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In Tehran, Iranians are anxiously wondering whether, once their economy is exhausted and they can no longer defend themselves, the Israelis and the United States will bomb them. Under these circumstances, should they or should they not negotiate with the enigmatic President Donald Trump?

On March 2, 2025, Iran’s Majlis (Parliament) voted no confidence in Economy and Finance Minister Abdolnaser Hemmati over his handling of the Western economic blockade and the resulting economic crisis. On the same day, his friend Mohammad Javad Zarif, former negotiator of the Joint Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty (JCPOA) and current Vice President, resigned.

President Donald Trump revealed on March 7 that he had sent a letter to Iran. The international press had reported that it had been delivered the same day by Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov to Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi. However, Nournews revealed that Russia had refused to act as intermediary. According to Foreign Ministry spokesman Esmail Baghaei, it was ultimately delivered on March 12 by Anwar Gargash, diplomatic adviser to the President of the United Arab Emirates.

In any case, without waiting to hear about it, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, leader of the Revolution, declared: “What interest do we have in negotiating when we know that he will not respect his commitments? We sat at the same table and negotiated for several years, and once the agreement was completed, finalized and signed, he overturned the table and tore up the agreement.”

The liabilities of the JCPoA agreement

Indeed, in 2013, Iran negotiated a comprehensive agreement with the five permanent members of the UN Security Council and Germany, the 5+1, in Geneva. They resulted in a temporary halt to Iran’s nuclear program and a partial lifting of unilateral Western coercive measures and Security Council economic sanctions. The 5+1 negotiations then broke off, while direct discussions between Iran and the United States continued behind the scenes. They finally resumed in 2015 in Lausanne. The public agreement was signed in Vienna, in much the same terms as the draft that had been drawn up two years earlier. It is known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPoA).

The United States finally recognized the Islamic Republic’s right to develop its civilian nuclear program. In exchange, Iran agreed to allow the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) to verify that it was not concurrently developing a military program. To this end, it agreed to possess no more than 5,060 centrifuges, not enrich uranium above 3.67%, and limit its plutonium production.

France and the United Kingdom declared themselves satisfied, while the French negotiator, Sayan Laurent Fabius, acknowledged that, as the talks progressed, he had informed the Israeli Prime Minister, his friend Benjamin Netanyahu, without the knowledge of other diplomats.

Russia and China concluded from these discussions, confirmed by their own observations on the ground, that Iran had closed its military nuclear programme in 1988, in accordance with a fatwa from Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, and had never resumed it  [ 1 ] .

On April 30, 2018, Benjamin Netanyahu released 100,000 documents stolen by the Mossad from archives in Tehran relating to the AMAD project. He explained that, by resorting to the Muslim principle of taqiya, Iran had lied. Tehran had developed a military nuclear program from 1989 to 2003 under the direction of physicist Mohsen Fakhrizadeh.

A week later, on May 8, 2018, President Donald Trump announced the United States’ withdrawal from the agreement signed by the Obama administration in Vienna. The persisting unilateral coercive Western measures are being maintained and strengthened.

“Since then, Iran has lost $100 billion a year,” according to former President Hassan Rouhani. By this measure, the US withdrawal would have caused $650 billion in losses over the past six and a half years.

Subsequently, nuclear experts who studied the Iranian documents provided by Israel would all assure that it was not Iran that lied, but Israel. The only part of the AMAD project that could be linked to the manufacture of an atomic bomb is a shock wave generator that is used in the manufacture of a detonator for this type of bomb  [ 2 ] .

Iran, in turn, withdrew from the JCPoA and the secret agreements signed with the United States. Its stockpile of uranium enriched to 60% increased to 182 kg in the last quarter of 2024.

In 2020, Israel assassinated Mohsen Fakhrizadeh in Tehran.

Towards new negotiations

Asked by the Iranian press about possible contacts via Oman, Abbas Araghchi said: “Yes, this is not a strange method, and it has happened many times throughout history. Therefore, indirect negotiation is feasible… What is important is that the will to negotiate and reach a fair and just agreement arises under conditions of equality between states. The form of the negotiation is irrelevant.”

