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Tim McGraw wrote:

Without the Scot Dam and Lake Pillsbury supplying water to the upper Russian River, the Russian River will go dry in late summer (August and September). This means Healdsburg won’t be getting any Russian River water in late summer.

I’ve asked the Water Department of Healdsburg and the Mayor a few times about what the hell they are going to do about this. They reply that they are negotiating with Sonoma Water for water from Lake Sonoma, just north of town on Dry Creek. Also, water conservation, water recycling (an 8% drop in the bucket to supply, just enough to cover the hotels’ demand). A new well field is being developed. Basically, less water for us residents. Many have already bought water tanks and buy water delivery in dry months. That’s expensive. 

PG&E doesn’t want to operate the Eel River dams anymore. PG&E has Governor Gavin Newsom and Congressman Jared Huffman in its pocket. PG&E has proven over and over again that it has caused deadly fires by not maintaining its equipment. It pays out big money to executives and shareholders of PG&E. But PG&E doesn’t give a flying bat fart about the customers.

PG&E Starts Draining Lake Pillsbury. Shuts off Water to Farmers & Ranchers

The post PG&E Starts Draining Lake Pillsbury. Shuts off Water to Farmers & Ranchers appeared first on LewRockwell.

Tim McGraw wrote:

Hi Daniel,

I just read your article on LRC. You did a great job of writing. The article is very well done, and oh, so true. Ron Paul changed my life. I was always anti-government, but I didn’t understand the economics of it all. Dr. Paul taught me about the Fed and Austrian economics. His two presidential campaigns as a Republican transformed politics. Dr. Paul showed that there were many Americans who were pro-peace, for liberty, and wanted to be left alone by the state. Dr. Paul showed the evil incompetence of the Fed.

Thanks for writing the article.

The post Re: How Ron Paul Changed the World appeared first on LewRockwell.

Brian Dunaway wrote:

Mr. Trump certainly has a right to take a victory lap. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit ruled against US District Judge James Boasberg, who “said he found probable cause to hold the administration in contempt because it purportedly violated his orders to halt deportations under the Alien Enemies Act.” In strong language, the Court of Appeals responded that “the government’s initial implementation of the proclamation clearly and indisputably was not criminal.”

But of course, winning is relatively unimportant, not even being the primary purpose of lawfare. The spectacularly evil part of lawfare is that it, in various circumstances: consumes the only irreversible physical attribute in the universe (time); permits evil to continue unabated while right action is slowed, hindered, corrupted or quashed; and in many cases, bankrupts and embitters the persecuted parties.

To be certain, that is the raison d’être of lawfare: to consume time, consume resources, consume wealth, and consume the souls of those whom it targets for persecution or prosecution.

The post Lawfare Unbound appeared first on LewRockwell.

Paul Roberts wrote:

This needed to be said.

By Chuck Baldwin Comment by PCR:   I am worried that in his meeting with Putin Trump will blow up as he often does, and the die will be cast.  There is a lot of hope placed on the Trump-Putin meeting,  No one seems to realize the danger. Where others see hope, I see danger.

This meeting has aspects of a set-up.  If Trump wants peace, why did he just deploy more Ohio class submarines closer to Russia?  Why did he just return the intermediate-range missiles, which Reagan had removed, to Europe? What does it mean when the US director of plans for strategic command says, “We’re ready to have a nuclear war with Russia, and we’re going to win.”

If Trump wants peace, why did he raise the nuclear threat to Russia?  Is this Trump’s practice of bluffing them into submission? As A.J.P. Taylor shows in his histories of both World Wars, bluffs produce wars.

Trump bemoans all the people being killed in Ukraine, but he does nothing to stop the killing in Palestine.  Let’s pray he doesn’t convince Putin that there is no security for Russia.

Has Trump renounced Washington’s hegemony?  No.  He asserted it:
“I rule America and the world.”

Has Trump ceased to serve the profits and power of the US military/security complex?  No.  He has just completed a deal with Europe to purchase hundreds of billions of dollars of American weapons for Ukraine. Will the purchases take place and the profits be realized if peace is achieved?

Can peace prevail over the American doctrine of hegemony and the power and profit of the US military/security complex?

https://www.paulcraigroberts.org/2025/08/09/in-the-year-2025/ 

The post A serious matter appeared first on LewRockwell.

Click Here:

Gateway Pundit

The post Fed Persecution of Conservative Catholics Will Involve Infiltration, Says Lawyer Who Uncovered FBI Infiltration Playbook appeared first on LewRockwell.

Thanks, John  Frahm.

Mises.org.

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1. Terrain Therapy: How To Achieve Perfect Health Through Diet, Living Habits & Divine Thinking 
   
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8. War Crimes Against Southern Civilians
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12. Isaiah Speaks to Modern Times
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Faithful readers know that I saw Trump for the con man he is since he filled his first administration with CFR globalists. So, I knew he was no less a con man during his presidential campaign in 2024.

However, after the mindless malevolent presidency of Joe Biden, I never expected Trump to degrade the White House into even deeper depths of insanity after being elected last November. I was horribly wrong! Donald Trump is not only worse than Joe Biden; he makes Biden look like George Washington by comparison.

Trump is taking America over the edge of the abyss economically and militarily at warp speed. Yes, just as he did with Operation Warp Speed as the father of the tyrannical Covid insanity.

It will take a few months for the American citizenry to begin feeling the deleterious and disastrous effects of Trump’s maniacal punitive tariffs, but feel it we will. Tariffs are taxes on consumers. That’s us! If Trump stays the course of using tariffs as personal, vindictive international retributions, before this time next year, many store shelves will be empty, and the cost of everything will be higher than any of us can now imagine.

But the way Trump is behaving in both the Middle East and Eastern Europe, we might not need to worry about inflation, long lines and empty shelves. The United States as we know it might not even exist, because Donald Trump is mindlessly, aggressively, recklessly and foolishly goading Russia (and China, North Korea, India, Iran and Pakistan?) into global nuclear war.

The United States has crossed a point of no return. It is no longer merely involved in proxy wars, weapons shipments, or veiled threats—it is now officially engaged in a nuclear confrontation with Russia. And this time, the words aren’t empty. This isn’t a warning. This is the real thing.

Trump has entered the arena. Not as a mediator, not as a peacemaker, but as the man who might tip the scale into the abyss. This isn’t the same Trump who, just months ago, condemned Zelensky for escalating a dangerous conflict. This is a new, reckless version—one who now believes it’s America’s turn to gamble with humanity’s survival.

Just a few hours ago, Trump announced the deployment of two nuclear submarines in response to what he called “highly provocative statements” from Duhmeetry Medvedev. A social media spat—yes, a damn tweet—has now triggered a U.S. nuclear escalation. This is no longer political theater. This is nuclear war posturing in real time, and it’s not coming from shadowy generals or faceless bureaucrats—it’s coming from the man many believe is returning to power.

And the Russians? They didn’t laugh. They didn’t flinch. Medvedev responded not with a threat, but a prophecy. He invoked “Dead Hand.” To most Americans, that sounds like Cold War fiction. But to anyone who understands nuclear doctrine, it’s the most terrifying phrase imaginable. It’s not a metaphor. It’s a machine—designed to destroy the world automatically if Russia’s leadership is ever taken out in a first strike.

And Trump? He’s positioning U.S. nuclear submarines for exactly that kind of decapitation scenario.

The Dead Hand—formally known as Perimeter—is a Cold War-era Russian system created for one purpose: to guarantee that Russia would still launch a full nuclear counterattack even if Moscow were reduced to ash. If command and control are gone, if Putin and his staff are dead, if communications are severed—Dead Hand takes over. It launches everything.

And Trump has just brought us inches away from activating it.

The logic behind the system is monstrous and flawless. If the U.S. ever attempts a first strike, or even appears to, the system’s sensors kick in. If there are signs of nuclear detonations, unusual radiation levels, or a communications blackout with Kremlin leadership—Perimeter launches missiles. Not one. Not a few. All of them.

And the worst part? Those missiles don’t need orders from a human being. Once Perimeter is armed and those conditions are met, missiles launch from silos, from mobile ICBMs, from submarines. Even if Russia has already been destroyed, the U.S. and every NATO capital would still be obliterated in minutes.

