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In recent years, many Americans have become refocused on the Constitution in a spirit of returning the country to its original objectives and values.

This is not surprising. The US has deteriorated, both economically and governmentally, to such a degree that the very structure of the US is in danger of collapse. Small wonder that many Americans are hoping for a return to the simplicity and unified focus that can be found in the country’s original “business plan.”

The framers of the American Constitution borrowed ideas from historical governmental structures, particularly the Roman Republic. They added a few new ideas and came up with a document that may well be the finest concept that has yet been written by which to govern a country.

It is difficult for us to grasp today that, at the time the new Republic was created, it was viewed by the rest of the world as an experiment. Not even the framers of the Constitution were convinced that the Republic would last. After all, the country was broke from having fought a major war, they had no currency of their own and none of them had previously held political office.

It has been stated that the Constitution is brilliant in its brevity; that it had not become bogged down in reams of detail. This is true. One only need look at the weighty Constitution of the European Union as an example of how not to write a constitution.

The implication of the simplicity of the Constitution is that the framers were fully in agreement on the basics, and, that they felt that the rest could be sorted out later by the Legislature. This is partly true – thankfully, the framers were not politicians and they did believe that simplicity was better. But the document is also brief because the committee of ten that wrote it disagreed so extensively on some basic concepts that it was difficult to get anything on paper that they could all accept.

They did agree that they would form a Republic and that it would be run by democracy. (Today, these words have, to some extent, lost their meaning. A republic is a form of government in which each citizen possesses stated rights… while democracy is only a means of governing, in which each citizen has an equal vote. The US is no longer a republic and it can be argued that it is no longer run by true democracy.)

From the beginning, the primary disagreement was the role of the Federal Government.

John Adams, who later found the Federalist Party and became the first Federalist president, argued that a strong central government was essential to hold the states together (at that time, the word “state” meant “country”).  Jefferson disagreed, arguing that “That government governs best that governs least,” and sought to have as minimal a central government as possible. Jefferson later helped found the Democratic Republican Party and became the first Democratic Republican president. To a great degree, Jefferson won out backed by the Constitution’s principle author, James Madison, and others.

However controversial the founding concepts were, we assume today that once the Constitution had been signed, that was it, done deal. But this was not so. Almost immediately the various factions began to “interpret” the Constitution and even recommend amendments… each seeking to bend the Constitution into the direction that would allow him to achieve his personal goals for the union. (Does this sound familiar?)

From the start, Alexander Hamilton (first Secretary of the Treasury) sought to create taxation. When Jefferson admonished him by saying that they had just fought a war to end taxation by King George, Hamilton responded that this taxation was different, as they would be the recipients of the money, not the king. This event should remind us that in every country, in every era, there will always be those who adjust their ideals according to whether or not they themselves are in power.  At that time, Hamilton also attempted to create the Bank of the United States — a federal bank.

To Americans today, Jefferson has emerged as the hero of the Constitution and deservedly so. As president, however, when he had the opportunity to purchase Louisiana for the bargain price of $15,000,000… he couldn’t resist. He had previously often argued that the central government should not make major expenditures and then pass the bill to the states. Yet at the time, the Louisiana Purchase was the greatest expenditure that had yet been considered by the Federal Government.

Jefferson made possible the western expansion of the US by making the purchase. But in doing so, he allowed future presidents to take on huge expenditures. Was he right to sacrifice his own principles in order to do so?

This trend continues today on a grand scale. Even the most conservative politicians have their pet projects they feel should be fully funded… while de-funding the projects of others.

Human nature dictates that while we may strive to agree on basic principles, as soon as we have agreed, we begin making exceptions. Human nature also dictates that power corrupts. In the early days of the union, Washington, Jefferson and even Adams believed that to accept public office when called upon was a duty… but… that having completed a term or two, it was time to return to the farm. Yet they all found that once having been in office, they were reluctant to leave.

So, where does this leave us today? Has nothing changed? Actually yes, there have been significant changes… each one for the worse.

First, beginning with John Quincy Adams, the concept of career politician has come into existence. Ideally, each candidate for office should have had an alternate career prior to running for office. At the very least, this would provide some objectivity. But career politicians generally have a very poor grasp of the real world, because they have never worked in it.

Second, the bureaucracy has become so ponderous that the bureaucracy itself routinely takes precedent over the best interests of the country in the present day, pork is still being seen as more important to legislators than a balanced budget.

The US is now entering the greatest period of crisis since the creation of the union itself. What will be the fate of the Constitution? Will it be discarded? Will there be revolution?

I believe that the answer will be that the Constitution will remain… but will have ever-decreasing significance. The reasons are these: First, politicians of today no longer represent the voters. They represent those who pay for their campaigns. These groups are already in control of the country and, to them, the Constitution is irrelevant. Second, all Americans receive benefits of some kind from the federal government. They can wave the flag all they want, but when their pet entitlements are threatened, they will scream bloody murder. The fact that the entitlements are not allowed for in the Constitution will have little significance.

In the end, with or without electoral shakeups, with or without a second revolution, Americans will argue in favor of their own entitlements and against the entitlements of others.

This is not an issue that will reach a resolution. Just as in ancient Rome, once the republic had become watered down to the point of corruption on the one side, and entitlements on the other, the republic had run its course and the slow collapse began. Concurrently, the “barbarians” (the third-world of their day) took the lead both economically and governmentally and Rome became a backwater.

The writing of the American Constitution was a high-water mark in governmental history. Today, however, the truth is that not even those who profess to honor it would be prepared to make the sacrifice necessary to live by it. Just like the Romans before them who settled for “bread and circuses”, rather than economic recovery, Americans will choose the inevitable decline of their country rather than give up “entitlements.”

Reprinted with permission from International Man.

The post The Constitution – The Past and Present appeared first on LewRockwell.

The ‘long war’ to subvert Iran, weaken Russia, BRICS and China is on hold. It is not over.

At one level, Iran plainly ‘won’. Trump had wanted to be regaled with a reality-TV style, splendid ‘Victory’. Sunday’s attack on the three nuclear sites indeed was loudly proclaimed by Trump and Hegseth as such – having ‘obliterated’ Iran’s nuclear enrichment programme, they claimed. ‘Destroyed it completely’, they insist.

Only … it didn’t: The strike caused superficial surface damage, perhaps. And seemingly was co-ordinated in advance with Iran via intermediaries to be a ‘once and done’ affair. This is a habitual Trump pattern (advance co-ordination). It was the mode in Syria, Yemen and even with Trump’s assassination of Qasem Soleimani – all intended to give Trump a quick media ‘victory’.

