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First of Its Kind

In a landmark ruling, the Brussels Court of First Instance has ordered the Flemish government not only to block a specific container of military equipment bound for Israel, but also to ban any further transit of military material to the country.

The judge ruled that Flanders — a region in the north of Belgium — is systematically failing to meet its obligations under arms legislation and international treaties, and even imposed a penalty for each shipment that goes through despite the ruling.

The four Flemish NGOs that filed the case were granted full victory on all points.

The container at the center of the case is located in the port of Antwerp. It contains so-called tapered roller bearings, produced by Timken via a French branch, and destined for Ashot Ashkelon Industries, an Israeli defense company that supplies components for Merkava tanks and Namer armored vehicles.

According to the organizations, these systems are used daily in the genocide in Gaza.

In its ruling, the court immediately prohibits the Flemish government from authorizing any new arms transit to Israel. Since 2009, there has been an agreement not to export weapons to Israel that could reinforce its armed forces — a policy that has been seriously eroded in practice.

To enforce this, the court has imposed a penalty of 50,000 euros for each shipment that still leaves for Israel.

Containers may only be shipped to Israel if the Flemish government has written proof that the goods are intended for civilian use. According to lawyer Lies Michielsen of Progress Lawyers Network, who pleaded the case, the ruling implies that the government must actively verify the final destination of goods exported to Israel.

Significance

This ruling is highly significant because the court has confirmed that facilitating the delivery of weapons to a state committing war crimes or possible genocide is illegal.

“The court is stating what politics refuses to acknowledge,” says Fien De Meyer from the League for Human Rights.

This means an end to impunity: governments can no longer look away while their weapons are used for atrocities.

The ruling sets a legal precedent that forces European and other governments to take responsibility. Similar lawsuits in other countries are expected to follow.

In any case, it is a victory for peace and solidarity movements, showing that resistance works.

Follow-Up

Around the same time, another lawsuit was filed in Belgium — this time against the federal government. A group of Palestinian claimants and Belgian organizations sent a formal notice to the federal government, accusing Belgium of passive complicity in the genocide in Gaza.

If no satisfactory response is received, they will proceed to court — which would also be a global first.

The action is led by a Palestinian citizen, several Belgian NGOs, and a legal expert. They demand that Belgium halt all military deliveries to Israel, confiscate imports from occupied Palestinian territories, block investments in those areas, and suspend the EU-Israel association agreement.

According to them, Belgium’s passivity is both morally and legally unacceptable. The action is supported by a group of artists and intellectuals who are raising funds for legal costs.

There is also movement at the European level. The legal NGO JURDI is taking both the European Commission and the Council of the European Union to the Court of Justice for their “negligence” regarding the violence in Gaza. For the first time in history, these two powerful institutions are being sued for failing to uphold their own treaty obligations.

JURDI cites Article 265 of the EU Treaty, which makes institutional inaction punishable. According to them, EU institutions are applying double standards: Russia was heavily sanctioned, while Israel remains untouched despite clear human rights violations.

JURDI is demanding, among other things, the suspension of the EU-Israel Association Agreement, the termination of subsidies, and sanctions against Israeli officials. The complaint argues that the EU is both legally and morally obligated to act and warns that even European leaders could be prosecuted for complicity in genocide.

Complicity

At the heart of these cases lies the question: does a country — or by extension, the European Commission — have a legal obligation, as a third party, to prevent genocide elsewhere? According to the Genocide Convention, it does. That treaty obliges every country not only to punish genocide but also to actively prevent it.

In January, the International Court of Justice already called on Israel to take all necessary measures to prevent genocide. But does that obligation also apply to countries like Belgium, which are not directly involved?

According to eighteen top Belgian jurists, the answer is yes. In a letter, they warn that a country like Belgium risks being brought before the International Court of Justice itself if it continues to remain silent about the situation in Gaza. Passivity can be legally interpreted as complicity.

The jurists are demanding sanctions against Israel and consider suspension of the EU-Israel Association Agreement as an absolute minimum. Countries too often hide behind diplomatic caution, but according to them, that attitude is legally and morally untenable. Only concrete actions — not words — can save the credibility of Belgium and the EU.

No Pause

The court victory in Flanders and other ongoing legal proceedings represent a qualitative leap in the fight against genocide. But that fight is far from over. Genocide does not pause. While politicians delay, people in Gaza suffer end die.

Now is the time to maintain and intensify pressure. Legal actions must be brought in other countries as well. Key demands include the immediate enforcement of the ban on arms deliveries, full transparency about the export of military equipment, and prosecution of those complicit in these crimes.

Lawsuits like this are very important, but certainly not sufficient to stop the killing in Gaza. Political leaders worldwide must be pressured through mass protests and acts of solidarity.

That is why the Palestinian resistance movements in Gaza have jointly issued a call for global mobilization starting on 20 July 2025 to save the population in Gaza from genocide, hunger, and thirst caused by the Israeli occupation.

They denounce the international silence and call on countries and citizens around the world to take to the streets and act to halt the genocide.

The original source of this article is Global Research.

The post Historic First: Brussels Court Judge Orders Halt to Arms Transit to Israel appeared first on LewRockwell.

If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles.
If you know yourself but not the enemy, for every victory gained you will also suffer a defeat.
If you know neither the enemy nor yourself, you will succumb in every battle.

Sun Tzu, Art of War, III.18

I am always amazed how little western governments are aware of their own (lack of) capabilities as well as of the nature and capabilities of their ‘enemies’.

They tend to not know the basic economic and sociological facts about their opponents. They operate on whatever nonsense they have come to believe about their ‘enemies’. They overestimate their own position, miscalculate and are astonished when, as a result, the factual situation turns against them.

We may recount, as Tucker Carlson does here, that the U.S. was “assured by some of the dumbest people on the planet, who currently serve in the United States Senate, that Russia was merely ‘a gas station with nuclear weapons’.”

Sanctions were imposed on Russia but failed to trouble it. They hurt those who imposed them the most.

The Trump administration recently put a 50% tariff on all goods from Brazil (even though it has a trade surplus with that country). This was to punish its government and judiciary for pursuing charges against the former president Jair Bolsonaro for plotting a coup after he had lost the elections.

Brazil is a nationalistic, well developed country which is allergic to interference by foreign powers. Anyone knowing that fact could have anticipated this reaction:

For [President] Lula, whose left-wing allies face a tough 2026 election, the moment is a windfall. Polls show revived support for his administration in the face of Bolsonaro-provoked American bullying. The tariffs also harm the interests of business elites who are often the biggest boosters of Lula’s conservative opposition.

“What was meant as a show of strength by MAGA and its Brazilian franchise has turned into a political gift for Lula, who now gets to credibly present himself as a symbol of national resistance while leaving his opponents scrambling to choose between loyalty to Bolsonaro and the economic interests of their own base,” observed Brazil historian Andre Pagliarini.

the U.S. trade war against China is another point where the lack of knowledge about the opponent led to the loss of the battle:

When Mr. Trump raised tariffs on Chinese exports in April, some top Trump officials thought Beijing would quickly fold, given its recent economic weakness. Instead, Beijing called Mr. Trump’s bluff by restricting rare earths needed by American makers of cars, military equipment, medical devices and electronics.

As the flow of those materials stopped, Mr. Trump and other officials began receiving calls from chief executives saying their factories would soon shut down. Ford, Suzuki and other companies shuttered factories because of the lack of supply.

Mr. Trump and his top advisers were surprised by the threat that Beijing’s countermove posed, people familiar with the matter say. That brought the United States back to the negotiating table this spring to strike a fragile trade truce, which Trump officials are now wary of upsetting. That agreement dropped tariffs from a minimum 145 percent to 30 percent, with the Chinese agreeing to allow rare earths to flow as freely as before.

Trump and his advisor likely did not even know what rare earth were. They did not know that China has a monopoly of making them into magnets. They did not know that these magnets were needed to create U.S. high-tech products.

Moreover, China used the U.S. pretext of ‘national security’ to make its move stick:

Mr. Trump was the first to harness the power of U.S. export controls, by targeting Chinese tech giant Huawei and putting global restrictions on American technology in his first term. But the Biden administration expanded those rules. Concerned that China’s growing A.I. capacity would advance its military, Biden officials cracked down on exports of Nvidia chips, seeing them as the most effective choke point over Chinese A.I. capabilities.

Since then, when Chinese officials raised their objections to U.S. technology controls in meetings, U.S. officials had responded by insisting that the measures were national security matters and not up for debate.

But in the meeting in Geneva in May, China finally had a powerful counterargument. Beijing insisted that its minerals and magnets, some of which go to fighter jets, drones and weaponry, were a “dual-use” technology that could be used for the military as well as civilian industries, just like A.I. and chips. It demanded reciprocity: If the United States wanted a steady flow of rare earths, Washington should also be ready to lessen its technology controls.

China has regained access to Nvidia chips and Trump is seeking a meeting with China’s president Xi. Evidently, China has won this battle.

I am sure there are some specialists on China down in the bowels of the Commerce Department or State, who did know how China could hit back. They probably had gamed-out and predicted how China would hit back.

But U.S. politicians, be they Obama, Biden or Trump, are too full of themselves to doubt their own level of knowledge about their opponents. They do not know their ‘enemies’. The battles they plan out and launch do inevitably end in disasters.

As I have observed the U.S. losing one foreign policy battle after the other over the last 25 years I was waiting for the moment where sanity would set in. Where realistic assumptions would be made before launching this or that new adventure. I am no longer expecting that to happen.

Some say the U.S. is in a strong position and, despite creating chaos by losing such battles, does win from it. But in reality only some are profiting from fighting and losing these battles while the country as a whole is getting diminished by it.

Reprinted with permission from Moon of Alabama.

The post Not Knowing The ‘Enemy’ appeared first on LewRockwell.

AI fails at tasks where accuracy must be absolute to create value.

In reviewing the on-going discussions about how many people will be replaced by AI, I find a severe lack of real-world examples. I’m remedying this deficiency with an example of AI’s failure in the kind of high-value work that many anticipate will soon be performed by AI.

Few things in life are more pervasively screechy than hype, which brings us to the current feeding-frenzy of AI hype. Since we all read the same breathless claims and have seen the videos of robots dancing, I’ll cut to the chase: Nobody posts videos of their robot falling off a ladder and crushing the roses because, well, the optics aren’t very warm and fuzzy.

For the same reason, nobody’s sharing the AI tool’s error that forfeited the lawsuit. The only way to really grasp the limits of these tools is to deploy them in the kinds of high-level, high-value work that they’re supposed to be able to do with ease, speed and accuracy, because nobody’s paying real money to watch robots dance or read a copycat AI-generated essay on Yeats that’s tossed moments after being submitted to the professor.

In the real world of value creation, optics don’t count, accuracy counts. Nobody cares if the AI chatbot that churned out the Yeats homework hallucinated mid-stream because nobody’s paying for AI output that has zero scarcity value: an AI-generated class paper, song or video joins 10 million similar copycat papers / songs / videos that nobody pays attention to because they can create their own in 30 seconds.

So let’s examine an actual example of AI being deployed to do the sort of high-level, high-value work that it’s going to need to nail perfectly to replace us all at work. My friend Ian Lind, whom I’ve known for 50 years, is an investigative reporter with an enviably lengthy record of the kind of journalism few have the experience or resources to do. (His blog is www.iLind.net, [email protected])

The judge’s letter recommending Ian for the award he received from the American Judges Association for distinguished reporting about the Judiciary ran for 18 pages, and that was just a summary of his work.

Ian’s reporting/blogging in the early 2000s inspired me to try my hand at it in 2005.