This system was built for one thing: to ensure that no one would ever dare to attempt a decapitation strike. Yet Trump, in all his arrogance, is doing exactly that—provoking the very response that Dead Hand was designed to unleash.

(Source)

In an interview with Judge Andrew Napolitano, Scott Ritter is even more descriptive about how dangerous Trump’s actions are:

Napolitano: What did he [Trump] announce that he did today, and what did he order, and what is the significance of it?

Ritter: What did the President do today? What the President did today is deploy two of the most lethal strategic nuclear assets in the American arsenal.

Ohio-class submarines launch ballistic missiles armed with Trident nuclear or solid-fueled missiles, each one tipped with multiple thermonuclear warheads. He has said that he has ordered them deployed into the appropriate areas in response to a Russian tweet from Duhmeetry Medvedev. This means areas where the submarine’s missiles can target Russia.

This is extraordinarily dangerous. The United States maintains a permanent force of Ohio-class submarines on station, two submarines at least in each of the oceans: two in the Atlantic, two in the Pacific. They’re on station where their missiles could reach any of the potential nuclear threats to the United States of America.

On occasion, we deploy additional Ohio-class submarines. For instance, just recently, an Ohio-class submarine was deployed into the Indian Ocean close to Iran, where its Trident missiles armed with W76-2 low-yield nuclear weapons could be used against Iran if the President so ordered.

But we have four nuclear-armed submarines. So, when he said he’s ordered two deployed, is he talking about two additional submarines to this? Or is he talking about redeploying two submarines out of their existing stations into new deployment areas that make them even more of a threat to Russia?

See, the tweet he’s responding to is one from Duhmeetry Medvedev, in which Medvedev sort of mocked the President . . .

Napolitano: Medvedev is the former President of Russia, who’s the number two person on their National Security Council. And what did he do? Pick a social media fight with Trump, and Trump took the bait?

Ritter: Mean Tweets. This is literally Mean Tweets. This is about Donald Trump threatening to end the world as we know it because of a Mean Tweet.

But what’s even more outrageous is that Donald Trump doesn’t understand what Medvedev tweeted. Medvedev was telling Trump to knock it off with the dangerous threats, saying that if you do this, America can end up looking like the walking dead because of the Dead Hand.

The Dead Hand is a reference to the perimeter system, which is a defensive system put in place by the Soviet Union back in the 1980s. So that if they are ever struck preemptively by the United States—a first strike, by the way, the tactic to be used in a first strike is to bring the Ohio-class submarines close to Russia’s shores, fire off their Trident missiles on a flattened trajectory to avoid detection so you can strike the targets quicker, which is what Trump just actually appeared to order the U.S. Navy to do. So, the Dead Hand now becomes a factor, because if Trump is dumb enough to launch an attack against Russia, the Dead Hand (the perimeter system) will ensure that all of Russia’s strategic nuclear forces will be fired against the United States, even if Trump takes out Putin, the National Command Authority, etc.

The Dead Hand is only defensive in nature. Trump should feel no threat from this unless he’s planning on attacking Russia. This is the insanity. This president doesn’t even know what he’s doing. And he’s responding to a Mean Tweet from a guy who’s been Mean Tweeting for years now.

Moves are being made right now that, if they’re not stopped and reversed, are going to lead to a general nuclear exchange between the United States and Russia. This is the direction we’re heading.

And I want to remind your audience that the CIA said last year, there’s a greater than 50% chance that there will be a nuclear war between the United States and Russia during the last months of the Biden administration. What the Biden administration was doing, as provocative as it was, pales in comparison to what this administration is doing.

We’re above 50% right now, Judge. We’re heading into extraordinarily dangerous territory.

In the following exchange, Ritter gets extremely frank with the realities of what would happen during a nuclear war:

Napolitano: How destructive can these submarines be if they were to attack under the radar or under the defensive systems at Moscow? Are we talking about Hiroshima and Nagasaki type destruction or greater?

Ritter: Oh, greater. Hiroshima and Nagasaki were 12 kilotons, under 20 kilotons, of destructive power. Very, I mean, destructive, no doubt about it. Our cities would be hit with 150 kilotons, 300 kilotons, one megaton. That’s a thousand.

Understand that when you do nuclear targeting, you’re putting at least two warheads on each target, just to ensure. If you’re hitting a national capital center, I can say this, during the Cold War, Moscow was targeted by about 60 warheads. That’s just overkill, to make sure we got everything.

And so, the Russians will be doing the same thing. There will be nothing left alive in Washington, D.C. Read Annie Jacobsen’s book Nuclear War. She runs through a very realistic scenario, and it’s over. And you don’t want to survive this. If there’s a nuclear war, you want to die. You want to be one of the ones who turns into dust immediately, because to live isn’t to live. To live is to die.

Rear Admiral Buchanan, who was the director of plans for strategic command, gave a lecture last November in Washington, D.C. And after he acknowledged that the Biden administration is ready to have a nuclear exchange with Russia (“We’re ready to have a nuclear war with Russia, and we’re going to win”), this is what he said. He then said, “We probably should be more honest with the American public about what this means and what victory means. Because,” he said, “even when we win, life will never be the same for any American.” There won’t be civil liberties. We’ll be living under permanent martial law. You’re not going to have electricity, running water, medicine. None of the niceties of civilization that you currently enjoy will exist. And that’s winning a nuclear war.

This is why people have to become angry about this and mobilized about this. People should be calling up their representatives in Congress and saying, “What the hell are you doing?”

People need to understand, we’re talking about, you’re going to die. Your kids are going to die. And if they don’t die, they’re going to suffer like you’ve never seen people suffer before. No parent wants to see that or experience that.

So, let’s nip this thing in the bud. Let’s let Donald Trump, let’s let Pete Hegseth, let’s let Lindsey Graham and everybody else know that this is not okay. This is not good. You don’t deploy two Ohio-class nuclear submarines because of a Mean Tweet. Get real. Become an adult. Become the leader that everybody expected you to be. A Mean Tweet sent two of the most powerful assets of the United States into an operational status? This is insanity, literal insanity.

Trump toadies will impugn what I’m about to say because they know that I am totally NOT a fan of Donald Trump—not in any shape, manner or form. I believe him to be a thoroughly corrupt individual. Not only does he have no morals, but he also has no conscience. But it’s even worse than that. Trump has zero critical thinking ability. He cannot reason. He has the attention span of a two-year-old. And still worse, his inner core is so psychotic that I truly believe that he has no clue whatsoever about how dangerous his Helter-Skelter, emotion-driven, thoughtless behavior is.

Donald Trump has been a bully all of his life. Bullying, intimidating, demanding and threatening are all he knows to do. He drove seven businesses into bankruptcy and each time was bailed out by his Jewish billionaire buddies. Trump owes his soul to the Zionist billionaires, such as Miriam Adelson and Lex Wexner.

And we already know that Israel has their Samson Option embedded in their strategic military protocols. This is the doctrine that says if it appears that the Zionist state is about to fall, it will launch all of its nuclear weapons to take as many goyim as it can down with it. And you can count on the legitimacy of this military option, because Israel already implemented the Hannibal Directive, which intentionally killed at least half (probably more) of the Israelis that were killed during the Hamas attack on October 7, 2023. If Israel would kill its own citizens in such fashion, don’t doubt for a second that they would kill as many people around the world as they could, if they felt sufficiently threatened.

But Vladimir Putin cannot be bullied or intimidated. We are not talking about buying and selling casinos here. We are talking about global nuclear war. We are talking about the total destruction of the industrialized world.

What difference does it make if Moscow, Beijing and Tehran are destroyed? So will be Washington, D.C., Baltimore, New York City, New Jersey, Delaware, Massachusetts, Connecticut, Virginia, Philadelphia, Chicago, North and South Carolina, Kentucky, Tennessee, Georgia, Alabama, Florida (especially Northern Florida), Louisiana, Texas, New Mexico, Nevada, Wyoming, North Dakota, Nebraska, Kansas, Oklahoma, the West Coast of Washington State and Southern California, Northern Colorado, Eastern Montana and Northern Utah.