The so-called ‘ceasefire’ that rapidly followed the U.S. strikes – albeit not without some hiccoughs – was a hastily assembled ‘cessation of hostilities’ (and no ceasefire – as no terms were agreed). It was a ‘stop-gap’. What this means is that the negotiating impasse between Iran and Witkoff remains unresolved.

The Supreme Leader has forcefully laid down Iran’s position: ‘No surrender’; Enrichment proceeds; and the U.S. should quit the region and keep its nose out of Iranian affairs.

So, on the positive side of cost-benefit analysis, Iran likely has enough centrifuges and 450 kg of highly enriched uranium – and nobody (except Iran) now knows where the stash is hidden. Iran will resume processing. A second plus for Iran is that the IAEA and its Director-General Grossi have been so egregiously subversive of Iranian sovereignty that the Agency most likely will be expelled from Iran. The Agency failed in its basic responsibility to safeguard sites at which enriched uranium was present.

The U.S. and European intelligence services thus will lose their ‘eyes’ on the ground – as well as forego the IAEA’s Artificial Intelligence data collection (on which Israel’s identification of targets likely was heavily dependent).

On the cost side, militarily, Iran of course suffered physical damage, but retains its missile potency. The U.S.-Israeli narrative of Iranian skies as ‘open wide’ to Israeli aircraft is yet another deception contrived to support the ‘winning narrative’:

As Simplicius notes: “There remains not a single shred of proof that Israeli (or American, for that matter) planes ever significantly overflew Iran at any time. Claims of ‘total air superiority’ have no grounds. [Footage] up until the final day shows Israel continued relying on their heavy UCAVs [large surveillance and strike drone aircraft] to strike Iranian ground targets”.

Furthermore, drop tanks from Israeli planes were recorded washing up on Iran’s northernmost Caspian shores, suggesting rather, stand-off missile launches were being mounted by Israel’s Air Force from the north (i.e. from Azerbaijani airspace).

Up a level in the cost-benefit analysis, one must move to the bigger picture: That the destruction of the nuclear programme was pretext, yet not the main objective. The Israelis themselves say that the decision to attack the Iranian State was taken last September/October (2024). Israel’s intricate, costly and sophisticated plan (de-capitation, targeted assassinations, cyber-attack and the infiltration of drone-equipped sabotage cells) that unfolded during the 13 June sneak attack was focussed on one immediate aim: the implosion of the Iranian state, paving the path to chaos and ‘regime change’.

Did Trump believe in the Israeli delusion that Iran was on the brink of imminent collapse? Very likely, he did. Did he believe the Israeli story (reportedly concocted by the IAEA Mosaic programme) that Iran was speeding ‘towards a nuclear weapon’? It seems possible that Trump was suckered – or more likely, was willing prey – to the Israeli and U.S. Israeli-Firster narrative building.

As the Ukraine issue has proved more intractable than Trump expected, the Israeli promise of an ‘Iran ready to implode, Syria-style’ – an ‘Epic’ transformation to a ‘New Middle East’ – must have been alluring enough for Trump to brusquely sweep aside Tulsi Gabbard’s assertion that Iran had no nuclear weapon.

So, has the Iranian military response and the massive popular rallying to the flag been a ‘big win’ for Iran? Well, it is certainly a ‘win’ over the ‘brink of regime change’ pedlars; yet perhaps the ‘win’ needs refining? It is not a ‘forever win’. Iran cannot afford to let its guard down.

‘Iranian unconditional surrender’ is, of course, now off the cards. But the point here is that the Israel establishment, the pro-Israeli lobby in the U.S. (and possibly Trump too), will continue to believe that the only way to guarantee that Iran never moves toward threshold weapon status – is not through intrusive inspections and monitoring, but precisely via ‘regime change’ and the installation of a purely western puppet in Tehran.

The ‘long war’ to subvert Iran, weaken Russia, BRICS and China is on hold. It is not over. Iran cannot afford to relax or to neglect its defences. What is at stake is the U.S. attempt to control the Middle East and its oil as a buttress to its dollar trading primacy.

Professor Hudson notes that “Trump had expected that countries would respond to his tariff chaos by reaching an agreement not to trade with China – and indeed to accept trade and financial sanctions against China, Russia and Iran”. Clearly, both Russia and China understand the geo-financial stakes surrounding a ‘no surrender’ Iran. And they understand too, how regime change would make Russia’s southern underbelly vulnerable; how it could collapse the BRICS trade corridors, and be used as a wedge separating Russia from China.

Put plainly: the U.S. long war likely will be resumed in a new format. Iran notably has survived this acute phase of the confrontation. Israel and the U.S. bet all on an uprising of the Iranian people. It didn’t happen: Iranian society united in the face of aggression. And the mood is more robust; more resolute.

However, Iran will ‘win’ all the more if the authorities seize on the euphoria of a united society to impart a new energy into the Iranian Revolution. The euphoria will not last forever – absent action. It is a paradoxical and unexpected opportunity offered to the Republic.

Israel, by contrast, having launched its ‘psychic-shock war’ to overturn the Iranian State, has quickly found itself in a situation where its enemy did not surrender, but responded. Israel found itself the target of large-scale retaliatory strikes. The situation quickly became critical – both economically and in the depletion of air defences – as Netanyahu’s desperate appeals to the U.S. for rescue, duly attested.

Moving to the wider geo-political cost-benefit level, Israel’s standing (at the regional level) of being unassailable when fused to American power, has taken a blow: ‘Think of it this way, in ten or twenty years, what will be remembered … [the de-capitation strike and the targeted killings of scientists] … or the fact that Israeli cities burned for the first time; that Israel failed to defang Iran’s nuclear program, and flopped with every other major objective it had, including regime change?’.

“The fact is, Israel suffered an historic humiliation that has destroyed its mystique”. Gulf States will have some difficulty to digest the larger meaning to this symbolic occurrence.

And though Trump’s electorate seemingly is satisfied that America participated in the war minimally – and apparently is happy to reside cocooned in a miasma of exaggerated self-congratulation – there is significant evidence that the MAGA faction of the Trump coalition, simultaneously is reaching the conclusion that the U.S. president is increasingly becoming part of the Deep State system that he so ardently criticised.

There were two key issues in the last U.S. Presidential election: immigration and ‘no more forever wars’. Trump, today, despite highly confusing and contradictory massaging, is clear that a forever war is not off the table: “If Iran builds nuclear facilities again – then in that scenario – the U.S. will strike [again]”, Trump has warned.