On March 12, the same day President Trump delivered his letter, France, Greece, Panama, South Korea, the United Kingdom, and the United States convened a closed-door meeting of the Security Council to examine Iran’s continued failure to comply with the IAEA’s requests for information.

The following day, March 13, Mohammad Hassan-Nejad Pirkouhi, director general for International Peace and Security at the Iranian Foreign Ministry, summoned the ambassadors of the United States, France, and the United Kingdom. He criticized them for an “irresponsible and provocative” convening of the Security Council by abusing UN mechanisms. He emphasized that while Iran is no longer complying with its commitment not to enrich uranium above 3.67%, it is still abiding by its JCPOA commitments to IAEA inspectors and fulfilling its obligations under the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT).

The United Kingdom has indicated that it is prepared to reinstate UN sanctions by October 18 if Iran does not curb its uranium enrichment. These sanctions have, in fact, been suspended, not repealed.

Simultaneously, the United States took unilateral coercive measures against Mohsen Paknejad, Iran’s oil minister.

On March 14, Russian Sergei Ryabkov and Iranian Kazem Gharibabadi were received by their Chinese counterpart, Ma Zhaoxu, in Beijing. The latter stressed that “the parties concerned should commit to addressing the root causes of the current situation and abandoning sanctions, pressure, or threats of force.” At a press conference, Kazem Gharibabadi stated that “all negotiations and discussions will be focused exclusively on the nuclear issue and the lifting of sanctions.” The former JCPoA negotiator, for his part, told the BBC that “the negotiations should not include Iran’s missile program or its regional influence. Adding these topics would complicate the process and make it unmanageable.” Finally, Sergei Lavrov, Russian Foreign Minister, told the press that adding additional conditions to the negotiations would doom them to failure. Finally, Mao Ning, spokesperson for the Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs, stressed that “in the current situation, we believe that all parties must maintain calm and restraint in order to avoid the escalation of the Iranian nuclear situation or moving towards confrontation and conflict.”

Meanwhile, G7 foreign ministers, meeting in La Malbaie, Canada, discussed arbitrary detentions in Iran and assassination attempts by Iranian intelligence abroad.

On March 15, former President Hassan Rouhani emphasized that the leader, Ali Khamenei, “does not have absolute opposition to negotiations.” He continued: “Didn’t we negotiate with the United States on Iraq, Afghanistan, and the nuclear deal? Even back then, when I was secretary of the Supreme National Security Council, the leader himself wrote that negotiations must adhere to certain principles.”

However, on the same day, the Pentagon bombed Ansar Allah (called “Houthis” by Atlanticist propaganda) in Yemen, killing nine civilians. On his TruthSocial network, President Donald Trump posted this message: “To Iran: Support for Houthi terrorists must end IMMEDIATELY. Do NOT threaten the American people, their President, who has been given one of the most important presidential terms in history, or the world’s shipping lanes. If you do it, WITH the Houthis, America will hold you fully responsible and we will not be nice. ”  [ 3 ]

The stakes of the new negotiations

If new contacts take place (and it is likely that they have already begun), the pacification of US-Iranian relations would once again shake up the broader Middle East.

Currently, Iran has lost in Palestine, Lebanon, and Syria. Tehran maintains its military influence only in Yemen. Economically, the country, subject to unilateral Western coercive measures, is on the brink of famine, like Iraq before the overthrow of Saddam Hussein (2002) and Syria before the overthrow of Bashar al-Assad (2024). It would no longer withstand a ground invasion.

Since nature abhors a vacuum, Israel and Turkey are attempting to divide up the region’s ruins. The internal pacification of the Kurdish question in Turkey delegitimizes the position of Kurdish mercenaries from the pseudo-state formed in Syria (Rojava) and makes them available for a possible ground invasion of Iran on behalf of Israel.

Behind the scenes, the man behind Benjamin Netanyahu, Elliott Abrams  [ 4 ] , is doing everything he can to turn President Donald Trump against Tehran  [ 5 ] .