But the vacuous Donald Trump says that the U.S. is “fully prepared for nuclear war with Russia.”

I’m telling you, Trump is nuts! He is delusional! He has zero concept of reality. Let me ask the reader something: Are YOU fully prepared for nuclear war with Russia?

We are talking about no electricity; no food in the stores; no gas at the pumps; no oil or propane; no medicine at the pharmacies; no working hospitals; no purified water; no sewage treatment plants; no garbage pickups; no sanitation of any kind; no diapers for babies; no milk for babies; no police departments; no fire departments; no law and order; unarmed people won’t survive a month; the sick and infirm will die; the very young will die; people with serious diseases will slowly die for lack of medicine; and the unthinkable list continues to the extremity of the imagination.

And a news flash to all of the Scofield evangelicals: YOU WON’T BE RAPTURED TO HEAVEN BEFORE THIS ALL HAPPENS. You’ll either be killed in the initial blasts or you will endure the suffering described above along with the rest of us.

And when that day comes (God forbid!), it won’t matter to a tinker’s dam if you are a Republican or a Democrat, a conservative or a liberal, a Christian or an agnostic. The nuclear rain will fall on the just and the unjust. (Matthew 5:45)

So, you MAGA Trump acolytes and you Christian Zionists, keep cheering on this mad man. Keep ignoring the genocide in Gaza. Keep your hatred for President Putin and the Russian people. Keep your bigotry against the Palestinian people. Keep cheering on the Zionist wars in Iran, Lebanon, Syria, the West Bank, etc. Keep your head in the sand regarding our spineless, gutless, worthless GOP Congress (save Thomas Massie and a handful of others).

People around the world are marching in the streets by the hundreds of thousands at a time against the U.S.-Israel ethnic cleansing, genocide and mass murders in the Middle East. The governments of Great Britain, France and Germany are collapsing before our eyes. The NATO countries are led by imbecilic morons, and the people of Western Europe know it. By historical comparison, the United States and Western Europe are the moral and ethical equivalents to France immediately prior to its revolution in 1789.

And the ones who should have the discernment and courage to lead the American people in a great spiritual resistance to this highway to hell, our pastors, are either in lockstep with Trump’s lunacy or are jellyfish without a spine to speak even so much as a peep of warning.

In 1969, the American pop-rock duo Zager and Evans recorded a “one-hit wonder” that reached Number 1 on the Billboard Hot 100 in both the U.S. and U.K. The title of that hit song was In the Year 2525.

Here are four of the stanzas:

In the year 2525
If man is still alive
If woman can survive
They may find

In the year 3535
Ain’t gonna need to tell the truth, tell no lies
Everything you think, do and say
Is in the pill you took today

In the year 7510
If God’s a-coming, He oughta make it by then
Maybe He’ll look around Himself and say
Guess it’s time for the judgment day

In the year 8510
God is gonna shake His mighty head
He’ll either say I’m pleased where man has been
Or tear it down, and start again

Perhaps the title of that hit song should have been In the Year 2025.

Reprinted with permission from Chuck Baldwin Live.

The post In the Year 2025 appeared first on LewRockwell.

The following is taken from Ch. 6 of my book, Write like they’re your last words.

A fallacy is defined as a mistaken belief or a failure in reasoning.  Though most people make an effort to avoid mistakes, no one is infallible, not even those who act like they are.

You can download a chart of common fallacies here.  The online chart is hyperlinked to each of the fallacies.

I break fallacies into two major groups:

A. First, we have traditional fallacies you might remember from Philosophy 101.  In these, the reasoning is obviously absurd, though we might be at a loss to explain the specific violation involved:

Your dog has puppies.
Your dog is a mother.
It is your dog, therefore it is your mother.

Every distance, no matter how short, consists of an infinite number of points
For a body to move any distance requires covering an infinite number of points.
Nothing can move an infinite distance.
Therefore, all movement is deceptive.

B. More frequently we find these, where the fallacies are more subtle:

“The country’s top economists are in agreement that the Federal Reserve is necessary for economic prosperity.”

“The country’s leading experts agree that X is harming the environment.  Therefore, the government should regulate or ban X.”

Let’s address the first statement found under B.

Is it true?  In a literal sense, yes — the top economists wouldn’t dream of doing without a central bank.  Or if they did it would be considered a nightmare.

So is our work finished?  Do we affirm it as true and move on?

No, because the statement suggests that unless you’re a top economist, you have no grounds for disagreeing.  I call it the “Who are you?” (Quis es?) fallacy.  History tells us experts can be dead wrong, so let’s at least mount a challenge, shall we?

The country’s top economists hold advanced degrees from universities that support central banking.  The universities, in turn, receive funding from the federal government, which created the federal reserve system and relies on it heavily for monetary support.  Is it odd the universities would promote the Fed as an essential economic institution?

With regard to funding, many of the top economists themselves are deriving at least a portion of their income from the Fed.  Is it possible their bank accounts play a role in their refusal to cast a critical eye?  Is it a stretch to imagine these economists are reluctant to turn against an institution they’ve been trained to salute?

And do the ones on top belong there?  If they’re the best and brightest, how did the bust of 2007-2008 explode in their faces?  Almost none of the “top” economists saw it coming, including the leading ones on the Board of Governors.  As Ira Katz notes, the same blindness prevailed before the collapse of the Soviet Union:

[Quoting from Paul Samuelson’s bestselling textbook of 1989]: “Contrary to what many skeptics had earlier believed, the Soviet economy is proof that … a socialist command economy can function and even thrive.” The Collapse of Communism happened during the same year and the Soviet Union broke up two years later.

In economics as in other crony (government-connected) professions there is a pay-to-play aspect, where the payment is an unstated agreement never to question certain assumptions publicly.

Perhaps the economics the top economists learn is flawed.  In school they are taught that low interest rates are necessary for economic growth.  Since the central bank has the exclusive power to increase the money supply and thereby (indirectly) lower the rate of interest, it is therefore regarded as a pillar of prosperity.

The idea that the economy is harmed by changes in the money supply, that any increase in money available for lending should come from real savings, is given little or no hearing in classrooms or policy discussions.  Not coincidentally the few economists who adhere to these views, who for this very reason are not considered “top,” had claimed a crisis was “baked in the cake,” as some put it.

I should also mention that if the Fed is necessary for prosperity, how did we ever prosper before November 16, 1914 when the Federal Reserve Bank of New York opened for business?  The period immediately before the creation of the Fed — late 19th century — is, according to the data, one of the most prosperous periods in American history.  And the reduction of the purchasing power of the dollar to near zero is scarcely a point in the Fed’s favor.  And if the Fed is needed to control the business cycle — the booms and busts — how is it we’ve had some of the biggest economic crises since the federal government imposed it on us?

So, returning to the original statement, we find the country’s “top economists” to be incompetent in monetary matters, grossly so, while the Federal Reserve has been anything but a facilitator of general prosperity.

I leave the second example in B for you to dissect as an exercise.

Final thought

I recall a scene from an old movie that dramatically illustrates the power of logic in action.  Sorry, I don’t remember the title.  It took place in a courtroom where a man was being tried for murdering his girlfriend.  The prosecution put a male witness on the stand who testified he had sometimes heard the accused and his girlfriend exchanging heated words.  To the best of my recollection here’s what transpired next:

“So, are you saying the accused had woman troubles?” the prosecutor summarized.

“I think that’s fair to say.”

“Thank you.”

He turned to the defense attorney. “Your witness.”

The defense lawyer approached the witness and hit him square on the nose: “Have you ever murdered a woman?”

“No!  Of course not!”

“Have you ever had woman troubles?”

“Yes.”

“Have you ever known a man who didn’t have woman troubles?”

“No.”

“Thank you. That’s all.”

The post Don’t Let Fallacies Torpedo Your Thinking appeared first on LewRockwell.

The reason is simple. If he doesn’t follow the Constitutional format, there never will be enough money. In our present Economic situation, that spells disaster. Under the Constitution, the Federal Government was to be financed with Tariffs and excise taxes. But that changed after the Coup of 1913, which was the kiss of death to our Constitutional government.