Ian has spent the last few years helping the public understand the most complex federal prosecution case in Hawaii’s recent history, and so the number of documents that have piled up is enormous. He’s been experimenting with AI tools (NotebookLM, Gemini, ChatGPT) for months on various projects, and he recently shared this account with me:

“My experience has definitely been mixed. On the one hand, sort of high level requests like ‘identify the major issues raised in the documents and sort by importance’ produced interesting and suggestive results. But attempts to find and pull together details on a person or topic almost always had noticeable errors or hallucinations. I would never be able to trust responses to even what I consider straightforward instructions. Too many errors. Looking for mentions of ‘drew’ in 150 warrants said he wasn’t mentioned. But he was, I’ve gone back and found those mentions. I think the bots read enough to give an answer and don’t keep incorporating data to the end. The shoot from the hip and, in my experience, have often produced mistakes. Sometimes it’s 25 answers and one glaring mistake, sometimes more basic.”

Let’s start with the context. This is similar to the kind of work performed by legal services. Ours is a rule-of-law advocacy system, so legal proceedings are consequential. They aren’t a ditty or a class paper, and Ian’s experience is mirrored by many other professionals.

Let’s summarize AI’s fundamental weaknesses:

1. AI doesn’t actually “read” the entire collection of texts. In human terms, it gets “bored” and stops once it has enough to generate a credible response.

2. AI has digital dementia. It doesn’t necessarily remember what you asked for in the past nor does it necessarily remember its previous responses to the same queries.

3. AI is fundamentally, irrevocably untrustworthy. It makes errors that it doesn’t detect (because it didn’t actually “read” the entire trove of text) and it generates responses that are “good enough,” meaning they’re not 100% accurate, but they have the superficial appearance of being comprehensive and therefore acceptable. This is the “shoot from the hip” response Ian described.

In other words, 90% is good enough, as who cares about the other 10% in a college paper, copycat song or cutesy video.

But in real work, the 10% of errors and hallucinations actually matter, because the entire value creation of the work depends on that 10% being right, not half-assed.

In the realm of LLM AI, getting Yeats’ date of birth wrong–an error without consequence–is the same as missing the defendant’s name in 150 warrants. These programs are text / content prediction engines; they don’t actually “know” or “understand” anything. They can’t tell the difference between a consequential error and a “who cares” error.

This goes back to the classic AI thought experiment The Chinese Room, which posits a person who doesn’t know the Chinese language in a sealed room shuffling symbols around that translate English words to Chinese characters.

From the outside, it appears that the black box (the sealed room) “knows Chinese” because it’s translating English to Chinese. But the person–or AI agent–doesn’t actually “know Chinese”, or understand any of what’s been translated. It has no awareness of languages, meanings or knowledge.

This describes AI agents in a nutshell.

Read the Whole Article

The post Maybe AI Isn’t Going to Replace You at Work After All appeared first on LewRockwell.

One hundred sixty years after the war for Southern independence, great confusion is still caused by the claim that the South fought for their independence and for “states’ rights.” What does the doctrine of “states’ rights” mean in this context? The dictionary definition is easily understood: “the rights and powers held by individual US states rather than by the federal government.”

However, confusion arises as to the substantive meaning of this doctrine, as the notion has now become entrenched that states only have such rights and powers as may be granted to them by the federal government in its mercy. That notion is entirely wrong-headed because the opposite is the case: the federal government only has such rights and powers as may be conferred upon it by the agreement of the people as delineated in the Constitution. As historian Clyde Wilson puts it, “The Constitution should be the instrument of society’s control of government, not vice versa.”

It is sometimes argued that the Constitution itself confers supremacy on the federal government to do whatever it considers appropriate in the discharge of its functions. Expressing that view, former President Barack Obama once said, “we have a supremacy clause in our constitution. When federal law is in conflict with state law, federal law wins out.” On the contrary, the doctrine of states’ rights, as explained by John C. Calhoun, holds federal law to be supreme only within the confines of its own sphere:

Calhoun pointed out that the [supremacy] clause itself stated that only laws “made in pursuance of the Constitution” were supreme. Thus, concluded Calhoun, federal and State laws were each supreme within their rightful spheres—a far cry from the claim that federal laws were categorically supreme over State laws.

The doctrine of states’ rights was widely understood in the nineteenth century as a constitutional doctrine denoting that sovereignty was vested in each state, as a means of resisting federal encroachment. States could exercise this sovereignty by, for example, the right of nullification or, ultimately, by the right to secede. The language of “rights” in this context means something done “rightfully” by the states under powers exercised as of right, rather than by the permission or grant of the federal authorities. Jefferson Davis wrote in the preface to The Rise and Fall of the Confederate Government that this was the right the Southern states fought to defend:

The object of this work has been from historical data to show that the Southern States had rightfully the power to withdraw from a Union into which they had, as sovereign communities, voluntarily entered; that the denial of that right was a violation of the letter and spirit of the compact between the States; and that the war waged by the Federal Government against the seceding States was in disregard of the limitations of the Constitution, and destructive of the principles of the Declaration of Independence.

Many libertarians are suspicious of the doctrine of states’ rights because it seems, on its face, to vest rights in the state as a collective entity. They reason that if all rights vest in individuals, then the state as a collective entity has no “rights.” This confusion is easily dispelled by recalling that the doctrine of states’ rights refers to the rights which sovereign states retained to themselves when forming the Union. As David Gordon explains, states retained “the right to do everything that free countries could do.” One might still ask, where do sovereign states, or countries, or nations, get their “rights”? In his article “Is Secession a Right?” Gordon traces the root of states’ right to the rights that vest in human beings:

Indeed, the right of secession follows at once from the basic rights defended by classical liberalism. As even Macaulay’s schoolboy knows, classical liberalism begins with the principle of self-ownership: each person is the rightful owner of his or her own body. Together with this right, according to classical liberals from Locke to Rothbard, goes the right to appropriate unowned property.

In this view, government occupies a strictly ancillary role. It exists to protect the rights that individuals possess independently — it is not the source of these rights. As the Declaration of Independence puts it, “to secure these rights [life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness], governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from consent of the governed.

Viewed in that light, the doctrine of states’ rights does not denote rights that vest inherently in the state, but rights that vest in the individuals who together have formed the state for the defense and protection of their liberty. As Clyde Wilson explains, individual liberty lies at the heart of states’ rights: “for Jefferson, individual liberty and state sovereignty were indivisible.” Lew Rockwell also expands on this point:

Some libertarians object to [the doctrine of states’ rights]. They point out that only individuals have rights, not states. That’s true, but states’ rights aren’t in conflict with individual rights. The President of the Mises Institute, the great Tom DiLorenzo, explains why not: “The idea of states’ rights is most closely associated with the political philosophy of Thomas Jefferson and his political heirs. Jefferson himself never entertained the idea that ‘states have rights,’ as some of the less educated critics of the idea have claimed. Of course ‘states’ don’t have rights. The essence of Jefferson’s idea is that if the people are to be the masters rather than the servants of their own government, then they must have some vehicle with which to control that government. That vehicle, in the Jeffersonian tradition, is political communities organized at the state and local level. That is how the people were to monitor, control, discipline, and even abolish, if need be, their own government.

How then did the doctrine of states’ rights come to be shrouded in confusion? Clyde Wilson identifies the reasons for this as largely political:

States rights has fallen into disuse not because it is unsound in history, in constitutional law, or in democratic theory. It remains highly persuasive on all these grounds to any honest mind. It has fallen into disuse because it presented the most powerful obstacle to the consolidation of irresponsible power—that “consolidation” which our forefathers decried as the greatest single threat to liberty.

For that reason states rights had to be covered under a blanket of lies and usurpations by those who thought they could rule us better than we can rule ourselves. At the most critical time, the War Between the States, it was suppressed by force and the American idea of consent of the governed was replaced by the European idea of obedience. But force can only settle questions of power, not of right.

The doctrine of states’ rights is not quashed by the fact that the Southern states, which fought to defend the right to secede, lost the war. Hence Wilson echoes the prophetic words of John C. Calhoun: “Without a full practical recognition of the rights and sovereignty of the States, our union and liberty must perish.”

Note: The views expressed on Mises.org are not necessarily those of the Mises Institute.

The post Understanding the Doctrine of States’ Rights appeared first on LewRockwell.

The Fed’s Beige Book shows a weakening economy

Please consider the Fed’s Beige Book for July 2025.

What is the Beige Book?

The Beige Book is a Federal Reserve System publication about current economic conditions across the 12 Federal Reserve Districts. It characterizes regional economic conditions and prospects based on a variety of mostly qualitative information, gathered directly from each District’s sources. Reports are published eight times per year.

What is the purpose of the Beige Book?

The Beige Book is intended to characterize the change in economic conditions since the last report. Outreach for the Beige Book is one of many ways the Federal Reserve System engages with businesses and other organizations about economic developments in their communities. Because this information is collected from a wide range of contacts through a variety of formal and informal methods, the Beige Book can complement other forms of regional information gathering. The Beige Book is not a commentary on the views of Federal Reserve officials.

By Fed Region

• Boston: Economic activity was flat or up slightly. Retail revenues decreased modestly, and tourism revenues edged lower, in part because of fewer visitors from Canada. Price increases were modest overall, although tariffs drove above-average price increases in a few cases. Home sales increased modestly. Hiring plans remained conservative amid a guardedly optimistic outlook.
• New York: Economic activity continued to decline modestly as heightened uncertainty hindered decision making. Employment was up slightly and wage growth was modest. Selling price increases remained moderate, while input prices rose steeply with widespread tariff-related cost increases.
• Philadelphia: Business activity continued to decline modestly in the current Beige Book period. Activity fell moderately for nonmanufacturers but edged up slightly for manufacturers. Employment declined slightly, while wages increased slightly. Prices rose modestly after moderate growth last period. Generally, firms expect slight growth over the next six months, although economic uncertainty remains.
• Cleveland: District business activity continued to be flat in recent weeks, but contacts expected activity to increase slightly in the months ahead. Several manufacturers reported softer orders, and transportation contacts reported a steep decline in demand. Contacts said that cost growth remained robust while their selling prices only increased modestly.
• Richmond: The regional economy grew moderately in recent weeks. Consumer spending on retail, leisure, and hospitality increased at a modest to moderate rate. Business conditions were largely unchanged as firms across most sectors reported steady sales and demand. However, manufacturing activity contracted slightly with firms citing higher prices curtailing demand in recent weeks. Employment rose modestly and price growth remained moderate this cycle.
• Atlanta: The economy of the Sixth District was little changed. Labor markets and wages were steady. Prices rose moderately. Consumer spending softened, but travel and tourism increased modestly. Residential and commercial real estate activity declined. Transportation activity grew modestly. Loan growth was flat. Manufacturing was flat, but energy activity rose moderately.
• Chicago: Economic activity increased slightly. Employment increased modestly; consumer spending, business spending, and construction and real estate activity were flat; manufacturing declined slightly; and nonbusiness contacts saw no change in activity. Prices rose moderately, wages rose modestly, and financial conditions loosened slightly. Prospects for 2025 farm income were unchanged.
• St. Louis Economic activity has remained unchanged. Employment levels were generally unchanged. Prices continued to increase moderately, and most contacts continued to expect higher nonlabor costs in the coming months as a result of tariffs. The outlook among contacts remains highly uncertain and slightly pessimistic.
• Minneapolis Economic activity was flat overall. Employment grew slightly and wage growth was moderate. Price growth eased but manufacturers felt more acute pressures. Overall consumer spending was down but tourism activity increased. Construction and energy activity decreased while manufacturing and vehicle sales were flat.
• Kansas City: Economic activity in the Tenth District was mostly unchanged, with some rebound in consumer spending and financial activities. Labor availability was reportedly much higher, which lowered expected wage pressures for the remainder of the year. Prices rose at a moderate pace.
• Dallas: Economic activity in the Eleventh District economy was up slightly over the reporting period. Nonfinancial services activity grew modestly, and manufacturing production held steady. Loan volumes expanded, while oil production was flat, retail sales declined, and the housing market weakened. Employment was unchanged and price pressures held steady. Outlooks remained pessimistic.
• San Francisco Economic activity was largely stable. Employment levels were slightly lower. Wages grew at a slight pace and prices increased modestly. Retail sales expanded modestly, and consumer and business services demand eased. Conditions in manufacturing, and residential real estate markets weakened somewhat. Lending activity and conditions in agriculture were largely unchanged.