That – and the increasingly bizarre posts that Trump pens – seem to have had the effect of radicalising the Populist base against Trump on this issue.

For the rest of the world, Trump’s recent postings are disturbing. Perhaps they work for some Americans, but not elsewhere. It means that Moscow, Beijing or Tehran find it harder to take such erratic messaging seriously. Equally troubling, however, is how divorced from geo-political reality, in a succession of cases, Team Trump has proved to be in their situation assessments. Amber lights are flashing in many capitals across the world.

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

The post What Means ‘Winning’? appeared first on LewRockwell.

The U.S. dollar just keeps getting weaker and weaker, and that is a major problem because our current standard of living depends on having a strong dollar.  When the U.S. dollar is strong relative to other national currencies, our paychecks stretch farther and we can buy more stuff.  Conversely, when the U.S. dollar is weak relative to other national currencies we can’t buy as much stuff and our standard of living goes down.  So the fact that the U.S. dollar is “having its worst start to the year since 1973” should deeply alarm all of us…

The US dollar — once a pillar of American economic strength — is having its worst start to the year since 1973.

President Trump’s whipsawing trade and economic policies have prompted investors to sell what is still the world’s dominant currency.

So far in 2025, the dollar index — which tracks the greenback against major currencies like the euro and pound — has dropped more than 10 percent.

That marks the sharpest first-half fall since the collapse of the gold-backed Bretton Woods system more than 50 years ago sent the dollar down 15 percent.

Were you alive in 1973?

If so, you probably remember that it was a horrible year.

The Vietnam War was raging, tax rates were sky high, crime rates were rising, the U.S. economy was in really rough shape, and Arab nations hit us with a crippling oil embargo.

Unfortunately, we are facing a similar scenario today.  We are involved in wars in the Middle East and Ukraine, the federal government is drowning in debt even though tax rates are still way too high, there has been rioting in the streets of Los Angeles and other major cities, economic conditions just continue to get worse, and a global trade war has erupted.

The rest of the world is losing confidence in us and in our currency, and the dollar index fell once again on Monday…

The dollar index , which measures the greenback against a basket of currencies including the yen and the euro, fell 0.15% to 97.05, on track for its sixth straight month of losses. It is set to mark its worst half-year since the 1970s.

The fact that the dollar index has now fallen for six consecutive months is a major national crisis.

Why aren’t more people talking about this?

The silver lining of having a weaker dollar is that it is supposed to make our products more competitive to the rest of the world and reduce our trade imbalances.  But instead, the U.S. current account deficit exploded to a brand new record high during the first quarter of 2025…

The U.S. current account deficit widened to a record high in the first quarter as businesses front-loaded imports to avoid President Donald Trump’s hefty tariffs on imported goods.

The Commerce Department’s Bureau of Economic Analysis said on Tuesday the current account deficit, which measures the flow of goods, services and investments into and out of the country, jumped $138.2 billion, or 44.3%, to an all-time high of $450.2 billion. Data for the fourth quarter was revised to show the gap at $312.0 billion instead of $303.9 billion as previously reported.

Meanwhile, our economy as a whole actually contracted at a 0.5% annualized rate during the first quarter of this year…

The U.S. economy contracted a bit faster than previously thought in the first quarter amid tepid consumer spending, underscoring the distortions caused by the Trump administration’s aggressive tariffs on imported goods.

Gross domestic product decreased at a downwardly revised 0.5% annualized rate last quarter, the Commerce Department’s Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA) said in its third estimate of GDP on Thursday. It was previously reported to have dropped at a 0.2% pace.

One of the big reasons why our economic performance has been so dismal is because the U.S. housing market is having “its worst year in decades”…

Meredith Whitney thinks the housing market is set for “its worst year in decades.”

The CEO of investment research firm Meredith Whitney Advisory Group and senior advisor at Boston Consulting Group told Yahoo Finance that 2023 and 2024 were both bad years, but it’s now looking even worse with about 4 million sales of existing homes expected.

Whitney thinks the actual number may be significantly below that figure. “That poses a real problem for the general economy,” she said.

The Federal Reserve needs to reduce interest rates immediately.

But Fed Chair Jerome Powell seems to think that everything is just fine.

I can certainly understand why President Trump is so frustrated with him.

On top of everything else, now that the student loan payment pause is over we are facing a student loan delinquency crisis of unprecedented magnitude…

Another significant development for consumer spending power is the return of student loan delinquencies. After a 43-month payment pause, nearly one in four student loan borrowers (23.7%) were behind on their student loans in the first quarter of 2025.

The scale of this change is unprecedented. According to the Quarterly Report on Household Debt and Credit published by the New York Fed, more than 2.2 million newly delinquent borrowers have seen their credit plunge by over 100 points, while more than 1 million have experienced drops of at least 150 points.

This isn’t just about student loans – it’s about access to consumer credit going forward. An estimated 2.4 million delinquent borrowers previously had credit scores above 620, meaning they qualified for mortgages, auto loans and credit cards before these delinquencies hit their reports. Many no longer do.

We have got a real mess on our hands.

Nobody can deny this.

Looking ahead, there is a tremendous amount of trouble looming on the horizon.

In fact, CNN just published an article that warns that “economic hell” could be coming this summer.

According to that article, one of the reasons why “economic hell” could be approaching is because the pause on “reciprocal tariffs” on most of our trading partners ends on July 9th…

The first is July 9, which marks the end of President Donald Trump’s 90-day pause on what he termed as “reciprocal” tariffs on dozens of America’s trading partners. Unless those countries reach trade deals with the US, they could potentially face much higher tariffs.

That is a really big deal.

If tariffs suddenly go far higher on literally thousands upon thousands of imported products, that is going to cause an immense amount of economic pain.

And the war between Israel and Iran could potentially erupt again at any time.  If that were to happen, the Iranians would likely close the Strait of Hormuz, and that would make the oil embargo of 1973 look like a Sunday picnic.

The first half of 2025 has been crazy, but I am even more concerned about the second half of 2025.

I believe that it is going to be filled with all sorts of unpleasant surprises, and that won’t be good for any of us.

Reprinted with permission from The Economic Collapse.

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Spoiler alert: this ends badly.

I have endeavored to explain how our economy has changed dramatically over the past 50 years beneath the surface. Nothing that’s going to happen in the future will make sense unless we understand this, so refill your beverage of choice and let’s go through what changed.