The Federal Reserve Bank, Income Taxes, Tax-Free Foundations and direct voting for Senators were initiated. Direct voting for Senators took away the state’s voice in Congress and put the power into the hands of big money. The income tax reduced the amount of tax money a state could collect, thereby making them vassals of the Federal government, which was a direct attack on State’s Rights second only to the Civil War.

The income tax allowed federal Government m(AKA “Establishment”) to usurp Constitutional functions assigned to the states, effectively transferring power to Washington.

I estimate that more than a thousand departments and agencies of federal establishment are unconstitutional because they are not authorized by the Enumerated Powers. These outlaw functions comprise a Criminal Enterprise of gigantic size with no lawful support whatsoever.  When people speak of the corrupt unelected bureaucrats of the Administrative State, this is where many of them are located.

If something is unconstitutional, it is unlawful and can be terminated with a stroke of Trump’s pen even if it was in legislation passed by Congress. Congress passes many unconstitutional laws. Two examples are foreign aid and financing wars for profit without a Declaration of War.

Last month I wrote about the need to separate the Communist cities from the taxes paid by working people. I said to do otherwise could provoke a Civil War. This situation is now DIRE and most evident in Communist New York City, and others are not far behind. All funds spent by  the Federal Establishment in the states are Unconstitutional and must be terminated.

Government has two choices: terminate income taxes or give states 50% or more of income taxes collected. This transfers the funding of Communist cities to the states, who can legally fund them.

Communism operates on other people’s money, so stop the unconstitutional funding of communist cities by the federal government. Let the states do what they want, as is their natural right. In any case, it is unconstitutional for the federal government to spend any money in the states for ANYTHING not in support of their enumerated, limited powers.

Our Constitution was written to fund the limited federal government with tariffs and excise taxes. Income taxes came into the picture with the Coup of 1913, which gave federal government excess income at the expense of the states. The federal government just expanded its powers and expenditures to absorb its new income. Additional funding was used to finance no-win wars for profit, foreign aid, Communism, and other socialist programs. The privately-owned Federal Reserve Bank allowed the government to spend as much as 50% more than its income. This was done by printing fiat money out of thin air which caused inflation and depreciation of currency. Remember, the Federal Government was designed to function only with tariffs and excise taxes. To do that it must return unlawful functions to the states. And yes, it is possible.

President Trump’s great plans for our economy have a high probability of succeeding big time. However it will still be absolutely impossible to avoid a Really Great Depression if he fails to  terminate expenditures that fail to comply with the Enumerated Powers in the Constitution. These unlawful expenditures are massive and when terminated would decimate the Criminal Enterprise. For that reason, it is unlikely to be popular in Washington, but necessary for us to survive as a Nation.

The major obstacle to our survival as a Constitutional Republic is Congress which is mostly corrupt. Period.

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“At 8:16 on the morning of August 6, 1945, the world got a glimpse of its own mortality. At that moment, the city of Hiroshima was obliterated by a fireball that sent waves of searing heat, then a deafening concussion, across the landscape. Three days later, a second bomb hit Nagasaki. … [President Dwight D.] Eisenhower said in 1963 “‘It wasn’t necessary to hit them with that awful thing.’

”… Besides the Manhattan Project’s internal momentum was an external motive. Its leaders had to justify the $2 billion ($26 billion in today’s dollars) expense to Congress and the public… Byrnes…warned Roosevelt that political scandal would follow if it [the atomic bomb] was not used. … ‘How would you get Congress to appropriate money for atomic energy research [after the war] if you do not show results for the money which has been spent already?’” …the U.S. had produced two types of bombs–one using uranium, the other plutonium. Whenever anyone suggested that the moment the bomb was dropped the war would be over, [bureaucrat] Groves countered, ‘Not until we drop two bombs on Japan.’ As [historian] Goldberg explains… ‘One bomb justified Oak Ridge, the second justified Hanford.’ Hiroshima was hit with the uranium bomb, nicknamed ‘Little Boy’; the plutonium bomb, ‘Fat Man,’ was used against Nagasaki. –Why We Dropped The Bomb By William Lanouette, CIVILIZATION, The Magazine of the Library of Congress, January/February 1995

Because of MAGIC intercepts of Japanese diplomatic cables, US decision makers were aware that the Japanese authorities were seeking an end to the war well before Truman authorized use of the nukes. Also HERE.

As Vietnam era Sec. of Defense Robert S. McNamara, who was part of the command under Curtis LeMay — which firebombed 66 Japanese cities before dropping the nukes — confesses, “He (General LeMay), and I’d say I, were behaving as war criminals.“

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I was heartened when the whole Black Fatigue thing went viral on the internet recently. Have White people finally, at long last, reached a tipping point in regards to ghettoized behavior, I wondered? Are they going to give up senselessly apologizing for nothing? Will they take away Blacks’ “get out of criticism free” card?

Alas, recent events suggest that racial business has returned to normal in our increasingly dystopian America 2.0. When pro rassling legend Hulk Hogan died on July 24, the online response was very telling. No one had more to do with turning the WWF (which became the WWE) into a major sport for millions of enthusiastic fans than the Hulkster. But in 2015, audio of a private phone conversation was leaked to our “free press,” which attacked it like the state controlled vultures they are. In it, Hogan bemoaned the fact that his daughter was dating a Black man. There is no greater crime in our twisted society than a White father objecting to his daughter dating a Black man. And, to make things even worse, he used the dreaded “N” word. It was actually a very human, understandable comment in a half joking vein. But the WWE didn’t hesitate, and fired the biggest name in their history.

After banishing him, the WWE eventually allowed Hogan back into the Hall of Fame in 2018. But first he issued the prerequisite White apology. Well, actually series of apologies. Really obsequious and embarrassing apologies. Classic humiliation rituals. He famously appeared at the 2024 Republican convention in support of Trump. But in January, 2025, he was unceremoniously booed off the stage at the debut RAW event for Netflix, in front of 17,000 in Los Angeles. But still the reaction by many to his death was astonishing. Now, I really wasn’t a fan of the Hulkster. But I have a real problem with someone’s private conversations being monitored. Big Brother shouldn’t be listening to any of us. We all say things behind closed doors that we wouldn’t want the world to hear. I don’t care what he said. The fact that anyone cares is yet another abridgement of free speech. Like all of us, Hulk Hogan had a right to his opinion.

We all know that if The Rock- who has become the Whitest Black man since Michael Jackson- had expressed similar reservations about his daughter dating a “Cracker,” that the response would have been a giant, collective shrug. To cite just one example of a Black celebrity saying something far worse, jazz legend (and what older Black musician isn’t a “legend?”) Miles Davis was once asked what he would like to do as his final act on earth. The humble Davis, beloved by millions of Whites, answered, “I’d strangle a White man, and I’d do it nice and slow.” I don’t believe his supremely hateful comment has ever been repeated again in polite society. Better to let sleeping Black legends lie. “Sir” Charles Barkley, the rotund former NBA star who was once renowned for throwing much smaller White bar patrons through plate glass windows, once declared, “I’m a 90s n…er. We do what we want.” Barkley has been feted by the clueless Republicucks as a political candidate. They are the Stupid Party.

Bad Black behavior has been on display for my entire life. Muhammad Ali, the former Cassius Clay, always had notable non-Irishman Howard Cosell by his side, as he perfected his own WWE-style act. Cosell was very much his “handler,” like Rabbi Shmuley watches over RFK, Jr. In sports alone, Black athletes have been exhibiting nasty, violent antics for decades. And there were always a slew of sports “journalists” and talking heads, many of them Jewish, to excuse and justify it. When the NBA’s Latrell Sprewell literally strangled his coach, many attempted to rationalize it. Sprewell was eventually welcomed back into the league, and his attempted murder was mentioned about as often as Miles Davis’s similar fantasy. I am currently writing a book about the racial dynamics in sports. It’s sure to plunge my social credit score to new depths. Black on White assaults are very common in the world of sports. I have yet to find a single example of a White on Black assault from the sports world.