Economy at Stall Speed

I count three Fed regions up, and a fourth if you count Boston listed as “flat or up slightly”. Richmond was the standout. The Richmond area grew “moderately.”

New York and Philadelphia declined “modestly”

Add it all up and you have an economy at stall speed.

This post originated on MishTalk.Com.

The post Only Three of 12 Fed Regions Are Growing, Two Slightly appeared first on LewRockwell.

For masterminding the “seditious coup” attempt known as the “Russia Hoax.”

The post Tulsi Gabbard Refers Obama to the DOJ for a Criminal Investigation appeared first on LewRockwell.

Thanks, John Frahm.

See here.

 

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The new Israeli government policy toward American Evangelical Christians.  Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee is reportedly hurt by how his people are being treated.

The post “Send Us Your Money, Send Us Your Weapons, But Don’t Send US Your Christian Tour Groups” appeared first on LewRockwell.

Prognostications From the Future?

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Ricordo a tutti i lettori che su Amazon potete acquistare il mio nuovo libro, “Il Grande Default”: https://www.amazon.it/dp/B0DJK1J4K9 

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 è una storia di cartelli, a livello sovrastatale e sovranazionale, la cui pianificazione centrale ha raggiunto un punto in cui deve essere riformata radicalmente e questa riforma radicale non può avvenire senza una dose di dolore economico che potrebbe mettere a repentaglio la loro autorità. Da qui la risposta al Grande Default attraverso il Grande Reset. Questa è la storia di un coyote, che quando non riesce a sfamarsi all'esterno ricorre all'autofagocitazione. Lo stesso è accaduto ai membri del G7, dove i sei membri restanti hanno iniziato a fagocitare il settimo: gli Stati Uniti.

____________________________________________________________________________________

da The Epoch Times

(Versione audio della traduzione disponibile qui: https://open.substack.com/pub/fsimoncelli/p/la-ricchezza-mineraria-della-groenlandia)

Taatsi Olsen sa cosa serve per iniziare la ricerca di minerali in Groenlandia.

In un magazzino alla periferia della capitale Nuuk, ha esaminato i dettagli dell'esplorazione mineraria in un Paese freddo e scarsamente popolato: attrezzi, imbracature e piccoli rimorchi trasportati in elicottero verso siti remoti, essenziali in un luogo dove non ci sono strade che collegano le città.

Olsen ha sottolineato che il modello di insediamento unico della Groenlandia, costituito da villaggi di pescatori isolati sparsi su centinaia di chilometri di isole rocciose e fiordi, può presentare dei vantaggi per i minatori.

“Se vi trovate in una zona remota, ci sono buone probabilità che ci sia un piccolo villaggio nelle vicinanze”, ha detto a The Epoch Times.

Olsen è direttore operativo di X-Ploration Services Greenland. L'azienda, che supporta l'esplorazione mineraria sull'isola, potrebbe prosperare se i giacimenti di terre rare del territorio danese si rivelassero una vera e propria manna.

Conosce bene le difficoltà del successo individuale. Olsen stima che solo uno su mille progetti esplorativi in Groenlandia dia origine a una miniera.

“È semplicemente difficile trovare qualcosa che abbia senso dal punto di vista economico”, ha affermato.

Il presidente Donald Trump ha citato le terre rare della Groenlandia, stimate in 1,5 milioni di tonnellate, come una delle ragioni principali per incorporare questo Paese negli Stati Uniti.

I minerali essenziali sono utilizzati in molte tecnologie avanzate, tra cui telefoni cellulari e sistemi di difesa. Il settore è attualmente dominato dalla Cina.

Per ora in Groenlandia sono operative solo due miniere, nessuna delle quali estrae terre rare.

Eppure l'attività mineraria non è una novità per la Groenlandia. Fa parte di una lunga storia che lega l'isola più grande del mondo alla Danimarca e agli Stati Uniti.

I sostenitori dell'estrazione delle terre rare sperano che possa contribuire all'indipendenza della Groenlandia. Molti cercano fonti di reddito aggiuntive in un territorio dominato dall'esportazione di prodotti ittici, dall'impiego pubblico e da una sovvenzione annuale forfaittaria dalla Danimarca.

“Dobbiamo rafforzare l'economia”, ha detto a The Epoch Times Svend Hardenberg, un groenlandese coinvolto negli sforzi per sviluppare l'estrazione delle terre rare.

Estrazione mineraria, passato e futuro

L'attività mineraria in Groenlandia ha radici che risalgono al 1720, quando un pastore luterano, Hans Egede, giunse in Groenlandia alla ricerca dei Vichinghi scomparsi dopo essersi stabiliti lì più di mille anni fa. Il pioniere danese-norvegese fondò una nuova colonia sull'isola. Pochi decenni dopo iniziò l'attività mineraria su piccola scala.

Un sito risalente al 1850, la miniera di criolite di Ivittuut, si è rivelato di vitale importanza nel XX secolo.

La criolite era necessaria per la produzione di alluminio e Ivittuut era l'unica fonte commerciale.

Durante la Seconda Guerra Mondiale Ivittuut si dimostrò cruciale per lo sforzo bellico alleato, tanto che gli Stati Uniti istituirono una base navale nelle vicinanze per proteggerla. Ancora oggi gli Stati Uniti mantengono una base militare nell'estremo nord di Pituffik.

L'estrazione di criolite a Ivittuut si esaurì con l'avvento della criolite sintetica e infine chiuse i battenti nel 1987. La base, allora danese, chiuse i battenti nel 2012. I cinesi tentarono di acquistare l'impianto abbandonato nel 2016, ma il governo danese glielo impedì.

Nel frattempo la società australiana Eclipse Metals ha acquisito una licenza per un sito che comprende l'ex-base e la miniera.

La promessa delle terre rare ha attirato l'attenzione anche sul progetto Tanbreez, un giacimento nei pressi della città di Narsaq, nella Groenlandia meridionale.

Nel 2024 i funzionari statunitensi fecero pressioni sull'azienda australiana Tanbreez Mining affinché negasse i permessi alle società legate alla Cina che cercavano di acquisirla.

A marzo la società di sviluppo minerario, Critical Metal Corp., ha stimato il valore dell'1% della roccia ospitante di Tanbreez a circa $3 miliardi.

La società, che detiene una quota di proprietà nel progetto, ha stretto una partnership per il progetto Tanbreez con GreenMet, un'azienda statunitense di minerali essenziali guidata da Drew Horn.

Horn ha dichiarato a The Epoch Times che Tanbreez ha suscitato l'interesse di una delegazione del settore privato da lui guidata. Il gruppo comprende dirigenti delle società minerarie Critical Metals Corp, American Renewable Metals, Refracture e Cogency Power.

Horn ha inoltre stretto una partnership con Hardenberg per un progetto di trattamento delle alghe, una sorta di operazione di proprietà statale sviluppata da Royal Greenland.

La guida turistica Pakkutannguaq Larsen ha affermato che, pur essendo favorevole all'indipendenza della Groenlandia, non è favorevole a un'ulteriore industria estrattiva.

“Vogliamo mantenere la natura così com'è”, ha dichiarato a The Epoch Times.

Olsen, il cui studio non è stato coinvolto in Tanbreez, ha affermato che l'attenzione di Trump verso il suo Paese d'origine ha alimentato sia entusiasmo che incertezza.

Le aziende statunitensi non si sono ancora messe in fila per collaborare con X-Ploration Services, specializzata in logistica, pianificazione e settori correlati.

“La maggior parte dei nostri clienti sono canadesi”, ha aggiunto Olsen.

Nikoline Ziemer, una biologa coinvolta nel progetto sulle alghe marine della Royal Greenland, ha affermato di sperare che il governo groenlandese non ritiri le licenze come ha fatto in passato.

“Dobbiamo avere una politica stabile in merito, perché ciò danneggia la credibilità della Groenlandia come potenziale fonte di estrazione mineraria”, ha affermato.

Nel 2021 il Paese ha revocato a un'azienda cinese la licenza per l'estrazione di ferro. Nello stesso anno il territorio ha smesso di offrire nuove licenze per l'esplorazione petrolifera.

Olsen ha affermato di ritenere che il governo groenlandese, ora sotto una guida diversa, potrebbe cambiare rotta su quest'ultima decisione.

Un'economia dipendente

Olsen, Hardenberg, Ziemer e Larsen non sono anomalie.

Quasi tutti i groenlandesi intervistati da The Epoch Times intravedono all'orizzonte una richiesta di indipendenza dalla Danimarca, sebbene i tempi siano incerti dopo le elezioni di marzo. L'indipendenza potrebbe anche aiutare i groenlandesi a stringere legami più stretti con gli Stati Uniti, se lo desiderassero.

Hardenberg ha affermato che le terre rare rappresentano uno dei mezzi per far avanzare il territorio verso una maggiore autonomia.

Ziemer concorda. Parlando a titolo personale, e non per Royal Greenland, ha affermato che la dipendenza del territorio dalla pesca “non è un modello economico sostenibile”.

Oggi gamberetti e pesce costituiscono oltre il 90% delle esportazioni del territorio. Più della metà del bilancio del governo groenlandese e un quinto del prodotto interno lordo della Groenlandia provengono dal governo danese. La Groenlandia riceve inoltre un contributo annuale a fondo perduto dalla Danimarca, pari a circa $500 milioni.

Questa concessione potrebbe intaccare le entrate minerarie per l'amministrazione locale. Se la Groenlandia generasse entrate superiori a 75 milioni di corone danesi (circa $11,3 milioni), metà di queste commissioni andrebbe a compensare la sopraccitata concessione.

Il settore pubblico ha un'influenza enorme sull'isola: i dipendenti pubblici rappresentano il 42% dell'occupazione, rispetto al 28% in Danimarca e al 13,4% negli Stati Uniti.

Hardenberg, che in passato ha ricoperto un incarico governativo, ha affermato di ritenere che la Groenlandia sarebbe più dinamica se “liberasse più persone dal settore pubblico per dedicarle a lavori più produttivi”.

Non tutte le attività legate al settore minerario si tradurranno in lavoro per la gente del posto.

Olsen ha affermato che la piccola popolazione della Groenlandia (meno di 60.000 persone) implica che l'esplorazione mineraria debba attingere a qualche talento straniero.

“Non ci sono molti geologi ed esperti [qui]”, ha detto.

Ha affermato che se l'attività mineraria passerà dall'esplorazione allo sfruttamento, ci saranno più posti di lavoro per i lavoratori groenlandesi.

A terra

A Nuuk, dove vivono circa 20.000 persone, il quadro economico appare eterogeneo.

Mentre alcune strade sono fiancheggiate da quartieri residenziali fatiscenti, altre brillano per le nuove costruzioni.

In città un aeroporto internazionale ospiterà presto voli della Scandinavian Airlines e della United Airlines, alimentando le speranze di turismo.

In un “Fight Club” finanziato dal governo, dove i giovani pugili si allenano davanti a una folla festante, Ethan Ingholt ha raccontato a The Epoch Times di essere arrivato a Nuuk dalla Danimarca.

In Danimarca lavorava come arboricoltore; ora, in una terra senza alberi, è direttore dei lavori.

“Se si è disposti a lavorare, il lavoro lo si trova sempre”, ha detto.