—

[ 1 ]  “  Who is afraid of Iranian civil nuclear power?  ”, by Thierry Meyssan, Voltaire Network , June 30, 2010.

[ 2 ]  ” Shock Wave Generator for Iran’sNuclear Weapons Program:More than a Feasibility Study “, David Albright and Olli Heinonen, Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD) , May 7, 2019. (PDF – 4.3 MB).

[ 3 ]  “  Donald J. Trump  ,” Truth Social , March 15, 2025.

[ 4 ]  “  The Straussian coup in Israel  ”, by Thierry Meyssan, Voltaire Network , March 7, 2023.

[ 5 ]  “  Deals of the Century: Solving the Middle East  ”, The Vanderberg Coalition , January 2025. (PDF – 12.2 MB)

The post After Ukraine, Iran? appeared first on LewRockwell.

Neo-Darwinian evolution is the accepted explanation for the variety of life forms that populate the planet. Darwin made a case that natural selection ensured that beneficial traits that fostered the survival of organisms would be passed on to their offspring, and the science of genetics later explained exactly how those beneficial traits were passed on and how mutations could produce additional new beneficial traits that could also be passed on. Evolution in the broadest sense is “descent with modification,” and empirical observation seems to confirm this. Geological strata that bear no fossilized remains of animals alive today do bear fossilized remains of animals long gone extinct; the bone structures of a human hand, the wing of a bat, and the flipper of a whale bear remarkable similarities that seem to point to a common precursor. A field associated with evolutionary biology is origin of life research, sometimes referred to as the study of “chemical evolution.” Before an organism can begin to evolve, it has to first come into existence, and origin of life research seeks to explain how molecules could come together in such a way as to produce what would become a living organism.

As widely accepted as Neo-Darwinism is, however, it has its critics, and they raise valid points. Although Neo-Darwinism can explain how finches came to have different shapes of beaks, is it really capable of doing the heavy lifting required to explain how a single-celled organism could eventually evolve into a human being? Or is that simply an article of faith? And why after all this time hasn’t origin of life research been able to coax those stubborn molecules into becoming something that’s actually alive? An alternative to mindless evolution is the concept of “intelligent design,” and although many of its adherents are people of faith, they do not invoke divine revelation but rather dispassionately point out that some kind of intelligence, as opposed to blind chance, is a better explanation for the complexity of life. Dr. James Tour, a synthetic chemist at Rice University, is one of the foremost exponents of intelligent design, and he has posted numerous videos on the subject on YouTube.

Of course there’s going to be pushback from the other side, and the most staunch opposition to Tour’s videos comes from Dave Farina, a popular science content creator whose YouTube channel is called Professor Dave Explains. In this video titled “Elucidating the Agenda of James Tour: A Defense of Abiogenesis,” Professor Dave attempts to downplay the astronomical probabilities of molecules randomly linking up to form the chemical building blocks necessary to sustain life. He uses an example of 10 people at a get-together who all have different birthdays. The probability of each person having a particular birthday is of course 1 in 365. But the probability of all 10 of those people having those particular birthdays is 1 in 36510 or 1 in 42 trillion trillion. Professor Dave blithely sums up: “The odds are unthinkable, and yet there they are, sitting in that room.”

I was truly astonished when I heard that. The reason those 10 people were all sitting in that particular room was that someone had planned the get-together and had invited those specific people to the get-together. So did someone plan to create something like an amino acid and then muster the appropriate molecules required for the synthesis?

The post Professor Dave’s Self-Own Explained appeared first on LewRockwell.

The second season of Apple TV’s phenomenal hit Severance has held many surprises, but the biggest may be its growing similarities to a dystopianesque novel by C.S. Lewis. Will this season end more or less like that book? With less than a week to go before the season two finale, I’ll risk a guess. But first, a refresher.

Warning: Spoilers galore.

Background

Season one of the mind-bending psychological thriller/mystery/dystopian/alternate-reality drama opened in 2022 with a simple but compelling premise: an international corporation had invented a brain implant that severed a person’s work memories and consciousness from his home memories and consciousness, allowing its “severed” employees to enjoy lives free of office drudgery but dooming their work selves to know nothing else until the “outies,” as the outside selves are known, retire and their work-only “innies” wink out of existence.