After Hogan’s death, very popular “gym influencer,” whatever that is, Joey Swoll spoke fondly of the man who had been a tremendous influence on him. And then the TikTok response forced him into issuing the standard White apology, much as Hogan had done himself. Watching the video of it, Swoll’s cringeworthy cuckery should have destroyed his shockingly large fan base. No White person should ever support him again. And, like every other apology issued by a White public figure over the decades, it did no good. The Social Justice Warriors didn’t pat him on the back and say, “Ah, that’s okay, don’t worry about it. Just don’t do it again, okay?” They still think he’s “racist.” Just like the Hulkster. Anyway, I imagine Swoll lost a substantial portion of his fans over his cowering, pointless capitulating. When will one of these Whites say, “I’m not apologizing. That’s what I think. We’re all protected by the Bill of Rights. If you disagree, that’s fine. I’m not catering my views based on what you think.”

And then, demonstrating that the Black Fatigue movement hasn’t made an iota of difference, there was the mass attack on a White couple in Cincinnati after a jazz festival. By, of course, the usual suspects. You will search news accounts for a very long time before you find a White mob attacking any Black person. Maybe in 1930 in the deep south. Maybe. This group assault was consistently referred to as a “fight” by our dear, beloved press. Sure, it was kind of an unfair fight- fifty or a hundred against two. And there were the normal trappings of ghetto culture involved. The woman was sucker punched from behind. You know, the way they do it in the Knockout Game. I mean, why can’t you actually punch a much smaller woman straight on? Why is it necessary to sucker punch her, to use classless, underhanded tactics? But then, why do these big, strong Black “gangstas” sucker punch elderly White and Asian women as well? To be clear, I’m not suggesting that women should be punched in any situation.

One of the White groups who have financed Black Lives Matter is run by Democracy Alliance, with the bottomless wallet of well known non-Christian George Soros behind it. Democracy Alliance was founded by Rob Stein. Not a Catholic. Both Norman Lear and Rob “Meathead” Reiner were also members of the organization. The NAACP was founded by Whites, one of them named Henry Moskowitz. Ironically, one of the things Joey Swoll got in Woke trouble for was referring to Blacks as “colored people.” Which makes perfect sense, given that the first organization formed to advocate for them is called the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. Swoll didn’t understand the distinction between “colored people” and “people of color.” To a former blue collar worker like me, they would seem to be interchangeable terms, with only a very slight semantic difference. And that’s what he should have said, and shamed them for their absolute stupidity.

Blacks all over social media have attempted to depict the “fight” in Cincinnati as being “started” by the White guy slapping a Black man. You don’t slap a Black man in 2025. You don’t call him a “colored person.” He’s a person of color! And if you do, every black has cause to physically assault you. Sucker punch your wife. Kick you when you’re down. Stomp on your head. The normal Marquess of Ghettosberry rules of engagement. Ghetto culture has elevated the sucker punch- formerly a sign of craven cowardice in our once civilized society- into a virtuous characteristic. Somehow, punching an eighty year old Asian lady- and even doing it in such a brazen, unsportsmanlike manner- is a sign of machismo to those who make the “Hood” what it is. Basically a swamp unfit for human habitation. The Deep State is in Washington, D.C. Think of the situation in urban areas across the country as the Dark State.

Cincinnati’s undefinably but undeniably nonwhite mayor, and the man-hating DEI chief of police spoke for the corrupt local authorities. The police chief, who clearly has never dealt with a violent criminal before, lashed out at social media, not the crowd of thugs who battered these poor immigrants. Yes, apparently the victims were Russian immigrants. I know, that doesn’t really count. An immigrant isn’t an immigrant if he/she/they/them aren’t nonwhite. That couple was like the South African migrants Trump gave asylum to a few months back, to great critical reaction from the state sponsored talking heads. The immigrants=good mantra was put to the test. Adding a nonwhite into the equation makes them nongood. Ungood. Look at the woman’s face. Where is the feminist outrage? If only her White husband had inflicted that kind of damage. Apparently, some fists are more equal than others.

So I’m more fatigued than ever at this nonsense. This celebration of impoliteness, ignorance, ugliness, loudness, unearned conceit, and irrational bravado. But to the people who run our culture, the film studio heads, the television network executives, the record company presidents, as well as every big business leader and politician, this mishmash of everything that used to be frowned upon is the apex of civilization. Even Ivy League graduates, with IQs twice the average of what you’ll find in a typical “Hood,” mimic it and promote it. So who is really smarter, the Ivy Leaguer or the gang banger? I don’t need to tell you what incredibly small religious/ethnic minority group a disproportionate number of those leaders come from. When you have seemingly a majority of one particular racial group willing to say- very loudly- that the mob was the good guy, and not the two injured victims- then you know how bad things are.

White silence and subservience in the face of the most uncontrolled and unlikeable segment of the population, has made this situation possible. That’s with all the figures in the shadows, with the easily recognized surnames, overtly pulling the strings. White people still made a conscious choice to be total cucks in the face of even the most outrageous injustice. Think Reginald Denny, the White truckdriver hauled from his vehicle and beaten to a pulp by Blacks he’d never met or done anything to. Denny and his mother would both hug the Blacks who tried to kill him in court. That’s what cucks do. Do we really think Denny would have resisted if the Blacks wanted to screw his wife? After all, there’s a whole, very popular subset of porn devoted to the fantasy of White men drooling with pleasure over Blacks pleasuring their wives. I haven’t found any examples of Black men wanting White men to screw their wives.

We will never have racial “harmony” in this country until that very visible percentage of Black people stop behaving like untamed animals. Stop acting like the same rules that apply to everyone else don’t apply to them. Now, to be fair, considering how often the rules haven’t applied to them over the years, this is understandable on their part. Why not call the young White girl who won’t go out with you a “racist?” Do you think any school system, any workplace, is going to take those Blacks to task for their obvious harassment of women? If you can get large numbers of people, not all of them Black, to defend Karmelo Anthony stabbing Austin Metcalf in the heart, then what Black misbehavior can’t you get people to defend? All you need are some of the plethora of DEI hires that litter the television screens now, or an obnoxious White guy not named O’Flaherty, to talk about “racism” and “historical oppression.”

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One of my favorite homosexuals of all time was Justin Raimondo, founder of Antiwar.com and author of the 2008 book Reclaiming the American Right, who once said that the best thing about being homosexual was all the sneaking around. That was when there was a closet; ahh, the closet.

Most people in those days knew who was “that way,” who was “light in the loafers.” But they weren’t shoving it down our throats. Gays in Hollywood would ask of other gays, “Is he musical?” Almost everything was “on the down-low,” which, by the way, is a reference to married men sneaking out for gay action.

Then came a lot of things, including HIV/AIDS and gays invading St. Pat’s Cathedral, shouting “we’re here, we’re queer, get used to it.” Will & Grace came on TV. Then pederast Harvey Milk was murdered (not over gay) and drug-dealing Matthew Shepard was murdered (by a former gay sex partner)—all for “who they loved” was the narrative.

And then came the push for homosexual marriage. Voilà, cue the mythical white picket fences. “We are just like you!” All we want is to be treated just like you because, after all, that is what we are. They got “marriage” based on two lies: they wanted to be married, and they are just like us.

They didn’t really want to be married. After the imposition of gay marriage by the Courts, only roughly 10 percent of gay couples got “married.” Lots and lots of coupling, but only a rarest of couples sought permanency. Would you like to know what that percentage is now? Still just ten percent. A rarity. And without a doubt, none of these so-called marriages are monogamous. As a creepy-crawling gay sex writer named Dan Savage said many years ago, we are monogamish, not monogamous. This means you have someone at home and lots of action on the side. This is “normal gay.” Not just like us at all.

After gay “marriage” landed, queer theory emerged, seeking to “deconstruct the binary.” Everything was fluid. Cross-dressers wanted to flounce in front of school kids. They began cutting off the privates of boys and girls. This kind of thing was always present among homosexuals—see cross-dressing bars.

White picket fences began evaporating into the ether. Queer theory thrust the gay project out in the open, out from the back room, and society began rethinking the whole queer thing, most especially trans. Sirens began going off even among other gays, those who do not put on that gay voice, gays who could pass as one of us, that is, as “normal.” Was it time to cut ties? What happens if Mr. and Mrs. America turn against us, too?