Wages gained ground 1945 – 1975, and lost ground 1975 – 2025. In the “glorious 30” (Trente Glorieuses) years of sustained global growth 1945 – 1975, wages’ share of the economy remained around 50% of the nation’s income. As the economy expanded, wages increased in step with the economy.

Since the mid-1970s, that trend has reversed. Wages have lost ground for the past 50 years. As the economy expanded, wages’ share declined, meaning the economy’s gains flowed to capital rather than wages. (Chart #1 below)

This wealth transfer was non-trivial: $150 trillion was siphoned from wages to owners of capital.

As the chart below shows, Federal debt as a percentage of GDP declined in the the decades of organic growth, meaning the economy expanded from increases in productivity, efficiencies and resource extraction, as opposed to the synthetic growth of using debt / financialization to boost consumption.

Financialization took off in the 1980s as unlimited credit for financiers enabled a synthetic boom of corporate takeovers and mergers. Financialization expanded into every nook and cranny of the economy in the 1990s and 2000s, so that assets such as the family home became commoditized assets that could be sold as securities to global capital.

As the Federal-debt-GDP charts illustrates, Federal debt rose faster than GDP as financialization hollowed out the US economy. The acceleration of globalization from 2001 advanced this hollowing out.

The destabilizing nature of financialization manifested in 2008 as the Global Financial Crisis, when heavily financialized subprime mortgage securities catalyzed a global meltdown.

the 2008-09 crisis and response was a critical juncture in American history , as the organic economy became subservient to the synthetic economy of debt, bubbles and “the wealth effect,” the toxic harvest of hyper-financialization and hyper-globalization.

Federal debt, which has risen from 40% of GDP in the early 1980s to 60% in 2007, exploded higher to 120% as the synthetic “growth” of using debt to inflate asset bubbles that generated “the wealth effect” became the engine of consumption.

As a result of policy decisions made in 2008-2010, our economy became dependent not on wages but on “the wealth effect” for consumption: as asset valuations bubble higher, the owners of the assets feel wealthier, and are incentivized to borrow and spend more of their phantom wealth.

The top 10% of US households now account for 49.7% of all US consumer spending: The U.S. Economy Depends More Than Ever on Rich People: The highest-earning 10% of Americans have increased their spending far beyond inflation. Everyone else hasn’t. (WSJ.com)

The problem is that unlike wages, which are broadly distributed, asset ownership is concentrated in the top 10% of households, so “the wealth effect” dramatically boosted wealth and income inequality. So all the synthetic “growth” since 2009 has flowed to the top tier of households as wages’ share of the nation’s income continued losing ground.

This sets up a can’t win scenario: if the Everything Bubble that drives “the wealth effect” continues inflating, wealth inequality will crack our society wide open. If the bubble pops, consumption implodes, jobs will be lost and the Great Recession that was pushed forward in 2009 will kick in with a vengeance.

Beneath the superficial surface of rising GDP, the policies of inflating debt-bubbles to drive “the wealth effect” have hollowed out not just the economy but society. Courtesy of @econimica (X/Twitter), these charts show the pernicious consequences of relying on debt for consumption and channeling gains to the owners of assets.

The net effect was to load younger generations with debt while funneling the majority of Federal spending to the older generations who also happen to own most of the assets. Since younger workers couldn’t buy assets when they were cheap, few have gained from “the wealth effect.”

By effectively impoverishing the nation’s younger generations, we’ve chosen a demographic doom-loop as marriage and birth rates have collapsed from 2007. Guess what happens when you make starting a family and buying a house unaffordable to younger generations? They no longer start families and have children.

As the Boomer generation retires, the legacy of retirement programs designed in the 1930s (Social Security) and the 1960s (Medicare) is fiscal bankruptcy as these programs are driving the expansion of federal spending and borrowing.

It’s called a Doom Loop, with no exit, for all speculative asst bubbles pop. Once “the wealth effect” reverses, assets get sold off to raise cash and since only the wealthy can afford to buy them, there’s no buyers left, so valuations crash.

Read the Whole Article

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According to the Wall Street Journal, “President Trump on Monday signed a presidential memorandum to restore hard-line U.S. policy toward Cuba, reversing the Biden administration’s late-term efforts to ease some restrictions on the communist-run island.”

Yawn! Same old, same old. Keep targeting the Cuban with the brutal, decades-old economic embargo in the hope of finally — finally! — achieving regime change on the island. When it comes to Cuba, hope springs eternal within the U.S. national-security establishment that the Cuban people, faced with death by starvation, will finally — finally! — revolt against their communist regime and replace it with another brutal pro-U.S. “capitalist” dictator.

The Journal continues: “The memorandum reinforces the Trump administration’s stance that Cuba is a U.S. national-security concern, reimposes a statutory ban on tourism, and doubles down on a decades‑old economic embargo.”

Ooh — “National Security”! The two most important words in the American political lexicon. Yeah, the Cuban army is right now making preparations to invade Miami. And the Cuban Air Force is getting ready to bomb U.S. nuclear missile sites. And Cuban officials are preparing lesson plans for teaching communism in America’s socialist public (i.e., government) schooling system. And Cuban sharpshooters are already here looking for people to assassinate.

No matter what definition is put on that meaningless, ludicrous term — “national security” — the notion that Cuba is a threat to “national security” is absolutely ridiculous.

In the long, sordid history of U.S.-Cuban relations, it has always been the U.S. government that has been the aggressor, and it has always been the Cuban government that has been the defender.

Cuba has never initiated an attack against the United States or against the American people.

It is the U.S. government that has invaded Cuba. It is the U.S. government that has engaged in state-sponsored assassination attempts in Cuba, including in partnership with the Mafia, one of the biggest criminal groups in history. It is the U.S. government that has committed acts of terrorism within Cuba. It is the U.S. government that has targeted the Cuban people with death by starvation with a brutal economic embargo.

Why can’t U.S. officials just leave Cuba alone? What is with it their never-ending obsession with Cuba?

It all goes back to the Cuban Revolution in 1959. Cuba was being ruled by a brutal dictator named Fulgencio Batista. He was a tyrant but what mattered was that he was a loyal member of the U.S. Empire. He did what U.S. officials told him to do.

The Cuban people finally had enough of that brute, especially when his goons began kidnapping underaged girls and furnishing them to the Mafia’s high rollers in Havana’s casinos. After the Cuban people successfully revolted, they installed Fidel Castro into power, a communist who refused to cow-tow to the U.S. Empire.