Inunnguaq Korneliussen, uno studente presente all'evento, ha dichiarato a The Epoch Times che l'economia “sta andando abbastanza bene in questo momento”, ma “è in continuo peggioramento”. Ha citato l'aumento dei prezzi dei generi alimentari.

A poche strade di distanza, Jens Smith vende pesce in una bancarella del mercato. Un prodotto molto popolare sono le uova di lompo, una prelibatezza simile al caviale di storione.

Mentre Smith parlava, un uomo è entrato e ha acquistato due sacchi di uova.

Smith ha dichiarato a The Epoch Times che molti clienti rivendono i suoi prodotti in Danimarca, dove i frutti di mare della Groenlandia possono essere venduti a prezzi elevati.

Ha detto che l'inverno è stato duro per la pesca.

“L'acqua è troppo fredda adesso”, ha affermato.

Larsen, contraria all'attività mineraria, ha dichiarato di sperare di aprire una propria agenzia di viaggi. Ha affermato che il turismo potrebbe aiutare la Groenlandia a seguire la propria strada, come accaduto con l'Islanda.

Ex-territorio danese divenuto indipendente, l'Islanda, un Paese con meno di 400.000 abitanti, ha attirato quasi 2,3 milioni di visitatori con pernottamento nel 2024, secondo l'Ente per il turismo islandese.

La Groenlandia, che dipende in larga parte dal turismo basato sulle crociere, ha accolto 76.477 crocieristi nel 2023, un numero record e il 640% in più rispetto al 2019, l'anno migliore precedente.

Hardenberg ha affermato che le recenti elezioni hanno rivelato un punto in comune in tutta la Groenlandia: “Tutti concordano sul fatto che dobbiamo creare il nostro futuro. Dobbiamo dirigere e controllare il nostro destino”.

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

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The post Rebel Capitalist Interview With Robert Barnes – Real EPSTEIN COVER UP Story Too Dangerous For The Public To Hear appeared first on LewRockwell.

Price inflation is moving up again, in spite of President Trump’s repeated (and false) claims that prices are falling. The media isn’t right either, though, since much of the media consensus about June’s stubbornly high price inflation trend is that it was caused by tariffs. Tariffs however, are not inflationary. The price inflation we now see is the continued legacy of the monetary inflation of Trump-Biden efforts to embrace huge deficits and pressure the Federal Reserve to push interest rates downward with easy-money policies.

According to the latest price inflation data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the consumer price index rose 2.7 percent year over year, and 0.3 percent month over month. That’s the largest year-over-year increase in four months, and the largest month-to-month increase since January 2025. June’s CPI increase also places CPI growth above of CPI growth rates experienced during September of last year. At that time, Fed Chairman Jerome Powell had declared that price inflation was rapidly moving back toward the Fed’s two-percent target. Nine months later, we can see the Fed’s forecasters were clearly wrong, as the CPI has increased by 2.1 percent in that period.

We find a similar trend if we look at so-called “core CPI” which removes volatile food and energy prices. Core CPI also hit a four-month high in June, measured year-over year. Measured month-to-month, core CPI hit a five month high in June.

Put into larger perspective, we find that ongoing price inflation continues to ensure that real wages have stagnated for years. For example, since January 2021, average hourly earnings have increased by 21 percent. During that same period, however, CPI inflation has increased by nearly 22 and a half percent. Put another way, the average hourly earnings increased from $29.92 from January 2021 to $36.30 in June 2025. In real, inflation-adjusted terms, however, average hourly earnings fell from $29.92 to $29.65 during that same period. Wages simply have not been keeping up with price increases.

In its comments on June’s CPI report, however, the Trump White House stated in a press release that “prices for everyday Americans continue to fall” and crows that core inflation “beat expectations.” First of all, “beating expectations” does not mean price inflation has improved. To “beat expectation” means simply to come in slightly less bad than what forecasters who were expecting. “Beating expectation” is something that investors follow, but the concept is irrelevant to the real economy. Moreover, it is absolutely not the case that prices “continue to fall” as the White House claims. Naturally, the White House public relations workers point to the few places in the report that show falling month-to-month prices, specifically, new and used vehicles. Virtually all other categories—including shelter, medical care, food, and energy, showed rising prices over the period, however. Year over year, shelter prices were up 3.6 percent, medical care was up 3.4 percent, and food was up 3 percent. This is not an economy in which basic expenses are becoming more affordable.

(Moreover, CPI core inflation has now been above the Fed’s two-percent target for 51 months. CPI has been above the target for 52 months. PCE, the Fed’s favored measure of price inflation, has been above the target for 51 months.)

In media coverage of the report and rising prices, most outlets take the position that rising prices are explained by new tariffs imposed by the administration. While it is true that tariffs will indeed increase prices in areas most directly impacted by tariffs, this is not “inflation” in the strict sense. The conventional definition of price inflation is that it is a general increase in prices. Tariffs—which are taxes—do not cause a general increase in prices because, in the absence of monetary inflation, rising prices in some areas will lead to falling prices in other areas.

For example, steel tariffs will indeed cause the price of steel to go up because the tariff will limit the supply of steel at the former non-tariffed price. Assuming that the demand for steel remains the same, the steel tariff will cause prices to rise. Unless the supply of money goes up, though, rising steel prices will leave less money available to purchase other goods, so prices in other areas will go down. Thus, the tariff by itself will not cause a general increase in prices. It will only cause prices to go up in some areas and down in others.

So, it is not accurate to say that tariffs cause inflation in any precise sense. We can only say that tariffs cause rising prices in some areas—assuming stable demand. Indeed we could argue that tariffs are deflationary in many cases because they raise the prices of important inputs for domestic production and thus force down labor demand and wages. Overall demand will then fall, and there will be deflation. This doesn’t mean tariffs improve the economic situation, of course. Tariffs are simply sales taxes on goods Americans wish to buy, and like all taxes, tariffs choke demand by leaving Americans will less disposable income.

If we wish to find the real cause of general price inflation, we need look no further than the monetary inflation that continues to be baked into the US economy. The US economy is still dogged by the more-than-five-trillion dollars that was created as a result of the Fed’s covid-era inflationist policies. This massive infusion of new money will continue to show up in unpredictable ways.

Notably, the bond markets today have signaled that bond investors are not convinced that price inflation is “solved,” regardless of what the Trump administration might claim. Noting that price inflation is likely to persist into the foreseeable future, longer bond yields surged in the wake of the CPI inflation report’s release, with the 30-year yield surging to over five percent by midday on Tuesday. The ten-year yield—which is key in setting mortgage rates—responded to the CPI report by rising from 4.4 percent to 4.48 percent.

According to MarketWatch today:

The U.S. bond market was in the process of selling off on Tuesday in a manner that tends to spell fresh trouble for many stock investors.

The selloff in Treasurys sent the yield on the 30-year bond above 5% and on its way toward its highest closing level since May. Back in May, the 30-year yield’s rise above 5% was accompanied by worries about the U.S.’s fiscal outlook. By contrast, Tuesday’s moves were largely about the outlook for inflation after June data showed consumer prices rose by the most on a monthly basis since the beginning of the year.

Note: The views expressed on Mises.org are not necessarily those of the Mises Institute.

The post Price Inflation Rose in June to a Five Month High—But Don’t Blame Tariffs appeared first on LewRockwell.

Former British prime minister Liz Truss describes Britain, as I describe the United States, as a country ruled by an establishment that is stronger than the elected leader.  The brief interview with Truss is enlightening. 

Clearly Britain is no longer a free country.  It is not even a country in which ethnic British can complain about the lawlessness they suffer at the hands of immigrant invaders.

Here is the recent prime minister’s description of Great Britain:

“What has happened is an orthodoxy has taken over British institutions in the same way as it has taken over European institutions. That orthodoxy believes in mass migration, multiculturalism, toleration of Islamism. We have seen appalling coverups of grooming gangs in Britain with girls as young as 12  being systematically raped and no national inquiry. It’s been covered up. There is a group of people who have essentially taken over our institutions with a particular world view and they don’t want to be challenged, which is why we’re seeing free speech being suppressed because they don’t want people to know just how badly wrong it is going. I think all of these problems are connected. 

“So, mass migration is putting pressure on housing costs which means that Brits are not able to start a family. They are not able to buy a home because it is too expensive. That is creating a population crisis which then creates the demand for more migration. You’ve also got a left-wing ideology in terms of things like net zero which is making British energy very expensive. So, our energy costs in Britain are four times what they are in the United States. All of these things are compounded and people feel that things are getting worse and they cannot even say what is wrong. They can’t even complain about the grooming gangs or speak out about what happened in Southport because they are literally fearful of getting arrested.

“A similar thing has happened in Britain that also happened in the United States: The deep state, the unelected bureaucracy accumulated a lot of power, particularly under Tony Blair. He gave more power to judges; more power to so-called independent bodies. Those bodies have now been captured by woke ideology, by Islamic extreme Islamism, by a sort of multicultural human rights lobby. They said, ‘We don’t really care if you are British or Afghani, you have got the same rights in Britain.’ The British public do not agree with that. They believe that if you are British, those are the people the government should be prioritizing. So, all of that must be changed.

“The way to change it is to do what President Trump is doing in the United States. Win an election. What you have to do is first of all, restore justice and accountability to our justice system. At present, we have a two-tier system where if you tweet something, you could be put in jail, but if you’re found abusing children, you might not be put in jail.

“We have got a major problem with mass immigration, a major problem with de-industrialization, with stagnation. People’s incomes aren’t going up. Things are getting worse. But we have a very powerful establishment that doesn’t want the radical change that our country needs. So, it is a very serious situation we’re in at a very severe level. I believe unless there is change in the next few years, it could become irreversible.”

Dear Readers, We have the same situation in the United States.  Trump is finding it as hard to move against the establishment as PM Truss did in Britain.  Russiagate has been discredited, but now the establishment is coming for Trump with the Epstein documents.

Democracy only works when the people are motivated to be informed.  An insouciant people always succumb to tyranny.  

The post Freedom No Longer Characterizes the Western World appeared first on LewRockwell.

Richard Dawkins once quipped, “It is absolutely safe to say that if you meet somebody who claims not to believe in evolution, that person is ignorant, stupid—or insane or wicked, but I’d rather not consider that.”

The seed of that sentiment was planted 100 years ago in July 1925, when John T. Scopes was tried and convicted in Dayton, Tennessee, for teaching evolution in public schools in violation of the state’s Butler Act. The media coverage of the trial—coupled with Inherit the Wind, a 1960 Hollywood film depicting religion as an enemy of open inquiry, helped establish belief in evolution as a litmus test for sorting out science-deniers from the smart set.

In 2008, that test was put to 10 Republican presidential candidates in a debate when the moderator asked, “How many of you don’t believe in evolution?” Without any clarification of the term and restricted to respond with a simple show of hands, three of the hopefuls “failed.” However, their response revealed nothing of the candidates’ true attitudes about evolution, much less science. That’s because “evolution” spans a range of origin-of-life theories, a fact acknowledged by the late John Paul II in a 1996 address to the Pontifical Academy of Sciences.

Like the debate moderator, JPII didn’t define the term but called evolution “more than a hypothesis,” adding

…rather than the theory of evolution, we should speak of several theories of evolution. On the one hand, this plurality has to do with the different explanations advanced for the mechanism of evolution, and on the other, with the various philosophies on which it is based.

Those “several theories” are reflected in public attitudes.

In February 2025, the Pew Research Center reported that 80 percent of U.S. adults believe in evolution: 33 percent believing that God had no role in it and 47 percent believing that God or a “higher power” allowed it or guided it; only 17 percent discount evolution altogether. The PRC also found that over 75 percent of Protestants and Catholics accept some form of evolutionary theory, contradicting the modern view of religious belief as a science-stopper.

