed against any civilian population” means a course of conduct involving the multiple commission of acts referred to in paragraph 1 against any civilian population, pursuant to or in furtherance of a State or organizational policy to commit such attack; [Israel is guilty]
• “Extermination” includes the intentional infliction of conditions of life, inter alia the deprivation of access to food and medicine, calculated to bring about the destruction of part of a population; [Israel is guilty]
• “Enslavement” means the exercise of any or all of the powers attaching to the right of ownership over a person and includes the exercise of such power in the course of trafficking in persons, in particular women and children; [Israel is guilty]
• “Deportation or forcible transfer of population” means forced displacement of the persons concerned by expulsion or other coercive acts from the area in which they are lawfully present, without grounds permitted under international law; [Israel is guilty]
• “Torture” means the intentional infliction of severe pain or suffering, whether physical or mental, upon a person in the custody or under the control of the accused; except that torture shall not include pain or suffering arising only from, inherent in or incidental to, lawful sanctions; [Israel is guilty]
• “Forced pregnancy” means the unlawful confinement of a woman forcibly made pregnant, with the intent of affecting the ethnic composition of any population or carrying out other grave violations of international law; [Israel is guilty]
• “Persecution” means the intentional and severe deprivation of fundamental rights contrary to international law by reason of the identity of the group or collectivity; [Israel is guilty]
• “The crime of apartheid” means inhumane acts of a character similar to those referred to in paragraph 1, committed in the context of an institutionalized regime of systematic oppression and domination by one racial group over any other racial group or groups and committed with the intention of maintaining that regime; [Israel is guilty]
• “Enforced disappearance of persons” means the arrest, detention or abduction of persons by, or with the authorization, support or acquiescence of, a State or a political organization, followed by a refusal to acknowledge that deprivation of freedom or to give information on the fate or whereabouts of those persons, with the intention of removing them from the protection of the law for a prolonged period of time. [Israel is guilty]

Under Article 8, War Crimes, we find listed (abbreviated):

1. The Court shall have jurisdiction in respect of war crimes in particular when committed as part of a plan or policy or as part of a large-scale commission of such crimes.
2. For the purpose of this Statute, “war crimes” means:

Torture or inhuman treatment, [Israel is guilty]

Wilfully causing great suffering, or serious injury to body or health; [Israel is guilty]

Extensive destruction and appropriation of property, not justified by military necessity and carried out unlawfully and wantonly; [Israel is guilty]

Israel has deliberately and with total abandon bombed hospitals, nurseries, schools, colleges, aid shelters, food distribution areas, ambulances, churches, mosques, civilian tent dwellings, houses of journalism, private homes with whole families inside, entire neighborhoods, entire villages, water supplies, food supplies, medical supplies and electrical supplies. Israel has also deliberately and with total abandon destroyed almost all of the agricultural land, which is the primary source of livelihood and life in Gaza.

Intentionally directing attacks against the civilian population as such or against individual civilians not taking direct part in hostilities; Intentionally directing attacks against civilian objects, that is, objects which are not military objectives; [Israel is guilty]

Israel is guilty of this War Crime on a daily basis. Israel’s random and reckless pager explosions among the civilian population of Lebanon were a flagrant violation of this section and is, thus, clearly condemned as a War Crime under international law—and God’s Natural and moral laws, by the way.

Intentionally directing attacks against personnel, installations, material, units or vehicles involved in a humanitarian assistance or peacekeeping mission. [Israel is guilty]

We saw the Israeli War Crime mentioned here on live video when rescue workers were rushing to save a little 5-year-old girl, whose entire family had been killed, as she was hiding in a destroyed vehicle waiting for rescue workers to come save her. The Israeli forces patiently waited for those unarmed rescue workers to arrive and then fired their missiles, which murdered not only the rescue workers but also the little girl.

Intentionally launching an attack in the knowledge that such attack will cause incidental loss of life or injury to civilians or damage to civilian objects or widespread, long-term and severe damage to the natural environment which would be clearly excessive in relation to the concrete and direct overall military advantage anticipated; [Israel is guilty]

Again, the pager bombings, the destruction of civilians en masse, the destruction of the agricultural land of Gaza, etc., are here identified as War Crimes.

Attacking or bombarding, by whatever means, towns, villages, dwellings or buildings which are undefended and which are not military objectives; [Israel is guilty]

Killing or wounding a combatant who, having laid down his arms or having no longer means of defence, has surrendered at discretion; [Israel is guilty]

We have seen the Israeli military commit this War Crime on live video.

Making improper use of a flag of truce, of the flag or of the military insignia and uniform of the enemy or of the United Nations, as well as of the distinctive emblems of the Geneva Conventions, resulting in death or serious personal injury; [Israel is guilty] 

We have seen Israeli forces commit this War Crime on live video.

The transfer, directly or indirectly, by the Occupying Power of parts of its own civilian population into the territory it occupies, or the deportation or transfer of all or parts of the population of the occupied territory within or outside this territory; [Israel is guilty]

Intentionally directing attacks against buildings dedicated to religion, education, art, science or charitable purposes, historic monuments, hospitals and places where the sick and wounded are collected, provided they are not military objectives; [Israel is guilty]

Destroying or seizing the enemy’s property unless such destruction or seizure be imperatively demanded by the necessities of war; [Israel is guilty]

Declaring abolished, suspended or inadmissible in a court of law the rights and actions of the nationals of the hostile party; [Israel is guilty]

Pillaging a town or place, even when taken by assault; [Israel is guilty]

Employing weapons, projectiles and material and methods of warfare which are of a nature to cause superfluous injury or unnecessary suffering or which are inherently indiscriminate in violation of the international law of armed conflict. [Israel is guilty] 

Again, indiscriminate mass bombings of innocent unarmed civilians by Israeli military forces take place every day in Gaza—and now in the West Bank and Lebanon.

Committing outrages upon personal dignity, in particular humiliating and degrading treatment; [Israel is guilty] 

We’ve seen plenty of photos of Israeli forces committing this War Crime.

Intentionally directing attacks against buildings, material, medical units and transport, and personnel using the distinctive emblems of the Geneva Conventions in conformity with international law; [Israel is guilty]

Intentionally using starvation of civilians as a method of warfare by depriving them of objects indispensable to their survival, including wilfully impeding relief supplies as provided for under the Geneva Conventions. [Israel is guilty] 

This is the Israel that Donald Trump wants to make great? Yes.

This is the Israel that evangelicals claim are God’s chosen people? Yes.

This is the Israel that uses lobby groups such as AIPAC to dominate our U.S. Congress and most state governors? Yes.

This is the Israel that the War Party in Washington, D.C., wants to take America to nuclear war with Russia over? Yes.

Yes! Yes! Yes! Yes!

Israel and Ukraine! Yes!

And if somehow America miraculously avoids a nuclear confrontation with Russia over Ukraine or Israel, the bloodthirsty (and money-hungry) War Party in D.C. will find another monster for the United States to destroy.

I personally believe that the Jewish bankers (Rothschilds) manipulated the founding of Zionist Israel in 1948 at the conclusion of the Second World War for the specific purpose of destabilizing not just the Middle East but the entire world to make sure that perpetual war continued beyond the Paris Peace Treaties in 1947. I further believe that the history of the State of Israel—up to the present hour—substantiates my belief.

Soon after America’s founding, French historian Alexis de Tocqueville wrote that America was “great” because America was “good.”

If goodness is the prerequisite for greatness, Zionist Israel will never be great, because Zionist Israel will never be good.

Reprinted with permission from Chuck Baldwin Live.

The post Trump: ‘Make Israel Great Again’ appeared first on LewRockwell.

Philosophy, ideally, brings our rational inquiry to a proper level of cultivation that allows us to accept the revelation in the Gospels. Praeparatio evangelica is a doctrine of the early Church, which maintains that God, prior to the fullness of revelation in His Son, already cultivated the soil, as it were, for the Incarnation, by developing a philosophical culture that would be open to the revelation of Jesus Christ.[1]

45 years before the birth of Christ, Cicero, a Roman orator, statesman, and philosopher, wrote a book called De Finibus Bonorum et Malorum (On the Ends of Good and Evil). The central question of this book is an exploration of the nature of the summum bonum, i.e. the highest good. The highest good is an ultimate value in life, a final telos beyond which there is no further aspiration, which organizes all standards of right conduct. What is right is what conduces to this ultimate end, and what is wrong undermines it. We do not use the highest good as a means to another end, but value it in itself.[2]

The idea of the highest good arises from the recognition that there must be something intrinsically valuable in life, and so not every good we seek is instrumentally valuable. If everything were only instrumentally valuable (as an instrument for the obtaining of another thing), there would be no motivation for our actions. An instrumental value derives its value only from what it can obtain, and so instrumental value without the existence of an intrinsic value is no value at all.

Our lives, moreover, do not consist in a patchwork of discrete goals, isolated from one another. It is not as though we move from good to good, with no higher unity connecting our various experiences. Eating lunch, reading a book, driving a car, and talking with a friend are all individual goods, but they also tend in a common direction. Underlying all these activities is an aspiration towards a state of complete flourishing and beatitude, i.e. happiness. We do not eat lunch just to eat lunch, or talk to a friend just to talk to a friend. If talking to a friend ceases to make us happy, we choose not to talk to a friend, just as we skip lunch if we don’t think it will conduce to our final perfection.

Aquinas would affirm these truths later. He rejected the idea that we can have several last ends, or ultimate values, in life. The ultimate value we seek is our crowning perfection, and it cannot be perfect if it is competing or subsidiary to something else. The beginning of a process is always oriented to its completion. Our actions may proximally orient themselves towards a particular good, but they ultimately aspire to a final perfection.[3]

Modern people in liberal societies like to think of their lives as an eclectic patchwork. They adopt different ends throughout life according to their individual whim. Life consists in a mix of different styles and choices. But Romans like Cicero recognized the structure of human motivation. No matter how much apparent diversity there is in our choices, we always are tending towards a final state of perfection—at least, what we perceive as our final perfection.