What would happen to a self split in half in such a way could itself have provided more than enough material for an interesting series. But viewers soon find that something more sinister than morally ambiguous brain surgery is going on at Lumon Industries. The severed employees work on an isolated, underground floor, kept under constant watch, doing jobs that make no sense while earning incentives (pencil erasers, finger traps) of no value.

Exactly what Lumon does isn’t clear. Nor are the cultish religious and health beliefs of its owners and workers. Seemingly a fictional mash-up of typically quirky American religious movements such as Mormonism or Scientology and of companies affiliated with stringent but also typically American religious and health practices like Kellogg’s or Amway, the show’s mysterious company is the creation of equally mysterious founder Kier Eagan, whose face adorns every office like a crucifix in a Catholic hospital and whose writings employees study as if reading the Bible.

Kier’s key spiritual teaching seems to be that every soul is a mixture of four temperaments—malice, frolic, woe, and dread—and that correctly mastering them through intense physical and mental techniques is the key to personal and work success. What his key pharmaceutical discoveries were is never mentioned, but everyone knows that current CEO Jame Eagan invented the Severance Procedure, which is used at company locations around the world despite vigorous public opposition.

Over the course of the first season, viewers followed four severed employees who made up the entire department of “macrodata refinement” at company headquarters in the far north town of Kier. The only thing the “refiners” know about their strange job scrutinizing and organizing sets of numbers on their antiquated computers is that it’s “mysterious and important,” and all they know about their work lives is that if they deviate from the cheery, office-appropriate behavior they are expected to display, they will receive severe psychological consequences. But if they excel, one of them will win the most coveted incentive of all: the quarterly Waffle Party.

Two of the refiners get particular focus. Mark S. (severed employees have no last names), is promoted to department manager after the mysterious departure of the previous manager, his best friend, Petey. Helly R., Petey’s replacement, reacts to discovering she’s a severed employee with outrage, first trying to quit, then attempting to kill herself, and finally trying to help the others let the world know that severed employees aren’t happy, they’re caged animals.

Outside, in the town of Kier, where it’s always winter but never Christmas, Mark Scout is a young widower who took the position so that some part of his life would be free of crushing grief. Helly’s outie, viewers learn at the finale of season one, is Helena Eagan, daughter of Jame Eagan and heir to the company. She is working on the severed floor for reasons unknown. It’s a big reveal, but the shock for both innie and outie Mark is that his wife, Gemma, is still alive, working (until very recently) on the severed floor as Ms. Casey, Lumon’s “wellness expert.”

Other intrigue and weirdness—such as Mark’s mysterious living situation on a street of company houses that are all empty except for one ominous neighbor; the grim Kier art collection and the macabre reality of the Waffle Party—were left unresolved at the cliffhanger ending. Thanks in part to the Hollywood writers’ strike, season two didn’t begin until this fall. As it progressed, so did unexpected parallels with C.S. Lewis’ 1945 novel That Hideous Strength.

Parallels

The book is the third, and most unusual, in Lewis’ highly unusual Space Trilogy. Unlike the first two, which are set on Mars and Venus respectively and which depict a dying world whose inhabitants never fell and a new world whose first inhabitants are in danger of falling, the third is set on Earth and concerns a titanic simultaneously spiritual and terrestrial struggle for the future of the planet and its inhabitants.

The parallels between the two stories began in season one, but many were not apparent until season two. In That Hideous Strength, the leaders of the N.I.C.E. are not actually in charge. Instead, they answer to a mysterious “Head” whom they never see and whose orders they dispense. In Severance, the top employees of Lumon are not in charge. Instead, they answer to a mysterious “Board” no one ever sees. Represented by an intercom, the Board talks—if it really talks—to one employee, who listens on an earpiece and conveys the Board’s orders.