One form of the theory is the “macroevolution” of Darwinism—that is, the non-intelligent, non-teleological mechanism of random variation, adaptation, and natural selection, whereby new and increasingly complex organisms gradually emerge from a simple primordial life form. As to how “matter went live” in the first place to create something to evolve, well, that’s yet to be worked out.

Another form is “microevolution:” limited, small-scale changes in life forms adapting to environmental stresses through a process of genetic variation and inheritance. Microevolution explains why dogs, for example, even after millennia of intelligent intervention (dog breeding), are distinguishable from other life forms by their unique gene pool.

Imagine, after a century and a half of scientific “evidence” since the publication of Darwin’s theory and a century of inclusion in educational curricula since Scopes, mud-to-man Darwinian evolution is supported by scarcely one-third of adults. You might chalk that up to the lack of transitional forms in the fossil record, the failure to empirically demonstrate the evolution of a one-celled organism into a two-celled one, or religious fundamentalism and science skepticism. Or maybe it is because of something more devastating.

In 1996, Bill Gates and a team of software engineers analyzed the chemical sequences of DNA and came away remarking, “Human DNA is like a computer program but far, far more advanced than any software we’ve ever created.” Let that sink in for a moment.

If the most highly evolved thing on the planet, the human mind—using the collective imagination, creativity, and cognitive power of the brightest software engineers in the world—is unable to re-create the programming in DNA, then to conjecture it could have been cobbled together from a trial-and-error process of random variation and adaptation is nothing short of stupefying.

What we know, empirically, is that every computer code is the product of intelligence. So, if a code, or anything else, exhibits complexity far beyond the competency of human intelligence, the most reasonable assumption is a super intelligent origin. That’s the proposition of “intelligent design” (ID), an origin-of-life theory that aligns closest to the belief of up to two-thirds of adults, including the scientifically informed.

In a book review on Darwinism, evolution popularist Daniel Dennett lamented: “I was disconcerted to overhear some medical students talking in a bar recently. One exclaimed: ‘How could anybody believe in evolution after learning about the intricacies of the DNA replication machinery?’” When a scientific theory is rejected by scientifically trained individuals, that’s bad, very bad, and Dennett knows it. (I’ll bet he had another drink, or two, before leaving the bar that night.)

Read the Whole Article

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George Carlin once cleverly noted, “That’s why they call it the American Dream- because you have to be asleep to believe it.” By the time he said that, it was a bleak but mostly true observation. But from the end of World War II, until the early 2000s, the American Dream was at least possible for most people to achieve.

I came from a lower middle-class family. No one graduated from college, and a few didn’t finish high school. I was born with bold fantasies, but little practical ambition. Clearly, I could have made a lot more money than I did. But I still managed to luck into a lovely version of the American Dream; loyal wife, a wonderful son and daughter, and a nice sized single family home in a very quiet neighborhood. And, of course, after I hit fifty, the sudden and unexpected fruition of my wildest dreams of becoming a published author. Ten books later, I realize just how fortunate I’ve been. I did little to deserve all the blessings I have. I’m sure I consistently fall short of being grateful enough for it all. But I can’t stop thinking of all those who didn’t have my luck. Who didn’t achieve the American Dream in any way, shape, or form. Now, things have deteriorated to such an extent that very few can hope to achieve it.

The American dream, as popularly expressed by politicians and media during the 1940s-1950s, meant owning your own home. Preferably with that white picket fence. A garden to tend to. A yard to mow, with no illegals around yet to do it. A faithful wife, who loved to cook for you, and didn’t mind housework. Who wanted as many children as you did. The larger the family the better. This Dream was much easier to achieve in the immediate postwar era. The girls would line up to marry you if you had served in the “good war.” It was kind of like being a doctor. And your job prospects were brighter as well, especially if you had won a medal or two. Every company liked to hire veterans. They were still everywhere you looked when I entered the workforce in the mid-1970s. Every one of those old timers I talked to had clearly experienced the American Dream. I don’t think I met any without a wife, kids, and a nice home.

So I understand the bitterness that many Millennials and Gen Zers feel toward the Boomers. We- especially the Boomers who are a decade or so older than me- were definitely the Luckiest Generation. We could pay for much more reasonable college tuition by working at a fast food place. Well, not me- as I’ve related far too many times, I was a community college dropout. Just about every job paid a living wage after World War II, up until maybe the early 1980s. Upward mobility was more possible than it ever had been before. It’s obviously very rare now. Unions were strong, and triggered higher wages, nicer benefits, and decent pensions. Even at non- union workplaces which wanted to be competitive. I knew a guy who was a cashier at Safeway in the early ‘80s. He was making $17 an hour, which translates to about $112,000 in today’s money. That same job at the same company pays less than $17 an hour to start. Today. Food prices in the ‘80s were much lower. Make that make sense.

Retired Boomers think the workplace is still the same as when they were seeking a job in the 1970s. Then, you really could walk into a place and be hired on the spot. Now, you have to apply online, take pointless tests, and compete often with hundreds of other applicants. For starting pay that won’t be enough for you live independently anywhere in this country. They think fast food jobs are for teenagers. Which they used to be. They seem oblivious to the impact from decades of outsourcing, disastrous trade deals, massive immigration and foreign visa workers. This is not your World War II veteran’s America any more. Trump’s accurate analysis of our trade policies attracted many to him. Tariffs are needed, but in typical Trump fashion, he’s doing things backward; domestic industry must be restored first, so there is some competition for foreign imports. I don’t see any new factories being built.

The destruction of the American Dream is reflected everywhere around us. The crumbling infrastructure, crying out for attention like a starving Palestinian. The rise in obesity, chronic illness, and slovenliness. “Smart” phones, which have helped to destroy eye to eye communication. Dwindling marriage rates and plummeting birth rates, especially for young Whites. Every poll shows that a clear majority of young girls have no interest in becoming mothers. This is a pure recipe for extinction. Dysfunctional families are the norm now. We have a loneliness phenomenon, which I wrote about and have pinned at the top of my Substack page. You can’t live the American Dream alone. It’s not the American Dream without a spouse and children, and a nice house in the suburbs, with or without a picket fence. I desperately want my children to experience an even better version of the American Dream than I have. But being realistic, I fear that just may not be possible.

None of this happened naturally. We didn’t “evolve” to a point where females no longer want to be feminine, and males have turned into submissive soy boys. Males didn’t lose their levels of testosterone because of nonsense like “Climate Change.” Females didn’t abruptly lose the maternal instinct because they became enlightened. Our odious culture was responsible for all of it. Beginning in the 1950s, when teenagers were conditioned to hate their parents for no reason, as represented in films like Rebel Without a Cause, and the best-selling book Catcher in the Rye, and television shows went from promoting unrealistic but socially desirable family harmony, to flooding the airwaves with single mothers, and fractured families where the children disrespected the parents, and the father figure went from Ward Cleaver to Al Bundy. Men were depicted as weak idiots. Housework and motherhood were discouraged. Cats and dogs were portrayed as apt replacements for that nagging maternal instinct.

As I detailed in my book Bullyocracy, there is evidence that teenagers were “invented” in the 1950s, as a hot new demographic to exploit. All those great films from the ‘50s directly targeted them; I was a Teenage Werewolf, Teenagers From Outer Space, etc. And the films increasingly portrayed a friction between parents and their pubescent children that doesn’t seem to have existed before. Somehow, I can’t picture teenage angst on the prairie. Do we really think Colonial era teenagers rolled their eyes at their parents, and screeched, “You just don’t understand me!” Family farms were the norm in this country for a very long time. They couldn’t have been productive with that kind of nonsensical bickering between parents and kids. Virtually all young people had the same goal; to meet the boy or girl of their dreams, get married and fruitfully multiply, and live happily ever after. Now a young woman gets cats and immerses herself in work. Young men satisfy themselves with video games and porn.

It wouldn’t have been possible to destroy the family unit, which is the foundation of the American Dream, without focusing on the fairer sex. Until the 1960s, men had little chance of being a “player,” and bedding different women. Females were raised to be “good girls,” and most of them were. Some slipped up a bit, but a “shotgun wedding” quickly ensued, and the American Dream could still be accomplished. Men aren’t naturally monogamous. Women were. That’s been altered through conditioning. By itself, feminism changed the landscape. In one fell swoop, women learned they didn’t need to be chained to their kitchens, and young girls discovered that you didn’t have to wait for marriage to have sex. This seemed a great victory for the young men of that era, but it opened the door to no fault divorces, latch key kids, and widespread abortions. Sex without deep feelings results in sex with dire consequences. By the 1980s, few brides and grooms were sexual strangers before their honeymoons.

The counterculture was antiwar. Well, at least the Vietnam War. Which was a good thing. But the hippies were also anti-nuclear family. Their American Dream was far different from the traditional one. More than a half century later, the American Dream has turned into a real nightmare for most people. Employees aren’t being paid enough, if they can even get a job, to pay rent on a small apartment, let alone buy a starter home. Middle-aged and older workers have been the victims of unspoken discrimination, and experienced layoffs and outsourcing. Many who formerly made a nice salary have been relegated to jobs like grocery store cashiers. Which now doesn’t pay enough to live independently. In the 1980s, the same job paid enough to qualify you to purchase a nice home. Reagan’s clash with the Air Traffic Controllers was the first blow to the power of unions. Big Labor is dead as a political force now. No Democrat courts them, as they once did the powerful George Meanys of the world.

The conservative response to the death of the American Dream is to deny that it’s dead. Because, of course, it isn’t dead for anyone in the fortunate top twenty percent of the population. This is the new managerial class, the ones who run the mess. They’ll call you snowflake, and advise you to become an entrepreneur. 90 percent of small businesses fold within a year or something, but conservatives act like it’s easy to start your own business in America 2.0. If over 70 percent of the public can’t save $500, how are they going to handle the startup costs? And we can’t all be small business owners. Someone has to do the grunt work. Both parties love to wax rhapsodic over “small business,” when they permitted untold numbers of small business owners to be decimated by the senseless COVID shutdown. In reality, both sides love cheap labor. Low wages, no benefits, and illegal immigrants, baby!

Financially, the American Dream was killed by an unprecedented consolidation of wealth, in the hands of fewer and fewer oligarchs. You can’t have a First World economy, let alone an American Dream, when the bottom half of your population has less than one percent of the total wealth collectively. Even if we started manufacturing things again, you’d have to pay those 150 million or more Americans much higher wages, if you want them to buy your new products. The billionaires have their gated, palatial estates. An increasing number of Americans are living in tents on the streets, where they now also freely defecate. And no one hurries to clean it up. Somehow, I don’t think that was ever intended to be a part of the American Dream. And it’s all happening in full view of tyrannical masters who watch our every move on security cameras. But aren’t proactive in the least about this glaring disparity of wealth.

Decades ago, it could be fairly said that if you found yourself homeless, it was because you didn’t want to work. That certainly isn’t the case now. Most polls claim that at least 10 percent of the homeless work, most of them full time. One of the best things Bernie Sanders ever said was that no one should be homeless when they’re working full time. The cost of housing, the cost of food, the cost of transportation, all contribute to this. Many blue collar workers have to Uber, thereby losing perhaps half their daily pay to transportation, because of the increased cost of automobiles. At jobs that don’t pay enough to live on your own to begin with. Another mainstream answer is to push the new minimalist nonsense, where young people can enjoy living in tiny boxes. That may be the Chinese reality, but it’s surely not the American Dream. As I’ve said many times- put the preschoolers in charge, and they’d do a much better job.

