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I’ve been a Democrat my whole life — until I walked away in 2021, because it was a Democratic administration that turned America evil, and that turned my own life unconstitutionally upside down.

I have never looked back, except to marvel at how, day by day, policy by policy, today’s DNC seems ever more determined to destroy its party’s storied legacy, as well as its own ability ever to win another race.

The DNC is pursuing a wholesale, wrecking-ball destruction of everything that made people want to vote Democratic in the first place, and to send money to Democratic candidates. It trashes its heritage of speaking up for marginalized groups; for the concerns of communities of color; for unionized workers; for cops and teachers and firefighters; for ordinary Americans who struggle to pay bills; people who, as Democratic candidate and later President Bill Clinton used to say, “work hard and play by the rules.”

How a party can burn up so visibly, and so readily, so much of what we used to call “political capital”?

There is a revolution brewing in New York City and its boroughs, and it just may show a shift that can transform the nation.

New leaders are arising, who simply cannot call themselves Democrats.

This is due to self-inflicted wounds by that party, in the form of lunatic and corrupt policies, and critical abandonments from 2021-present.

Lunatic polices? Here are some:

Support the rights of gay and lesbian people, and of other sexual minorities, not to face legal discrimination? Sure; that is a no-brainer. Take that consensus to a bizarre new level, and insist on interjecting biological males into women’s sports, endangering women physically and destroying Title 9 protections; then place biological males into female spaces such as bathrooms and changing rooms, prisons and mental institutions?

Who thought that that policy would have widespread support? What percent of the electorate has that deliverable at the top of its list?

Speak up for legal immigrants to be treated as fairly as anyone else? Absolutely. Those are traditional Democratic values. But champion the ingress to our nation of 15-30 million people who broke our laws in order to be here, and then shower ostentatious benefits upon them — ranging from cash cards to four star midtown NYC hotel stays — that our American elders and veterans and single parents can never afford for themselves?

How can the advisors sitting around the Democratic campaign tables, not game out what we used to call the “optics” of that situation? How does that help any Democrat run and win?

“Defund the Police”? Who thinks that that was a good idea? A winning policy?

Offer guidance in a public health crisis, sure. But force thousands of NYC teachers, cops and firefighters, and city workers of all kinds, to take into their bodies against their will, an experimental injection that everyone sentient now knows can be damaging or sterilizing or lethal? What are the odds that that will work out longterm?

Deny religious exemptions? Really?

There are 36,000 cops in NYC and 19,000 NYPD staff. There are 11,000 firefighters and 4500 EMTs in NYC. There are 77 thousand teachers in NYC. So a total of 147,400 New Yorkers in the front lines of New Yorkers’ lives, and of their kids’ wellbeing, were “mandated” with the experimental injection.

What if they get sick? What if they die? What if they know others who are getting sick and dying?

Who wants to “own” that catastrophe electorally?

The DNC does.

To this day, first responders in NYC who were “mandated”, do not have their jobs back. They do not have due process,. They did not get their day in court. The people on whose bodies the city runs, were betrayed.

Who isn’t sorry? The DNC. Who isn’t offering to “reinstate and compensate” these workers? The DNC’s new star, the “new AOC”, New York State Assembly Member Zohran Mamdani.

He is a poster child for the corruption of the DNC, and its betrayal of first responders and communities of color; traditionally stalwart groups in the Democratic base.

Mamdani is to the manor born. A Bowdoin college graduate, son of the glamorous Indian filmmaker Mira Nair, Mamdani’s family lives in Uganda, where Mandani was recently married. Indian media are reporting this event as a “lavish Uganda wedding bash”. “New York City mayoral frontrunner and current Queens Assemblyman Zohran Mamdani celebrated his recent marriage with a three-day private celebration at his family’s high-security estate in Uganda”, reports DNA_India.

In New York City media, in contrast, Mamdani poses in a hoodie on the subway.

Trust fund millennials in gentrified neighborhoods in New York, are salivating about Mamdani. In a gesture, voting for Mamdani wipes away the guilt of “white privilege”; no matter than he himself is more privileged than almost anyone in New York’s five boroughs.

Mamdani is a true socialist candidate: he offers to make New York life “affordable.” Free transit for all; government-run grocery stores — (which worked so well in the Soviet Union); frozen rents. It is a seductive appeal; New York is expensive; and Mamdani can hope that people under 60 do not remember what socialism actually did to those suffering under its yoke.

His candidacy definitely depends upon no one asking where all the money is going to come from, or noticing that when “the government” pays for it, it is taxpayers who actually pay.

Headlines from Politico to Newsweek are broadcasting the “fact” that Mamdani polled at 50 per cent, far above his competitors. But read the not-so-fine print (as Politico’s and Newsweek’s editors should have done, more carefully):

‘“Our independent poll — the first in this cycle to be offered in four languages and to drill down into national origin and religious denomination — makes one thing clear: Black union households, young Jews, South Asians, East Asians, Latinos, and New Yorkers in every income bracket are all on the same Zohran Mamdani bus, and it’s headed in the direction of the Democratic Party’s future,” said Amit Singh Bagga, the principal of Public Progress Solutions and a veteran of federal, city, and state government.

Bagga’s firm designed and analyzed the poll along with Adam Carlson’s Zenith Research. It was funded through private donations to Bagga, who advised Mamdani’s campaign during the primary on setting up an administration, and was fielded by Verasight.”

So: a poll handpicked the most likely Mamdani voters, left out the likely Mamdani non-supporters, his donors funded it, and legacy media is calling that a win. Both polling and news reporting could not be more corrupt than this.

In contrast to Mamdani and his theatrical structure of institutional alliances, a new generation of very different leaders in New York City, is also running for office. These young men and women had very different life experiences from Mamdani’s. They were not born to wealth or privilege; their families do not live on “lavish estates” in foreign countries.

The corrupt, institutional machine of New York City politics, is not helping them; the legacy media of New York City are not championing them.

Some of these new leaders have walked away from the Democratic party. They have re-registered as Republicans, which is in itself newsworthy. But these are not your grandma’s country club Republicans.

Athena Clarke, a New York City teacher who was “mandated” out of her job when she refused to take the experimental injection, the daughter of immigrants from Jamaica and the West Indies, and a mother of one, is running for city council in Brooklyn’s District 46. (Disclosure: DailyClout.io will run sponsored content from her supporters). She has an BA and an MA in education, specializing in children with disabilities.

For seven years Clarke worked as a tenured teacher in the New York City Department of Education. But in 2021, the city implemented a COVID-19 vaccine mandate. When Ms Clarke refused it, she was terminated from her job, without any court hearing, which is a violation of New York State Education Law.

This trauma led her to decide to run for City Council, and to seek reinstatement for first responders and teachers, among other planks on her platform.

Unlike Mamdani, she is not promising free everything. (One of her slogans is “Stop the Socialists!”)

I interviewed Clarke, and it was a different experience from interviewing a seasoned pol. She spoke from the perspective of a teacher and of a mom. She talked about the kids injured developmentally from being kept out of school for months; children alone in a room, socially isolated, staring at monitors. She talked about how kids with speech disabilities could not learn how to pronounce the sounds “l” or “th” without seeing their teacher’s mouths, which were hidden behind masks.

Her platform has other grassroots concerns. Parental rights is one of them; she is tackling the delicate issue of parents being unaware that children are exposed at public schools to “sensitive content,” often without their consent. She promises to take on the bureaucracy: Brooklyn often simply changes zoning, and imposes drug treatment clinics, homeless shelters, mental health facilities and other problematic institutions into local neighborhoods, especially in lower-income areas, without any local buy-in or approval process. Clarke promises to end that. She will also “reinstate and compensate” the terminated city workers who were “mandated” and who lost their jobs when they refused the vaccine.

Luis Quero is another Brooklyn-born and raised next-generation leader. He is running for Brooklyn City Council, District 38. He is sort of an anti-Mamdani.

His website is startlingly direct. “You just want to get to work without getting stabbed or burned alive”, it reads. “There is no Democratic or Republican way of cleaning the streets,” it notes, quoting legendary New York Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia.

Read the Whole Article

The post Democrats: Winning a Battle but Losing the War appeared first on LewRockwell.

The commute in Campbell, California, collapsed into chaos today (Tuesday) when a plastic trinket—placed by a weekend treasure hunter—was mistaken for the second coming of Guy Fawkes. Winchester Boulevard turned into a no-go zone while patrol cruisers, armored vans, and an inquisitive news chopper circled the scene.

Parents ran late, businesses lost customers, and every weary taxpayer footed the bill for a few lumbering hours that felt like a bad rehearsal of Homeland Security Theater.

I happened to be stuck in it. As the O’Learys claim to be an adventuring clan, I took my children on a quest while Mom was at the dentist. It turns out that the trip to the coin-op carwash a few klicks down the road was more than we bargained for.

I told Jack Callahan about our misadventure— “twenty minutes, seven side streets, and two cranky kids just to scrub road dust and a bunch of bird crap off the Yukon” —and he barked the laugh of a man who has shoveled more bureaucratic folly than snow.

“Son,” he said over a quick Zoom, clanking a coffee mug on his desk, “they closed a principal artery because some gadgeteer dropped a glorified Tupperware? That’s not safety. That’s institutional hypochondria!”

Jack has also watched government balloon in the post-Eisenhower years. There’s an industrial complex that never knows when to stand down. Whose folks haven’t regaled them about the drills of the 1950s and 60s—kids ducking under desks, generals measuring fallout with slide rules, mothers praying the Cubans would blink first in the nuclear standoff?

Back then, Jack argued, they served a palpable dread: Soviet warheads. Today, the danger is a nylon box with a smiley-face sticker.

Across the nation, bomb squads sprint to geocaches with the reflex of Pavlov’s dog, racking up overtime and wear on six-figure robots. Technicians detonated a pipe-shaped cache near a middle school in Frisco, Colorado. Officers in Murfreesboro, Tennessee, x-rayed a “Pipe Bomb Geocache” in a Home Depot lot. Ohio wardens evacuated hikers for a plastic LocknLock that did nothing but hide a logbook.

Each scare drains finite manpower. Colorado again: Summit County’s sheriff lamented “a significant amount of time and valuable resources” burned on harmless PVC.

Last week in Door County, Wisconsin, deputies cleared an entire park for a GPS game piece.