The so-called “normal” gays saw their opportunity: we can finally cut them loose. No more LGBT, now only LGB! We don’t like Drag Queens for Diapered Babies, we’re just like you. Oh sure, we like drag queen bars. Sure, we cheer on the naked men parading past St. Pat’s every year. We chuckle at the leather boys. And we like promiscuous sex and lots of it, I mean, lots of it. Did I say lots of it? We are not like the perverts, we’re normal. We even voted for Trump! We even work for Trump.

Trans and queer became the perfect foils for Douglas Murray, Anderson Cooper, Andrew Sullivan, Brad Polumbo, Ric Grenell, and that long-haired lisping guy who says he won Pennsylvania for Trump. The Republican candidate for Lieutenant Governor of Virginia, John Reid, who presents himself as a “normal” gay, loves drag shows and gay hook-ups, just not for kids. How normal. How us.

Here’s the thing. There is no such thing as “normal gay.” Go to practically any “pride” parade. Pick up almost any “gay” book they want your children to read. Walk down the street on a summer’s evening in the Castro District of San Francisco. Go to the Pines on Fire Island. Look at the “gay” marriage rates. The only place you see this business about “normal gay” is in the political and policy hustings, not in real life. There is no such thing as “normal gay,” and J.D. Vance ought to take that back. They say he started this phrase on Joe Rogan.

Homosexuality is a sickness. It is a mental illness. It comes from early childhood sexual or emotional trauma. It was understood thusly by the psychiatrists before their professional associations were taken over by outside pressure and internal subversion. A man kissing another man is not normal. A man wanting to be treated like a woman is not normal. Putting certain body parts into the biological sewer is not normal. Having to wear adult diapers because of certain nasty sexual proclivities is not normal. Having hundreds of “sex” partners is not normal.

It is all queer. The “normal gays” want you to think queer theory is the enemy, the guys who want to deconstruct everything. But “gay” deconstructs everything—gay marriage queered marriage. Gay sex queered sex. Gay strikes right at the heart of what makes us human. They are sexual revolutionaries, all of them, even the most crew-cut, buttoned-down homosexual. They queered sexuality the moment they parted company with Justin Raimondo, who liked all the sneaking around. They queered it the moment they said it was normal and natural.

And, no, penguins have never been homosexual.

This article was originally published on Crisis Magazine.

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The Daughters of Union Veterans of the Civil War organization has joined with the Daughters of the Confederacy to advocate the restoration of the Confederate Memorial statue, also known as the Reconciliation Statue, to Arlington National Cemetery.  The beautiful monument, the work of Confederate Veteran sculpture Moses Ezeliel, was taken down during the burst of cultural Marxist communism during the Biden regime.  Now that the whole world knows that Biden was senile when he ran for office and declined year after year, it is clear that his administration was controlled by so-called cultural Marxist, modern-day American communistic revolutionaries.

The core believe of the “cultural” Marxists is that the old Marxism of class warfare between the capitalist class and the working class is not enough to persuade enough citizens to embrace communism.  It takes more than just factory workers who, by the way, only ever wanted better pay and working conditions and not to run the factories, as Marxist theorists argued.  As F.A. Hayek pointed out in “The Intellectuals and Socialism,” socialism has always been primarily promoted by “intellectuals” of various sorts and not by normal human beings.

The new “cultural” Marxism posits that there are two different classes in their class struggle theory:  the oppressor class and the oppressed class.  The major component of the oppressor class in America is essentially white heterosexual males of European heritage.  Everyone else is assumed to be oppressed by them.  Confederate soldiers in particular and the Confederacy in general are a key component of this New Communism.  Not only were they white males of European heritage, they supposedly fought to continue to oppress the slaves.  It does not matter to the cultural Marxists that Lincoln himself adamantly denied this, as did the 1861 War Aims Resolution of the U.S. Congress (the Crittendon-Johnson Resolution).  It was tariff collection that incited Lincoln to invoke the words “invasion” and “bloodshed” in his first inaugural address when addressing the topic of secession.  (There was no income tax at the time; tariff revenue composed more than 90 percent of federal tax revenue; and the average tariff rate had been more than doubled two days before Lincoln’s inauguration).

Hence the takedown of the Confederate Memorial at Arlington National Cemetery by Biden’s stable of cultural Marxist communist ideologues.  These are people who would never accept the idea of reconciliation of North and South, the whole idea of the Monument that was dedicated in 1914.  To them, accepting reconciliation with the South and southerners is to deny their own reason for being.  They are devoting their lives to politics and political activism in order to finally bring communism to America.

Ludwig von Mises would not be at all surprised by this.  In the latter chapters of his book Socialism Mises wrote extensively of “destructionism.”  Socialists of all varieties, he wrote, were first and foremost destructionists who sought to destroy the existing institutions of society that had evolved over time so that they could remake the world in their own communistic image.  The cultural Marxists, who first gained notoriety in the 1960s as celebrated Marxist university professors and “counter-culture” gurus, pinpointed in their writings and speeches the necessary destruction of the nuclear family, Christianity, the rule of law, constitutionalism, and of course economic freedom or real capitalism.  These are the main reasons why Europeans never voluntary accepted communism, they argued: They enjoyed freedom, prosperity, and human normality too much.

Although it appears to be a minor event, it is a most welcomed event that the Daughters of Union Veterans have become, whether they know it or not, the new anti-communists by calling for the restoration of the beautiful Reconciliation Monument at Arlington National Cemetery.

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I remember like yesterday when Dr. Paul called me into his Member office in 203 Cannon with a draft of his famous “What If” speech.

He had written it in his own hand and he asked me to go over it and clean it up a bit. Not unusual for how he writes: from the heart.

And afterward I spent a good deal of time in his office with a stopwatch making sure he could deliver it under the five minute rule. Shuffling the papers. What do we have to cut. Which paragraph could be spoken a bit faster.

I knew and understood at the time that it was a very special speech. No one as far as I know had ever done such a thing before on the Floor of the House.

It was incredibly innovative and made all the powerful points without being unnecessarily confrontational. It was meant to gain allies, not to punish adversaries.

Because that is how Ron Paul always thought when he was in Congress. The worst of them were not fools to be brought low, but potential allies awaiting the proper argumentation with the application of time.

“They’ll come around,” he said patiently.

And believe it or not, it worked more often than you might think. Being a fly on the wall as the organizer of his legendary Thursday Congressional Member lunches, I was privy to so many Members who would not dare say so in public but who dropped in for a couple of Gulf Coast shrimp and to tell Rep. Paul how right he was on the Iraq war and Afghanistan and the Fed etc.

The campaigns later on were so important and galvanized the Liberty Movement and sent it worldwide, but the kernel was planted in his unique and generous, kindly approach to even his most odious adversaries.

“What did Ron Paul ever achieve in Congress???” – they demand. Well, he changed the world. How’s that?

Reprinted with permission from The Ron Paul Institute.

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The Donald seems to be continuing his bombing campaign, albeit this time by pivoting back to the home front and taking aim at “Too Late” Jay.

As usual, Trump has his facts all wrong about who has had how many rate cuts and that inflation has miraculously disappeared since January 20th. In fact, if anything, inflation has bottomed at an unsustainably high 3.0% level. Indeed, since March 2023, the annualized monthly change in our trusty 16% trimmed mean CPI has cycled between 2.5% and 4.0% with no indication that a return to the Fed-mandated 2.0% lane is imminent.

But at least this time the Donald is attacking the right target. The truth is, when it comes to verbal assault, you can’t drop enough bombs on the Fed or easily avoid the Donald’s bottom line conclusion: “We will be paying for his incompetence for many years to come”.

Unfortunately, the arrogant monetary mandarins who run the Fed are as unlikely to bend to the Donald’s verbal fusillades as the stiff-necked Netanyahu. Still, it is well worth pursuing the opening that the Donald’s latest missive provides.

To be sure, he is not remotely correct in suggesting that the Fed should be pegging rates “two to three points” lower. Nor would its failure to push rates back toward the negative yield line in real terms amount to monetary malpractice per his echo chamber in the VP’s office.