Nobody does that to the Pentagon, the CIA, and the NSA. The U.S. deep stated decided that Cuba now posed a grave threat to U.S. “national security.” Everything would be done to protect the United States from this grave threat, including invasion, state-sponsored assassination, terrorism, and, of course, a brutal economic embargo designed to target the Cuban people with death by starvation.

President Kennedy is the only president who was willing to put a stop to this vicious, malicious, deadly, and destructive misconduct. That was what his famous Peace Speech at American University was all about. In fact, on the day that the U.S. national-security establishment assassinated him on grounds of protecting “national security,” he had an emissary having lunch with Castro with the aim of bring an end to the U.S. national-security establishment’s war on Cuba. Kennedy’s assassination ensured that the U.S. embargo on Cuba would continue into perpetuity or until regime change was finally achieved.

It shouldn’t surprise anyone that no president since Kennedy, including Donald Trump, has dared to buck the U.S. deep state when it comes to Cuba. And so it is that the brutal, deadly U.S. embargo continues — on grounds of protecting “national security” of course.

I’ve got a better idea. How about just finally leaving Cuba alone? How about lifting the decades-old U.S. embargo, which targets innocent people with impoverishment or death by starvation? Indeed, how about finally dismantling the U.S. national-security state, along with its totalitarian-like, dark side powers, and restoring America’s founding governmental system of a limited-government republic? Hasn’t it done enough damage to America, Cuba, and the rest of the world?

Reprinted with permission from Future of Freedom Foundation.

The post Why Not Finally Leave Cuba Alone? appeared first on LewRockwell.

Operations “The Rising Lion” and “Midnight Hammer” were massive demonstrations of force. They lasted no more than 12 days in total. Their results are unknown, but much has been learned about those who planned them. The International Atomic Energy Agency, which relied on AI software rather than the observations of its inspectors, is now demonetized. The damage done to Iranian nuclear research sites is questionable. Only the assassinations of military leaders and civilian scientists have been documented.

Several elements of the “12-Day War” remain unexplained, but this does not prevent each major player (Israel, the United States, and Iran) from claiming to have won it. Above all, the questions raised about fundamental elements do not allow us to establish with certainty whether Washington deliberately violated international law or whether it believed it had to do so to avoid much worse.

Iran’s nuclear research program

We have, in these columns, explained at length the conflict surrounding Iranian nuclear research  [ 1 ] . It began in 1981 when the Islamic Republic of Iran demanded the enriched uranium to which it was entitled under the Iranian-French nuclear program, proposed by President Valéry Giscard d’Estaing and Prime Minister Jacques Chirac to Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, as part of the US “Atoms for Peace” program. It was in this context, and in the face of France’s refusal to give the Islamic Republic what it had planned for imperial Iran, that attacks by the Lebanese Revolutionary Armed Factions, linked to Iran, eliminated US and Israeli diplomats in France.

This conflict developed from the Anglo-Saxon invasion of Iraq (2003). Washington and London, who had invented the poisoning of Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction, extended it by that of Iranian weapons of mass destruction. They succeeded in having the United Nations Security Council adopt resolutions 1737 (December 23, 2006) and 1747 (March 24, 2007) which were to prepare for a war against Iran. However, following the Iraq Study Group , known as the “Baker-Hamilton Commission”, these wild ideas were abandoned by Washington and the conflict with France could be resolved  [ 2 ] .

The conflict flared up again when Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad launched a vast research program on nuclear fusion; a project that was by nature dual, meaning it could have both civilian and military applications  [ 3 ] . Supported by a majority of UN member states, he rightly refused to allow the Security Council to demand that Iran surrender one of its rights in order to “restore the confidence” of others in it (resolution 1696 of July 31, 2006); a polemic that exemplifies the drift that the West has influenced the United Nations with the dissolution of the Soviet Union. Iran, which had already experienced the overthrow of Mohammad Mossadegh, when he attempted to nationalize Iranian oil, could not fail to resist this Western attempt to prevent it from finding an inexhaustible source of energy. The controversy worsened when the Security Council adopted Resolution 1929 on 9 June 2010, again against the General Assembly.

The “revisionist Zionists” (that is, the disciples of the fascist Vladimir Jabotinsky) – not to be confused with the “Zionists” tout court, that is, with the disciples of Theodor Herzl – took up the subject. It was they who, fifteen years later, managed to infiltrate the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), of which Israel is not a member, and to influence its director, the Argentinian Rafael Grossi  [ 4 ] .

On April 2, 2025, Jean-Noël Barrot, French Minister of Foreign Affairs, told the Foreign Affairs Committee of the National Assembly: “We only have a few months before the expiration of this agreement [the JCPOA, from which the United States withdrew]. If it fails, a military confrontation seems almost inevitable.”  [ 5 ] He added that new EU “sanctions” against Iran related to the detention of foreign citizens would be approved in the coming weeks.

On 28 April 2025, the United Nations Security Council held two closed-door meetings on the “Non-Proliferation of Weapons of Mass Destruction.” We do not know precisely what was said, but the meeting was stormy, as evidenced by the publication the following day of a letter of protest from the Islamic Republic of Iran (S/2025/261  [ 6 ] ). According to this document, Jean-Noël Barrot, French Minister of Foreign Affairs, who had flown in from Paris specially for the occasion, allegedly claimed that “Iran [is] on the verge of acquiring nuclear weapons.”

Jean-Noël Barrot and his Minister Delegate for Europe, Benjamin Haddad, joined Michel Barnier’s government and were reappointed in François Bayrou’s. While Barrot’s thinking is not well known, that of his Minister Delegate is. Benjamin Haddad is not just a former senior official in the European Union’s foreign service; he was also a long-time employee of the Tikvah Fund of the “revisionist Zionist” Elliott Abrams  [ 7 ] . He was the one who defined Benjamin Netanyahu’s strategy for convincing Europeans to support Israel against the Palestinians  [ 8 ] .

A month later, the IAEA claimed in its two quarterly reports on Verification and Monitoring in the Islamic Republic of Iran in light of UN Security Council Resolution 2231 (2015)  [ 9 ] and on the NPT Safeguards Agreement with the Islamic Republic of Iran  [ 10 ] that Tehran was hiding something. However, these documents were not based on objective observations, but on the findings of the artificial intelligence software Mosaic. This software, designed to detect terrorist plots from an infinite amount of data, did not simply analyze them, but presented warnings as certainties. For the first time, an AI, designed to detect anomalies, was used to describe reality. As a result, the anomalies detected in Iran were interpreted as the preparation of an atomic bomb. On this grotesque and expensive basis, Rafael Grossi alerted the Agency’s Board of Governors on June 12.