Consider. A single response truck runs nearly $200k—forget sirens and strobing lights. Regional squads log 40–60 callouts per year, and Santa Clara County’s unit stands ready 24/7 for three neighboring counties. Meanwhile, local police budgets groan under the bloat of overtime—New York alone projects $507 million in uniform OT this fiscal year.

Jack’s verdict: “They buy a bazooka to swat a housefly, then pass the invoice to the housefly.”

The Founders believed liberty survives only where citizens and the state maintain proportion. Yet modern officialdom multiplies protocols the way kudzu chokes a fenceline. One errant cache and the default is “cordon-and-search.”

Reflect. During World War II, explosives were shipped across the continent without paralyzing traffic. Today, a plastic box is enough to darken countless traffic lights.

Jack thundered: “We lock down, we clear out, we pay up—yet we never wise up.”

The pattern mirrors Prohibition raids and TSA shoe shuffling: bold headlines first, sheepish footnotes later. Fear becomes currency, and compliance turns into habit.

No one begrudges caution—real threats exist, as Oklahoma City proved in 1995. But prudence must share the stage with perspective. Ground rules already tell geocachers to avoid pipes, military ammo cans, and public transit pylons. Enforcing amateur guidelines would cost pennies compared with mobilizing the paramilitary.

Callahan frames it in boxing terms: “Government should fight in its weight class. Right now, it’s shadow-boxing ghosts, burning stamina while real crooks pick pockets in the bleachers.”

His prescription is surgical: Dispatchers must first cross-reference geocache databases; Hobbyists should plainly label containers; Open civilian hotlines to resolve benign sightings before alarms spread like prairie fire.

Today’s fiasco was a bureaucratic belly flop, not a public triumph. It showcased an apparatus that mistakes activity for achievement, then invoices Ordinary Joe for its blunders. Each lockdown chips away at civic patience, the same way price controls bred gas lines and sour distrust.

Jack tells me he’s going to raise one up tonight—Bud Heavy bottle, label out—and toast to the folks like me who were stuck in their noontime commute: “May your engines stay cool, may your kids forgive the delay, and may your public servants learn that discernment is cheaper than spectacle.”

After all, the republic Jack’s ancestors bled for was forged on measured courage, not reflexive dread. Until our institutions remember that distinction, every plastic lunchbox will parade as Armageddon.

At the same time, the real business of the nation waits at the barricade, honking its horn.

This article was originally published on The O’Leary Review.

The post How a $5 Plastic Box Cost Taxpayers Thousands: My 20-minute Nightmare on Winchester Boulevard appeared first on LewRockwell.

This article was written by my father before the implementation of the 2nd amendment.

The UN’s Arms Trade Treaty which covers everything from small arms to battle tanks, combat aircraft and warships – came into force on 24 December 2014. This treaty has not been ratified by our Congress but had the support of our Secretary of State, John Kerry who signed it and Our president at that time, who without expressly mentioning the treaty, said in a speech at the UN that all nations “must meet our responsibility to observe and enforce international norms.” The problem with that statement and this treaty is that we the people aren’t in control of what those ‘international norms’ are and as we have seen time and time again, those international norms might be detrimental to our country.

Many preppers and 2nd Amendment proponents believe that the Arms Trade Treaty will first lead to registration of all firearms and when that happens, historically the next step is confiscation through some means. Technically, no treaty can be put into action in the United States unless it has been ratified by a 2/3 majority of the senate. This fact is what most people cite when they are trying to refute any legitimate concerns about the UN Arms Trade Treaty or any other treaty’s potential effect on our country. This sounds well and good and serves to placate some, but for this fail-safe to have any weight you would first need to have a government that followed the letter of the constitution and additionally, that government would need to follow the wishes of the citizens they are representing.

Our government has proven time and time again that following the constitution is simply not something they feel they have to do when it stands in their way. For example, the senate has never voted on the Kyoto Protocol but that hasn’t stopped the EPA from enacting rules complying with the main goals of that treaty. Coal plants are being shut down left and right while the US and China agreed in 2014 to let China keep growing their output of carbon emissions (with coal power plants) until 2030. There are many examples of policies that are enacted that fall well outside the bounds of Constitutional limits on power but that doesn’t stop our representatives does it? On any issue there is more brainpower spent on finding ways around the Constitution than actually following it with the seeming goal of every single facet of law being finally decided by the Supreme Court. It’s as if in our society, the rules we decided long ago to set for ourselves are only as good as the interpretations of people today and if every single thing can be challenged (and in some cases changed), we don’t really have a Constitution at all. What we have is a framework for legal arguments that only establishes a baseline which can be over ruled completely by a simple majority of ideology on the bench.

As for a government that listens to their constituents, that long gone relic of thought is promised by every single person running for office. “I feel your pain” The truth of the matter is that in this day and age, every politician is a benefactor of the same special interests. There are no democrat and republican sides whenever both are receiving money from the same companies. The elected politicians, by overwhelming majority do not care what you say or want because they don’t answer to you. Their actions directly contradict election results, polls and public outcry. The 2014 mid-term elections  held should have sent a very strong signal to the leadership of both parties that the country wasn’t on-board with the policies of the current administration and the direction of affairs with the Congress, however; Obamacare and Amnesty both remain intact without so much as a whimper from our newly elected majority who promised for years to repeal it as soon as they were ‘in power’. To add insult to injury, the Republicans just released a 1 trillion budget proposal just over 24 hours before a procedural vote on it knowing that nobody would have time to read it. Same tricks but a different face is behind the podium. Why should we expect anything different from what we have been seeing?

Do you really feel that there is anything ‘your party’ is going to do to stop elements of this treaty from being implemented if it is in their best interests?

What’s so wrong with simply registering all guns?

What’s the harm in simply registering you say? It makes sense that government would want to know who has guns, so they can ensure that bad people don’t have them. You can’t argue with that logic can you? Well yes I can try. Registration will only be done by law-abiding people. The criminals they will try to get you to believe this registration would stop would never turn themselves or their guns in. If that were true, why wouldn’t criminals be lining up a police offices every day because we do have laws already, don’t we? How is this not obvious to everyone? I maintain that it is obvious to the people who are pushing for any restriction and by that I am referring to registration,  of our 2nd amendment rights.

Do guns kill people? Yes they do, but deaths by guns are a small fraction of the total deaths in the US each year. If you want to know who really kills people you have to look at governments historically.

Yes, you read that right. Governments are responsible for more deaths of their citizens in the 20th century than any other unnatural cause. It is called Democide and is been documented by R. J. Rummel, formerly of the University of Hawaii Political Science Department. He writes:

Most probably near 170,000,000 people have been murdered in cold-blood by governments, well over three-quarters by absolutist regimes. The most such killing was done by the Soviet Union (near 62,000,000 people), the communist government of China is second (near 35,000,000), followed by Nazi Germany (almost 21,000,000), and Nationalist China (some 10,000,000). Lesser megamurderers include WWII Japan, Khmer Rouge Cambodia, WWI Turkey, communist Vietnam, post-WWII Poland, Pakistan, and communist Yugoslavia. The most intense democide was carried out by the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia, where they killed over 30 percent of their subjects in less than four years.

The best predictor of this killing is regime power. The more arbitrary power a regime has, the less democratic it is, and the more likely it will kill its subjects or foreigners. The conclusion is that power kills, absolute power kills absolutely.

But we live in a democracy in the United States and we elect our representatives. We have a rule of law and nothing like the atrocities you mention above would ever happen here. Really? I certainly hope not and so it is with much interest that I have and will be keeping track of what goes on after December 24th and into the future on this topic.

But Mr. Rummel’s statement has weight in historical precedence and is alarming when looked at from the context of where we are as a country today. One could argue that our regime has an increasingly disturbing amount of ‘arbitrary power’. That is power that they have assumed that is outside of the Constitution and the really fun part is they keep giving themselves more of it every day. Some of this power was enacted by law of course, but it is power nonetheless and it never decreases, it only becomes more vast. From the Patriot Act, to NSA Spying, to treaties with foreign nations, harassment of political parties, to illegal searches, illegal detainment without cause, to killing people without a trial and just yesterday they passed a bill which grants the government and law enforcement “unlimited access to the communications of every American”. How much power is that?

Read the Whole Article

The post Next Step Is Confiscation Through Some Means: A Response to the 2nd Amendment Critique appeared first on LewRockwell.

The American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) distinguished itself as an obsessive shots pusher and freedom theatener during the coronavirus crackdown. It was admonishing that children — who were at very minimal risk from coronavirus — be subjected to the quack practices of masking and social distancing to protect them until they became “fully vaccinated” with experimental coronavirus “vaccine” shots. The AAP was also calling on pediatricians to evangelize for giving these dangerous and ineffective shots to nearly all children in the age groups for which the United States government had approved the shots.

Luckily for many American children, their parents resisted the AAP supported effort. But, many other parents, placing confidence in pediatricians that peddled the AAP line, went along.

While the coronavirus crackdown has receded into the past, the AAP, an organization claiming 67,000 members, is still pushing shots and threatening freedom on a grand scale. The latest example is the policy statement the AAP issued on Monday titled Medical vs Nonmedical Immunization Exemptions for Child Care and School Attendance.

In the policy statement, the AAP endorses the presence of laws and regulations requiring children to receive “immunizations” as a prerequisite for attending school or daycare. Further, the AAP supports eliminating philosophical and religious based exemptions from such mandates — the means by which the vast majority of parents who have opted out across America have been able to protect their children from receiving some or all of the plethora of shots listed in the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) childhood vaccination schedule.

The only exemption basis, declares the AAP in its policy statement, should be “medically indicated exemptions to specific immunizations as determined for each individual student.” As this phrasing from the policy statement indicates, this medical exemption route turns out to deny exemption for most children and can even limit the applicability of medical exemptions that may be granted to just one or some of the mandated shots. Showing a child has already been hurt by shots is part of one of the limited routes to maybe obtain a medical exemption. Such an exemption will, by definition, be too late. As I wrote in April of 2023, the medical exemption for vaccines “could more accurately be called the mirage exemption” given that it is unavailable to almost all children.

The AAP policy statement further says that, even once granted, medical exemptions should have hanging over them the possibility of being revoked at any time. The policy statement directs that “all pediatric health care providers” should “recertify the need for these exemptions on a regular basis.” Here today, gone tomorrow.

The AAP also appears to want to shut the door on any doctors who try to grant medical exemptions in any but the most stingy manner. The policy statement declares that “states and territories should develop policies to ensure that any medical exemptions are appropriate and evidence based.” It is not the doctor’s determination after all. Big Brother will be there to crack down on any doctor who swims against the current.