Then again, JD Vance’s sheer ignorance on the economic policy front might well be explained by his misfortune of having taken economics courses at Yale:

“The president has been saying this for a while, but it’s even more clear: the refusal by the Fed to cut rates is monetary malpractice.”

To the contrary, the real “malpractice” is the fact that the Fed drove rates down into the sub-basement of history, generating negative inflation-adjusted yields for most of the 25-year span since the turn of the century. Yet negative real rates are the devil’s workshop of economic distortion and malinvestment. They encourage excessive gambling on Wall Street via the carry trades and unhinged borrowing in Washington owing to the temporary, artificial suppression of the interest cost of the public debt.

And yet, after just a few quarters of real money market interest rates above the flatline, currently posting at just 1.2% after inflation, the Donald and JD are huffing and puffing for a 2-3% cut in nominal rates. Of course, that would push real yields back into negative territory, which most definitely will Make America Broke Again—not usher in the Donald’s ballyhooed Golden Age of Prosperity.

Besides, riddle us this JD: How in the world did we get the storied Reagan Boom in the 1980s and 1990s when real money market rates posted in the +2.5% to +5.0% range? That is to say, capitalist prosperity is absolutely not a function of dishonest, cheap money flowing from the printing press of the central bank.

The fact is, the Fed should not be pegging rates at all – up, down, or sideways. This whole business of pegging overnight rates and, by extension, the level and shape of the entire yield curve amounts to monetary central planning, not sound money policy. So in attacking the Fed’s rate-pegging errors, the Donald is at least getting the issue on the table of public debate.

But the Fed will always be in error in pegging rates based on the dubious wisdom of the 12 monetary central planners who sit on the FOMC. Monetary central planning via the frail tool of rate pegging just plain doesn’t work in an immensely complicated and opaque $30 trillion open economy that is deeply and inextricably intertwined with the capital, money, goods, and services markets of the world’s $110 trillion GDP. By definition, the leakage of global supplies and financial flows into the US economy and domestic demand and flows outward confounds any possible formula linking short-run inflation and employment to interest rates.

Yet the Fed never stops counting the number of economic angels sitting on the heads of its interest rate pins. It pretends to be astutely monitoring and assessing the “incoming data,” but in the short run, the official data is way too full of noise and error messages—volatile data points which subsequently get revised, often unrecognizably.

For instance, the Powell Fed claims to watch wage rate movement like a hawk, claiming the resulting cost pressure or lack thereof is a leading indicator of price movements. Well, here are two indicators of wage rate movement over the last 10 years.

The blue line is the three-month moving average of year-over-year changes in unweighted linked wages (i.e., same workers), but is smoothed to exclude each month the 25% highest wage changes in the basket and the lowest 20%. Moreover, this “trimmed” wage index excludes a different set of high and low wages each month, meaning that it embodies a reliable smoothing mechanism without arbitrarily excluding any sector of the wage market on a recurring basis, as does, for instance, the CPI ex food and energy. The other key feature of the index is that the wage basket is unweighted and includes the same set of wage payments month after month.

By contrast, the green line represents the BLS’s comprehensive wage cost metric, including both wage payments and all fringes and non-cash compensation such as employer health insurance plans or vacation and maternity leave pay. Also, this index is weighted by current activity levels in each measurement period or quarter.

Thus, if the low-wage food service industry were to be shut down, for instance, the employment cost index would lurch higher. But that would happen owing to reweighting of the measurement basket to higher pay sectors of the labor market, not due to any acceleration of wage rate growth on an apples-to-apples basis.

The graph below makes clear that these indices do not measure the same thing or emit the same signals in the short or even medium term. For instance, from 2015 to 2017, the year-over-year rate of change measured by the two wage indices was roughly similar, but the gap widened significantly to a 100 to 150 basis points difference in favor of the employment cost index from 2018 to 2020.

But during the turbulence of the pandemic lockdowns and stimmies from mid-2020 through 2022, the gap not only widened, but the two indices went in the opposite direction. The employment cost index (green line) soared upwards to 5.0% on a year-over-year basis, while the trimmed mean wage index plunged to a -2% rate of year-over-year change.

All things considered, the dramatic widening shown in the graph amounts to a live fire experiment in the foibles of monetary central planning. By order of Dr Fauci, upwards of 10 to 15 million low-wage workers were laid off in the spring and the balance of 2020, which caused the employment index to soar, but not because wage growth suddenly accelerated. The doubling of the green line rate of change during that period (from 2.5% to 5.0%) was simply an error message about the wage change rates that are embedded in the activity-weighted construction of the index.

By contrast, the trimmed mean linked wage index went down because, with unemployment rates in double digits due to the lockdowns, wage pressures sharply abated. Accordingly, actual same employee wage rates turned flat to negative during Q1 2021 to Q4 2022.

Needless to say, it is not obvious which wage change signal, if any, the monetary central planners in the Eccles Building should have been eyeballing. The employment index was overstating the rate of true wage change owing to mix change in the wage basket, while the trimmed, same-worker index was measuring distressed but transient labor market conditions, which evaporated quickly after the economy was firmly reopened in 2023.

To be sure, this lesson could be written off by the Fed’s fanboys as illustrative of an aberrant economic shock that is not typical of year-in and year-out conditions and trends. But we don’t think so because the very nature of a dynamic capitalist economy is that it is always in a state of flux and change.

Accordingly, the primitive price and wage indices churned out by government statistical bureaus are always rife with noise and error messages. There is simply no set of 12 macroeconomic geniuses who comprise the FOMC that can possibly keep the signal separated from the noise.

And even if they could, the purified knowledge would be of limited use to central bankers. That’s because their tool kits consist of primitive interest rate pegging and bond buying and selling tools that are so loosely linked to the blooming, buzzing mass of activity in the interior of the GDP as to be thoroughly unreliable and dangerous instruments of economic navigation.

Fortunately, there is an answer to the information deficiency and toolkit inefficiency problem of today’s Keynesian central bankers. Namely, the free market in interest rates, money, capital, and every other kind of financial instrument and derivative.

Stated differently, we don’t need a 12-man committee of Too Late Jays setting interest rates, nor do we need to replace them with an Always Easy Donald or any other elected politicians. In fact, nearly 100 out of 100 times the free market will find the right price for money, debt, and equity capital far more reliably and efficiently than either the Powells or Trumps of the world ever could.

Of course, central bankers and their fanboys on both ends of the Acela Corridor will insist that interest rates, US Treasury debt costs and stock market indices don’t dare be left to chance on the free market. But that self-serving claim is exactly why a free market in money and finance is the only viable way to get honest prices in financial markets, and thereby force government spenders and Wall Street speculators alike to face the true economic risks and costs of their activities.

Accordingly, there is one simple reform that would pave the way to honest financial markets. To wit, a return to the “bankers’ bank” model of the Fed’s founding father, Congressman Carter Glass. Crucially, the Glassian model had no macro-economic targets or remit, operated exclusively through a passive discount window and included no provision for the Fed to effectively create “new” central bank credit by buying government debt.

To the contrary, interest rates were to be set by free market forces in the member banking system, while Fed credit would be priced at this free market rate plus a penalty spread and offered only in return for the collateral of commercial receivables against goods already produced and sold.

Accordingly, Fed credit growth could not be “inflationary” because it was predicated upon liens on new goods already produced, thereby keeping demand in line with supply and essentially functioning under the truth of Say’s Law.

At the same time, the Glassian Fed was no friend of the Washington spenders because it had no remit to purchase government debt on the bias of fiat credits snatched from thin air. Similarly, it was no solace to the Wall Street gamblers, either: There was no possible “put” under stock prices, not artificial suppression of bond yields and cap rates, and therefore no artificial goosing of PE multiples.

In short, the Glassian Fed was perhaps needed by a fractional reserve banking system that was still regulated on the basis of required reserves. The entire regime of required reserves and central bank provision of such reserves was ended in March 2020 when reserve requirements were abolished and the regulatory structure was shifted fully to bank balance sheet regulation via required capital and liquidity ratios.