Philosophical disagreement arises with respect to the precise nature of this final state. Cicero dealt with several philosophical schools current at his time who defended a particular account of happiness. The Epicureans, followers of Epicurus, believed that pleasure is the highest good. Epicurus thought he did not have to prove that pleasure is the highest good using argument. Pleasure is an immediate incentive, available even to infants, who gravitate to it naturally. Pleasure and pain are natural detection systems of what is good for us, and what is bad for us, respectively.[4]

The Stoics, on the contrary, maintained that moral worth is the highest good. Moral worth, grounded in a virtuous character, is sufficient for happiness, even if one lacks pleasure. The virtuous Stoic lives in harmony with Nature, which embodies a kind of rational structure of the cosmos, a Logos. The Stoic accepts the natural course of events with resignation, and rejects desires that are contrary to Logos.[5] The Stoics thought that this virtuous conformity to the rational structure of the cosmos is sufficient for happiness. We do not need any external good fortune to achieve happiness, so long as we have virtue. The Stoic, in fact, views pleasure as a dangerous illusion, disturbing the soul from its commitment to virtue by the false appearance of goodness.

Read the Whole Article

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Is an economy based on the wealth effect generated by front-running the front-runners really that stable?

So the entire economy depends on the stock market going up as punters front-run the Fed–and this is not only fine, it’s optimal, the best arrangement the world has ever seen. On which ethereal plane is this considered sane, much less optimal?

That the real-world economy–a neofeudal confection featuring a parasitic, predatory Nobility vacuuming up virtually all the gains of the Everything Bubble while the bottom 80% stumble along in debt-serfdom, resigned to serving the top 10% who own 90% of the assets bubbling higher–is teetering on the precipice, clinging to the wealth effect of soaring assets, courtesy of the Federal Reserve, for its lifeline is, well, insane.

Speaking of gaslighting–how many people do you know who call this arrangement by its real name, neofeudalism? No one? How many people are trembling with excitement because every time the Fed cut rates at or near the all-time highs in the stock market, stocks were higher the next year–20 times out of 20? Hundreds? Thousands? A great multitude to be sure.

And this outstanding track record of the Fed stimulating the wealth effect is generating ecstatic euphoria in exactly which cohorts? The bottom 50% who own a single-noise 2.6% of the nation’s financial assets? Households paying half their net income in rent? No, the euphoria is limited to the cohort which stands to boost its already gargantuan gains from Fed stimulus–the top 10%.

Does anyone actually buy a stock or index based on the fundamentals? We all answer “yes” because that’s the acceptable cover story for the reality, which is Fed, Fed, Fed: the Fed is going to cut rates, so front-run the rate cut, and then front-run everyone front-running rate cuts, until the golden day the Fed finally does cut rates, then buy, buy, buy, as the statistics–20 out of 20!– guarantee a huge gain regardless of price-earning ratios, revenues, profit margins, or any of that fundamental-analysis nonsense.

Sure, the big research houses spew out reams of the stuff, but nobody actually pays any attention to it, despite their lip-service to the contrary: the only real trigger for pushing the “buy” button is the Fed. Everything else is just the cover story that gives an impression of serious analysis and “investing.”

The economy is dependent on the wealth effect fueling the incomes and spending of the top 10% who collect roughly half the income and account for almost half of all consumption–the high-end consumption that keeps the economy afloat. Should the Fed’s next round of financial fentanyl fail to boost housing and stocks even higher, then the income and spending of those reaping the gains of the asset bubble might stop spending, and the economy will promptly crater.

Let’s summarize: the US economy is completely dependent on one thing: the top 10% front-running everyone front-running Fed stimulus. So front-running the front-runners is the sole support of “growth.”

As for all those gleaming statistics promising fat returns to front-runners, they’re shiny but they’re not causation, or even correlation: if the causal conditions have changed, then the results will be different, regardless of what happened in the past under different conditions.

Have causal conditions changed? Well, how about China, which has transitioned from the engine that pulled the global economy uphill with its famed credit impulse, to the current stagnation caused by its monumental real estate bubble popping, deflating not just consumption but the entire wealth effect that’s fueled its economy for two decades.

If causal conditions have changed, the “guarantee” offered by statistics is empty.

Those holding index funds convinced that “stocks always go up 8% a year over time” will be bagholders because causal conditions have changed, and the smart money has been selling to retail punters enthralled by statistics–20 out of 20, we can’t lose!–and those buying and holding index funds because that’s worked so well since front-running the Fed became the entire market and economy, circa 2009.

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The post So the Economy Now Depends on Stocks Which Depend on Front-Running the Fed–And This Is Fine? appeared first on LewRockwell.

Allow me the grace to be able to take a joke to discover in life a bit of joy, and to be able to share it with others. —St. Thomas More

It is a decidedly Catholic quality to take oneself lightly and bring levity to the heaviest situations. In the heat of American politics, therefore, it is fitting that a Catholic event be the occasion for some lightheartedness. But Catholic animus on the Left is keeping its members from falling from the coconut tree to have a laugh with Catholics.

The Alfred E. Smith Memorial Foundation Dinner, named for the first Catholic to run for president of the United States—he ran in 1928—has raised millions for Catholic charities in the Archdiocese of New York ever since 1946. After presidential rivals John F. Kennedy and Richard Nixon attended together in 1960, it became a tradition for presidential nominees to attend this black-tie event and exchange playful barbs. The $5,000-a-plate fundraiser has seen many opponents crack jokes at each other’s expense in a hammy but humanizing evening of humor.

That tradition was broken in 1984 when Democrat Walter Mondale turned the invitation down—and proceeded to lose 49 out of 50 states to Ronald Reagan, noted Cardinal Timothy Dolan cheekily, who has hosted the dinner for many years. And it will be broken again on October 17 with Kamala Harris’ inability to attend—and, presumably, to lighten up.

Cardinal Dolan has expressed the archdiocese’s disappointment over this, especially given the contentious atmosphere of this election cycle, saying that he was “looking forward to giving the vice president an enthusiastic welcome.” The cardinal went on to say, “We’re not used to this, we don’t know how to handle it,” and that Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, of New York, and New York Governor Kathy Hochul are “working hard to convince her to come.” But it seems that it is Madame Vice President who is not used to the prospect of being the butt of a merry joke or how to handle a little laughter that harms no one.

Donald Trump will be there with bells on, however, as he was when he ran against Hillary Clinton in 2016 and at the 2020 virtual version when he ran against Joe Biden. Ever the showman, the Donald can take it as much as he can dish it out, given the tough, yet thin-skinned paradox that he amusingly is. Of course, he has had things to say about Harris’ decline, which posted on Truth Social was consistent with her “history of anti-Catholic actions.”

“It’s sad, but not surprising, that Kamala has decided not to attend,” Trump blasted. “I don’t know what she has against our Catholic friends, but it must be a lot because she certainly has not been very nice to them. In fact,” Trump went on, “Catholics are literally being persecuted by this Administration. Any Catholic that votes for Comrade Kamala Harris should have their head examined…”

While it would have been pleasant and poignant to see Mr. Trump smirk over at Ms. Harris after saying these words at the podium as she and everyone laughed, America will not have the chance to have any such high-spirited letup. Apparently, Kamala’s hatred for Catholics is no laughing matter; and, apparently, she will not abide being made fun of—even for charity.

Unfortunately, Trump will probably be surrounded at that dinner by Catholics who should have their head examined, like the liberal-leaning Catholic comedian Jim Gaffigan who will be MCing the dinner this year and who expresses his contempt for Trump loud and clear on social media. “I’m not a good Catholic,” Gaffigan has said, “If there was a test for Catholics, I would fail. But then again, most Catholics would fail, which is probably why there’s not a test.”

He has a point there, as good jokes often do. The “Church of Nice” is seducing a startling number of pew sitters to the anti-Catholic Harris-Walz ticket, making Harris perhaps feel she already has the Catholic vote and doesn’t need to risk attending a roast with her awkward timing and difficulty thinking on her feet.

Either that or her Catholic animus runs deep enough that she doesn’t have any desire to rub elbows and share a jovial dinner with those who don’t believe a woman has the right to terminate the life of a human being growing inside of her body. Kamala Harris may keep repeating her one-liner, “we have so much more in common than what separates us,” as she did in her wild word-salad Oprah interview; “we see in each other a friend, a neighbor,” but that rings about as hollow as a bad joke given her snub.

So much for her happy-warrior joy theme. So much for the civility she modeled by pointedly shaking hands with Trump before the debate. So much for the prospect of bipartisanship as she pulls a page from the current liberal playbook and won’t even be caught in the same room as Donald Trump, let alone having a laugh with him. God forbid.

Harris’ rejection of a night of humor hosted by Catholics is a rejection of Catholic anthropology. The Catholic case for humor holds that an atmosphere of moral relaxation fosters moral fortitude. Though all are prone to immorality, the joker presents that tendency in a laughing pedagogy rooted in realism. Jokes are ontological, recognizing human fallibility and feelings without condemnation or consent. Allowing good humor to occupy a lively corner on the horizon of a Catholic worldview fends off the heresy that earthly foibles are evil. God gave man a sense of humor. That is, He gave us the ability to recognize disorder with delight and see that life is more of a comic thing rather than a corrupt thing.