Mosaic software is a product of Palantir Technologies, a company whose main clients include the CIA, the Pentagon, the IDF, and the Mossad, as well as the French Directorate General for Internal Security (DGSI). It is owned by the South African-American-New Zealander Peter Thiel, a director of the Bilderberg Group.

In a particularly heated meeting on 12 June, the IAEA Board of Governors adopted a resolution  [ 11 ] stating that “the Director General, as stated in document GOV/2025/25, cannot provide assurance that Iran’s nuclear programme is exclusively peaceful.” Although China and Russia protested, the IAEA referred the matter to the UN Security Council. The Russian delegation to the UN then urgently circulated an analysis (S/2025/377) denouncing the duplicity of Germany, France and the United Kingdom and their misleading interpretation of IAEA data  [ 12 ] . Reading this document, it is clear that these three countries were not fooled by Rafael Grossi, but participated in his staging.

Only US radars cover Iran. To reach Iranian nuclear research centers, Israel needed access to satellite data from the US Middle East Command (CentCom).

Operation “Rising Lion”

Without waiting, Israel launched Operation Rising Lion. At this point, it is not certain that the three European countries conspired to pave the way for this operation. They may just have been manipulated into supporting it. However, previous episodes, such as that of June 2024  [ 13 ] , attest that these states and their allies were no longer respecting their obligation to lift their “sanctions” against Iran, particularly as signatories to the Vienna Agreement (JCPoA). Just as in the 1980s they no longer considered themselves bound by their signature of the nuclear agreement with Iran after the Islamic Republic succeeded the Iranian Empire, so today they no longer consider themselves bound by their signature of the JCPoA after the United States denounced it.
The first hypothesis is therefore the most likely.

On July 14, 2023, the United Nations repealed the sanctions imposed on Iran under Annex B of Resolution 2231 (2015), pursuant to the Joint Comprehensive Peace Agreement (JCPoA), but Germany, France, and the United Kingdom continue to apply them. They now constitute only “unilateral coercive measures” and are clearly contrary to international law. Berlin, Paris, and London consider themselves released from their commitments under the JCPoA, although, unlike the United States, they have not denounced it.

Officially, US President Donald Trump was also said to be convinced that Iran was preparing to build a nuclear bomb within two weeks. At least, that’s what he said, shutting up his National Intelligence Director, Tulsi Gabbard, who said Iran had no military nuclear program  [ 14 ] .

In any case, informed by the same Tulsi Gabbard of the imminence of an Israeli atomic attack on Iran (“Samson Option”) against its nuclear research centers, President Trump proposed to support a conventional Israeli attack on Iran, rather than allowing it to carry out a nuclear bombing. The Israeli Air Force therefore launched a massive attack against Iranian nuclear research centers, against its ballistic missile system and against several of its military leaders and nuclear scientists. All this while relying on intelligence from US radars at Camp al-Udeid (Qatar), as Israeli radars do not cover Iran.

According to the presentation that Israeli Foreign Minister Gideon Sa’ar made to the Security Council (S/2025/390  [ 15 ] ), Israel claims that it wanted to “neutralize the existential and imminent threat posed by Iran’s nuclear weapons and ballistic missile programs.” It relies on IAEA discussions (based not on observations, but on the artificial intelligence of the Mosaic software) to falsely claim that Iran is not complying with its obligations to the IAEA and has “accelerated its clandestine efforts to develop nuclear weapons.” But even assuming that Israeli leaders believed that Iran would soon have an atomic bomb and would use it against them, “Rising Lion” also targeted the ballistic missile system, as well as several of the military’s leaders and nuclear scientists. The Israeli attack is therefore not aimed at the announced objective, but at the destruction of Iranian defense and research resources.

The question of the violation of international commitments by Israel and the United States, that is, of international law  [ 16 ] , arises once again. Israel’s permanent representative to the United Nations, Ambassador Danny Danon, spoke of a “preventive and preemptive” war. Thus, Israel would have acted without being provoked (preventively) and in the interest of the international community (preemption). In this game, anyone could assassinate their neighbor at any time. It has already been noted, even before the “Iron Swords” operation in Gaza, that Israel behaves without taking into account the human lives of civilians, that is, to use the words of the Hague Conference of 1899 (foundation of international law), not “like a civilized nation, but like barbarians.” The military participation of the United States, with the radars of the al-Udeid base, allows us to formulate the same judgment on Washington’s behavior.

Israel has not limited itself to bombing from its planes. The IDF has also used drones, present in Iran, to assassinate military leaders and nuclear scientists in their homes. This is the second time this method has been used, the first being the Ukrainian attack by Russian strategic bombers (Operation “Spider’s Web”) on June 1, 2025. How can we not draw a parallel between the two operations, especially since it was noted at the time that this action had been coordinated with a foreign secret service, American or Israeli? Besides the fact that we should reconsider the possibility that Israel could have declared war on Russia, we must remember that the “integral nationalist”, General Vassyl Maliuk, director of the Security Service of Ukraine (SBU), is a great admirer of the SS officer Otto Skorzeny  [ 17 ] . However, after World War II, Skorzeny, protected by the CIA and MI6, founded an agency, the “Paladin Group,” which worked for Israel, among other things. Of course, Israel did not bomb the Bushehr nuclear power plant, where many Russian engineers worked.

Furthermore, the day before the Israeli attack, the Iranian press published the first nuclear documents stolen by Iranian intelligence in Israel. One of them is a list of nuclear scientists provided to Tel Aviv by Rafael Grossi. It turns out that this is the exact list of scientists assassinated during Operation “The Rising Lion.” This does not mean that the IAEA director himself designated the men to be killed, but it does make him complicit in their deaths.

Operation “Midnight Hammer”

President Donald Trump, for his part, launched Operation Midnight Hammer on the night of June 21-22. The aim was to destroy three Iranian nuclear research sites. According to the official version, the GBU-57 bombs could be launched one after the other into the same hole so as to penetrate 80 meters of granite. Maybe, maybe not. In any case, by assuring that the mission was accomplished, the US president intended to deprive West Jerusalem of any justification for continuing its attack on Iran. Benjamin Netanyahu made no secret of the fact that he was also working to overthrow the “regime,” and Donald Trump appeared not to be opposed to it.

While a controversy with the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) was raging in Washington, the IDF continued to bomb Iran, destroying fuel stocks and various infrastructure. This was a far cry from the stated objectives, just as in Gaza, starving the civilian population has no bearing on the sole stated objective of defeating Hamas.