Shots mandates for children are already widespread in America. But, that is not good enough for AAP. It appears determined to eliminate the ability of almost all parents to opt their children out of the mandates.

This article was originally published on The Ron Paul Institute.

The post Pediatricians Organization Says Eliminate Almost All Vaccine Exemptions for Children appeared first on LewRockwell.

The “BRICS lab” has a non-stop, ever-adapting creative spirit. Beats Tariff dementia everytime.

The fourth plenary session of the Communist Party of China has been scheduled by the Politburo for October (no precise data announced; probably four days during the second half of October). That’s when Beijing will be deliberating the lineaments of its next five-year plan. The plenum should be attended by over 370 Central Committee members of the party elite.

Why this is so crucial? Because China is the undisputed top target, alongside top BRICS members, of the new universal “law” devised by the Empire of Chaos: I Tariff, Therefore I Exist. So the next five-year plan will have to take into consideration all vectors deriving from the new “law”.

The plenum will take place a few weeks after Beijing stages a grand parade to celebrate the end of WWII; Vladimir Putin is one of Xi’s guests of honor.

Moreover, the plenum will be right before the annual APEC (Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation) summit, starting October 31 in Seoul. This summit carries a window of opportunity for a direct, face to face Trump-Xi meeting – which the Circus Ringmaster, for all his posture and tergiversations, is actively pursuing.

The plenum will have to carefully weigh how a de facto trade, tech and geopolitical war between the US and China will only get more incandescent. As much as Made in China 2025 revealed itself to be a staggering success – maximum pressure from Trump 1.0 notwithstanding – new Chinese wave tech decisions taken in 2025 will define the road map ahead on everything from AI to quantum computing, biotechnology and controlled nuclear fusion.

I am so thrilled to be your lackey

Everything that matters on trade and tech will be decided between the two economic superpowers. By now it’s clear that a potential third actor, the EU, has simply committed serial suicide.

Let’s start with the China-EU summit on July 24 – which featured, among other niceties, Beijing protocol deigning to send at best a lowly tourist bus to greet the European delegation, and Xi Jinping for all practical purposes ending the summit before schedule in a message widely interpreted across the Global South as “we have  no time to waste with you clowns”.

That’s exactly what the Circus Ringmaster wanted.

Then came the EU-US get together – which sealed, in spectacular fashion, the already accelerated phase of Europe’s Century of Humiliation.

It starts with Trump de facto erasing Russia from the EU’s energy future. Brussels has been forced – Mafioso “offer you can’t refuse”- style, to buy $250 billion of overpriced US energy a year, every year, for the next 3 years. And in the process be slapped with 15% tariffs – and like it.

So smashing Nord Stream 2 – an operation carried out by the previous D.C. autopen administration – had a clear imperial purpose from the start.

On top of it, the EU must pay for its – already lost – war in Ukraine by buying unlimited amounts of overpriced US weapons to the tune of 5% of GDP. That’s what Trump imposed NATO to impose on the EU. Follow the money.

Yet whatever the “deal” advertised with a profusion of superlatives by the Circus Ringmaster, the numbers don’t add up.

The EU spent a hefty 375 billion euros on energy in 2024; only 76 billion euros of these were paid to the US.

That means that the EU would have to buy three times more US energy over the next three years. And only LNG Made in USA: no Norway, for that matter, which sells cheaper pipeline gas.

Defying reality – and obviously not put in check by meek European mainstream media – the toxic Medusa in Brussels vociferated that US LNG is cheaper than Russian pipeline gas.

Moscow is not breaking a sweat – because its major clients are all across Eurasia. As for the Americans, they will not divert all their exports to the EU – as European refineries can only handle a limited supply of American shale oil. Moreover, there’s no way EUrocrats can force European energy companies to buy American.

So to round up their figures they will have to buy from somewhere else. That would be Norway – and even Russia, assuming the Russians will be interested.

Trump 2.0 was clever enough to “exempt” some sectors from the tariff dementia, such as aircraft and aircraft parts, semiconductors, critical chemicals and some agriculture. Of course: these are all part of strategic supply chains.

The only thing that really mattered overall was to lock up Europe as a massive buyer of American energy and force them to invest in US infrastructure and the industrial-military complex.

And that points to the only way to “escape” the tariff dementia: when faced with an “offer you can’t refuse”, you don’t refuse; you take it, like it, and offer all sorts of investment in the US. Ancient empires used to force their “partners” to pay tribute. Welcome to the 21st century version.

After all, what does Europe have to offer as leverage? Nothing. No European company on the global Tech Top Ten. Not even an  European search engine; or globally successful smartphone; or operating system; or streaming platform; or cloud infrastructure. Not to mention no top semiconductor producer. And only one car maker among the global best-selling Top Ten.

All aboard “directed improvisation”

If the US sharks gave the EU rodents literally nothing, foxy China was benign enough to give just a little bit of something: a blah blah blah on climate change.

The end result – for the whole world to see: the EU as a sorry player carrying less than zero strategic autonomy on the global chessboard. It is royally ignored on the Empire’s Forever Wars – from Ukraine to West Asia. And it lectures Beijing – in Beijing – (italics mine) when it is totally dependent on Chinese raw materials, industrial equipment and complex supply chains for green and digital tech.

Yuen Yuen Ang, from Singapore, is a professor of political economy at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore. She may need to tow the – strict – lines of US academia, which is exceptionalist by definition. But at least she’s capable of some valuable insights.  

For instance: “We’re all suffering from an attention deficit. We used to read books, then articles, then essays, then blogs, and now it’s further reduced to tweets of 280 characters. So you can imagine what sorts of messages fit in that tiny space. It has to be simplistic.”

That cuts to the heart of how the Circus Ringmaster is conducting his foreign policy; ruling via an accumulation of nonsensical posts.

Yuen Yuen reaches more serious territory when she comments on how China “wants to retire an old economic model that was highly dependent on low-cost exports, construction and real estate. It wants hi-tech, innovation-driven development.”

That’s exactly what will be discussed at the heart of the plenum in Beijing in October.

Yuen Yuen also notes how “back in the 1980s and 1990s”, China  could “imitate the late industrialisation model in East Asia. Today, there aren’t many role models. China itself has become a trailblazer, and other countries are seeing it as a role model.”

Hence her concept of “directed improvisation” – being conducted by the Beijing leadership. They know the preferred final destination, but still need to test all possible paths. The same, by the way,  also applies to BRICS – via what I defined as the “BRICS lab”, where all sorts of models are being tested. What matters, above all, is a non-stop, ever-adapting creative spirit.

Beats Tariff dementia everytime.

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

The post Chinese Foxes, American Sharks, European Rodents appeared first on LewRockwell.

Oops, they did it again.  Even though the housing market has been in a depressed state for an extended period of time and even though economic conditions are slowing down all over the country, the Federal Reserve has once again refused to lower interest rates.  What in the world are they thinking?  I certainly share President Trump’s frustration with the Fed.  Central banks all over the world have been cutting rates, but our central bank just won’t budge.  Have Fed officials gone completely insane, or are they purposely trying to destroy the U.S. economy?

Those that have been following my work for an extended period of time already know that I am not a fan of the Federal Reserve at all.  And now we have another very clear example of the Fed’s lack of competence…

The Federal Reserve said Wednesday it’s keeping its benchmark interest rate unchanged, citing elevated uncertainty over the nation’s economic outlook.

The decision to hold rates steady marks a continuation of the Fed’s “wait-and-see” strategy this year, as it monitors the impact of the Trump administration’s tariffs on consumer prices.

There were two Fed governors that did not agree with this decision.  This was the first time since 1993 that more than one Fed governor has dissented…

For the first time since 1993 more than one Fed governor voted against the Fed chair Jerome Powell and the committee’s majority decision.

The dissenters – governors Christopher Waller and Michelle Bowman – were both appointed by Trump and like the President support cutting rates.

For months Trump has pressured Powell to cut rates – currently between 4.25 and 4.5 percent – threatened to fire him, appoint a shadow chair and even harangued him over the cost of improvements to the Fed’s offices.

There are some experts that argue that we need to continue to keep interest rates at elevated levels in order to get inflation under control.

I definitely acknowledge that our seemingly endless cost of living crisis is a major concern.

But what about the housing market?

It has been in a depressed state for a long time.

Last year, sales of existing homes in the U.S. fell to the lowest level that we have seen since 1995…

Sales of existing homes in the US fell last year to the lowest level in almost three decades, as sky-high home prices and elevated mortgage rates squeezed home buyers.

Sales of previously owned homes, which make up the vast majority of the market, totaled 4.06 million in 2024, the National Association of Realtors said Friday. That’s the lowest level since 1995 and slightly below 2023’s similarly anemic levels.

And this year, sales of existing homes are expected to be even lower than they were last year…

Sales volume for existing homes, previously projected to grow slightly this year compared with 2024, is now expected to fall 1.5% annually, to just 4 million transactions.

That would mark the slowest year for existing-home sales since 1995, when they registered 3.8 million. Home sales were also at their lowest since 1995 in both 2023 and 2024, according to the National Association of Realtors®.

Things were not even this bad during the Great Recession in 2008 and 2009.

The primary reason why homes are not selling is because interest rates are way too high.

Is the Fed just going to sit there and watch the life get squeezed out of one of the most important pillars of our economy?

Of course there are many pundits that are pointing to today’s GDP number as evidence that the overall economy is doing well…

Gross domestic product, a sum of goods and services activity across the sprawling U.S. economy, jumped 3% for the April through June period, according to figures adjusted for seasonality and inflation.

That topped the Dow Jones estimate for 2.3% and helped reverse a decline of 0.5% for the first quarter that came largely due to a huge drop in imports, which subtract from the total, as well as weak consumer spending amid tariff concerns.

That number looks pretty good until you realize that it was artificially boosted by a massive decline in imports.

In fact, we are being told that a huge drop in imports somehow added 5.2 percentage points to our GDP during the second quarter…

With Trump’s double-digit tariffs looming, American retailers and manufacturers raced to order foreign goods early in the year before the levies took effect. That led to an unprecedented flood of imports, which must be subtracted from GDP – the goods that consumers, companies and the public sector bought – because they’re made overseas.

Since those purchases were pulled forward, companies didn’t need to order as many goods from other countries last quarter and imports plunged 30.3%, reversing the 37.9% rise that dampened output earlier and bolstering U.S. growth. As a result, those foreign shipments added 5.2 percentage points to growth after subtracting a whopping 4.7 points in the January-March period.