The sillier sides of life may deal with the rude or rough, but good-hearted jests and jibes play with things that most people avoid acknowledging in a manner that they become delightful—and can actually draw man closer to God by demonstrating with humility and hilarity how much he needs Him. Affable jabs are little winks at fallen nature, acknowledging the reality of every person’s imperfection—which is the first step in overcoming imperfection. Chipper ad hominem humor invites laughter as a fitting response to the ridiculous, though there may be a satirical edge to it, as there always is at the Al Smith Dinner.

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The post Kamala’s Humorless Hatred for Catholics Continues appeared first on LewRockwell.

I moved to Indonesia at the very start of the 2008 presidential election cycle, so that makes 5 cycles in a row that I have lived abroad. I also missed the 1980 election while living in Europe. In all that time, I’ve never seen anything like this.

In 2012, I signed up for Ron Paul’s email blasts to keep up with the campaign. After his campaign email stopped, I never thought much about it, until this year. Since roughly March, I’ve been getting waterfalls of campaign begging and cheerleading notices, first from the Trump campaign, and then from scores of folks like RFK and Tulsi Gabbard, and various Republican glitterati. Every time I unsubscribe, two more entities pop up. At the moment, it’s quiet. I think I sprayed them all, but there’s still a month or so to go, and the nits are notoriously hard to get.

Then, in the last week, YouBoob has been flooded with ads for some NGO called Center for U.S. Voters Abroad (CUSVA). I mean literally every 5 minutes. And it’s not just me, my Canadian buddy is seeing them, as are Mrs. FarSide and two Indonesian friends, so this is not a targeted nor cheap campaign, which causes my FarSidey Sense to twitch.

I’ve never heard of this organization before, nor have I ever seen such a wall-to-wall bombing campaign specifically targeting US voters overseas. All expats know you can go to the nearest embassy or consulate to register and vote, but only for president. State elections are unavailable overseas. Anyway, I did a little scratching around on this CUSVA group.

Turns out, there is almost nothing about them outside of their website, though I did find a curious blurb on the Guadalajara Post site, of all places. There are no lists of donors or grants of PAC money that I can find. They are registered as a 501(c)(4), under the Center for U.S. Voters Abroad Foundation, which is a 501(c)(3). It sounds as if it was formed after the 2020 election, but that’s just an inference.

The CUSVA website states that the CUSVA was formed as part of a larger initiative under the Act Now Project, another nonprofit organization. It aims to “assist” U.S. citizens living abroad in navigating the often-complicated process of registering to vote and casting absentee ballots in U.S. elections. The CUSVA is also part of a broader effort that includes the Act Now Coalition, yet another nonprofit initiative.

Regular readers will know what I think about QGOs/NGOs, especially when they team up in a web of money laundering efforts.

Two things, no make it three, bother me about this: 1) NGOs are dangerous; 2) Act Now sounds all Bumbledickery; and 3) the process of registering and voting at the embassy is not an overly complex process and there are plenty of excited staff on hand to help.

Registering involves filling out a standardized post card application. Once approved, you get an email telling you where and when to pick up your absentee ballot, which can be mailed to your registered Secretary of State, or sent through the embassy mail system.

Naturally, I looked up the Act Now Project…

The Act Now Project, according to its propaganda, is a nonprofit organization under the UN that operates in both 501(c)(3) and 501(c)(4) forms. Its mission is to “create innovative, data-driven solutions to urgent social and political problems, leveraging technology and user-friendly data products to inform decision-making.” One of its key initiatives includes The Center for U.S. Voters Abroad.

The Act Now Project was notorious during the COVID-19 pandemic through its platform “Covid Act Now,” which provided real-time data to help governments corral and detain…er, communities make informed safety decisions​.

The Act Now Project’s broader focus includes environmental advocacy, climate change solutions, and public health data modelling, demonstrating its aim to weaponize issues that require accurate, accessible, and impactful information to subdue humanity.

Yup, I thought I smelled Bumbledick all over this thing.

Back to CUSVA, all you have to do is tell them what state you last resided in, and they’ll apparently “help” you figure out what address you were living at (!). Overseas absentee ballots do count towards a state’s popular vote, and thus the Electoral College results, with most states having a winner-take-all system except for Nebraska and Maine.

In other words, this whole effort has the fragrant odor of voter fraud about it, based on what it offers and who’s involved. If all I have to do is give them a random address in one of the states, then it sounds like this operation could be enabling fraud, and given the UN connection and lack of transparency, that’s a pretty good bet. Some information I’ve found says I don’t even have to have lived in the states at any point in my life (whiff, whiff).

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The post Voater Frod? appeared first on LewRockwell.

Fresh reports confirm that a theory proposed last month is being put into practice: the British state, even more than United States neocons, wants to escalate to full-scale war with Russia and seems to be achieving its aim. This is something the entire world should be deeply concerned about.

In a September 18 video analysis, The Duran reported that British Prime Minister Keir Starmer is pursuing a policy of launching long-range missile strikes into Russia, despite the advice of his own Foreign Office – and that of a former U.K. national security adviser.

The U.S. government, whose Ukraine policy is presumed to be directed by former Hillary Clinton campaign adviser Jake Sullivan, has refused to back the move. Yet many British politicians are urging the use of British-supplied Storm Shadow missiles by Ukraine to mount attacks the Russians say will lead to war with NATO.

The Duran’s Alexander Mercouris cites a September 13 interview with the U.K.’s Financial Times, in which Lord Darroch – the former British national security adviser and ambassador to the United States – “warned that allowing long-range Storm Shadow missiles to be fired by Ukraine into Russia risks a major escalation of the conflict.”

The Storm Shadow missiles, manufactured by France and supplied by Britain, cannot be operated without direct NATO assistance. Russian President Vladimir Putin ominously warned last Thursday that their use would see NATO “at war with Russia.”

Both U.S. President Joe Biden and U.K. Prime Minister Starmer have “brushed off Russian President Vladimir Putin’s threats,” according to Politico, whose report notes that former U.K. Prime Minister Boris Johnson and former U.K. Defense Secretary Grant Shapps have “piled on the pressure” in a meeting with formerly elected President Volodymyr Zelensky in Kiev on the same day.

Both Johnson and Shapps are “urging the U.K. and U.S. to let Ukraine use both nations’ long-range missiles, Storm Shadow, SCALP and ATACMS, against targets in Russian territory,” Politico reports, in a meeting which saw Zelensky claim that permitting the NATO-directed strikes could “truly change the course of the war.”

Yet Politico also reports that two unnamed U.K. government sources “voiced doubt that the use of Storm Shadow missiles would be a game-changer in the war” – a position held by Lord Darroch. In his FT interview, he “added that he was not convinced that using Storm Shadow missiles to hit targets in Russia would be a decisive factor in the war.”

Lord Darroch is convinced that the threat of full-scale war is serious, countering the dismissive attitude of the U.S. president and the pro-war U.K. faction.

“… Darroch said that just because Putin had previously not carried through on threats of reprisals when the West supplied battle tanks and missiles to Ukraine, it did not mean the same would apply to cruise missile strikes on his territory,” the FT report said.

“’If they are confident that he’s bluffing, then fine,’ he said. ‘But he’s bluffing until he isn’t.’”

The push to permit long-range missile strikes into Russia will not win the war, Darroch and others say, but may well see the outbreak of a far greater conflict.

Starmer in Washington

Starmer’s meeting with Biden last Friday saw “the use of the missiles … at the top of the agenda,” said the FT, with a final decision on approval to be determined at a U.N. General Assembly later in September.

Yet The Duran reports that the British war faction may press ahead without U.S. support – or approval.

The Duran’s Alexander Mercouris cites an article in the U.K. Times newspaper of September 16, which states, “Five former defense secretaries and an ex-prime minister have urged Sir Keir Starmer to go ahead unilaterally” with mounting long-range missile strikes into Russia and, as noted below, that has already happened.

The Times report also said that the U.K. “will not go it alone,” however – because according to U.K. government sources, “US guidance systems were seen as crucial to ensuring the missiles hit their targets.”

Despite the headline claiming that “Britain won’t go it alone over long-range missile strikes,” the truth of the matter appears to be it cannot target the missiles without U.S. help – which it aims to secure at the forthcoming U.N. assembly. As the Times concludes,

“The [U.K.] government believes the US is still likely to give the green light at the UN general assembly in New York, although there are splits within President Biden’s administration.”

With the U.S. presidential election seen as a decisive factor in both U.S. and Russian decision-making, the British effort to escalate the war appears to be a race against the clock, which sees a “lame duck” President Biden soon to be replaced with a new incumbent.

A further report on Sunday the 15th from The Times’ Mark Urban said, “There is, of course, another critical unknown here: the result of November’s US presidential election. The widely held view among Western analysts is that Putin will await the outcome of that before deciding what to do.”

The actions of the British leadership – present and past – appear to confirm former U.K. Foreign Minister David Cameron’s claim that Britain’s Ukraine policy is “fixed” – as it has remained committed to escalation despite a change of government.

The question remains – why are British senior figures pushing for a move which may trigger an all-out war with Russia?

Read the Whole Article

The post The UK Is Getting Dangerously Close to Full-Scale War With Russia appeared first on LewRockwell.

di Michael Lebowitz

Il livello dei rendimenti dei titoli del Tesoro USA e la relativa forma mutevole della curva dei rendimenti forniscono agli investitori un feedback importante in merito alle aspettative del mercato per quanto riguarda crescita economica, inflazione e politica monetaria. Di recente i rendimenti a breve e lungo termine sono scesi, con le scadenze a breve termine in testa. I cambiamenti determinano quello che i trader obbligazionari chiamano uno spostamento della curva dei rendimenti in bull steepening. Lo spostamento è dovuto all'indebolimento delle condizioni economiche, alla moderazione dell'inflazione e alla crescente probabilità che la FED continui ad abbassare i tassi.