Read the Whole Article

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“We’re going to win so much, you’re going to get tired of winning…I’ve always won, and I’m going to continue to win. And that’s the way it is.” – Pres. Donald J. Trump (note: fiat money-created inflation makes super billionaire winners at the expense of everyone else)

“Deflation creates a great number of losers…but also many winners…and (especially) punishes political entrepreneurs who thrived on their intimate connections and those who control the production of fiat money” – Jorg Guido Hulsmann, Deflation and Liberty (Von Mises Institute) p. 28.

In his definitive 1966 book on the world’s power structure, Tragedy and Hope: A History of the World in Our Time, historian Carroll Quigley discusses the suppressed concept of global monopoly Capitalism and the parasitical fiat money system that is used as a scapegoat for the rise of authoritarian, militaristic fascism and unnecessary wars: the “Deflationary Gap”. Quigley emphasizes that the Deflationary Gap is the “key to the twentieth century economic crisis and one of the three central cores of the whole tragedy of the twentieth century” economics (i.e., “innovation, savings and investment”) p. 546.

In his book Grand Deception (2018), commodities economist Alex Krainer defines Deflationary Gap as an imbalance in the economy where there is a surplus of goods because of dearth of money supply for consumption of goods due to retention of household savings such as for retirement plans.

Fascist “austerity” policies during economic contraction are thus designed to reduce government spending from crowding out capital for unsold goods and services, curiously except for money spent on wars (see Clara Mattei: The Capital Order: Austerity as a Way to Fascism, 2022).  Deflation means prices are falling, often below the price a producer can recover his costs and make a profit.

The Deflationary Gap can be reduced by lowering supply, by increasing demand and/or by increasing natural resources and hard assets to serve as collateral for fractional interest lending. This last option can be accomplished by piracy wars to exploit natural resources of other countries by regime takeovers via color revolutions and getting mercenary proxy nations to fight banker’s wars for them (e.g., Israel vs. Gaza Palestinians and Ukraine as US proxy versus Russia on behalf of London Bank and the New York Federal Reserve Bank). All world wars since 1900 have been proxy wars fought by mercenary nations for the bank of London (see B. Woolfolk, Great Red Dragon, or London Money Power, 1890 and E.C. Knuth, The Empire of the City: The Secret History of British Financial Power, 1944).

Manifestations of the Fascist austerity policy to reduce the Deflationary Gap beginning in 2020 were:

• Corporate medicine suddenly morphed into a mass depopulation industry by vaccinations, quarantines, overkill drug dosages as the standard of care, continued medieval cancer treatments of debulking surgeries and chemotherapy with effectually zero cure rate, and deadly acute hospital care of anyone with any kind of respiratory issue (but stemming from root cause of autointoxication by sepsis blood poisoning from waste buildup – i.e., constipation from insoluble fiber that interferes with calcium metabolism).
• Mysterious fires of food processing plants serving luxury food markets disguised as accidents so that corporate agriculture could collect insurance before they eventually faced bankruptcy from the coming depression/recession.
• Militant Antifa, BLM mobs carried out riots, arson, and vandalism of minority-owned small business district in “Blue” cities with legal impunity, funded by 25 Silicon Valley corporations and scofflaw George Soros to capture the customer base of small businesses concurrently with COVID lockdowns of small businesses.
• Religious-based NGOs were funded by Soros and former presidents Bush and Obama to fund relocation of millions of South American un-naturalized, unskilled migrants to provide a cheap labor pool especially for apartment builders in California (displacing skilled American workers). But the apparent trick of fascism is to portray it as an organic worker’s revolt and insurrection, just as elitist-benefitting Communism was mis-portrayed as a proletarian movement.
• Under fascism a policy of privatization was also adopted to transfer wealth from the working class to new privateers to compete with socialized global Chinese corporations of the Communist Party. Ergo the public-private partnerships in the US such as Space X replacing NASA, electronic mail, Fed Ex, UPS, unconstitutionally replacing the post office, Amazon e-commerce replacing the mom-and-pop-stores and local niche businesses by selective COVID lockdowns targeted at small businesses.
• Government austerity was selectively targeted to reduce or eliminate non-essential jobs program bureaucracies such as the federal Education Department, EPA, FEMA and the infamous congressional USAID programs.
• Social Security and Medicare were adjusted upward for politically induced hyperinflation but with the proviso the entire programs would be phased out around 2035. Immigrants are being banned from using these programs, including hospital birthing and citizenship.
• However, Defense Department funding was increased to continue supporting regime changes and unnecessary wars in the Middle East designed to capture the natural resources of foreign countries, so that globalist London banks would have sufficient hard assets to continue collateralizing usurious fractional lending. Afghanistan was abandoned abruptly by the Biden administration to fight wars in Gaza and Ukraine. The US left behind an enormous amount of war equipment. Now it comes to light that the London bank possibly wants to use Afghani troops to fight insurrections in Britain and elsewhere. There was a method to the Afghanistan madness and, like everything else, it leads back to London.

Effectually, in 2020 the COVID crisis served as legitimate government cover for fascist economic civil war waged on the Working Class and Small Business Class by banking and the luxury high-tech industries. This was effectually an undeclared mass regulatory taking of private property to benefit private interests without paying just compensation to those plundered for their losses as provided under the Fifth Amendment to the Constitution.

Amazon made no profit in its early years but now makes a profit mainly by replacing goods and services of small and medium size small businesses with layers of luxury services. Cheaper kinetic-analogue retail services were replaced by more expensive e-commerce, web services, web advertising, surveillance capitalism, mass home drone delivery, etc. Consequently, the concept of Market Value shifted from the lowest priced product in a competitive open transactional market in contrast to the highest price good to benefit the digital middlemen and Silicon Valley oligarchs in a rigged monopoly market.

This is especially seen in non-market goods such as mandated rooftop solar power and e-vehicles that require massive tax subsidies to enrich stock-owning oligarchs. The so-called air quality health dividend from solar power is fraudulent as only California has topographical smog traps. Concurrent with the shift to solar and wind power, in California asthma rates have not declined, lung cancer rates have declined but due to fewer smokers, TB is a bacterial disease spread through intimate contact, and Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease (COPD) is related to poverty not air quality. In California, smog is mainly a blight on the tourist industry. Income inequality also soared during the COVID crisis as the number of billionaires and Knowledge-Class jobs grew at the expense of the Working Class and small business.

But as of 2025 both London banks and Israel are about to fail as the Ponzi banking scheme they imposed on the entire world after WWII is crashing, leaving the US with a ginormous $31+ trillion debt for unnecessary wars that furthered no interests of the American people (Iraq War I, Iraq War II, 9/11 War on Terror, Afghanistan, Gaza, and Ukraine wars). Moreover, former HUD official Catherine Austin Fitts has revealed audits showing $21 trillion was stolen from the US Department of Defense Budget over a 15-year period and apparently diverted to the London banking system and spread to offshore tax havens. Included was a raid on the giant Cal-PERS retirement system which is only 75% funded. London bankers have been parasitically skimming 3% to 15% fees for international money exchange transfers since the end of WWII and the Bretton-Woods System.

Moreover, the London Bankers want to be paid back for the American artificial inflationary fiat money debt accrued from their unnecessary wars. Money deflation offers the prospect of freedom from London debt oppression (see Jorg Guido Hulsmann, Deflation and Liberty, Mises Institute, 2008, and Fox King, Cleanse Society of Governmental Parasites Through Monetary Deflation, 2025). “Bad” inflationary money has driven out “good” labor-based money, but the lenders of the bad money want paid back in sound money.  And the US Congress is willing to oblige them apparently partly through the passage of the Genius Act (aka Stable Coin Act) and a legislative system of bribery. The Genius Act will continue funding the national annual budget deficits to fill the gap of Japan and China no longer buying US T-bills to finance that debt. Stable Coins do nothing to stop out of control government fiscal profligacy or fighting more banker’s wars.

However, government combining bitcoins and artificial intelligence system to pay down the national debt potentially abrogates privacy provisions under the Constitution. Stable Coins have alarmed conservatives Catherine Austin Fitts, Mike Adams of Brighteon.com and the La Rouche Organizationas fraud and the potential start of a totalitarian surveillance system. Fitts says Trump was put in the presidency by the Silicon Valley AI lobby and can’t be depended on to bring about proper reforms.

However, Austrian economist Tom Luongo says Stable Coin under the Genius Act is not necessarily or principally designed for use by citizens but mainly by banks through a block chain to circumvent the charges of the intermediary London exchange bank and the requirement of banks to hold double reserves. This would free up a bank’s balance sheet to issue more loans and at a lower interest rate. Luongo says Pres. Trump’s advocacy of Stable Coin is an “ingenious system” that cuts out the central bank middleman.

Luongo says the old system was like buying dinner on your credit card at 21% interest every night without having any income, but having to put up 200% collateral of your car and home, as opposed to borrowing from the Fed Reserve at 4% under the new system with no collateral because Stable Coin will be backed by Treasury Bills, bitcoin, gold, etc. Mortgages under the new stabler Stable Coin system can also be underwritten with bitcoin and gold as well as savings.

This would reverse the old system of buying cheap imported goods and being left with debt with a new system that we will eventually be producing our own goods with debt backed by gold and stabilized bitcoin with debt we owe ourselves. But a Stable Coin system is no panacea as it would still be inflationary and would continue to fund unnecessary and illegitimate wars.

Alex Krainer says that despite Pres. Trump’s bombastic misdirection style of speech, he has an ad hoc strategy designed to abandon London’s totalitarian money dominance, pursue a multipolar world of many currencies with Russia, China and Iran (BRICS), and divorcing the dependency of Europe on the US for foreign aid the mercenary US military to fight proxy wars for the London bank.

In sum, domestic corporate fascism, contrived hyperinflation, domestic terrorism, weaponized immigration and medicine, and wars fought to reduce the “Deflation Gap” do not have to be inevitable. But the future cannot be predicted especially now that the London-Israel axis has been incentivized to deploy atomic weapons out of a desperation of last resort.

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That the United States of America is controlled by a criminally perverse, two party ruling class should be obvious to any reasonable (not rational, for the above-named people are very rational) person not living in what Jean-Paul Sartre, the French existential writer, called bad faith (mauvaise foi).

Bad faith is based on Sartre’s premise that people are radically free despite social and biological constraints; in each person’s consciousness they sense this but choose to play games, to perform for themselves and others, and to act as if they have no choices when they do. They deny their freedom. This is not lying but a form of self-deception since one cannot lie to oneself for “the one to whom the lie is told and the one who lies are one and the same person, which means that I must know in my capacity as a deceiver the truth which is hidden from me in my capacity as the one deceived,” writes Sartre. This should be so obvious but it escapes most people who imbibe psychobabble.

Lying is different since it involves other people. “The essence of the lie implies in fact that the liar actually is in complete possession of the truth which he is hiding,” added Sartre. This cynical consciousness that knows the truth but denies it to others is a perfect description of  politicians, propagandists, intelligence services, and their media mouthpieces. They know they are lying and are proud of it, but of course they will never admit it. Regular people also lie regularly but with not the same tremendous social consequences.

People often say that certain people really believes their own lies, that they are deluded, but this is impossible.

I begin with this brief excursion into philosophy (and psychology) because I recently read a fine journalist, Patrick Lawrence, in an otherwise excellent article – “Trump, Bibi, and Ayn Rand’s ghost” – write the following about war criminals Trump and Netanyahu’s recent dinner meeting in which  Netanyahu shows Trump a letter he wrote nominating Trump for the Nobel Peace Prize, that Medea Benjamin of Code Pink rightly called “surreal:

We must reason through the matter such that we are able to recognize that these two appalling men were serious in their self-congratulation. The idea of themselves they presented before the media cameras is to them genuine: They sincerely understand themselves in this way—virtuous, courageous, standing heroically alone, bearing the world’s banner forward. (my emphasis)

Of what are such people made? This is our question. Attempting our answer leads us beyond politics and policy and into the spheres of psychology and pathology. I have long contended that any true understanding of global affairs cannot leave out consideration of the mental and emotional makeup of those who, for better or worse, are in positions of leadership. The Israeli PM, a case in point, exhibits clear symptoms of clinical psychosis if by this we mean a frayed relationship with reality.