If you took away the 5.2 percentage points that were added to our GDP due to falling imports, economic growth would have been deeply negative last quarter.

And based on all of the other economic data that we have been getting, that would make all the sense in the world.

We see a similar thing going on with the official employment numbers that the government has been giving us.

Thanks to the “birth-death model”, the U.S. has supposedly added 614,000 jobs so far this year.

But if you take away the “birth-death model”, the U.S. has actually lost 62,000 jobs so far this year…

So far this year, the net birth-death model has converted what would have been a 62,000-job decline in not seasonally adjusted nonfarm employment into a 614,000-job gain. In the note cited above, Bloomberg Economics estimated that the model and other factors have been artificially boosting seasonally adjusted gains of 130,000 a month so far this year by about 80,000 a month. If even roughly correct (Bloomberg Economics’ payroll overcount estimates as of June 2024 were about twice as big as what the BLS eventually reported), this would mean another sharp downward revision next February, the fifth in the last seven years.

I don’t have any confidence in the numbers that the government gives us at this stage.

When President Trump called them “fake” prior to the election, he was right on target.

One recent survey found that 70 percent of Americans are feeling “anxiety and depression” due to the finances.

That wouldn’t be happening if our economy really was in good shape.

Unfortunately, as long as the Federal Reserve keeps interest rates at elevated levels it is going to be a real struggle to turn things around.

Reprinted with permission from The Economic Collapse.

The post Is the Federal Reserve Purposely Trying To Destroy the U.S. Economy? appeared first on LewRockwell.

Today as I write we are experiencing the effort by Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabba and CIA Director John Ratcliffe to retrieve American law from its weaponization against President Trump by the Obama Five–John Brennan, James Coney, James Clapper, Hillary Clinton, and President Obama himself, all of whom have been referred to the Attorney General on criminal charges. These people created the false “Russiagate” charges against President Trump in order to cancel his election and presidency and his intent to “normalize relations with Russia,” which was a threat to the profits of the US military/security complex. 

A large percentage of Americans are outraged by the corrupt Democrats’ use of law against Trump as a weapon in order to trample on the democratic process that elected Trump. But the weaponization of law occurred 80 years ago at the Nuremberg Trials.

The person responsible was the least likely of all.  It was former US Supreme Court Justice and former US Attorney General Robert Jackson. 

Until I read some years ago David Irving’s book, Nuremberg, I was a great admirer of Robert Jackson.  I still am for his previous positions, but he blew it at Nuremberg.

World War II was a disaster for many reasons still unrecognized. The victims were not only the millions of lives, the destruction of economies, the loss of European countries’ national confidence and sovereignty, but also truth and justice as values that must be defended.  

At Nuremberg the British, Americans, and Soviets, who had committed worst war crimes than the Germans, sat, immune from accountability, in judgment. “The winners write the histories” and hold he trials.

As David Irving documents in his histories, Churchill’s War and Hitler’s War, Hitler regarded the bombing of civilian cities as a war crime. When Churchill kept secret from his cabinet Hitler’s generous offer of peace, which included Germany’s promise to use its military power in defense of the British Empire, which Hitler regarded as essential to the continuation of vastly outnumbered white ethnicities, Churchill kept the document secret from the British Parliament and ordered the British air force  to commence bombing civilian German residential neighborhoods. 

Churchill ordered that the air force focus on workers’ housing, because it was closer together and the fires would spread quicker.  He ordered that first the British bombers use incendiary  bombs, then when the fire trucks showed up to again hit with high explosives.  He ordered that the British air force add poison gas to the bombs.  At this point, the Air Force high command, already concerned about war crimes, flatly refused.

In Germany, the generals told Hitler that the British would not stop bombing German civilians unless Hitler replied in kind.  Once Hitler was pressured into this response, Churchill, who had kept secret from the British that he was firebombing German cities, said: look, the barbarian Hitler is bombing civilians.  We must fight on and continue the war.

You can find the documentation in Irvings’ World War II histories and in John Wear’s books reproduced on my web sites.  Ron Unz of the Unz Review has also written extensively about the true story of World War II, one most people have never heard.

As far as I can tell, there are only three historians of World War II who are not court historians regurgitating the official war propaganda.  One is A.P.J. Taylor, who saw the hypocrisy of the court historians, but did not have the documentary resources that David Irving spent 50 years hunting down and forcing out of official files, hunting down and reading diaries and interviewing survivors.  John Wear is the third.

If you want to know the truth about World War II, you can only find it in these few writers, especially David Irvings’ Churchill’s War and Hitler’s War.  On orders from Israel, these books, that once sold in the millions of copies, have been burnt by the threatened and intimidated publisher, and copies are hard to find.

My generation and those following were taught that Churchill, Franklin Roosevelt, and Dwight Eisenhower were moral crusaders who fought against the evil demon Hitler.  Once you read Irving’s histories of World War II–histories based entirely on the OFFICIAL DOCUMENTARY EVIDENCE, NOT IRVING’S OPINION–you will wonder who the true evil demons were.  John Wear’s account of Eisenhower’s treatment of German prisoners of war shows the hate-driven barbarity with which German POWs were treated.  No honor of the rules of war here.

Here you have the great moral Western heroes showing their true colors:

“President Franklin D. Roosevelt, General Eisenhower, and Winston Churchill thought that surviving Nazis should be shot without trial. Roosevelt laughed about liquidating 50,000 German military officers. Eisenhower told Lord Halifax that Nazi leaders should be shot while trying to escape, the common euphemism for murder. Russians spoke of castrating German men and breeding German women to annihilate the German race. US Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau wanted to reduce Germany to an agrarian society and send able-bodied Germans to Africa as slaves to work on ‘some big TVA project.’”

The Great Moral Western World thought this was appropriate punishment for a country that dared to retrieve its national borders from the Treaty of Versailles that had dismembered Germany despite guarantees by US President Wilson.  The fact that WW II was started by Britain and France declaring war on Germany is left out of the story.

Below written by me eight yeas ago is the sad story of Robert Jackson’s destruction of law, which has left us all unprotected. Those of you who still care about your country need to understand what you are up against.

You are up against the worst and most powerful form of evil–the lost of your mind to lies and your conviction of a crime for believing the truth.

The Pale Horse is among us in Washington and Tel Aviv, with wars in process or brewing in Europe and Ukraine with Russia, in Iran with Trump and Netanyahu, in China with Trump.  The other Horses of the Apocalypse are not far behind.

The nuclear weapons likely to be used in war today are terminal of life on earth.  The Americans have idiots for foreign security advisers who think that  Russia is incapable of defending Russia from US nuclear attack.  Therefore the US can win a nuclear war with a country whose nuclear war capability greatly exceeds that of the US.

Putin’s hesitancy has given rise to this mistaken opinion.  In the world of today those who seek peace are regarded as trying to avoid war because they are weak and cannot win.  The apocalypse that is unfolding is due to the refusal of Washington to conclude a mutual security agreement with Russia.

Tyranny at Nuremberg

Update Aug. 12, 2017: Here is David Irving’s account of his arrest, trial, and imprisonment in Austria. His conviction was overturned by a higher court, and he was released. http://www.fpp.co.uk/books/Banged/up.pdf 

The showtrial of a somewhat arbitrarily selected group of 21 surviving Nazis at Nuremberg during 1945-46 was US Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson’s show. Jackson was the chief prosecutor. As a long-time admirer of Jackson, I always assumed that he did a good job.

My admiration for Jackson stems from his defense of law as a shield of the people rather than a weapon in the hands of government, and from his defense of the legal principle known as mens rea, that is, that crime requires intent. I often cite Jackson for his defense of these legal principles that are the very foundation of liberty. Indeed, I cited Jackson in my recent July 31 column. His defense of law as a check on government power plays a central role in the book that I wrote with Lawrence Stratton, The Tyranny of Good Intentions.

In 1940 Jackson was US Attorney General. He addressed federal prosecutors and warned them against “picking the man and then putting investigators to work, to pin some offense on him. It is in this realm—in which the prosecutor picks some person whom he dislikes or desires to embarrass, or selects some group of unpopular persons and then looks for an offense—that the greatest danger of abuse of prosecuting power lies. It is here that law enforcement becomes personal, and the real crime becomes that of being unpopular with the predominant or governing group, being attached to the wrong political views or being personally obnoxious to, or in the way of, the prosecutor himself.”

Later as a Supreme Court justice Jackson overturned a lower court conviction of a person who had no idea, or any reason to believe, that he had committed a crime.

Having just finished reading David Irving’s book Nuremberg (1996), I am devastated to learn that in his pursuit of another principle, at Nuremberg Jackson violated all of the legal principles for which I have so long admired him. To be clear, at Nuremberg Jackson was in pursuit of Nazis, but their conviction was the means to his end—the establishment of the international legal principle that the initiation of war, the commitment of military aggression, was a crime.

The problem, of course, was that at Nuremberg people were tried on the basis of ex post facto law—law that did not exist at the time of their actions for which they were convicted.

Moreover, the sentence—death by hanging—was decided prior to the trial and prior to the selection of defendants.

Moreover, the defendants were chosen and then a case was made against them.

Exculpatory evidence was withheld. Charges on which defendants were convicted turned out to be untrue.

The trials were so loaded in favor of the prosecution that defense was pro forma.

The defendants were abused and some were tortured.

The defendants were encouraged to give false witness against one another, which for the most part the defendants refused to do, with Albert Speer being the willing one. His reward was a prison sentence rather than death.

The defendants’ wives and children were arrested and imprisoned. To Jackson’s credit, this infuriated him.

President Franklin D. Roosevelt, General Eisenhower, and Winston Churchill thought that surviving Nazis should be shot without trial. Roosevelt laughed about liquidating 50,000 German military officers. Eisenhower told Lord Halifax that Nazi leaders should be shot while trying to escape, the common euphemism for murder. Russians spoke of castrating German men and breeding German women to annihilate the German race. US Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau wanted to reduce Germany to an agrarian society and send able-bodied Germans to Africa as slaves to work on “some big TVA project.”

Robert Jackson saw in these intentions not only rank criminality among the allied leadership but also a missed opportunity to create the legal principle that would criminalize war, thus removing the disaster of war from future history. Jackson’s end was admirable, but the means required bypassing Anglo-American legal principles.

Jackson got his chance, perhaps because Joseph Stalin vetoed execution without trial. First a show trial, Stalin said, to demonstrate their guilt so that we do not make martyrs out of Nazis.