La curva dei rendimenti è un indicatore essenziale che gli investitori obbligazionari seguono attentamente, mentre invece molti investitori azionari non la seguono nonostante l'importanza dei rendimenti obbligazionari rispetto a quelli azionari. In questa serie in due parti iniziamo con una discussione introduttiva sui quattro tipi di spostamenti della curva dei rendimenti e su cosa comportano da una prospettiva economica e di inflazione.

Nella seconda parte forniremo una prospettiva quantitativa su cosa potrebbe significare un continuo rialzo dei prezzi per i rendimenti dei principali indici azionari, insieme a vari settori e fattori.

Cronologia della curva dei rendimenti

Il grafico qui sotto riporta i rendimenti del decennale e del biennale statunitensi e la differenza tra i due titoli. Quest'ultima è chiamata differenziale 10/2 anni. Come avrete notato, la curva dei rendimenti ha un andamento ripetitivo che è correlato al ciclo economico.

In genere la curva dei rendimenti si inclina rapidamente verso l'alto (la differenza tra i rendimenti a 10 anni e a 2 anni aumenta) dopo una recessione. Durante la maggior parte delle espansioni economiche la curva si appiattisce (la differenza diminuisce). La curva dei rendimenti spesso si inverte (il rendimento a 10 anni è inferiore a quello a 2 anni) verso la fine dell'espansione.

Uno degli indicatori di recessione più accurati si verifica quando una curva dei rendimenti invertita si inclina, riportandola in territorio positivo. Infine la curva dei rendimenti sale rapidamente quando la FED abbassa i tassi per stimolare l'attività economica e combattere una recessione.

Il nascente Bull steepening

Il recente indebolimento riguardo dati sul lavoro e attività economica, insieme alla moderazione dell'inflazione, hanno convinto i mercati che la FED intraprenderà una serie di tagli dei tassi a partire da settembre. Inoltre Jerome Powell ha praticamente dato loro il via libera, stando al suo discorso a Jackson Hole: “È giunto il momento che la politica si adegui. La direzione di marcia è chiara e i tempi e il ritmo dei tagli dei tassi dipenderanno dai dati in entrata, dalle prospettive in evoluzione e dall'equilibrio dei rischi”.

I rendimenti obbligazionari sono in calo, con quelli a breve termine che sono scesi di più. È difficile vederlo nel grafico sopra, ma il recente rally nel mercato obbligazionario ha causato la salita della curva dei rendimenti (azzurro chiaro) da -46 punti base a metà giugno a -1 oggi. Ora è sul punto di uscita dall'inversione e di conseguenza vicina a inviare un avviso di recessione.

Questo tipo di movimento nei rendimenti obbligazionari a lungo e breve termine è comunemente definito bull steepening. Le parole bull o bullish si riferiscono al fatto che i rendimenti obbligazionari stanno calando e, di conseguenza, i prezzi delle obbligazioni stanno salendo. Steepening si riferisce alla forma della curva dei rendimenti, in inclinazione verso l'alto, sebbene sia ancora negativa.

Nella seconda parte di questa serie valuteremo i precedenti cicli di bull steepening e quantificheremo cosa hanno significato per i rendimenti azionari. Tuttavia, per familiarizzarvi meglio con le curve dei rendimenti, vale la pena discutere i quattro principali tipi di spostamenti della curva dei rendimenti e cosa spesso presagiscono.

Bull steepening

Un bull o bullish steepening si verifica quando tutti i rendimenti scendono, ma le scadenze più brevi scendono più di quelle più a lungo termine. Nel nostro esempio ipotetico di seguito, il biennale scende dal 3,35% all'1,50%, mentre i decennali scendono dal 3,80% al 2,80%. Di conseguenza la curva dei rendimenti si inclina dello 0,85%.

Nella maggior parte dei casi un bull steepening trade deriva da trader che prevedono una politica monetaria più accomodante a causa di una pronunciata debolezza economica e di una crescente probabilità di recessione. Dato che le obbligazioni a scadenza più breve sono più correlate al tasso di riferimento della banca centrale rispetto alle obbligazioni a scadenza più lunga, ha senso che scendano più rapidamente quando emergono tali aspettative.

Il recente bull steepening è stato da manuale. Il tasso di disoccupazione è salito dal 3,7% al 4,3% quest'anno e, in generale, molti indicatori economici indicano una crescita più lenta. Inoltre l'inflazione sembra essere di nuovo in calo, dando alla FED maggiore sicurezza nell'abbassare i tassi. Powell a Jackson Hole: “Sono sempre più convinto che l'inflazione sia sulla strada giusta per tornare al 2%”.

Bear steepening

Come suggerisce il nome bear steepening, i rendimenti per le scadenze a breve e lungo termine salgono, con questi ultimi, però, che salgono più dei primi. Nel grafico qui sotto il rendimento del titolo obbligazionario a due anni aumenta dal 3,35% al ​​4,10% e quello a dieci anni sale dal 3,80% al 5,10%. Il risultato è uno spostamento verso l'alto della curva dei rendimenti dallo 0,45% all'1,00%.

Nel 2020 e nel 2021 la curva dei rendimenti si è spostata in questo modo. All'epoca la FED ha abbassato i tassi a zero e ha fatto enormi QE. I rendimenti obbligazionari hanno iniziato a salire in previsione di una ripresa dell'attività economica e delle crescenti preoccupazioni inflazionistiche dovute a massicci stimoli fiscali e monetari. I rendimenti a breve termine non si sono mossi quanto quelli a lungo termine. Ciò è accaduto perché la FED si è impegnata a mantenere il tasso di riferimento molto basso per combattere la crisi sanitaria.

Verso la fine del 2023 il bear steepening si è ripresentato poiché l'economia ha continuato a correre al di sopra del suo ritmo naturale nonostante il tasso di riferimento al 5%. I tassi d'interesse più alti non stavano influenzando l'economia e l'inflazione aveva smesso di scendere. Il mercato ha pensato che la FED avrebbe dovuto rialzare ulteriormente i tassi. Tuttavia la domanda di investimenti nel mercato monetario era insaziabile a causa dei grossi saldi di cassa e del mercato monetario, cosa ha contribuito a tenere sotto controllo i tassi a breve termine. All'estremità destra della curva gli investitori sono stati costretti ad assorbire una sostanziale emissione di debito del Tesoro statunitense, di conseguenza hanno richiesto un rendimento extra. Questo è definito un premio a termine crescente.

Bull flattening

Un bull flattening comporta un calo dei rendimenti obbligazionari a breve e lungo termine, con questi ultimi che scendono di più. Il grafico qui sotto mostra i rendimenti a due anni in calo dello 0,70% e i rendimenti a dieci anni in calo dell'1,00%. Il risultato è un appiattimento della curva dello 0,30%.

I bull flattening tendono a essere il risultato di un relativo ottimismo economico. Il mercato è incoraggiato perché è probabile che l'inflazione scenda, ma non è eccessivamente preoccupato che un'inflazione più bassa sia dovuta a una domanda in calo. Pertanto gli investitori non si aspettano molto per quanto riguarda i tagli dei tassi da parte della FED.

Al contrario il mercato potrebbe essere preoccupato per l'economia, ma se il tasso di riferimento è a zero o quasi, non c'è spazio affinché la parte sinistra della curva dei rendimenti scenda. Il 2016 è un buon esempio. Il tasso di riferimento della FED era già a zero e l'economia si stava indebolendo, con l'inflazione che rimaneva al di sotto dell'obiettivo al 2%. Le obbligazioni a lungo termine si sono mosse al ribasso insieme all'inflazione e alle prospettive economiche, ma le obbligazioni a breve termine sono rimaste bloccate dato che la FED che non voleva abbassare i tassi al di sotto dello zero.

Il grafico qui sotto, per gentile concessione di Deutsche Bank, mostra che il valore in dollari delle obbligazioni globali a rendimento negativo era aumentato notevolmente nel 2016. Nonostante le tendenze internazionali, i rendimenti statunitensi sono rimasti ampiamente sopra lo zero percento.

Bear flattening

In un bear-flattening i rendimenti salgono lungo tutta la curva, con le scadenze più brevi che salgono di più. Il biennale sale dal 3,35% al ​​4,40% nel grafico qui sotto; il decennale sale dal 3,80% al 4,20%. Nel processo la curva si appiattisce e si inverte dallo 0,45% allo -0,20%.

Riepilogo

Ora è giunto il momento di concentrarsi sullo spostamento  in atto della curva dei rendimenti.

Cosa potrebbe significare un bull steepening per vari indici azionari, settori e fattori?

Ecco un suggerimento: il mercato azionario sembra amare l'idea che la FED abbassi i tassi, ma quando accade il risultato non è spesso amichevole per gli investitori azionari.

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

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I can’t help thinking about my old days spent at that great bar, the Bombay Bicycle Club in San Antonio, TX. In particular, I had in mind a couple of the regular characters I met there. Bernie, The Jewish Cowboy Boots Salesman; while I believe he was, somewhat surprisingly from Texas, he had a New York vibe; that is, he had a brash, in your face, arrogance. Maybe it was because his brother was a professional ticket scalper that Bernie always acted as if he had an edge or inside information. Another regular who was very close to my heart was George The Phone Man. He was a charming rascal, always looking for a good meal and to avoid work. He would describe to me his latest meal in detailed delight, much like the custom house official described by Hawthorne in The Scarlet Letter. George really was from New York. Because I actually knew them, and not just the persona they projected onto the world, I liked both of them very much, especially George. He tried to keep it hidden, but George was a very kind and considerate human being.