Now Patrick Lawrence most forcefully and eloquently often condemns Trump and Netanyahu and their ilk as the genocidal war criminals that they are. Because I admire his work so much, I hesitate to pick up on his point about their sincerity, but I think it is essential to do so because of its wider implications.

Sartre claimed “sincerity,” purportedly the anti-thesis of self-deception, takes one deeper into self-deception. It goes to Patrick’s  question of what are such people made, of what are we all made; it goes behind psychology to its philosophical presuppositions and beyond the issue of pathology to a theological analysis of evil. While Lawrence’s analysis is focused not on these matters but on Ayn Rand’s influence on Trump, Netanyahu, and the wider individualistic culture – an astute analysis – it respectfully needs an a priori corrective.

I maintain that not for a second do Trump and Netanyahu believe they are genuine or virtuous or believe their own lies. They are the perfect examples of hypocrites, as in the word’s etymological sense of stage actor; pretender, dissembler, from the Greek hypokritēs. To repeat: it is impossible to believe one’s own lies since one knows they are not the truth one withholds.

Since it is obvious from their own words and actions and can be followed in real time video by any concerned person that they enthusiastically support the genocide of the Palestinians without an iota of compunction, can we say they are mentally ill?  I think not. That would suggest that if in some alternative universe they were tried for their crimes and convicted, they should be sent to a mental institution, not a prison, because they are sick. They are far beyond sick and are the current examples of their nations’ predecessors’ support for massive war crimes for a very long time. Both the U.S.A. and Zionist Israel were founded on similar claims of being  God-ordained countries that hid the satanic violence they used against native peoples and anyone who dared to suggest God was not on their sides.

Are they, as Lawrence says of Netanyahu, out of touch with reality? I think not. In any case, whose reality? Those in power, with the corporate mass media and tech companies as accomplices, create their own reality, as in the famous quote attributed to a George W. Bush aid by Ron Suskind: “We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality.” This is even truer today with the use of artificial Intelligence. Their reality is not yours, mine, or Patrick Lawrence’s. Their facts are not ours. In any case, to suggest Netanyahu is out of touch with “reality” would suggest mental illness, not evil intent. Sartre would say that to do so is to excuse him, which is clearly not Patrick’s intention. The result, however, of saying that Netanyahu and Trump sincerely think of themselves as genuine does exactly that.

One can, of course, reject Sartre’s philosophical premise about freedom, bad faith, and lying in favor of psychological and biological explanations. This is the modern approach, which is commonplace. It assumes much. It needs to be understood within the historical context of the decline of religion and the rise of science, modernism, and post-modernism. It is not scientific, however, but pseudo-scientific, and delusional on its own claims to being scientific. I maintain that it fails to comprehend the nature of evil.

But like Sartre and Dostoevsky, I too believe we are fundamentally free. Which is not to say we are not confronted with biological and social limitations on that freedom. We are. But fundamentally we have free will.

In the ancient tragedy Oedipus Rex, known in its Greek original as Oedipus Tyrannus, Oedipus commits two heinous acts: he kills his father and marries his mother. He commits crimes against society and sins against the gods. But he does so unknowingly, unconsciously, as the play makes clear. Throughout the Western world in morality and law it has become accepted, as Aristotle argues in his Ethics, that consciousness and will are necessary for acts to be ethically bad or good.

If Netanyahu, Trump, and their ilk (to be clear, by ilk I mean Biden and former U.S. presidents and Israeli prime ministers before Netanyahu) are not conscious but believe they are being virtuous by mass murdering Palestinians and so many others, then they, like Oedipus, deserve sympathy. For they know not what they do. But they clearly know, so they deserve no sympathy. They deserve condemnation.

What could possess them, and all the other political leaders, to commit mass murder over and over again while reveling in their “accomplishments,” and to speak casually about using nuclear weapons? For that is what they do. I should emphasize that I am not referring to individuals who commit murder and other horrible crimes but to political leaders backed by millions of supporters. Institutional leaders who quite rationally sit in offices discussing the best methods for slaughtering millions.

Why do they act this way? Why did Hitler? Harry Truman with Hiroshima and Nagasaki? George W. Bush with Iraq? You know all the names, or should. They are legion, as are the statistics. The demonic nature of U.S. history from the start is there for all to contemplate, as the late theologian David Ray Griffin has documented in a number of books. No amount of feigned amnesia will erase the bloody truth of American history, the cheap grace we bestow upon ourselves. It is demonic, as is the history of Zionism in Palestine.

So we are left with the question that has engaged people for millennia: What is the nature of evil? The demonic? While not here entering into a long analysis of this question, I will cast my vote with those, such as Soren Kierkegaard, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Herman Melville, et al., who have claimed it goes much deeper than psychological sickness to a spiritual level and that the Enlightenment’s error was that it lacked a devil.

Satan is hard character to fathom, but when he is strutting his stuff, the consequences of his evil are blatantly real in the actions of those who have sold their souls for his favors.

In Melville’s Moby Dick the possessed Ahab says to Starbuck and to us:

Ahab is forever Ahab, man. This whole act is immutably decreed. ‘T’was rehearsed by thee and me a billion years before this ocean rolled. Fool! I am the Fates’ lieutenant, I act under orders.

The same clarity of mind and will can be said of Trump, Netanyahu, and their ilk. They know from whence their orders come; they echo Ahab’s words that “from hell’s heart” and “for hate’s sake” they will kill the innocent and exult in the slaughter.

God and Satan battle on.

Reprinted with the author’s permission.

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On January 24, President Trump fired 17 inspector generals working for a wide array of federal agencies. Trump’s action jolted Washington because most of those officials could supposedly only be removed for cause — specific misconduct or other abuses. Trump also scorned the federal law requiring giving Congress 30-days notice before terminating such officials.

Some of the inspector generals that Trump axed had done good work exposing government abuses while others had defaulted to the lap dog mode. A White House official justified the firings: “These rogue, partisan bureaucrats who have weaponized the justice system against their political enemies are no longer fit or deserve to serve in their appointed positions.” The official said the firings will “make room for qualified individuals who will uphold the rule of law and protect Democracy.”

Maybe the White House wanted inspector generals who could bring bigger brooms to sweep evidence under rugs? The controversy that erupted over Trump’s firings largely ignored the long history of inspector generals either being wrongfully terminated or being worse than useless.

Politicians create facades to make citizens believe that government automatically guards against waste, fraud, and abuse. The purpose of inspector generals is to create the illusion of honest government — to make people think that oversight is going on. While inspector generals are routinely portrayed as paragons of integrity, many are appointed by the chief of the federal agency they oversee. Their jobs and budgets depend directly on the political appointees they are supposed to investigate, and they grovel accordingly.

Bush and the IGs

The George W. Bush administration throttled inspector generals who exposed too much dirt. After CIA Inspector General John Helgerson investigated whether CIA officials were guilty of torture, CIA director Michael Hayden
responded by launching an investigation of the IG. Former CIA inspector general Frederick Hitz commented that Hayden’s investigation would be seen as an effort to sway the IG “to call off the dogs…. The rank and file will become aware of it, and it will undercut the inspector general’s ability to get the truth from them.”

Homeland Security Department Inspector General Clark Kent Irvin was pressured to downplay his findings of the failures of the Transportation Security Agency (TSA) and federal terrorist watch lists. But elbowing the IG failed to prevent the TSA from becoming a laughingstock and a public menace.

Federal agencies responsible for exposing abuses were neutered. During the Bush administration, the amount of Pentagon contracting skyrocketing thanks to Bush’s wars. At the same time, the Defense Contract Audit Agency (DCAA), the Pentagon’s front line watchdog against fraud and abuse, was gutted. The Government Accountability Office condemned the DCAA in 2008 for becoming a lapdog for military contractors. Auditors were threatened with retaliation if they did not rescind findings critical of contractors. Supervisors tampered with audit findings to exonerate companies. Reports revealing how contractors did shoddy work or overcharged the government were buried.

President Bush repeatedly revealed in signing statements that he viewed anticorruption efforts as a violation of his prerogative. After Congress created an inspector general in late 2003 to look into the Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq, Bush decreed:

The CPA IG shall refrain from initiating, carrying out, or completing an audit or investigation, or from issuing a subpoena, which requires access to sensitive operation plans, intelligence matters, counterintelligence matters, ongoing criminal investigations by other administrative units of the Department of Defense related to national security, or other matters the disclosure of which would constitute a serious threat to national security.

And since Bush acted as if any criticism of his policies undermined national security, it was not surprising that the new IG was hogtied even before he started on the job. The White House in 2007 “specifically exempted U.S. contractors in Iraq from any obligation to report waste, fraud and abuse to the U.S. government.” U.S. government contractors at home and elsewhere in the world are obliged to file such reports.

In 2008, Bush declared in a signing statement that his administration would not cooperate with a “Commission on Wartime Contracting in Iraq and Afghanistan” Congress created “to investigate allegations of waste, mismanagement, and excessive force by contractors.” Regardless of how many controversies had arisen over U.S. contractors wantonly shooting innocent Iraqis, or how many scandals had erupted over billions of U.S. tax dollars vanishing in Iraq, the president ruled that no one had a right to discover what happened under his command. Preserving the prerogatives of the president was far more important than protecting American taxpayers or Iraqi civilians.

New York University professor Paul Light observed, “Over the past seven years they [the Bush Administration] have systematically worked to undermine IG authority and chill audit and investigatory range.” But “hope and change” for IGs didn’t arrive with Obama’s inauguration. In 2008, Sen. Barack Obama cosponsored the Inspectors General Act of 2008, enacted to buttress the independence of agency watchdogs. That act required the president to give Congress 30-days notice and a statement of “sufficient cause” before firing an inspector general.

Obama and the IGs

But Obama wasted no time in trampling the new law after he took his presidential oath of office. In June 2009, he fired the IG for Ameri-Corps, Gerald Walpin, for refusing to back down from his criticisms of a prominent Obama supporter caught misusing hundreds of thousands of dollars in federal subsidies. Walpin also spooked the White House because he courageously exposed how AmeriCorps had no legal justification for pouring tens of millions of dollars into the Teaching Fellows Program, one of the agency’s flagships. At the time, ABC News reported that a “source familiar with the president’s thinking” said that Obama wanted to replace Walpin with “someone who could effectively provide the kind of independent oversight that the president values.” The best way to ensure “independent oversight” is to remind all inspector generals that they will be axed if they embarrass the White House. A joint House-Senate investigation concluded that firing Walpin “undermines the Inspectors General Act.”

In the same month Walpin was fired, the administration unsuccessfully sought to obliterate the independence of the special inspector general for the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP), Neil Barofsky. Some IGs who have not been fired have instead come under withering pressure. Russell George, the IG who exposed the IRS’s targeting of conservative nonprofit groups, was perennially hammered by Obama’s congressional allies.

For most of Obama’s first term, his administration refused to appoint permanent inspectors generals at several of the largest federal agencies. There was no inspector general for the State Department during Hillary Clinton’s entire reign. Instead, the position was filled on an acting basis by a retired Foreign Service officer who was close friends with Undersecretary of State for Management Patrick Kennedy. The lack of a real IG at State might have helped “contain the facts” regarding Benghazi and enabled Hillary to help coverup her official emails — a scandal that tormented her 2016 presidential campaign. The Obama administration announced a permanent IG only after Republican Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas announced that he would block all State Department nominations until the IG slot was filled.