Whom to select for the list of 21-22 persons to be charged? Well, whom did the allies have in custody? Not all those they desired. They had Reichsmarschall Herman Göring who headed the air force. Whatever the valid charges against Göring, they were not considered to be mitigated by the fact that under Göring the German air force was mainly used against enemy formations on the battleground and not, like the US and British air forces in saturation terror bombing of civilian cities, such as Dresden, Tokyo, Hiroshima, and Nagasaki, or by the fact that in Hitler’s final days Hitler removed Göring from all his positions, expelled him from the party, and ordered his arrest.

The Nuremberg trials are paradoxical in that the law Jackson intended to establish applied to every country, not to Germany alone. The ex post facto law under which Germans were sentenced to death and to prison also criminalized the terror bombing of German and Japanese cities by the British and US air forces. Yet, the law was only applied to the Germans in the dock. In his book, Apocalypse 1945: The Destruction of Dresden (1995), Irving quotes US General George C. McDonald’s dissent from the directive to bomb civilian cities such as Dresden. Gen. McDonald characterized the directive as the “extermination of populations and the razing of cities,” war crimes under the Nuremberg standard.

They had foreign minister Ribbentrop. They had field marshals Keitel and Jodl and the grand-admirals Raeder and Dönitz. They had a German banker, who was saved from sentencing by the intervention of the Bank of England. They had a journalist. They had Rudolf Hess who had been in a British prison since 1941 when he went to Britain on a peace mission to end the war. They wanted an industrialist, but Krupp was too old and ill. He was devoid of the persona of a foreboding evil. You can read the list in Irving’s book.

Göring knew from the beginning that the trial was a hoax and that his death sentence had already been decided. He had the means (a poison capsule) throughout his imprisonment to commit suicide, thus depriving his captors of their planned humiliation of him. Instead, he held the Germans together, and they stood their ground. Possessed of a high IQ, time and again he made fools of his captors. He made such a fool of Robert Jackson during his trial that the entire court burst out in laughter. Jackson never lived down being bested in the courtroom by Göring.

And Göring wasn’t through with making his captors look foolish and incompetent. He, the field marshalls and grand admiral requested that they be given a military execution by firing squad, but the pettiness of the Tribunal wanted them hung like dogs. Göring told his captors that he would allow them to shoot him, but not hang him, and a few minutes before he was to be marched to the gallows before the assembled press and cameras he took the poison capsule, throwing the execution propaganda show into chaos. To this injury he added insult leaving the prison commandant, US Col. Andrus a note telling him that he had had 3 capsules. One he had left for the Americans to find, thus causing them to think his means of escaping them had been removed. One he had taken minutes prior to his show execution, and he described where to find the third. He had easily defeated the continuous and thorough inspections inflicted upon him from fear that he would commit suicide and escape their intended propaganda use of his execution.

There was a time in Anglo-American law when the improprieties of the Nuremberg trials would have resulted in the cases being thrown out of court and the defendants freed. Even under the ex post facto law and extra-judicial, extra-legal terms under which the defendants were tried, at least two of the condemned deserved to be cleared.

It is not clear why Admiral Donitz was sentenced to 10 years in prison. The chief American judge of the Tribunal, Francis Biddle, said: “It is, in my opinion, offensive to our concept of justice to punish a man for doing exactly what one has done himself.” “The Germans,” Biddle said, “fought a much cleaner war at sea than we did.“

Jodl, who countermanded many Nazi orders, was sentenced to death. The injustice of the sentence was made clear by a German court in 1953 which cleared Jodl of all Nuremberg charges and rehabilitated him posthumously. The French justice at the Nuremberg Tribunal said at the time that Jodl’s conviction was without merit and was a miscarriage of justice.

The entire Nuremberg proceeding stinks to high heaven. Defendants were charged with aggression for the German invasion of Norway. The fact was kept out of the trial that the British were about to invade Norway themselves and that the Germans, being more efficient, learned of it and managed to invade first.

Defendants were accused of using slave labor, paradoxical in view of the Soviets own practice. Moreover, while the trials were in process the Soviets were apparently gathering up able-bodied Germans to serve as slave labor to rebuild their war-torn economy.

Defendants were accused of mass executions despite the fact that the Russians, who were part of the prosecution and judgment of the defendants, had executed 15,000 or 20,000 Polish officers and buried them in a mass grave. Indeed, the Russians insisted on blaming the Germans on trial for the Katyn Forest Massacre.

Defendants were accused of aggression against Poland, and Ribbentrop was not permitted to mention in his defense the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact that divided Poland between Germany and the Soviet Union, without which Germany could not have attacked Poland. The fact that the Soviets, who were sitting at Nuremberg in judgment on the Germans, had themselves invaded Poland was kept out of the proceedings.

Moreover, without the gratuitous British “guarantee” to Poland, the Polish military dictatorship would likely have agreed to return territories stripped from Germany by the Versailles Treaty and the invasion would have been avoided.

The greatest hypocrisy was the charge of aggression against Germany when the fact of the matter is that World War 2 began when the British and French declared war on Germany. Germany conquered France and drove the British from the European Continent after the British and French started the war with a declaration of war against Germany.

Irving’s book is, of course, politically incorrect. However, he lists in the introduction the voluminous files on which the book is based: Robert Jackson’s official papers and Oral History, Francis Biddle’s private papers and diaries, Col. Andrus’ papers, Adm. Raeder’s prison diary, Rudolf Hess’ prison diary, interrogations of the prisoners, interviews with defense counsel, prosecutors, interrogators, and letters from the prisoners to their wives. All of this and more Irving has made available on microfilms for researchers. He compared magnetic tape copies of the original wire-recordings of the trial with the mimeographed and published transcripts to insure that spoken and published words were the same.

What Irving does in his book is to report the story that the documents tell. This story differs from the patriotic propaganda written by court historians with which we are all imbued. The question arises: Is Irving pro-truth or pro-Nazi. The National Socialist government of Germany is the most demonized government in history. Any lessening of the demonization is unacceptable, so Irving is vulnerable to demonization by those determined to protect their cherished beliefs.

Zionists have branded Irving a “holocaust denier,” and he was convicted of something like that by an Austrian court and spent 14 months in prison before the conviction was thrown out by a higher court.

In Nuremberg, Irving removes various propaganda legends from the holocaust story and reports authoritative findings that many of the concentration camp deaths were from typhus and starvation, especially in the final days of the war when food and medicine were disappearing from Germany, but nowhere in the book does he deny, indeed he reports, that vast numbers of Jews perished. As I understand the term, a simple truthful modification of some element of the official holocaust story is sufficient to brand a person a holocaust denier.

My interest in the book is Robert Jackson. He had a noble cause—to outlaw war—but in pursuit of this purpose he established precedents for American prosecutors to make law a weapon in their pursuit of their noble causes just as it was used against Nazis—organized crime convictions, child abuse convictions, drug convictions, terror convictions. Jackson’s pursuit of Nazis at Nuremberg undermined the strictures he put on US attorneys such that today Americans have no more protection of law than the defendants had at Nuremberg.

The post The Demise of Western Law Dates From the Nuremberg Trials appeared first on LewRockwell.

On Monday the 21st of July the Ukrainian Secret Service (SBU) searched offices of the independent anti-corruption police (NABU) and anti-corruption prosecutor office (SAPO) and detained several of its investigators. A day later the Zelenski regime pushed a law through parliament which ended the independence of both entities by putting them under control of the prosecutor general.

The move had been planned for months (in Russian) but was executed in haste after NABU and SAPO had served a notices-of-investigation to people near to the president.

But Zelenski had miscalculated the step. There were highly visible local protests and the EU stepped in by threatening to withhold subsidies on which the Ukrainian state depends.

Two days after his strike against the independent anti-corruption entities Zelenski had to pull back. Today the parliament reestablished the independence of NABU and SAPO.

The Verkhovna Rada (Ukrainian parliament) has passed a law restoring powers to Ukraine’s key anti-corruption agencies – the National Anti-Corruption Bureau (NABU) and the Specialised Anti-Corruption Prosecutor’s Office (SAPO).

A total of 331 MPs voted in favour of the presidential bill [..]. No MPs voted against the bill, and no one abstained. Nine MPs did not vote.

Under the new law, SAPO will now independently oversee the procedural supervision of NABU investigations – and is no longer under the control of the Prosecutor General.

The new law was signed by the president and is now in force.

By his misstep and its retraction from it Zelenski demonstrated a fatal weakness which his political enemies will soon use to end his control of the country.

Several additional corruption investigations against Zelenski’s entourage are pending. The most severe one is against Timur Mindich, a longtime business partner of the president nicknamed “Zelenski’s wallet”. NABU had wiretapped Mindich’s apartment which was used by Zelenski and others to discuss ‘businesses’. (Mindich’s bugged luxury apartment in Kiev is said to include a room with a golden toilet.)

With the independence of NABU and SAPO restored, new investigations against Mindich and other people near to Zelenski, and potentially against himself,  are likely to soon be published.

They will demonstrate that the president has lost the ability to protect those who work with him.

In consequence the majority of his party in parliament is shrinking (machine translation):

People’s Deputy Dmytro Kostyuk announced from the rostrum of the Verkhovna Rada that he was leaving the Servants of the People faction due to the situation with the National Anti-Corruption Bureau of Ukraine.

According to him, deputies were forced to vote for the draft law on depriving the NABU and SAPO of their powers, threatening them with criminal cases. He himself also supported this bill a week ago.
…
Now the faction formally consists of 231 deputies, which gives “Servant of the People” the rights of a mono-majority coalition. [..] However, if six people leave the faction, its number will be reduced, it will be less than the required 226 votes, and thus the ruling mono-majority will disappear.

The opposition, with former president Petro Poroshenko in the lead, will soon be able to clip the president’s wings.

The political chaos in Kiev is reinforced by the catastrophic situation on the battle field. There are four significant population centers which are likely to fall under Russian control within the next month.

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1. Kupiansk (pre-war population 26,000) – The Russian forces are pressing from the north towards the west of the city to cut its main supply line.

2. Siversk (pre-war population 10,000) – Russian forces have captured large parts of the woods north of Siversk and are now moving in from all sides.

3. Konstantinivka (pre-war population 8,500) – Russian forces are pushing west from the finally taken Chasiv-Yar agglomeration to cut the northern supply line to Konstantinivka. Russian forces southwest of the city are moving northward for the same purpose.