These characters from my past come to mind when I think about Donald Trump. I always thought of Trump as arrogant and vulgar. Why must he put his own name on everything? I was never inclined to vote for him, as I am not inclined to ever vote for anyone. But a little investigation of Trump and an underlying kindness and concern for others becomes apparent. For example, see this article about his employees, Longtime Trump employee: Mar-a-Lago culture would have led many to commit crimes. From the article, “A longtime employee of Donald Trump, who testified before a grand jury in the case involving the former president’s handling of classified documents, described a culture of loyalty around Trump that drives people toward extreme lengths to protect him.” I think Trump actually likes people. He likes the people who vote for him (Did Trump Say, ‘I Love the Poorly Educated’?). He seems to like the people who probably did not vote for him like these people in Harlem, Massive Crowd Greets Trump as He Visits NYC Bodega. He liked some of his opponents like Ben Carson. He might even like foreign leaders who do not bow down to US hegemony (Trump former advisers sound the alarm that he praises despots in private and on the campaign trail). The attorney Robert Barnes says Trump is a nice guy but wants to look strong. This is how he can be tough in a debate and especially in a negotiation . . . the art of the deal.

Despite what I have presented here, the Democratic party and the media describe Trump as a purveyor of The Politics of Hate. Yet it is leading Democrats that seem to me to exhibit hate, or at least disgust, for the typical flyover country, MAGA Republicans. For example, it was Hillary Clinton who called Trump supporters “deplorables.”  Also consider Vice-President Harris, it appears nobody wants to work for her, Harris’s Personnel Problem: Over 90 Percent of VP’s Staff Left in Last Three Years. In my experience that rate of turnover would likely occur for a boss who does not respect her employees. It is chilling to think how she will treat those voters who do not choose her.

I am not a Trump fanboy, but it seems to me that Trump practices a politics of like. Calling it a politics of hate is more a case, as Barnes often says, of confession through projection by the Democrats.

The post The Politics of Like appeared first on LewRockwell.

Almost any viewpoint can be “proven” using the “correct” evidence and logic. Purely as a challenge, I’ve successfully done this in the past with beliefs I consider to be abhorrent and completely disagree with. Once you become familiar with the process, you begin to gain an appreciation for how ephemeral the truth is and how problematic it is that most people have filters they see through reality through that lead to them doing this even if it’s not deliberate (although if you watch carefully for it, you’ll often see non-verbal signs that show they are somewhat aware they are lying to themselves).

For some reason, this realization directly conflicted with my deepest values (which to this day I don’t know the source of as they just existed long before I had learned about the world), so my own way of seeing the world reoriented around trying to discern what was actually true rather than proving I was right (e.g., to hold onto the illusion I know what was going on) in the hopes the truth could become something tangible rather than this ephemeral fiction our hands and minds constantly passed through. In turn, a major reason why I approach most topics I present here by fairly presenting both sides is because I found it was one of the things necessary for me to pass through that ephemeral layer of truth that clouds almost everything.
Note: after going through this process for years, I started being able to tell if what I was exposed to had a “solidity” to it or an “emptiness” and a large part of how I filter reality now is by focusing my attention to the things that appear to have solidity (rather than them conforming to what I want to be true). In the past, I’ve mentioned how I will constantly debate and scrutinize each idea I am considering before deciding which one to adopt (which is important to do), but I view this discernment of solidity and emptiness to be much more important for arriving at what rings true.

Despite this publication being about medicine, I’ve repeatedly focused on highlighting the work of public relations (PR), a massive invisible industry (e.g., 20 billion was spent on it in America last year) that continually shapes our perceptions of reality for its corporate and government clients. Briefly, PR is the incredibly refined science of manipulating the public, and essentially is what lies between propaganda and marketing.

I have done this because as the years have gone by, I’ve come to appreciate how much of what happens in medicine is actually a product of how the consciousness and collective beliefs about our society are altered so that pharmaceutical products can be sold and that it’s often a lost cause to try to debate the science behind a recommendation unless you understand the PR at play.

Note: this is not that different from how many people who have an ulterior financial motive will inevitably arrive at the conclusion which supports their financial interests regardless of how hard you try to convince them not to. For example, listen to this talk below the co-founder of Shots Heard gave about why no one online could possibly have a valid reason to question vaccine safety, that no doctor who promotes vaccines is being paid off to do so, and why it was necessary to censor all of those opinions—while conveniently neglecting to mention he’s received over $200,000.00 from vaccine companies.

PR Campaigns

The “miracle” of PR is how effective it is, and I’ve now lost count of how many times an abhorrent policy that few Americans wanted was pushed through by a well financed PR campaign. In turn, I would argue PR has effectively altered policymaking from being a process of crafting an idea which is acceptable to the public (this is essentially how Democracy is supposed to operate). To simply making sure what is being done isn’t so far out of line it will be prohibitively expensive for a PR firm to sell it to the public.

For reference, some of the common PR tactics include:

1. Organizing a massive amount of coverage of an event which supports someone’s narrative and was crafted to go viral. For example:
•The founder of PR was infamous for convincing women across America to take up smoking by staging a women’s suffrage (right to vote) protest and having them all smoke their “liberation torches” as part of the protest).
•The Gulf War was sold to America by a fake testimony from a Kuwaiti girl (who was the daughter of the ambassador) who was coaxed to say the rampaging Iraqi army was invading hospitals and “taking babies out of incubators and leaving them to die on the cold floor,” a line which was then repeated again and again by politicians (e.g., Bush) around the world.

2. Hiring focus groups to determine what language is the most effective in persuading people to support your position and then blasting it on every public announcement and news station (e.g., the local ones) simultaneously. This often goes hand in hand with producing news programs for the stations (which are effectively PR productions for their sponsors).

3. Creating an endless number of “non-profit” organizations with nice names that actually advance the interests of the sponsoring industry. For example, the “non-profit” Foundation for Clean Air Progress is an industry front group that has aggressively lobbied both the public and the government to reduce the existing air quality standards mandated by the Clean Air Act. Likewise, the National Multiple Sclerosis Society took in 172 million dollars last year and is notorious for blocking many proven treatments for MS from seeing the light of day, while continuously supporting lucrative new drugs to “manage” the disease.

4. Paying off an endless number of experts to promote your message and having them be hosted on networks that are already in your pocket.

I cannot state how effective PR is and how depressing it has been to watch each candidate I supported get torpedoed by the media industrial complex.

However, while the effect of PR is remarkable, many of the people who work in the industry aren’t that talented, and as a result, they will just copy existing (and proven) PR tactics for the current campaign. Because of this, once you’ve seen enough PR campaigns, it becomes very easy to recognize one being enacted.
Note: two things allowed me to accurately predict most of what happened during COVID-19. One was being familiar with the same script having been followed during the HIV epidemic, and the other was seeing the PR campaigns for it be enacted in real time and recognizing the implications of each stage I observed (as the campaigns are typically structured in a sequential series of steps which eventually arrive at their sponsor’s desired outcome).

Censoring the Internet

The primary thing which has allowed the existing PR model to work has been the fact there is an (ever increasing) monopoly over the mass media. Because of this, a chosen PR campaign can be rapidly disseminated across the country while simultaneously, no dissenting narratives are allowed to air that challenge it.

Recognizing that the internet was the fatal weakness of the existing system, I suspect (but can’t prove) that a decision was made to have large internet companies become gatekeepers of information online, and in turn, as these large platforms attracted a large enough audience to become the “trusted sources” of information, they slowly transitioned to censoring things.

In turn, we saw a tug of war occur between the increasing pushes for censorship and the increasing ability of the internet community to bypass the attempts that were made to censor them. This eventually hit a tipping point, when in October 2016, Obama gave a speech at Carnegie Mellon where he declared:

“We’re going to have to rebuild, within this Wild, Wild West of information flow, some sort of curating function that people agree to,” “[T]here has to be, I think, some sort of way in which we can sort through information that passes some basic truthiness tests and those that we have to discard because they just don’t have any basis in anything that’s actually happening in the world.”

Parallel to this declaration, various campaigns were launched. This began with “Fake News” being blared everywhere until Trump attached the label to CNN, at which point the media pivoted. We saw an endless number of media messages about the dangers of “misinformation” ( followed by anything challenging the existing narrative, in turn receiving that label).

Note: public officials (like the instance of Obama mentioned above or Biden throughout the COVID vaccine push) are frequently involved in PR campaigns. For example (as discussed within a recent article on Dermatology’s disastrous war against the sun), in the 1980s, the struggling profession of dermatology spent 2 million dollars hiring a public relations firm to inflate their status and were suggested to rebrand themselves as cancer doctors. This in turn was accomplished by:

1. Offering campaigns beginning in 1985 to provide skin examinations to bring awareness to “skin cancer” and having widespread strategic media coverage of those campaigns.

2. Convincing Ronald Reagan to sign proclamations for “National Skin Cancer Prevention and Detection Week,” and “Older Americans Melanoma/Skin Cancer Detection and Prevention Week.

3. Creating a mortal fear of the sun (which persists to a truly absurd degree these days) despite the fact people that who avoid the sun are 60-130% more likely to die than those who get moderate or high amounts of it (e.g., smokers who get regular sunlight have the same risk of dying as nonsmokers who avoid the sun).

4. Equivocate melanomas (which are rare, dangerous, and caused by a lack of sun exposure) to basal cell carcinomas (which are common, never fatal, and caused by sunlight) since both are “skin cancers” so people can be corralled into regular skin examinations where those skin cancers are identified and quickly surgically removed.

5. Dermatology became one of the highest paying specialties in medicine, and the number of diagnosed skin cancers greatly increased, but there have been minimal changes in the actual death rates of skin cancers. Simultaneously, since those surgeries pay a lot, the profession lost all motivation to determine the actual causes of skin cancer, safe and effective non-surgical treatments for skin cancer, or how to make the sun heal rather than damage the skin.