President Trump then banged his fist on the table, and the Israeli planes still heading towards Iran were forced to stop their mission and return to their bases.

—

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

[ 2 ]  However, under pressure from the United States, Georges Ibrahim Abdallah, the leader of the Lebanese Revolutionary Armed Factions, is still imprisoned in France, although, according to the law, he should have been released long ago for good behavior. He is the longest-serving French political prisoner.

[ 3 ]  “  The unspoken aspects of the Iranian nuclear program  ”, by Thierry Meyssan, Voltaire Network , June 24, 2025.

[ 4 ]  “  Argentinian Rafael Grossi, director of the IAEA, almost triggered a nuclear war  ,” by Alfredo Jalife-Rahme, Translation Maria Poumier, La Jornada (Mexico), Voltaire Network , June 28, 2025.

[ 5 ]  “  International situation: hearing of Jean-Noël Barrot  ”, Foreign Affairs Committee of the National Assembly , April 2, 2025 (listen at the 34th minute).

[ 6 ]  “  Iran protests against Jean-Noël Barrot’s false statements  ”, by Amir Saeid Iravani, Voltaire Network , April 29, 2025.

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

[ 8 ]  “  The place of the United States and Israel in the governments of the EU and France  ”, by Thierry Meyssan, Voltaire Network , October 1, 2024.

[ 9 ]  Verification and monitoring in the Islamic Republic of Iran in light of UN Security Council Resolution 2231 (2015) , Report by Director General Rafael Grossi, International Atomic Energy Agency (ref: GOV/2025/24), 2 June 2025.

[ 10 ]  NPT Safeguards Agreement with the Islamic Republic of Iran , Report by Director General Rafael Grossi, International Atomic Energy Agency (ref: GOV/2025/25), 4 June 2023.

[ 11 ]  “  Resolution of the IAEA Board of Governors  ”, by IAEA, Voltaire Network , June 12, 2025.

[ 12 ]  “  Russia recalls that Germany, France and the United Kingdom are solely responsible for the reduction of IAEA verification activities in Iran  ”, by Vassily Nebenzia, Voltaire Network , June 12, 2025.

[ 13 ]  “  Vienna Agreement on the Iranian Nuclear Program (JCPoA): Iranian Perspective  ”, by Amir Saeid Iravani, Voltaire Network , June 5, 2024. “  Update from China, Russia and Iran on the verifications of the Iranian nuclear program  ”, by Amir Saeid Iravani, Fu Cong, Vassily Nebenzia, Voltaire Network , June 12, 2024.

[ 14 ]  “  Annual Threat Assessment of the US Intelligence Community  ”, Office of the Director of National Intelligence, March 2025.

[ 15 ]  “  Israel’s presentation of Operation “Rising Lion”  ”, by Gideon Sa’ar, Voltaire Network , June 17, 2025.

[ 16 ]  “  What international order?  ”, by Thierry Meyssan, Voltaire Network , November 7, 2023.

[ 17 ]  “  Who is controlling the drones in Kiev?  ”, by Manlio Dinucci, Translation M.-A., Voltaire Network , June 9, 2025.

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In discussion yesterday with Nima on Dialogue Works about the Israeli-Iranian-Trump-Netanyahu ongoings, I suggested a bold and innovative plan for the Middle East that Trump should present to the world in a speech to the UN General Assembly.  I even offered to write the speech.

I formed the plan from mulling over insights into Trump’s attitude toward the Middle East from Gilbert Doctorow, Michel Chossudovsky, and from Trump’s news conference with Netanyahu when Trump stated Washington’s claim to Gaza as an American possession.

Doctorow pointed out that it was irrelevant whether Trump had destroyed the three underground Iranian nuclear sites.  What mattered is that Trump’s assertion, true or false, had destroyed Netanyahu’s excuse for war with Iran. Is Netanyahu going to risk Washington’s protection by contradicting President Trump?

Chossudovsky pointed out that in the press conference at which Trump stated Washington’s claim to Gaza, Trump expressed the idea of a Gaza resort as the anchor for an American Middle East colony in place of Greater Israel.

In front of Netanyahu Trump unveiled a vision of a Middle East made rich by American management.  It would be a different kind of colonial management from the British/French approach that extracted assets and sent them home to Britain and France.  Trump envisioned a partnership in which the “colonies” would be shareholders sharing in the profits from economic development.  This would be good for Israel as well.  When a presstitute asked Netanyahu his opinion, Netanyahu did not disavow it.

I was surprised that Trump’s claim to Gaza and its reconstruction and his idea of a reconstruction of the Middle Eastern countries  that previous US regimes had destroyed for Israel did not get a big news play.  But Chossudovsky saw it, and he helped me to see it.

Ask yourselves, Is there any better solution to the Israeli-Muslim problem in the Middle East?

Israel is smaller in area than New Jersey.  Iran is 2.5 times larger than Texas.  Israel has fewer than 10 million people.  Iran has more than 90 million people.  Iran can produce modern missiles in greater quantities than Israel can be supplied from the US.  In a recent news conference in a demonstration of Israeli insanity, Netanyahu added the territory of Pakistan to Greater Israel.  Pakistan has nuclear weapons and a population of 250 million.

Israel has zero chance of winning a war with Iran and the same for Pakistan.

Israel knows this but is confident that the power that the Israel Lobby can exert over dumbshit American’s  lives and money guarantees that Americans will fight more wars for Israel.  The Israeli-subsidized Christian Zionists–a contradiction of terms–are all for it.  Amazing, isn’t it, Israel has even corrupted Christian evangelicals, paying their preachers to send Americans to war for Israel.  

What might be reducing Israel’s control over America is the weakened position of Netanyahu, under two Israeli court indictments for crimes, and by the destruction inflicted on Israel by its irresponsible attack on Iran, culminating in Netanyahu’s plea to Trump to stop the war before Israel had to sue for peace.

This leaves Trump with the upper hand.  Israel now understands that it cannot exist without Washington’s protection.  Thus Trump can force Netanyahu to give up the unrealistic Zionist goal of Greater Israel and comply with Trump’s vision of a colony under America’s redevelopment of the Middle East.

If Trump would take this plan to the UN, it would silence Israel and the American neoconservative zionists and save us from war that  could turn nuclear.  

If Trump establishes peace and cooperation in the Middle East, he can do the same with the West and Russia.  Russia was the ally of Britain and France in both WW I and WW II.  It is not difficult to come to terms with a former ally.  There is no ideological reason and no territorial reason for conflict between the West and Russia.