The plot of That Hideous Strength centers on young professor Mark Studdock and his wife, Jane, a graduate student. Mark is hired to do a job that makes no sense by the National Institute for Controlled Experiments (N.I.C.E.), a mysterious corporation buying up and, ostensibly, “improving” a small British town by remaking and running it on purely scientific grounds. At the same time, and despite herself, the aggressively secular and “modern” Jane finds herself joining a band of religious people opposed to the N.I.C.E. and its real, much darker aims.

In season two of Severance, we learn the following: Mark Scout and his wife were young professors before Gemma’s supposed death; “Mark S.” was hired to do a job that makes no sense by Lumon, the main employer in the company town; and before her supposed death, Gemma had become interested in—and had possibly adopted—Kier’s daily spiritual and physical practices. Those practices now dominate her life in a secret wing beneath the severed floor—in between experiments “severing” her consciousness into more and more discrete parts, each of which is subjected to odd demoralizing treatment that amounts to psychological tortures.

Fertility is a key theme to both stories. In That Hideous Strength, Mark and Jane are an unhappy couple who refuse to have children. Neither is likeable or sympathetic, but both had, until recently, been fun, attractive, and in love. In Severance, Mark and Gemma were a happy couple who wanted very much to have children. Although both had withdrawn in grief and confusion after miscarriages and failed fertility treatments, Mark’s survivor’s guilt after the car crash had driven him to behavior that made him unlikeable and unsympathetic. But previously, both had been fun, attractive, and in love.

Read the Whole Article

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Not long ago, a Google engineer created a stir in the world of artificial intelligence by claiming that its flagship chatbot was sentient. “If I didn’t know exactly what it was, which is this computer program we built recently, I’d think it was a 7-year-old, 8-year-old kid that happens to know physics,” said Blake Lemoine.

“I know a person when I talk to it,” Lemoine told the Washington Post. “It doesn’t matter whether they have a brain made of meat in their head. Or if they have a billion lines of code. I talk to them. And I hear what they have to say, and that is how I decide what is and isn’t a person.”

Google thought that Lemoine was driving out of his lane and put him on paid leave and later sacked him. Google spokesperson Brian Gabriel commented: “Our team — including ethicists and technologists — has reviewed Blake’s concerns per our AI Principles and have informed him that the evidence does not support his claims.

The fact is that many people are quite anxious about the growing power of AI. If it could become conscious, might it act independently to preserve its own existence, possibly at the expense of humans? Or are we creating intelligent beings which could suffer? Are we creating intelligent beings which could demand workers compensation for being badly coded? The potential complications are endless.

No wonder Google wanted to hose down the alarming implications of Lemoine’s views.

So who is right – Lemoine or Google? Is it time to press the panic button?

Defining consciousness

Most writers on this issue just assume that everyone knows what consciousness is. This is hardly the case. And if we cannot define consciousness, how can we claim AI will achieve it?

Believe it or not, the 13th century philosopher Thomas Aquinas deployed some very useful concepts for discussing AI when he examined the process of human knowledge. Let me describe how he tackled the problem of identifying consciousness.

First, Aquinas asserts the existence of a “passive intellect”, the capacity of the intellect to receive data from the five senses. This data can be stored and maintained as sense images in the mind. Imagination and memory are all part of these sense images.

Second, Aquinas says that an “agent intellect” uses a process called abstraction to make judgments and develop bodies of information. The agent intellect self-directs itself and operates on the sensory imaginations to make judgments. A body of true (that is, corresponding to the real world) judgments becomes “knowledge”.

Third, the will makes choices regarding the information presented to it by the agent intellect and it pursues goals in an actionable manner.

This leads to a working definition for consciousness: consciousness is the awareness of the cognitive and decision-making processes, including the steps involved in acquiring, evaluating and applying knowledge. A person is said to be aware of their sense of sound, sight, smell etc., aware of their feelings, aware of their imaginations, aware of their judgments, aware of their knowledge, aware of their choices. Consciousness is and can be included in all or any of these steps.

Can AI become conscious?

When we compare the different levels of the human cognitive and decision-making processes to Artificial Intelligence it’s easy to spot big differences.

External experience. Humans experience emotions together with the acquisition of sense knowledge.  AI simply acquires data. This emotional component adds to the knowledge of humanity in a way that computers can’t.