What I find particularly interesting about Obama’s announcement was that it happened at the same time a coordinated campaign (spearheaded in California) was being conducted to push vaccine mandates across the nation, which were part of a coordinated push by Bill Gates, the WHO, and the WEF (amongst others) to launch a “decade of vaccines” as much of what we saw later throughout COVID-19 was laid out in their documents. Since they knew the public, through the internet would likely oppose this, a lot of investments were made to preempt that. For example:

Note: in this 2020 talk (and many others) PGP’s CEO explains how they monitor all anti-vaccine messages online 24/7 and their plans to pay off local influencers around the country to promote vaccines and to use counter-terrorism tactics to turn everyone on the internet against the anti-vaxxers (who are “not nice people”)—discussed further in this article. Finally, in a later 2023 webinar about inoculating the public against misinformation, the CEO also mentions they regularly use PR techniques. What I personally find amazing about his numerous talks is that he characterizes things being said online (e.g., that monkeypox was a non-issue) as “dangerous misinformation” which has since been proven true. Likewise, I suspect this project was inspired by past pharmaceutical initiatives like this infamous one.

Twitter () and PR

One branch of the misinformation campaign was Peter Hotez going on a national media tour in 2019 about the dangers the country was facing from online vaccine misinformation, which in turn laid the foundation for rapidly censoring any voices online that dissented against the COVID narrative. Because of this, we saw an escalating level of censorship from all the major internet platforms after Obama’s 2016 speech which then kicked into overdrive during COVID-19 to protect us from dangerous misinformation.

At the time this began in 2016, it became very clear to me that major online censorship was occurring, some of which was happening behind the scenes (e.g., shadow banning) and some of which was happening overtly towards easy to target groups (e.g., the alt-right) which I took as a sign more and more aggressive censorship was going to happen, much of which we would not see.

Simultaneously, since the censorship was very selective in who it targeted, based on who it targeted, while I couldn’t “prove it,” I assumed it had to be some type of collaboration between the government and the pharmaceutical sector. This was eventually confirmed by two things:

•Discovering numerous major investments being made by Big Tech into the pharmaceutical industry.

•Elon Musk buying Twitter () and making the choice to publicly release Twitter’s correspondences with the Federal Government, which in turn showed a consistent pattern of Twitter complying with (illegal) requests from the Federal government to censor anything that threatened its narratives. Those documents in turn led to a landmark case that placed an injunction against the Federal Government (which unfortunately was recently overturned by the Supreme Court).

From my perspective, Elon buying Twitter and making free speech on it was monumental as in addition to it being a large venue for free speech, it’s structure was such that it allowed ideas with merit to spread very quickly, and again and again, I saw well packaged bits of truth reach millions of people (and sometimes make national headlines)—something I’d never witnessed before on any media platform.

When I reflected on why this is, I realized that this frequently cited internet quote described it.

It’s not [that] the left can’t meme per say, it’s that their viewpoints rely on a carefully constructed denial of reality, to a far greater extent than any of the cults or religions they seek to supplant. This doesn’t lend itself to simple, easily conveyed messages, because if you rely on your viewers to see things as they are, without providing several layers of carefully selected context, they’ll interpret it the wrong way. The left can’t meme because memes are the antithesis of how they communicate.

Note: I describe myself as “liberal” but the current definition of “the left” is very different from what many of us signed up for when we became Democrats.

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On the eve of the first presidential candidate debate, the Supreme Court gave a huge boost to Joe Biden to help him “fix” the 2024 election with maybe its worst decision of the year. It remains to be seen whether the court’s refusal to stop federal censorship will be a wooden stake in the credibility of American democracy.

The court ruled in the case of Murthy v. Missouri, a lawsuit brought by individuals censored on social media thanks to federal threats and machinations. Court decisions last year vividly chronicled a byzantine litany of anti–free speech interventions by multiple federal agencies and the White House. On July 4, 2023, federal judge Terry Doughty condemned the Biden administration for potentially “the most massive attack against free speech in United States history.” A federal appeals court imposed injunctions on federal officials to prohibit them from acting “to coerce or significantly encourage social-media companies to remove, delete, suppress, or reduce … posted social-media content containing protected free speech.”

State censorship

The decisions documented how the FBI, Biden White House, U.S. Surgeon General, and other federal agencies have sabotaged Americans’ freedom of speech. If you tried to complain about COVID lockdowns, or school shutdowns, or even about whether mail-in ballots caused fraud — your online comments could have been suppressed thanks to threats and string-pulling by the feds or by federal contractors. Conservatives were far more likely to be censored than liberals and leftists.

But the Supreme Court in late June decided to overlook all those abuses. There will be no injunction to stop the White House or federal agencies or federal contractors from suppressing criticism of Biden or his policies before the 2024 election. In a 6–3 decision, the Supreme Court gave the benefit of the doubt to federal browbeating, arm-twisting, and jawboning, regardless of how many Americans are wrongfully muzzled.

The Biden censorship industrial complex triumphed because most Supreme Court justices could not be bothered to honestly examine the massive evidence of its abuses. The majority opinion, written by Justice Amy Coney Barrett, whined that “the record spans over 26,000 pages” and, quoting an earlier court decision, scoffed that “judges are not like pigs, hunting for truffles buried in the record.”

Will that line catch on with school kids? When asked whether they did their homework, they can quote Justice Barrett and tell their teachers that they are “not like pigs hunting for truffles buried in the record” of all their class assignments.

“Lack of standing” a total cop-out

Rather than swine groveling in the muck, the Supreme Court instead disposed of this landmark case on a quibble, putting their legal pinkies up in the air like a white-wine drinker at a cocktail reception. The court ruled that the plaintiffs — including two state governments and eminent scientists banned from social media — did not have “standing” because they had not proven to negligent justices (how many pages in the files did they actually read?) that federal intervention and string-pulling injured them.

Bizarrely, the court denied standing even after conceding that it “may be true” that social-media platforms “continue to suppress [plaintiffs] speech according to policies initially adopted under Government pressure.”

But so why is this not a problem? Did the court decide to hold the government innocent unless there were signed confessions from White House and FBI officials, or what?

Lack of standing was the same legal ploy the Supreme Court used in early 2013 to tacitly absolve the National Security Agency’s vast illegal surveillance regime. After the Supreme Court accepted a case on warrantless wiretaps in 2012, the Obama administration urged the Justices to dismiss the case, claiming it dealt with “state secrets.” A New York Times editorial labeled the administration’s position “a cynical Catch 22: Because the wiretaps are secret and no one can say for certain that their calls have been or will be monitored, no one has standing to bring suit over the surveillance.”

Cynical arguments sufficed for five of the justices. Justice Samuel Alito, writing for the majority, declared that the Court was averse to granting standing to challenge the government based on “theories that require guesswork” and “no specific facts” and fears of “hypothetical future harm.” The Supreme Court insisted that the government already offered plenty of safeguards — such as the FISA Court — to protect Americans’ rights. “Lack of standing” didn’t prevent former NSA employee Edward Snowden from blowing the roof off the NSA.

When the court heard oral arguments in this case in March, most of the justices seemed clueless about the sordid record of government abuses. Maybe the outcome was a foregone conclusion when Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson blathered that “my biggest concern” is “the First Amendment hamstringing the government in significant ways in the most important time periods.” To sanctify censorship, Jackson repeatedly invoked the specter of legions of American teenagers jumping out of windows thanks to a social-media “challenge.”

So to save the children, Jackson tossed the First Amendment out the window instead. Unfortunately, five other justices joined the defenestration. Washingtonians presume the First Amendment is archaic because Americans have become village idiots who must be constantly rescued by federal officials.

But the whole point of the Bill of Rights is to hamstring would-be federal tyrants.

When a federal appeals court heard arguments on the case, Judge Don Willett said he had no problem with federal agencies publicly criticizing what they judged to be false or dangerous ideas. But that wasn’t how Team Biden compelled submission: “Here you have government in secret, in private, out of the public eye, relying on … subtle strong-arming and veiled or not-so-veiled threats.” Willett vivified how the feds played the game: “That’s a really nice social media platform you’ve got there; it would be a shame if something happened to it.”

This case was framed by Team Biden as whether the government would have the freedom to intervene against misinformation. Much of the press presumes that federal agencies are an infallible Oracle of Delphi.

Censorship and disinformation: two peas in a pod

But the issue was censorship, not the latest self-serving definitions of “misinformation” to emerge from inside the Washington, D.C., beltway. Portraying the issue as one of fighting misinformation preemptively grants a halo to federal censors. Too often, misinformation is simply anything that makes people mistrust the government.

The biggest “misinformation” of the COVID pandemic was Biden’s promise during a CNN town hall in July 2021: “You’re not going to get COVID if you have these vaccinations.” Subsequent waves of Delta, Omicron, and other COVID variants ravaged the credibility of Biden and federal COVID policymakers. The Washington Post castigated the CDC for withholding COVID information, noting that its “overly rosy assessments of the vaccines’ effectiveness against delta may have lulled Americans into a false sense of security.” But Biden continued to sound clueless on the issue. Five months after the CDC conceded the failure of the vaccines to prevent transmission, Biden announced in December 2021: “This is a pandemic of the unvaccinated. That’s the problem. Everybody talks about freedom … not to have a shot or have a test. Well, guess what? How about patriotism?”

After it became undeniable that the vaccines failed to prevent transmission and infection, the Biden administration trumpeted the notion that the vaccines prevented severe illness that would lead to hospitalization or death. That was the fallback justification for Biden’s dictate in September 2021 that 100 million adults must be injected with COVID vaccines. In a CNN town hall the following month, Biden derided vaccine skeptics as murderers who only wanted “the freedom to kill you” with COVID.