At the end of the day, the virtual disappearance of hand-to-hand currency in daily commerce means that “money” has become entirely a matter of digital ledger entries and a derivative of private credit. Accordingly, the American economy no longer needs a central bank to print “money” in either paper or digital form, as the case may be.

At the same time, a marketplace that can find ways to securitize the likes of credit card receivables and recorded music royalties doesn’t need central bank credit at all. The free market can both make the credit and price it based on the facts and circumstances of its issuance.

Given those realities, we can hope that the Donald’s verbal bombing of the Fed can also lead to a lasting truce under which Wall Street and the Washington spenders both give up their piggy banks in the Eccles Building. So doing, they would give the people of Main Street America once again the opportunity to pursue their own economic ends and betterments on a free market of honest money and credit where neither Too Late Jay nor Too Easy Donald has anything to do with it.

Reprinted with permission from David Stockman’s Contra Corner.

The post Free Market Money: The Antidote appeared first on LewRockwell.

Autoimmune conditions have become one of the most common and stubborn health challenges of our time. While conventional medicine often treats them as mysterious immune system malfunctions—managed primarily with harmful steroids and other immunosuppressants —there’s increasing evidence that many of these diseases are not random. Rather, they’re signals of deeper dysfunctions in the body—many of which are tied to the modern lifestyle we’ve come to accept as normal.

Lifestyle Contributions to Autoimmunity

Many things in our lives that we have control over significantly affect our predisposition to autoimmunity:

Sleep—I have previously written about the profound importance of sleep and how many different illnesses are linked to poor sleep. In practice, we frequently find that patients with autoimmune conditions also have disrupted sleep cycles, and these improve once that is addressed (e.g., by improving sleep hygiene and avoiding blue light).
Note: the treatments for sleeping issues like insomnia are discussed further here.

Sunlight—Since the sun has no commercial lobby to advocate for it, the medical field demonizes sunlight as a cause of cancer despite a deficiency of the sun and sunlight being tied to a wide range of medical conditions (including cancers) and making individuals 60% more likely to die. A loss of sunlight exposure is also tied to many autoimmune conditions (e.g., multiple sclerosis). As such, we frequently find autoimmune patients improve from resuming healthy sunlight exposures (likewise, I suspect this partly explains why ultraviolet blood irradiation benefits so many different autoimmune conditions).
Note: appropriate sunlight exposure (e.g., going outside early in the morning and having the sunlight touch your face without being obstructed by glass) is also very helpful for reestablishing the circadian rhythm and restoring healthy sleep.

Exercise—Many of the benefits of exercise arise from the fluid circulation it creates in the body (as fluid stagnation underlies many illnesses—many of which we suffer from due to our sedentary lifestyle. This perspective in turn, is corroborated by the Chinese Medical viewpoint that blood stasis causes autoimmunity and that either treating blood stasis or zeta potential (which underlies both microclotting and lymphatic stagnation) frequently improves autoimmune conditions.
Note: exercise and eliminating fluid stagnation frequently improve insomnia. Likewise, sunlight exposure is a critical driver of fluid circulation throughout the body, all of which illustrates how intertwined many of the key lifestyle factors we routinely ignore are to our health.

Diet—Food allergens such as wheat, dairy, and nightshades frequently contribute to autoimmune conditions (particularly arthritis), and many have found food elimination diets that identify the reactive allergen to improve their condition significantly. Additionally, in many cases, allergies arise from deficient stomach acid, as without sufficient stomach acid, proteins are often not fully broken down (allowing intact allergens to enter circulation) and triggers acid reflux (due to top of the stomach only closing when sufficient stomach acid is present), which then irritates the lungs.
Note: many of the issues with gluten (e.g., autoimmunity or weight gain) are not experienced in countries like Italy that use more natural forms of wheat.

Stress—is well known to predispose one to autoimmune disorders and flares (e.g., 80% of autoimmune patients report an unusually stressful situation prior to their disease onset, while stress disorders increased the risk of autoimmune disorders by 46%-129%).
Note: some patients will not respond to a rheumatologic drug, until they eliminate the stress in their lives.

The Global Loss of Vitality

If you review the early history of medicine, it is striking:

• How profoundly damaging many of the early western medical remedies were (e.g., the smallpox vaccine or mercury).

• How much healthier people were and how much more effective many natural therapies were in the past than they are now.

This second point prompted me to ask older doctors (from various medical schools) if they had observed a general decline in human vitality in the patients they saw at the start of their careers compared to the end, and all of them shared that they had. Additionally:

• They noted that beyond patients becoming much sicker and having conditions they’d never seen before, it was also much harder to treat them as each therapy they used had shifted from making a dramatic improvement to a more minuscule one, which required numerous successive treatments to bring about an improvement.

• They typically attributed this shift to a loss in human vitality. They cited a variety of correlates (e.g., the average human body temperature dropping, people becoming less able to mount fevers, infants being less able to produce a brisk cry, or increasing degrees of fluid stagnation in their patients).

Note: typically this decline in vitality proceeds in a linear fashion and then spikes at certain times (e.g., after the introduction of the smallpox vaccine, the 1986 law which granted immunity to vaccine manufacturers and led to a rapid proliferation in the vaccine schedule, and after the COVID vaccines). In each case, this increase in disease gets normalized and forgotten by the next generation of doctors (who entered practice after the last wave of sickness had become the “new normal”).

Likewise, many datasets corroborate this steady decreasing vitality in humanity over the decades (e.g., we’ve witnessed a continual increase in autoimmune disorders). Having extensively explored this topic, we believe much of it is due to modern technology (e.g., vaccines, chronic chemical exposures or heavy metal toxicity, dentistry and surgical scars, EMFs, and widespread circadian rhythm disruption). Many of these, in turn, share a common thread—creating fluid stagnation throughout the body.

Note: After thousands of years, around 1830, blood stasis suddenly came to be viewed as a primary cause of disease in Chinese Medicine, which occurred shortly after the smallpox vaccine (which caused many severe injuries resembling blood stasis), which was introduced in China in 1805.

Systemic Suppression

One of the central criticisms of Allopathic (Western) medicine by natural schools of medicine has been that anytime an external agent is used to forcefully change a process which is unfolding within the body (rather than aiding the body’s ability to resolve it) you run the risk of a minor temporary issue being exchanged for a severe chronic one—especially when this is repeatedly done throughout the course of someone’s life. In some cases, this risk is very justified (e.g., in a life-threatening emergency or with a relatively safe drug that has limited long-term complications). At the same time however, a general unwillingness to acknowledge this issue pervades Allopathic medicine.

I’ve thus never forgotten a conference in the 1970s at which one of the world’s leading homeopaths convened a panel to discuss the likely consequences of modern medicine routinely suppressing symptoms (e.g., aggressively using fever suppressing medications or preventing childhood febrile illnesses with vaccination).
Note: studies have repeatedly linked preventing measles, mumps, and chickenpox to severe cancers later in life.

At that conference, building upon the recent mass introduction of suppressive steroids, they correctly predicted that if this suppression continued to increased, in the decades to follow:

• We would see a global shift from less severe illnesses to more severe ones.

• That this suppression would cause physical illnesses to be pushed deeper into the body and be replaced with psychiatric illnesses, and in time spiritual ones (particularly when the psychiatric illnesses were also suppressed with medications)—all of which would dovetail with people being willing to do crazier and crazier things.

Now, everyone has gradually become habituated to patients “just being” sicker and sicker, and that not much can be done about it.

Read the Whole Article

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What is Speaker of the House Mike Johnson, a Christian and a Southern Baptist, doing going to Israel and praying at the Western Wall like a Jew? Theologically conservative Christians like me want to know.

The post What Is Mike Johnson Doing? appeared first on LewRockwell.

President Trump put a whopping 39% tariff on gold from Switzerland. Is it really about a trade imbalance? Or is there more to such a drastic tax? Also this week, the President took steps to allow 401(k)’s to include crypto and private equity. Is there are relation between these two policies? A huge tax on a global safe haven asset, and easier access to high-risk assets?

The post Tariffs on Gold, Gambling in 401(k)’s — Signs of A Crack-Up Boom? appeared first on LewRockwell.