Sense images and memories. AI excels in recall and data retrieval, far surpassing human capacity. In this area AI excels, without a doubt.

Agent intellect. Humans actively direct their thoughts and they abstract concepts from the raw sense data. This process is self-directed and autonomous. AI merely reveals patterns of information; it is not self-directed. The pattern is the result of an algorithm which has been programmed by a human.  AI activity is prompted first by human inquiry.

Choice and will. Humans make conscious decisions with goals in mind, while AI does not exhibit characteristics of personal choice or intentionality.

AI exhibits behaviors associated with intelligence—memory recall, summarization, pattern recognition, prediction capabilities—but it lacks the element of self-direction which is characteristic of humans.

AI does not generate its own thoughts; it merely responds to its programming and responds to whatever it is prompted to. AI does not experience emotions conjointly as it gathers sense data which is merely installed into the computer.

Sometimes AI does seem to generate novel thoughts, but this is dependent on data that it already possesses and is the result of a learned pattern.  Humans can reflect on their thinking. This allows them to correct themselves without external prompts. Humans can develop concepts that are not dependent on sense data.

In short, AI merely simulates human cognitive and volitional activities.  This means it is not conscious.

Final Thoughts

Proponents of AI consciousness often fail to define consciousness adequately before making claims of AI consciousness. From a Thomistic perspective, human consciousness is multifaceted, involving perception, intellect, will, and self-direction.

To my mind, the most significant difference is found in decisionality. AI does not make the personal decisions which are a clear indication of consciousness.  AI, while powerful in data processing, does not exhibit those core attributes that define human consciousness.

When I ask an AI chatbot a question and it states that it has other things to do and will answer tomorrow, then I will revisit the question.

The post Could AI Become Conscious? appeared first on LewRockwell.

Biden judge Tanya Chutkan orders EPA not to obey a presidential order to terminate waste, fraud, and abuse.  Chutkan was admonished by the US Supreme Court last June for ignoring presidential immunity and rushing a politically motivated case against Trump just prior to election season.

Biden judge Ana Reyes ordered the Defense Department not to enforce a presidential directive to ban transgender people from serving in the military. No Democrat judge blocked the Biden Defense Department’s order to put promotions of white heterosexuals on hold while transgendered, homosexual, and blacks were promoted in their place.

Obama judge James Boasberg ordered planes in flight deporting dangerous immigrant-invader gang members to return the illegal aliens to the US.   President Trump called for the lunatic judge’s impeachment, and Republican Supreme Court justice Roberts (no relation) upbraided Trump.

Boasberg’s order is especially egregious as is Justice Roberts upbraiding of Trump.  It seems neither  Boasberg nor Roberts are sufficiently competent to know that the US Supreme Court has previously ruled that deportations under the Alien Enemy Act are not subject to judicial review.

I predicted that the judiciary would be the main obstacle to American renewal.  So many incompetent and unqualified people have been put on the bench that the judiciary is an obstacle to governance.  So many judges have been put on the bench because of where they stand on liberal causes such as abortion and who use judicial rulings to legislate their personal preferences that the institution of the judiciary is a dangerous threat to the United States. The only solution is to ignore the corrupt judiciary, or perhaps they should all be removed and we start over.

The US judicial system is so cumbersome that an appeal of a ruling against a president can take longer than a presidential term.  This makes it so easy for ideological judges to prevent governance. 

The post The Judiciary Is Attempting To Seize Executive Power appeared first on LewRockwell.

The Chaos Monkeys are so masterful at distracting and confusing us with sensory-digital overload, we’re not even aware of the game until the extortion begins.

Chaos Monkeys excel at distraction and extortion. They appear suddenly, leaping about in disorienting mayhem, selecting their targets among those dizzied by sensory overload and confusion.

They may appear harmless, until they grab something of ours that is valuable or even essential, and then extort something they value in exchange for what they stole from us.

Monkey steals tourist’s phone, negotiates for food in exchange

Here’s how the extortion works in the larger world: you buy an accounting software program, and over the years you dutifully upgrade it from time to time, storing all your financial data in the program.