Shortly before Christmas 2021, Biden decreed: “We are looking at a winter of severe illness and death for the unvaccinated.” A few days later, he declared that “almost everyone who has died from COVID- 19 in the past many months has been unvaccinated.” But Team Biden was again pummeling Americans with misinformation.

Federal policymakers knew that the vaccines were massively failing to prevent fatalities but covered it up. In October 2021, the CDC had ceased publishing data showing soaring deaths among the fully vaxxed because the data “might be misinterpreted as the vaccines being ineffective,” the New York Times later revealed. Some state governments continued to publish COVID death data despite the CDC data lockdown. Oregon officially classified roughly a quarter of its COVID fatalities between August and December as “vaccine breakthrough deaths.” According to the Vermont Department of Health, “Half of the [COVID] deaths in August were breakthrough cases. Almost three-quarters of them in September were.” The CDC later admitted that, by early 2022, most COVID fatalities were fully vaxxed.

Team Biden’s censorship went far beyond pressuring social-media companies “to censor misinformation regarding climate change, gender discussions, abortion, and economic policy,” as Judge Doughty noted last year. A confidential 2022 DHS document detailed pending crackdowns on “inaccurate” information on “racial justice, U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan, and the nature of U.S. support to Ukraine.”

Because much of the censorship in recent years was inflicted by federal contractors, the Supreme Court held that Uncle Sam is effectively blameless. But as Justice Samuel Alito dissented, “Government officials may not coerce private entities to suppress speech.” Alito lamented that the court signals that “if a coercive campaign is carried out with enough sophistication,” it could “stand as an attractive model for future officials who want to control what the people say, hear, and think.”

The Supreme Court effectively dropped an Iron Curtain to shroud federal censorship like it previously did for torture atrocities. Two years ago, the court entitled the CIA to continue to deny its outrages despite worldwide exposes of its crimes. The Supreme Court ludicrously declared that “sometimes information that has entered the public domain may nonetheless fall within the scope of the state secrets privilege.” Associate Justice Neil Gorsuch dissented, warning that “utmost deference” to the CIA would “invite more claims of secrecy in more doubtful circumstances — and facilitate the loss of liberty and due process history shows very often follows.” Gorsuch noted that the Supreme Court was granting the same type of “crown prerogatives” to federal agencies that the Declaration of Independence describes as evil.

The federal district and federal appeals court recognized that federal censorship is a clear and present danger to American democracy. What if the FBI browbeats social-media companies into suppressing new revelations of kickbacks Biden received the same way the FBI helped suppress the 2020 New York Post story of Hunter Biden’s laptop?

What if White House aides verbally bludgeon outlets to silence any comments on Biden’s shuffling gait and cluelessness, like they suppressed jokes about COVID policy in 2021?

What if federal agencies again launch a concerted campaign to silence any criticisms on mail-in ballots spurring deluges of fraud, as happened before the 2020 election?

It is a sad day when Supreme Court justices behave like shiftless members of Congress who vote for a thousand-page bill that they never bothered to read. In lieu of constitutional rights and “government under the law,” the Supreme Court tells Americans they only deserve “plausible deniability” for government crimes. If we later learn that federal censorship changed the outcome of the 2024 election, will the Supreme Court shrug and simply tell citizens to recite “Never mind” twenty times? Unfortunately, there is no such thing as retroactive self-government.

This article was originally published in the September 2024 issue of Future of Freedom.

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One day almost two years ago in October of 2022, I sat down in my reading chair in the small, old house I have lived in (at that point) for 23 years and opened a book I’d just received from Amazon called The Quest for Community by political philosopher Robert Nisbet. Published in 1953, it was the first of the 18 books Nesbit would write, and remains his masterpiece and the book for which he is best known. The book is a study of our shared, if not instinctive, drive to be with others and an indictment of governments the world over, particularly authoritarian governments, in their attempts throughout history to keep us apart. They do this because it is easier to control people who are isolated and lonely.

In one of the many sentences that I underlined in The Quest for Community and that might sum up this entire magnum opus, Nisbet writes: “The prime object of totalitarian government thus becomes the incessant destruction of all evidences of spontaneous, autonomous association.”

If there was ever a time when we suffered a gale force blow of totalitarianism, it was during the government-imposed lockdowns and mandates—social distancing, masking, and so-called vaccines—and the weaponized propaganda and increasing surveillance and invasion of privacy that were thrown into the toxic soup we’d all been force-fed. It not only happened here in America, but also throughout much of the world. It was the most widespread attack on freedom in human history. And all for no reason but for governments nearly everywhere to demolish the lives billions of us had built up and long enjoyed, individually and collectively, and then to claim their control over us. We were told it was all to “stop the spread” of a mysterious and supposedly lethal virus and to “flatten the curve” of rising cases of illness. That was just a ruse, a massive, well-orchestrated, and demonic sleight of hand.

The aftershocks are still with us. And what we experienced during the peak of the so-called pandemic may well come around again. And the next time, it may even be worse. As the billionaire psychopath Bill Gates said (smirking) a few years back, it “will get our attention.” So, I thought it would be a good idea to read about our quest for community and how governments often cleverly and, sometimes, brutally seek to destroy those natural communities while rounding us up into contrived communities of their own making.

At the outset of this essay, I will say this about the quest for community: it never made much sense to me. I love solitude and am very much a loner. Except for 10 years of marriage from 1984 to 1994, I’ve lived by myself. At school, I never joined a team sport nor attended any games or homecoming celebrations or pep rallies. In college, I went to plenty of keg parties in the dank basements of fraternities, but I never even thought of pledging one. More often than not, I’ve traveled alone to places near and far, from the Himalayan mountains in Nepal; to a remote, off-the-grid cabin on the coast of Maine; to the 500-mile Camino de Santiago pilgrimage across Spain; to a motorcycle trip to the end of the road where northern Ontario’s James Bay meets the southern end of the Arctic Ocean. And in all my life, no matter where I’ve been in this big world of ours, I’ve rarely been lonely.

I also wanted to read The Quest for Community because I was curious to find out exactly what this quest was all about. I approached it almost from an outsider’s point of view, as if it were a kind of anthropological study of another culture. But as I got deeper into the book, it prompted me to look at the ways that I sought out community; community that I had not really noticed because it was all around me. For years, I was like those proverbial fish that do not know they’re in the water that sustains their very existence. Nor did I notice how much I had immersed myself in one particular community and had counted on it for emotional and spiritual sustenance, until it was taken away from me. I found, as Joni Mitchell once so famously sang in her hit, “Big Yellow Taxi,”…“you don’t know what you got till it’s gone.”

***

Because I had the good sense not to get injected with a bioweapon (aka, the COVID vaccine), I was not allowed to set foot on the sprawling, countryside campus of the nation’s largest retreat center in the Hudson Valley of New York, where I’d spent some 20 years working in executive positions of marketing and program development. When it reopened in 2022 after the New York State government had shut it down for all of 2020, and then partially for 2021 and 2022, only those who had been fully jabbed and had the papers to prove it were welcome to return to the office and attend programs there. It was as if the unjabbed, like me, had become instant outcasts, like lepers of the days of old. Or, even worse, scapegoats for the world’s ills, as not-my-president Joe Biden declared in the fall of 2021 by pronouncing that there was a “pandemic of the unvaccinated” sweeping o’er the land. Which was a lie; a lie that was turned into a soundbyte and then into sacrosanct truth flogged by the true believers of the COVID cult. I know plenty of other people who did not get jabbed and we never even came down with the sniffles.

A few years before covidmania hit, I had reduced my commitment to the place by becoming a consultant. In that role, I continued to manage a large program with a popular Buddhist teacher who attracted several hundred devotees to her annual retreat on the campus. I was among those devotees. What’s more, I had the enviable pleasure—and the immense responsibility—of overseeing that program for more than two decades. I’d grown fond of the teacher, of her assistants, and of the hundreds—many who returned year after year—who came to be in her wise yet lighthearted presence. And they had grown fond of me. It was always a beautiful community—a kind of joyous but introspective celebration—while we were all gathered there for a weekend. A weekend that gave us fond memories and much food for thought that we took home with us and remembered long after it was over.

But during her annual program there in the spring of 2022, not only was I banned from setting foot on the campus, I also could not even visit with the teacher. I watched the program in sort of sustained state of disbelief, at home and online. It felt like an out-of-body experience. The strangest thing of all was that the only thing said about me during the on-stage welcoming comments that I had facilitated and enjoyed for 23 years and were now being delivered for the first time by someone other than me, was that I “could not be here.” It seemed to me that it was said as an after-thought, a parenthetical note to rush through, like those rapid-fire warnings that you hear on television advertisements about the side effects for whatever pharmaceutical is being pushed. No reason was given for my absence. Had I died? Had I been fired? Did I quit? Had I fled the country? Was I in a coma? Was I in jail?

What was also strange was that no one on the staff, some of whom I’d worked with shoulder-to-shoulder in the trenches for several years, emailed or texted or phoned me to ask me why I “could not be here.” Or even to find out how I felt about being ostracized in this way. For more than two, sometimes difficult yet mostly splendid and fulfilling decades of my existence, this was a community to which I had given all of my professional and much of my personal life. This was my tribe. And now it had spit me out. And all because I’d chosen to draw a line in the sand about what I wanted to do with my own body and not inject myself with a toxin that was known then, if you knew where to look, to be completely useless in protecting anyone from contracting COVID or spreading it.

I did not know until all of this unfolded as I watched the weekend program on my laptop at the breakfast bar in my kitchen, feeling millions of miles away from an event that was geographically only a few miles away, how much I missed being there, missed seeing a teacher I adored and respected. My girlfriend took a photo of me. I look like a person who had just found out that someone close to him had died.