At the Homeland Security Department, the acting IG repeatedly launched preemptive strikes against facts that could undermine Obama’s credibility. Republican Sen. Ron Johnson of Wisconsin declared that a DHS IG report watered down many of the details on a 2012 alcohol-and-prostitute rampage by Secret Service agents in Colombia “in order to avoid embarrassing the administration in an election year.” The acting IG first delayed and then jiggled the classification status of a report on Transportation Security Administration screw-ups to minimize the number of officials who saw it. Charles Edwards, the acting IG from early 2011 till late 2013, toadied to Obama appointees at every opportunity — stifling reports, deleting damning findings, and boasting of his chumminess with agency chieftains. Unfortunately, torpedoing oversight of the federal government’s largest nonmilitary department fits the administration’s template of suppressing evidence of its debacles far and wide.

In October 2014, the Washington Post revealed that the Agency for International Development (AID), the largest foreign-aid bureaucracy, was massively suppressing audit reports revealing waste, fraud, and abuse. More than 400 negative findings were deleted from a sample of 12 draft audit reports. In one case, more than 90 percent of the negative findings were expunged before the report was publicly released. Acting Inspector General Michael Carroll buried the embarrassing audit findings because he “did not want to create controversy as he awaited Senate confirmation to become the permanent inspector general,” according to some AID auditors.

The most brazen case involved hushing up $4.6 million in illegal ransom money that AID paid in March 2012 to secure the release of the son of Secretary of Transportation Ray LaHood. Sam LaHood and 15 other Americans had been arrested after they entered Egypt illegally and engaged in prohibited political activism. At the time, a State Department official brazenly lied, denying that the payoff came from the U.S. government. This novel use of foreign-aid money might have caused an uproar if it had been revealed prior to Obama’s 2012 reelection.

This is not the first time that AID’s inspector general has been caught trying to bury a scandal. John Sopko, the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan reconstruction (SIGAR), revealed in 2014 that AID had “covered up information” on U.S.-funded Afghan ministries’ potential links to terrorist organizations. Sopko was appalled at how the U.S. government was denying bitter realities in Afghanistan: “I was stunned when senior State Department officials on my first trip to Kabul suggested how we should write our reports. They even suggested changes to our report titles and proposed that we give them our press releases in advance so they could pre-approve them.”

Sopko set the gold standard for courageous, focused IGs that made sure that Americans learned of federal abuses. In 2016, Sopko declared that “U.S. policies and practices unintentionally aided and abetted corruption” in Afghanistan. A few weeks before President Biden was shocked by the collapse of the U.S. puppet regime in Kabul, Sopko publicly declared: “We basically forced our generals, forced our military, forced our ambassadors, forced the USAID to try to show success in short timelines, which they themselves knew were never going to work.” Sopko exposed the systemic fraud that had long shielded U.S. military intervention:

Every time we went in, the U.S. military changed the goalposts and made it easier to show success, and then finally, when they couldn’t even do that, they classified the assessment tool. So they knew how bad the Afghan military was, and if you had a clearance you could find out, but the average American … wouldn’t know how bad it was, and we were paying for it.

Biden and the IGs

The primary lesson that the Biden administration took from Sopko’s candor was to never ever allow a special inspector general to oversee the $100+ billion in military and other aid sent to Ukraine. Congress repeatedly kowtowed to the White House to block proposals to create a Ukraine IG modeled after the Afghanistan IG. Biden policymakers recognized that the only thing worse than wasting billions of dollars was permitting Americans to learn how their tax dollars were torched. Biden preferred to preserve deniability — “Waste? What waste? We didn’t hear about” — in lieu of efficacy. Biden’s White House issued a statement that there was no need for a special IG on Ukraine because the Pentagon inspector general and the Government Accountability Office “are currently undertaking multiple investigations regarding every aspect of this assistance.” But Biden appointees made sure to minimize any embarrassing disclosures.

Trump and the IGs

Trump’s firing of the inspector generals looks like an ominous sign for transparency and accountability in Washington. But the feds have belly-flopped on those scores going back far into the last century. Two years ago, Sopko declared, “The U.S. government, whether it’s USAID, or DOD, or State, have horrible records on effective monitoring and evaluation.” Unfortunately, there is no reason to expect the second Trump administration to be better on those scores than were the Bush, Obama, and Biden administrations.

The article was originally published in the July 2025 issue of Future of Freedom.

The post Did Trump Expose the D.C. Sham on Waste and Fraud? appeared first on LewRockwell.

Clodovis Boff, the brother of the famous liberation theologian Leonardo Boff, recently wrote an open letter to the Latin American Bishops’ Conference (known as CELAM) in which he criticized what he called the same old music: “social, social, social.” He said the bishops neglected the basic religious message of Jesus. His words were very pointed: “Can’t you see that people are tired of the same old story?”

His message was a real example of pastoral theology, of how to preach the true Gospel. He asked,

When will we give the Good News of God, of Christ and His Spirit? Of Grace and Salvation? Of conversion of heart and meditation of God’s Word? Of prayer and adoration, of pious love of the Mother of the Lord and other such themes? In short, when are we going to send a truly religious message, one that is spiritual?

I wonder what his brother Leonardo thinks. Despite his leaving the clerical state, Leonardo Boff is probably the most prominent liberation theologian, a man who studied and sparred with his former professor Joseph Ratzinger and was considered personally close to Pope Francis from the time the latter was archbishop of Buenos Aires. The letter is outspokenly open about seeing the failure of liberation theology to gain hold of the bulk of the faithful in Latin America.

This is not the first time that the friar of the Servants of Mary has taken a different tack from the school of theology that made his brother famous. In 2007, Clodovis (I cannot just put his last name for fear of confusing him with his brother) wrote an essay called “The Theology of Liberation and the Return to the Fundamental.” In that publication, he declared that “the error of Liberation Theology as it exists today, is that it put the poor in the place of Christ, making them a fetish and reducing Christ to a kind of co-worker.”

Clodovis Boff wrote his latest letter as a response to the 40th General Assembly of CELAM at the end of May. Even the secular world “is fed up with secularism,” said the friar.

Souls beg for the supernatural and you insist in the natural. That paradox is seen even in parishes: as lay people tend to like to show signs of their Catholic identity (with crosses, medals, veils, shirts with holy pictures on them) the priests and religious sisters go against that trend and wear no distinctive signs of identity.  

The brother of the man who wrote so much liberation ecclesiology criticized the bishops—whose message concluding the 40th anniversary of the conference mentioned Jesus Christ only once in the context of the celebration of the anniversary of the Council of Nicaea—by affirming,

Your excellencies are correct saying that you desire a Church that is a “house and school of communion,” and in addition, “merciful, synodal and extending itself outward.” And who doesn’t? However, where is Christ in this ideal image of the Church? 

The Church in Latin America is “bleeding,” losing blood and vitality.

What is more evident here are empty churches, empty seminaries, empty convents—empty. Seven or eight Latin American countries are no longer majority Catholic. Even Brazil is on its way to being the greatest ex-Catholic country in the world…Nevertheless, this does not seem to worry our Venerable Brothers [the bishops] very much.

Friar Boff’s (his brother is no longer a religious) words reminded me of something that has greatly puzzled me in recent years. I saw the decline of the Catholic Church in El Salvador, where I worked for twenty years—but that seemed to be ignored by theologians and academics who were formed by an almost ideological approach to pastoral theology.

Clodovis lamented in his letter the lack of real eschatology in the preaching of the Church leaders. Their talk of hope is very general and seems to be limited to this world’s realities. “I don’t doubt, brothers, that heaven is also part of your ‘great hope,’ but why this diffidence to talk about [heaven] out loud and clearly.”

I remember being on a commission for a pastoral plan and having to appeal to the archbishop for the inclusion of the word “salvation” as a central theme. The ideologues of the Left who loved splicing words for major goals in the “five-year plans” of pastoral projection (and I intend the allusion to the Soviet plans) did not like eschatology. They were more worried about an eschatology that echoed the leftist intellectuals who were dominant in the universities of El Salvador. Their mantra of “see-judge-act” always seemed to end up sounding like position papers for a political party.

And what has been the result of all the pastoral theology of liberation. I know that we have to be careful of a “post hoc, ergo propter hoc” about extraordinarily complex social phenomenon, but the burgeoning Protestant sects did not worry about “social, social, social,” and they thrived. The latest study of religious identification in El Salvador shows an alarming growth of non-Catholic religious sensibility. What used to be a majority Catholic nation now approaches an evenly divided ecclesiastical panorama. What went wrong?

And this happened after the beatification and canonization of saints like Fr. Rutilio Grande and Archbishop Oscar Romero and after a pope from Latin America who clearly tried to revive liberation theology. When St. Oscar Romero was beatified, a massive number of people attended the open-air Mass celebrating the event. A woman who watched the swelling crowd from a nearby home said it was an apotheosis.

Read the Whole Article

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Sarepta Therapeutics is in hot water with the FDA and its stock has been hammered after three deaths were reportedly linked to its Elevidys muscular dystrophy gene therapy. As reported by Bloomberg:

Two teenage boys died of acute liver failure in recent months after taking Elevidys. They were being treated for Duchenne muscular dystrophy and weren’t able to walk because of the muscle-wasting disease. Separately, the company said Friday that a 51-year-old patient died of acute liver failure last month in an early-stage trial of a gene therapy to treat limb-girdle muscular dystrophy.

FDA leaders met with Sarepta, the agency said in a statement, and requested it voluntarily stop all shipments of the drug, which is its biggest product. “The company refused to do so,” the agency said.

This morning comes the news that the Children’s Hospital Los Angeles (CHLA) has announced it will halt the use of Elevidys, further pressuring the stock, which was already at a nine-year low.

The FDA’s response to Sarepta’s trouble with Elevidys starkly contrasts with its breathtaking leniency with Moderna and Pfizer in the matter of their COVID-19 mRNA gene therapy injections that have been misleadingly categorized as “vaccines.”

On August 1, 2022, thoughtful and attentive cardiologists were stunned by the publication of a report that two teenage boys had died within the first week after receiving the second Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 dose. Autopsies confirmed that both had died of vaccine-induced myocarditis.

As we note in Chapter 26 of our book Vaccines: Mythology, Ideology, and Reality:

As of April 25, 2025, 19,403 American deaths have been reported to the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS), mostly by healthcare professionals who believe these deaths are vaccine related. Approximately 1,134 deaths on the day of vaccination have been reported, and 1,266 on the day after vaccination. A study published in 2010 by principal investigator Lazarus Ross, MBBS, MPH for Harvard Pilgrim Health Care, Inc. found that “fewer than 1 percent of vaccine adverse events are reported” to VAERS. Using the far more conservative estimate of 3.3 percent, or a 1 in 30 under-reporting factor, 19,403 yields a nationwide estimate of 582,090 US vaccine deaths.

Sarepta is not a vaccine producer. Its Elevidys therapy is categorized as a pharmaceutical product without the special liability protection granted to substances categorized as “vaccines.”

What is happening to Sarepta is evidence that companies such as Moderna and Pfizer—i.e., companies that have availed themselves with the mystical appellation of “Vaccine Producers”—have obtained a unique status in human affairs akin to an ancient and powerful religious institution.

Vaccine Producers have also succeeded in placing innumerable “friends” in federal agencies—including the DoD, CIA, and HHS—whose entrenched power supersedes the executive power of HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.

The Sicilian Mafia calls itself the “Cosa Nostra,” which translates into English as “This Thing of Ours”—a sardonic and veiled reference to a secretive power structure erected over centuries that has proven remarkably immune to the reform efforts of honest law officers. Dedicated cops and prosecutors come and go and many die violently, but “This Thing of Ours” remains.

Vaccines: Mythology, Ideology, and Reality will be published on July 29. Please click on the cover image below to see the book’s Amazon product page and consider ordering a copy.

This article was originally published on Courageous Discourse.

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