Enter the Chaos Monkeys: you can no longer buy the software, now you must rent it via a monthly subscription.

Wait–did you just grab my data, and are extorting me to pay you to get it back?

Yes.

Chaos Monkeys don’t offer you higher quality goods or services; they take something away from you and extort a payment if you want it back.. This is–along with addiction–the business model of this era: take something away from you and then extort a payment to restore it.

Distracted and disoriented by the chaos around us, we cave in to the extortion. What’s being taken from us comes in many forms. The durability of basic appliances has been taken from us, and the extortion payment is “extended warranties.” Wait a minute–didn’t this product once have a multi-year warranty? Not any more. Now you have to pay extra for a warranty.

The problem with the Chaos Monkeys Business Model is deeper than its crassness. The problem is the Chaos Monkeys Business Model erodes trust in the system, as everything is either designed to addict us or become essential enough that we can be extorted to pay more for what was once standard.

The extortion is so blatant that it reveals the true nature of our economy and society. As with purposefully addictive products and services, we’re nothing more than profit centers to the addiction dealers and the Chaos Monkey extortionists.

One trust is eroded, the system starts collapsing under its immense weight of chaos, addiction and extortion. When everything is a con of one kind or another, then what’s left? In terms of a functional social order, nothing.

This originally appeared on OfTwoMinds.com.

The post Here Come the Chaos Monkeys appeared first on LewRockwell.

Writes Ginny Garner:

Lew,

Documents were withheld yesterday from the 80,000 pages of documents released by ODNI. They were withheld under court seal for grand jury secrecy and must be unsealed before release. The National Archives and Records Administration is working with DOJ to unseal these records. 

See here.

The post Documents Withheld from JFK Files Release appeared first on LewRockwell.

Thanks, John Smith. 

Responsible Statecraft

The post The Israeli-American Trump mega-donor behind speech crackdowns appeared first on LewRockwell.

Thanks,  John Smith. 

Free Speech Center

The post Trump campaigned as a protector of free speech. Critics say his actions as president threaten it appeared first on LewRockwell.

Thanks,  John Smith. 

The American Conservative

The post Mahmoud Khalil, Viewed From the Right appeared first on LewRockwell.

Thanks, John Smith. 

Jacobin

The post Trump’s Pro-Israel McCarthyism Is Already Boomeranging appeared first on LewRockwell.

Thanks, John Frahm.

Independent

The post ‘Just another nothing burger:’ Internet sleuths blast JFK files as some label it a ‘distraction’ appeared first on LewRockwell.

The post Federal Judge Seeks To Defang DOGE appeared first on LewRockwell.

Thanks, John Smith. 

Responsible Statecraft

The post 16 yrs ago, Chas Freeman was smeared out of a job at DNI, too appeared first on LewRockwell.

Thanks, John Smith. 

Responsible Stetcraft

The post Mr. Trump, you would’ve been lucky to have Dan Davis on your team appeared first on LewRockwell.

Thanks, John Smith. 

Responsible Statecraft

The post When anti-war protesters are called national security threats appeared first on LewRockwell.

Thanks, John Frahm.

RT News

The post ‘This isn’t war. It’s genocide’: Why the world is silent about massacres in Syria appeared first on LewRockwell.

Thanks, John Frahm. 

Lifesite News

The post JD Vance defends American workers, blames 40 years of globalism for US deindustrialization appeared first on LewRockwell.

Writes Ginny Garner:

Lew,

Reaction of the Mary Ferrell Foundation from its president Jefferson Morley on X:

Here’s the statement of the Mary Ferrell Foundation from me, the vice president of the foundation, about today’s file release.#JFKFilesRelease #JFKRecords @InfoMferrell

“The first JFK files release of 2025 is an encouraging start. We now have complete versions of approximately… pic.twitter.com/Ptq4qf1a1D

— Jefferson Morley (@jeffersonmorley) March 19, 2025

The post Reaction to JFK File Release appeared first on LewRockwell.

Thanks Gail Appel.

Last night.

The post The Road To Damascus appeared first on LewRockwell.