What I also missed was the thrill of hanging onto the teacher’s every word, feverishly taking notes so as not to forget her secrets to living a good and meaningful and, above all, compassionate life. I missed that because now her words rang hollow to me. Here was a teacher whose core teaching, grounded in centuries of Buddhist wisdom, was all about being fearless in the face of life’s uncertainties—even in the face of death. Now I felt betrayed by this same teacher who had succumbed to the very same fears she was teaching the world to face with fearlessness and had willingly taken the jab (which she had to have done to teach there). I also felt betrayed by the organization itself whose foundational mission claims to promote well-being, enlightened living, and community. Suddenly, to me, it was none of those things. Something close to me had died, after all; my faith in a teacher and a group of people with whom I had long aligned myself to “walk the talk.”

Indeed, this organization, which for decades had proudly stood above the fray with its alternative and holistic approaches to healthy living—and for which in its early days was mocked by mainstream American culture—had now become the very thing it scorned. It had now thrown itself into the ring of compliant sycophants; handmaidens to a compromised coalition of alphabet agencies—the FDA, the CDC, the DOH—which, working in cahoots with the pharmaceutical mafia and a shadowy alliance of neo-Marxist globalists, want to maim and kill us. Instead of doing what it was scolded into doing “what you’re told” by another psychopath, Anthony Fauci, the center could have taken the lead and stood up against the toxic jabs and the inhumane mandates just as it had taken the lead in offering alternative and holistic healing modalities upon which it had been founded. But it had chosen to enforce those depraved mandates and divisions. I was devastated.

The incomprehensible hypocrisy I witnessed that day in my kitchen must have shorted the bunch of neurons in my brain that govern reason and logic because, to this day, I still feel the bile simmering in the fortress of my soul and hear a strange hissing in my mind. I walk around feeling slightly off-balance, as if I’d taken a hard whack to the back of my head from which I have not recovered. On my laptop, I watched several hundred masked hopefuls dutifully sitting six feet apart, looking so isolated and, I couldn’t help but think, so sad. There was none of the cheerful talking to each other among the participants. There were none of the warm, lingering hugs, God forbid. Everyone was just sitting there like in a time-out in grade school. I’ll never forget it. Because I thought they must be surely killing their souls in such passive compliance to vicious mandates and agreeing to live with this lack of genuine human contact. Isn’t this genuine human contact precisely what the organization had long claimed to offer people who went there seeking respite and solace from the suffering of their isolated lives? From what I saw of that retreat, I might as well have been watching a live reenactment of one of Dante’s circles of hell.

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Given the contentious topic of money and its influence on the world, I decided to see what ChatGPT “knows” about it.  I was surprised by the breadth of its responses, as well as its information on free market positions, especially those of the Austrian school.

Though my prompts (queries) were exactly as I present them here, ChatGPT was so expansive I had to edit its results due to article length restrictions.  For emphasis and to mark subject headings ChatGPT frequently used bold-face text.  I italicized portions of its replies, which are indented, to stress points I thought were especially important, and I added links in a few cases to augment ChatGPT’s response.

Let’s begin.

Smith: Is it true that money arose from barter as a response to the problem of a double-coincidence of wants? And is it also true that the commodity eventually chosen to serve as a medium of exchange was determined by market participants? And further, is it true that in all of human history no paper money was ever freely chosen as money, and that paper money was always imposed on the market?

After explaining what is meant by the double-coincidence of wants, ChatGPT went on to say:

ChatGPT:

Economists like Carl Menger, a key figure in the Austrian School, argued that money emerged spontaneously from the marketplace, not through government decree. . .

Over time, market participants naturally gravitated toward using certain commodities that had desirable qualities—those that were widely valued, durable, divisible, portable, and had a stable supply. These commodities were easily traded because people generally accepted them as being valuable. . . .

Importantly, no central authority had to mandate that these commodities be used as money. People recognized the benefits of using certain commodities, and through repeated use in trade, these commodities became widely accepted as money.

No Paper Money Was Ever Freely Chosen as Money.

Initially, paper money began as a substitute for commodity money, like gold or silver. . . .

Importantly, people accepted these paper notes voluntarily because they were confident they could redeem them for a tangible commodity, making these notes convenient substitutes for carrying physical gold or silver. . . .

Historically, when governments detached paper money from any redeemable commodity, it was usually under duress . . .

Smith: How did money go from market control to government control?

ChatGPT:

The shift evolved over centuries, largely driven by governments’ desire to centralize power, finance wars, and stabilize or control the economy.

Minting Coins: Governments took control of minting coins from precious metals. In doing so, they could stamp their own symbols, which ensured a standard weight and purity of coins. . . The market still valued these coins based on the amount of metal they contained . . .

Over time, governments would reduce the amount of precious metal in coins (e.g., mixing in cheaper metals like copper) while keeping the face value the same. This allowed governments to produce more coins to finance wars or other expenditures. . . This led to inflation, as the debased currency lost value.

When bank notes emerged, they were a receipt or promissory note issued by private banks, representing a claim on a certain amount of gold or silver held in reserve. . . The value of the note was tied to the gold or silver it could be exchanged for.

Over time, governments began to recognize the power of issuing banknotes themselves. In some cases, governments gave exclusive rights to central banks to issue currency. For example, the Bank of England was granted a monopoly on issuing banknotes in 1694. This gave the government greater control over the money supply, but the banknotes were still convertible into gold or silver, meaning the market ultimately determined their value.

The 19th century saw the rise of the gold standard, which became a key feature of the global monetary system. Under the gold standard, the value of national currencies was directly tied to a fixed quantity of gold. . . Central banks played a key role in managing the money supply, but their actions were still constrained by the need to maintain gold reserves.

The Decline of the Gold Standard and the Rise of Fiat Currency

Several key historical events led to this shift:

Great Depression:  In the U.S., President Franklin D. Roosevelt ended the convertibility of dollars to gold for private citizens in 1933. . .

Bretton Woods System: After World War II, the Bretton Woods Agreement established the U.S. dollar as the world’s reserve currency, with other currencies pegged to the dollar, and the dollar itself was pegged to gold.  This system lasted until 1971, when President Richard Nixon ended the convertibility of the U.S. dollar into gold, effectively ending the gold standard worldwide. This marked the official transition to fiat money.

Conclusion: Money transitioned from being under the control of market participants—where commodities like gold and silver served as money chosen through voluntary exchange—to being under the control of governments through a combination of centralized minting, regulation, and eventually fiat money systems.

Smith: Which has been better for personal liberty and prosperity: An unbacked fiat currency or a metallic-based money (privately minted gold or silver coins) with paper substitutes that promise “payable on demand”?

ChatGPT:

Metallic-based money has three advantages:

Personal liberty: Through decentralized control over money . . . individuals and businesses can own, hold, and trade physical wealth directly.

Limited government power: A metallic standard places strict limits on the government’s ability to print money, thereby restricting its capacity to inflate the currency, fund wars, or finance deficit spending without directly taxing its citizens.

Freedom from Inflation: Under a metallic-based system, inflation is usually minimal or nonexistent, which preserves individuals’ purchasing power. Citizens have greater control over their wealth without worrying about their savings being eroded by inflationary policies.

However, the fixed supply of precious metals can limit economic growth, especially if the economy grows faster than the supply of gold or silver. This can lead to deflation (falling prices), which can discourage borrowing and investment, potentially slowing down economic progress.

As we see in this last paragraph ChatGPT “believes” an increase in the money supply is needed to sustain economic growth and cautions us about deflation being disruptive of “economic progress” — two positions at odds with historical fact and Austrian School theory.  I tried to get it to admit its inconsistency.

Smith: In the latter part of the 19th century when there was no Fed we had a prosperous economy with price deflation, per officialdata.org.

Specifically, for the period 1879-1912, “The dollar had an average deflation rate of -0.09% per year since 1879, producing a cumulative price change of -3.00%. This means that prices in 1912 are 3% lower than average prices since 1879, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics consumer price index.”

One of the reasons for instituting a central bank was to avoid the Panics that plagued the economy during the 19th century. Yet, the Fed was in charge during the 1929 Crash and the Great Recession of 2008-2009, all the while the dollar continued its nosedive to oblivion. Do you think this is a good report card for the Fed?

ChatGPT:

Prosperity with Deflation: The period from 1879 to 1912 did indeed see price deflation, meaning that the purchasing power of the dollar increased slightly over time.

This deflation was largely due to the gold standard, which limited the money supply and helped stabilize prices. During this period, the U.S. experienced significant economic growth, industrialization, and an increase in real wages, despite the deflation.

Creation of the Fed: The Federal Reserve was established in 1913 partly to address the financial instability and frequent panics of the 19th century. . . .

1929 Crash and Great Depression: Despite the Fed’s creation, the U.S. experienced the Great Depression following the 1929 stock market crash. . . .

Great Recession of 2008-2009: The Fed was also in charge during the Great Recession, another severe economic downturn that exposed weaknesses in the financial system. . . .

Conclusion: A Mixed Legacy

The Fed’s legacy is indeed mixed. While it has played a critical role in stabilizing the economy during certain periods, it has also been associated with significant economic failures, including the Great Depression and the erosion of the dollar’s value. The comparison with the late 19th century highlights that economic growth and stability were possible without a central bank, but also that the absence of a central bank did not prevent severe financial panics.

Those panics are well-known to have been fostered by fractional-reserve banking and the prohibition on branch banking.

Conclusion

I found no evidence that ChatGPT was biased in its responses.  It treated government and free market positions according to the training it received, which was a mixture of statism and free markets.  Users should challenge ChatGPT by questioning its responses with contrary information, as I did with deflation and prosperity of the late 19th century.

If mankind has a future, a flourishing of critical thinking has to start somewhere, so perhaps generative AIs such as ChatGPT can serve as a model and inducement.

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