4. Prokovsk (pre-war population 85,000) – Ukrainian defense lines around and within the city have broken down. Russian forces are already in the city. Supply and exit routes to the north and west are barely passable.

The Ukrainian forces lack infantry. Some Ukrainian brigades have less than 100 people to man several miles long defense lines. There is a severe lack of mortar and artillery ammunition. The Russian side has more and better drones available in higher numbers. The recent re-organization of the Ukrainian army into corps sized structures has only increase the organizational chaos.

The Ukrainian army, like the Ukrainian state, is in the process of falling apart.

Reprinted with permission from Moon of Alabama.

The post Ukraine – Anti-Corruption Independence Restored, Zelenski Weakened, Four Cities Are Falling appeared first on LewRockwell.

How many of you readers out there sincerely want to be very rich? The get-rich tip is only for Takimag faithful, so keep it under your belt: You go to something called Seeking Arrangement, and when a certain David Geffen contacts you, take his call. The bad news is there’s some hanky-panky involved, the kind I know nothing about but is the one celebrated by a multicolored flag for a whole bloody month. You then sue him, and you tell your lawyers that he plied you with drugs and told you that your relationship with him would be genuine and enduring. Then say you believed that you had finally found someone who cared. Do not, I repeat, do not sign any prenup.

Okay, I’m obviously joking, but I cannot understand how a Hollywood shark like Geffen can fall for the oldest of tricks, pun intended. Geffen is 82 and white, David Armstrong is 32 and black. Geffen is a billionaire mogul and Armstrong was a go-go dancer and part-time hooker. They married and were supposed to live happily ever after. Hollywood was thinking of making a family movie of their happy household. (I actually made that last bit up.) Now it’s in the hands of the lawyers, and love has flown the coop. Oy vey!

“Get-rich schemes have a way of turning sour, unless you’re a go-go dancer, that is.”

Now here’s my confession: I have never looked at seekingarrangements.com and didn’t know it existed until I read about the lawsuit. But I have met David Geffen—once—and he could not have been more polite and complimentary. My sailing boat Bushido, a real beauty, was anchored off shore next to his gigantic and ugly-as-sin behemoth near Antibes. That evening Geffen was seated next to my wife at a dinner party, and he told me how beautiful he thought my boat was. I thanked him, did not mention how horrid I thought his superliner was, and never saw him again.

In view of his kind words about my boat, I will not reveal what I think about an 82-year-old homosexual marrying a 32-year-old go-go dancer, except to say that it’s as fascinating as a lengthy history of orthodontics. They say that desire is the pain of ignorance, and David Geffen has shown ignorance of an alarming magnitude. Mind you, if Monsieur Geffen came to me for advice (as likely an event as me marrying a black go-go dancer), I would encourage him to settle for around $20 million with his husband and then get on his boat and sail away for a very long time.

Why twenty big ones? Why not? If Geffen is reported to be worth around 5 billion, 20 million is peanuts. He should also convince his soon-to-be ex that anything he wins in court will go to the lawyers, known for skinning the richest of cats. Of course, there’s another way of making a quick buck, this one practiced to perfection by one Antonius Saint Julian, age 6 and my grandson.

Instructed by his grandmother to bring her telephone from her bedroom, he discovered lotsa cash attached to the contraption. He pocketed the moola but delivered the phone. Nobody suspected nuttin’, as they say, until the next day when my wife decided she had lost her wallet with all its contents. I was sitting down to write about Geffen and the go-go dancer and took a look at my grandson. He is a beautiful little boy with blond curly hair, but I noticed a gleam in his eye as his granny searched for her cash. So I put the 6-year-old to the Shylock test, offering him 5 percent of the missing loot as he had no idea how much he had lifted. We shook hands, he turned over the spoils, and everyone was happy.

So there you have it: Get-rich schemes have a way of turning sour, unless you’re a go-go dancer, that is. Or Jeffrey Epstein, probably the world’s most disgusting blackmailer, now being used to embarrass The Donald. But take it from Taki, Trump never had anything to do with that scumbag except for the most superficial of social contacts and conversations. Prince Andrew, Larry Summers, Bill Gates, even Bill Clinton, they were all friends with Epstein, but not The Donald. Trump liked full-bodied models; the scumbag liked underage waifs. And while I’m at it, I knew Ghislaine Maxwell while her crook father was being courted by the Brit royals and most of British society in the ’80s and ’90s, and she wasn’t as bad as she could have been. In other words, compared with the arrogance and bad manners of her crooked old man, she was better. She became downright servile once the Maxwells lost their ill-gotten loot, which I found very embarrassing, especially when she once cornered me in Saint-Tropez and begged me and the wife to attend a cocktail party she was giving with the scumbag. We refused and in fact sailed away that afternoon.

No, I wasn’t afraid of that crook, just disgusted to be in the same port with him. Epstein made his moola by blackmailing Les Wexner, a rough and powerful Jewish mogul from Philadelphia. Wexner is dead, but while alive it was either a murder or Epstein buggering him that made him cover up, give lotsa moola, and present him as a financial adviser. I’d say it was both murder and buggery, for that matter. Ghislaine will now say anything to get out—who wouldn’t?—but she will be speaking with forked tongue.

This article was originally published on Taki’s Magazine.

The post Uneasy Money appeared first on LewRockwell.

“There are no dangerous thoughts; thinking itself is a dangerous activity.”—Hannah Arendt

The government’s war on homelessness—much like its war on terrorism, its war on drugs, its war on illegal immigration, and its war on COVID-19—is yet another Trojan Horse.

First, President Trump issues an executive order empowering federal agencies to clear out homeless encampments and lock up the homeless in mental institutions using involuntary civil commitment laws intended for dealing with individuals experiencing mental health crises.

Days later, a gunman allegedly suffering from a mental illness opens fire in New York City, killing four before turning the gun on himself.

Coming on the heels of Trump’s executive order aimed at “ending crime and disorder on America’s streets,” the shooting has all the makings of a modern-day Reichstag fire: a tragedy weaponized to justify allowing the government use mental illness as a pretext for locking more people up without due process.

An Orwellian exercise in doublespeak, Trump’s executive order suggests that jailing the homeless, rather than providing them with affordable housing, is the “compassionate” solution to homelessness.

According to USA Today, social workers, medical experts and mental health service providers say the president’s approach “will likely worsen homelessness across the country, particularly because Trump’s order contains no new funding for mental health or drug treatment. Additionally, they say the president appears to misunderstand the fundamental driver of homelessness: People can’t afford housing.”

And then comes the kicker: Trump wants to see more use of civil commitments (forced detentions) for anyone who is perceived as posing a risk “to themselves or the public or are living on the streets and cannot care for themselves in appropriate facilities for appropriate periods of time.”

Translation: the government wants to use homelessness as a pretext for indefinitely locking up anyone who might pose a threat to its chokehold on police state power.

When you consider the ramifications of giving the American police state that kind of authority to preemptively neutralize a potential threat, you’ll understand why some might view these looming mental health round-ups with trepidation.

By directing police to carry out forced detentions of individuals based not on criminal behavior but on perceived mental instability or drug use, the Trump administration is attempting to sidestep fundamental constitutional protections—due process, probable cause, and the presumption of innocence—by substituting medical discretion for legal standards.

Taken to its authoritarian limits, this could allow the government to weaponize the label of mental illness as a means of exiling dissidents who refuse to march in lockstep with its dictates.

Police in cities like New York have already been empowered to forcibly detain individuals for psychiatric evaluations, based on vague, subjective criteria: having “firmly held beliefs not congruent with cultural ideas,” exhibiting “excessive fears,” or refusing “voluntary treatment.”

What happens when these criteria are expanded to encompass anyone who challenges the police state’s narrative?

Once the government is allowed to control the narrative over who is deemed mentally unfit, mental health care could become yet another pretext for pathologizing dissent in order to disarm and silence the government’s critics.

Take heed: this has the potential to become the next phase of the government’s war on thought crimes, cloaked in the guise of public health and safety.

According to the Associated Press, federal agencies have been exploring how to incorporate “identifiable patient data” into their surveillance toolkits, including behavioral health records.

The infrastructure is already in place to profile and detain individuals based on perceived psychological “risks.”

The government is actively exploring how to use data from wearable health devices—including heart rate, stress response, and sleep patterns—to flag individuals for intervention. Now imagine a future in which your Fitbit or Apple Watch triggers a mental health alert, resulting in your forced removal “for your own safety.”

Mass surveillance combined with artificial intelligence-powered programs that can track people by their biometrics and behavior, mental health sensor data (tracked by wearable data and monitored by government agencies such as HARPA), threat assessments, behavioral sensing warnings, precrime initiatives, red flag gun laws, mental health first-aid programs aimed at training gatekeepers to identify who might pose a threat to public safety, and government access to behavioral health records could pave the way for a regime of police state authoritarianism by way of preemptive mental health detentions.

If the police state is equipping itself to monitor, flag, and detain anyone it deems mentally unfit, without criminal charges or trial, this could be the tipping point in the government’s efforts to penalize those engaging in so-called “thought crimes.”

This is not about public safety. It’s about control.

We’ve seen this tactic before. When governments seek to suppress dissent without provoking outrage, they turn to psychiatric labels.

Throughout history, from Cold War-era Soviet gulags to modern pre-crime initiatives, authoritarian regimes have used psychiatric labels to isolate, discredit, and eliminate dissidents.  As historian Anne Applebaum notes, administrative exile, which required no trial and due process, “was an ideal punishment not only for troublemakers as such, but also for political opponents of the regime.”

The word “gulag” refers to a labor or concentration camp where prisoners (oftentimes political prisoners or so-called “enemies of the state,” real or imagined) were imprisoned as punishment for their crimes against the state. Soviet dissidents were often declared mentally ill, institutionalized in prisons disguised as psychiatric hospitals, and subjected to forced medication and psychological torture.

Totalitarian regimes used such tactics to isolate political dissidents from the rest of society, discredit their ideas, and break them physically and mentally.

In addition to declaring political dissidents mentally unsound, government officials in the Cold War-era Soviet Union also made use of an administrative process for dealing with individuals who were considered a bad influence on others or troublemakers. Author George Kennan describes a process in which:

The obnoxious person may not be guilty of any crime . . . but if, in the opinion of the local authorities, his presence in a particular place is “prejudicial to public order” or “incompatible with public tranquility,” he may be arrested without warrant, may be held from two weeks to two years in prison, and may then be removed by force to any other place within the limits of the empire and there be put under police surveillance for a period of from one to ten years.

Warrantless seizures, surveillance, indefinite detention, isolation, exile…sound familiar?

What’s unfolding in America is the modern police state’s version of that same script.

Civil commitment laws are found in all states and employed throughout American history.

Under the doctrines of parens patriae and police power, the government already claims authority to confine those deemed unable to act in their own best interest or who pose a threat to society.

When fused, these doctrines give the state enormous discretion to preemptively lock people up based on speculative future threats, not actual crimes.

This discretion is now expanding at warp speed.

The result is a Nanny State mindset carried out with the militant force of the Police State.

Once dissent is equated with danger—and danger with illness—those who challenge the state become medicalized threats, subject to detention not for what they’ve done, but for what they believe.

We’ve already seen what happens when dissent is pathologized and criminalized, and civil commitment laws are weaponized:

• Russ Tice, an NSA whistleblower, was labeled “mentally unbalanced” after attempting to testify in Congress about the NSA’s warrantless wiretapping program.
• Adrian Schoolcraft, an NYPD officer who exposed police corruption, was forcibly committed to a mental facility in retaliation.
• Brandon Raub, a Marine who posted controversial political views on Facebook, was arrested and detained in a psychiatric ward under Virginia’s mental health laws.

These cases aren’t anomalies—they’re warning signs.

Government programs like Operation Vigilant Eagle, launched in 2009, characterized military veterans as potential domestic terrorists if they showed signs of being “disgruntled or disillusioned.” A 2009 DHS report broadly defined “rightwing extremists” as anyone seen as antigovernment.

The result? A surveillance dragnet aimed at military veterans, political dissidents, gun owners, and constitutionalists.

Now, under the banner of mental health, the same dragnet is being equipped with red flag gun laws, predictive policing, and involuntary detention authority.

In theory, these laws are meant to prevent harm. In practice, they punish thought, not conduct.

Trump’s latest executive order doesn’t just target the homeless—it establishes a precedent for rounding up anyone deemed a threat to the government’s version of law and order.

The same playbook that pathologized opposition to war or police brutality as “Oppositional Defiant Disorder” could now be used to classify political dissent as a psychiatric illness.

This is not hyperbole.

The government’s ability to silence dissent by labeling it as dangerous or diseased is well documented—and now it’s about to be codified into law.

Red flag gun laws, for example, authorize government officials to seize guns from individuals viewed as a danger to themselves or others. The stated intention is to disarm individuals who are potential threats. No mental health diagnosis is required. No criminal charge. Just a hunch. Those most likely to be targeted? The people already on government watch lists: political activists, veterans, gun owners, and anyone labeled an “extremists”— a term that now applies to anyone critical of the government.

While the intention may appear reasonable—disarming people who pose an “immediate danger” to themselves or others—the problem arises when you put the power to determine who is a potential danger in the hands of a police state that equates dissent with extremism.

This is the same police state that uses the words “anti-government,” “extremist” and “terrorist” interchangeably.

The same police state whose agents are weaving a web of threat assessments, behavioral sensing warnings, flagged “words,” and “suspicious” activity reports using AI, social media surveillance, behavior sensing software, and citizen snitches to identify potential threats.

The same police state that renews the NDAA year after year—authorizing the indefinite military detention of U.S. citizens.

The same police state that considers you suspicious based on your religion, your bumper stickers, or your political beliefs.

As a New York Times editorial warns, you may be labeled an anti-government extremist (a.k.a. domestic terrorist) if you are afraid that the government is plotting to confiscate your firearms, believe the economy is about to collapse, fear the government will soon declare martial law, or display too many political and/or ideological bumper stickers on your car.

This is the same police state that now wants access to your mental health data, your digital footprint, your biometric records—and the legal authority to detain you for your own good.

And it’s the same police state that, facing rising protests, unrest, and collapsing public trust, is seeking new ways to suppress dissent—not through open force, but under the cover of public health.

This is where thought crimes become real crimes.

We’ve seen this trajectory before.

The war on drugs.

The war on terror.

The war on COVID.

Each began with real concerns. Each ended as a tool of compliance, coercion, and control.

Now, as I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, we are entering a new war: the war on anti-government dissidents.

We are fast approaching a future where you can be locked up for the thoughts you think, the beliefs you hold, or the questions you ask.

The government will use any excuse to suppress dissent and control the narrative.

It will start with the homeless.

Then the mentally ill.

Then the so-called extremists.

Then the critics, the contrarians, and the constitutionalists.

Eventually, it will come for anyone who dares to get in the government’s way.

This is how tyranny rises. This is how freedom falls.

Unless we resist this creeping mental health gulag, the prison gates will eventually close on us all.

This article was originally published on The Rutherford Institute.

The post The New Gulag: Mental Health Detentions and the Criminalization of Dissent appeared first on LewRockwell.

Ever heard of Media Matters, the character assassination site masquerading as a left-wing media watchdog group?

It’s in big trouble.

Rod Martin has an excellent thread about it on X today.

Media Matters is run by David Brock, author of The Real Anita Hill, an expose on the woman whose accusations against Clarence Thomas created a media frenzy in 1991.

Brock later regretted writing that book, and began his move to the left, at which point he’d engage in character assassination against the right. Here he is on MSNBC:

You may recall the conflict Media Matters had with Elon Musk, which is what led to the disastrous situation it now faces.

It alleged that the platform was so out of control that major brands were seeing their ads appearing alongside Nazi content.

Media Matters pointed to screenshots of such pairings in its report as evidence of a severe and widespread problem on the platform, without disclosing the lengths to which they’d had to go in manipulating the algorithm to get the system to generate these anomalous results.

According to X, these juxtapositions of large companies alongside objectionable content were so rare that essentially nobody except Media Matters itself ever saw them. For brands like IBM, Comcast, and Oracle, only one viewer, Media Matters itself, saw the pairing out of over 500 million users; for Apple, it was just two views, at least one of which was by Media Matters.

Since the platform has 5.5 billion daily ad impressions, to call these pairings unrepresentative would be a gross understatement.

The result was what Media Matters had hoped for: an exodus of advertisers from the platform.

So Elon Musk sued.

When Media Matters tried to negotiate, Musk laid out his terms:

• Retract the report about antisemitic content on X.
• Pay X all the money remaining in Media Matters’ bank account.
• Shut down operations entirely.

Needless to say, Media Matters didn’t accept those terms. But life has grown ever more challenging for the organization since then.

Their law firm, friendly to progressive causes, demanded $4 million (eventually lowered to $2.25 million) in unpaid fees. Media Matters has had to lay off a significant portion of its staff and is dealing with donors who have been described, understandably, as “skittish.”

Ain’t that a shame.

Never pay for a book again: TomsFreeBooks.com

The post Left-Wing Smear Artists Ruined appeared first on LewRockwell.

I arrived in Washington for an event last night, trying to finish the story about former CIA official Susan Miller’s disputed biography on my phone, when new information dropped from Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard’s office. Before heading home today (with a pause to record America This Week from a hotel), I wanted to catch readers up on new developments, and explain some of what we’ll be publishing in the next week or so, as a wall of nonsense enters crumble mode.

Tulsi’s new document is a whistleblower statement, from a former “Deputy National Intelligence Officer (DNIO) at the National Intelligence Council (NIC).” The former official’s story mostly surrounds his suppressed objections to the use of unverifiable evidence in the Russiagate assessment, and subsequent odyssey through the whistleblower bureaucracy. A tale I’d never heard before, that the dossier material was inserted during a car ride involving James Comey, James Clapper, and John Brennan, makes a cameo. The jokes write themselves:

An additional interesting angle has to do with the investigation of Special Counsel John Durham and the whistleblower’s apparent inability across years to connect with him, despite appearing to have evidence relevant to his probe. If you want to know why few people in federal service blow the whistle, this excerpt might offer insight:

The IC IG staff stated to me — for the first time — that the IC IG lacked a mechanism or authority to convey potentially relevant whistleblower information, regarding potential criminal activity, to the Department of Justice (DOJ) Special Counsel. IC IG staff acknowledged the possibility that I had witnessed malfeasance and events of possible relevance to ongoing criminal investigations being conducted by Special Counsel Durham, but the IC IG staff stated no procedure existed to pass information to DOJ investigators, save my taking action in personal capacity.

That’s Catch-22 in life. Intelligence personnel who witness malfeasance are trained to go to the IC Inspector General, but when this whistleblower went to that office, he was essentially handed back the line made famous by Maine humorist Marshall Dodge: “You can’t get there from here.”

Rumors continue to circulate about the possible incipient publication of a classified annex to Durham’s investigation. A lot of people are waiting for that document. Meanwhile, Greg Collard published a Racket Library page containing an archive of the recently declassified materials. Greg does a great job detailing the chronology of this story, showing dates of document releases and statements along with clips of coverage to show the progress of media reactions. We’ll be adding as we go to this timeline, which readers will know by another memorable illustration by Daniel Medina:

The image of Brennan in “Take my wife, please” mode fits the moment, as Walter and I will discuss on tomorrow’s America This Week. There is a definite rats-fleeing-a-sinking-ship vibe around the original protagonists in this story. Brennan and Clapper pointed fingers at Comey in a remarkably poisonous “It wasn’t us!” editorial in the New York Times; former National Security Adviser Susan Rice wore out the all-caps function in one of a series of nervy tweets on this topic; and John Kerry “protected” his social media record. This is all in addition to once-ubiquitous CIA spokesperson Susan Miller’s “Yeah, that’s the ticket” act about having authored or directed the Intelligence Community Assessment team blowing up yesterday in bizarre fashion.

Racket will have a feature coming soon by UndeadFOIA, explaining little-known documents relevant to this case obtained by his public records requests across years. These shed a lot of new light on how we got where we are. We’re pushing this now because there’s a strong sense one of the major deceptions of our era is about to fall, and we all want it documented cleanly. Please hang in there with us.

This article was originally published on Racket News.

The post New Whistleblower Report Drops as Pressure Mounts in Russia Case appeared first on LewRockwell.

Not only is Robert Barnes a master litigator and top-notch attorney but one of the most in depth, articulate, well read and street-smart experienced political analysts in the nation. Whether it involves the institutionalized criminal machine cartels of the Democrats and Republicans or the deep state, he is a true polymath reminiscent of Murray N. Rothbard in his power elite analysis of Realpolitik.

Always look at the long-term perspective of history and civilizational progress, particularly noting that pantheon of courageous individuals who spoke truth to power.

For freedom remains the genius of American civilization. Other great nations were born in obeisance to the power of the state. Ours was born with the Declaration of Independence and the enshrining of the inalienable natural rights of man.

The above classic interview with Robert Barnes is the definitive example of this process. He forthrightly outlines and elucidates those magisterial philosophical and legal principles upon which America was founded, as well as detailing the systematic erosion and tragic betrayal of those principles over the course of time.

His wonderful interviewer is a delightful and charming combination of naive curiosity and sincere, honest eagerness and desire to get to the root of things to discover how all this came about, to find out how the system was designed to work, and why and how she has been lied to and mislead about these essential core facts.

The post The Best and Most Enlightening Interview Online appeared first on LewRockwell.

As should everyone and not just Gene.  

The post “Gene Epstein Hates the Fed” appeared first on LewRockwell.

Thanks, Johnny Kramer. 

X-Post

The post AI begins displacing lawyers appeared first on LewRockwell.

Tim McGraw wrote:

This is a very good interview of Professor Sachs by Tucker Carlson. Sachs explains the USA’s foreign policy and the mad plans of the neocons behind the past thirty years of US foreign policy. 

The neocons have killed millions and bankrupted the USA with their desire to rule the world.

Professor Jeffrey Sachs Interview by Tucker Carlson: Video

The post Professor Jeffrey Sachs Interview by Tucker Carlson appeared first on LewRockwell.

The post Kucinich interview appeared first on LewRockwell.

The post Is Trump 2.0 Morphing Into Biden 2.0? appeared first on LewRockwell.

Tucker discusses the war crimes in Gaza with retired Green Beret Lt. Col. Tony Aguilar.

The post The Most Powerful Tucker Carlson Interview Ever appeared first on LewRockwell.

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

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(Versione audio della traduzione disponibile qui: https://open.substack.com/pub/fsimoncelli/p/realizzazioni-ridondanti-su-bitcoin)

Quando penso ai concetti chiave che ho imparato su Bitcoin negli ultimi mesi, non ce n'è uno che mi abbia spinto a crederci più della funzione di ridondanza della rete.

Voglio dire, certo, quasi tutti quelli che mi conoscono sanno che, ideologicamente, sono un grande sostenitore dell'economia Austriaca e un grande sostenitore dell'oro, quindi ovviamente questa è un'ottima base da cui partire se si vuole iniziare a studiare e poi credere in Bitcoin.

Ma gran parte della mia incertezza su di esso negli ultimi anni era dovuta al fatto di non aver capito con assoluta chiarezza cosa fosse o come funzionasse. Chi ha guardato la mia intervista con Peter McCormack sa che nella prima mezz'ora lo sfidavo a darmi una descrizione in una sola frase di cosa si acquistava con Bitcoin. Ho ancora sete di poterne semplificare i concetti, rendendoli più comprensibili non solo per me, ma anche per gli altri.

Per la cronaca, se dovessi rispondere a questa domanda ora, descriverei l'acquisto di Bitcoin come lo scambio di una valuta con un'altra. Il prezzo rappresenta il tasso di cambio. So che c'è molto di più, tra cui il potenziale per una maggiore adozione e un più ampio utilizzo tecnologico della rete, tra le altre cose, ma per semplificare, direi semplicemente che è la prima valuta digitale al mondo, accessibile a livello globale, e il prezzo è il suo tasso di cambio. È un codice Unicode digitale per il denaro.

E non c'è bisogno di conoscere i dettagli di come funziona, basta sapere che funziona e che, man mano che migliora, diventa più sicuro. Per chi non ha familiarità con il funzionamento della Proof of Work, ecco una semplice analogia che farà infuriare i nerd dei computer perché non è abbastanza accurata. Pensate a un lucchetto con combinazione a quattro cifre che usate per chiudere la bici in città. Ora, immaginate se ogni volta che usate il lucchetto, venisse aggiunta una cifra allo stesso e la combinazione si reimpostasse su un nuovo numero. L'ultimo utente vi fornisce il codice a 4 cifre per sbloccare il lucchetto della bici in modo che voi possiate usarla. Dopo l'uso, invece di avere un lucchetto a quattro cifre con 1000 possibili risposte, avete una combinazione completamente nuova a cinque cifre, con 10 volte più combinazioni possibili. Date quella combinazione all'utente successivo in modo che possa usarla. Ora, moltiplicate tale transazione per tutte le volte che qualcuno ha usato il vostro lucchetto e vedrete subito che, qualunque sia la combinazione di oggi, è molto lunga e nessuno sarà in grado di indovinarla. E, man mano che più persone lo usano, il lucchetto diventa ancora più sicuro.

Ora immaginate che 20.000 persone utilizzino tutte lo stesso lucchetto per chiudere le loro biciclette, senza sosta, per 13 anni.

Comprendere la sicurezza di Bitcoin è stata una delle intuizioni semplici e profonde che mi hanno permesso di iniziare a crederci. In un articolo che ho scritto l'anno scorso, affermavo che Bitcoin è la manifestazione digitale della frase “l'unione fa la forza”.

Ma non c'è solo sicurezza, c'è anche forza e potenza. Una volta compreso questo concetto nel contesto del funzionamento della rete Bitcoin, e osservando un grafico dei nodi o dell'hashrate, diventa molto difficile ipotizzare che la rete possa fallire.

Per me, è stata la consapevolezza che 20.000 nodi in tutto il mondo, in decine di Paesi, in innumerevoli giurisdizioni, gestiti da persone di ogni tipo e con stili di vita diversi, interagiscono costantemente in un sistema di controlli e contrappesi per garantire l'integrità della rete. Mi piace l'idea che se qualcuno prova a modificare il codice, i nodi glielo rivomiteranno addosso. Mi piace l'idea che sia necessaria una notevole potenza di calcolo per verificare costantemente la blockchain, con grande disappunto di allarmisti per il clima come Elizabeth Warren. E infine, mi piace l'idea che, man mano che cresce, diventa esponenzialmente più difficile fermarla.

Circa un'ora prima di scrivere questo articolo sono andato a farmi una doccia e ho avuto una serie di interazioni che mi hanno ispirato a riflettere sul concetto di ridondanza.

Innanzitutto ero appena tornato da un viaggio e avevo messo via la mia trousse da viaggio. Essa contiene un duplicato di tutto ciò che ho già a casa: tagliaunghie, forbicine, shampoo, kit di pronto soccorso, deodorante e altri articoli. Ho scelto di creare una seconda trousse per i miei viaggi in modo da non dover preparare e disfare continuamente la mia serie iniziale di prodotti da bagno; devo solo spostare l'intera trousse da un posto all'altro. Allo stesso tempo, la mia trousse da viaggio funge anche da riserva per tutti gli articoli che ho a casa se qualcosa finisce prima che io possa andare al supermercato. La mia trousse da viaggio rappresenta un'eccedenza per i miei prodotti da bagno.

Sono entrato nella doccia e mi sono accorto di essere rimasto senza sapone. Ho preso una scatola di sapone che tengo vicino alla doccia, ma era vuota, così ho aperto l'armadietto del bagno e ne ho aperta una nuova. Tengo un sacco di cose di riserva che uso sempre perché non voglio mai rimanerne senza. La prima scatola rappresenta la ridondanza e la seconda rappresenta un ulteriore livello di ridondanza. Era una rete composta da tre nodi: la doccia, la prima scatola e l'armadietto.

Dopo essermi vestito, sono andato a mettermi il mio cappello invernale preferito, cosa che sono riuscito a fare nonostante avessi appena lasciato lo stesso cappello invernale in lavanderia. Ne ho comprati diversi apposta per averne uno da usare mentre qualcun altro si sarebbe trovato in lavanderia. Questa è una ridondanza di cappelli invernali.

Oggi indossavo una maglietta di cui ho almeno 12 copie, perché è l'unica che mi sta come piace a me. Diverse magliette erano in lavatrice, ma ne avevo altre pulite perché ne avevo comprate di più. Questa è una ridondanza di magliette.

Poi sono uscito per prepararmi un caffè e mi sono accorto che il mio porta capsule Nespresso era vuoto. Così, ho aperto gli armadietti della cucina, ho preso un'altra scatola, l'ho aperta e l'ho riempita. Tengo l'armadietto pieno di scorte di scorta nel caso in cui il porta capsule finisca. Questa è una ridondanza di capsule Nespresso.

Infine, dopo la doccia, sono uscito per andare al ristorante e sono passato davanti a un gigantesco set di generatori Generac accanto alla casa del mio vicino. Ho pensato: servono a creare una ridondanza di energia in caso di blackout. La ridondanza di un generatore è una sicurezza energetica per il mio vicino.

Questa potrebbe sembrare una serie di affermazioni del tutto banali e prive di senso, ma negli ultimi 20 anni, da quando vivo da solo, ho sempre cercato di tenere sempre a portata di mano una scorta di tutto ciò che uso. Se trovo qualcosa che mi piace, ne compro diverse, se possibile. Ho diverse riserve per quasi ogni singolo prodotto che uso quotidianamente in casa.

Se aprite l'armadio della biancheria in questo momento, avete un asciugamano o mezza dozzina? Probabilmente avete un po' di asciugamani in più.

Quindi oggi ho capito perché mi piaceva così tanto l'idea della ridondanza di Bitcoin. Mi piaceva l'idea della rete di sicurezza di 20.000 nodi sparsi in tutto il mondo. Questo è ciò che mi ha dato la fiducia necessaria per arrivare all'idea che la rete e Bitcoin stesso funzioneranno se le persone lo vorranno. Con l'arrivo di più sviluppatori e miner, e l'ulteriore crescita dell'adozione, la rete passerà da “estremamente sicura” a “a prova di bomba”. Quando altri stati saranno coinvolti, si assicureranno che la potenza di calcolo necessaria per proteggere la rete sia pronta e disponibile. Non seguo Bitcoin da abbastanza tempo per sapere se abbiamo veramente raggiunto la velocità di fuga in termini di sicurezza della rete per il prossimo futuro, ma sembra che l'abbiamo già superata.

Ho iniziato a dedicarmi con impegno allo studio su Bitcoin solo da un paio di mesi, ma sembra che le analogie e gli esempi concreti che aiutano a comprenderlo meglio arrivino ogni giorno che passa.

E quindi, perdonatemi se pontifico su cose che molti di voi già capiscono, o se mi ripeto. Si tratta solo di ridondanza della sicurezza.

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

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