Think about America’s waste of resources and prestige during the first quarter of the 21st century.  Trillions of dollars spend destroying Iraq, Libya, Syria, and Somalia with zero gain.  No one except military/security war profits got anything from these wars. There was no terrorist threat. Washington brought no one democracy, only destruction.

Think about the destruction Washington brought to entire countries for no purpose than Israel’s absurd idea of a Greater Israel.  The millions of dead, permanently maimed, and dislocated people, many of whom have located in Europe and the US burdening those taxpayers with their upkeep. WHO BENEFITTED??

Let’s give Trump a chance.  An American partnership in the Middle East is far better than the conflicts inherent in  Greater Israel.  If Israel refuses to go along, Trump should just run over them.  Israel is of no consequence in the world.  Israel since its existence has never been anything except a cause of conflict, death, and destruction.  Why a people like this has been tolerated, I do not know.

Can Sunni and Shia be brought together and Muslims brought together with Jews?  Seems fantastic.  But perhaps they will see it as preferable to the continuation of endless bloodshed.

If Netanyahu has any sense, he will let Trump rescue the Israeli people.

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Voters can act more in their own best interests when they have foreknowledge of the ways their normal perceptions and anticipations get used against them.

Voters get misled by listening to gatekeepers, by focusing on near-term negatives, and by looking for positives.

Envision Best Actions

Even in the best circumstances, making sense of new information takes a lot of attention.

This human limitation gets exploited by media people, activists, and politicians. All of these gatekeepers draw our attention to their priorities and away from ours.

To get on course and stay there, we need to generate a stronger setpoint signal ourselves. We can do this by considering these fundamentals:

• What action would a government person take if he supported the Constitution on a given issue?
• How would this action impact what matters most: life, then liberty, then property?
• What overall course of action would best make our rights secure?

Legislators currently spend most of their time taking unconstitutional actions. They grab the executive power to allocate budget line-items. They grab the executive power to manage the faithful execution of rules and sanctions.

Executives also currently spend most of their time taking unconstitutional actions. They enact regulatory rules and sanctions. They interfere with our saving, working, and shopping. They command troops in undeclared wars. They enact tariff taxes.

We need legislators to spend most of their time formally repealing the many unconstitutional existing statutes. We need executives to spend most of their time closing the many unconstitutional administrative departments and agencies, and recommending formal repeals.

We can help ourselves get on course and stay there by making good use of a constitutionalist voting scorecard.

We can use a scorecard to help us appreciate how little government action gets voted on in a given session. We can read the positions taken in the scorecard to help us review our own thinking. We can gage how well a politician supports the Constitution based on his votes—in the most-recent session, and in past sessions when his party was in power and his votes helped decide what could become law.

A time-tested voting scorecard is John Birch Society’s Freedom Index. The Freedom Index explains constitutionalist positions on major votes, and scores the votes of congressmen and state legislators.

See Long-Term Negatives

In most counties, most voters strongly desire to live freer and to live better.

Progressives are the USA’s socialists. Some are business-crony socialists, and others are activist-crony socialists.

To the extent that there is freedom, producers are controlled by customers. To the extent that there is Progressive crony-socialist tyranny, producers are controlled by politicians.

Customers relentlessly seek more of what they value themselves. Politicians also relentlessly seek more of what they value themselves. But what one customer values, other customers value. What politicians value, customers don’t value.

Most voters naturally recoil at potentially having the most-openly Progressive politicians hold offices for any time at all. They naturally anticipate that this would cause serious losses. They naturally try to prevent those losses by voting against those Progressives.

But what they anticipate doesn’t match reality. Having the most-openly Progressive politicians hold offices for a term isn’t what actually leaves us stuck with serious losses.

During any given politician’s term in office, other officials are called on to limit what losses he can cause during his term. State-government officials are called on to legislate against and punish national-government officials who take unconstitutional actions. National-government officials are also called on to use their offsetting powers to limit unconstitutional actions.

Many losses could be prevented or mitigated if voters would choose each politician wisely, and if voters would call on politicians to use their offsetting powers to limit Progressives.

Typically, though, people don’t do their duties.

Even so, we mostly only get stuck with serious losses in the succeeding terms. In these later terms, the latest politicians are called on to not execute and to formally repeal any and all past tyrannies. We have plenty of time, but no representation.

The latest politicians don’t do their duties. That’s what does us in.

After tyranny has been advanced by openly-Progressive Democrats, Progressives protect those advances, ratcheting those gains into place—courtesy of Republican Progressives.

Seek Long-Term Positives

Misidentifying an openly-Progressive Democrat as a problem that’s urgent and that’s the most serious warps most voters’ perceptions.

Most voters decide that a Republican Progressive alternative is good, or see him as the lesser of two evils. They anticipate that they’ll see positives, they begin to seek out positives, and they begin to see positives.

After the Republican Progressive is elected, many voters keep anticipating that they’ll see positives, and they keep seeing positives. What negatives they see, they see as still being the lesser of the two evils, just like they had anticipated.

Governments exploit voters’ natural inclinations to collaborate. Likewise, the Republican Party further exploits voters’ natural vulnerabilities to getting flooded with information from gatekeepers, to focusing on near-term threats, and to looking for what’s good in their past decisions and current circumstances.

But armed with foreknowledge of these vulnerabilities, we can instead achieve the fastest gains possible, by refining our perceptions and by voting strategically.

We should practice keeping in the forefront of our minds how constitutionalist politicians would use their powers in all areas. We should prioritize life, then liberty, then property. We should make use of constitutionalist voting scorecards like The Freedom Index. And always, in Republican primaries and in general elections, we should vote for the most-constitutionalist candidates and let the chips fall where they may.

When enough voters stop electing Republican Progressives, in subsequent elections all voters will finally get to elect majorities of constitutionalists. This will bring a sea change for the better, a change we’ve been needing since before the last small-government major party changed for the worse in 1894.

Constitutionalists will severely limit governments, better than ever. Finally, suddenly, freedom will rise up, stronger than ever.

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The Senate is on the verge of passing the distinctly misnamed “big beautiful bill.” It is, in fact, one of the ugliest pieces of legislation to come out of Congress in living memory. The version that passed the House recently would cut $1.7 trillion, mostly in domestic spending, while providing the top 5% of taxpayers with roughly $1.5 trillion in tax breaks.

Over the next few years, the same bill will add another $150 billion to a Pentagon budget already soaring towards a record $1 trillion. In short, as of now, in the battle between welfare and warfare, the militarists are carrying the day.

Pentagon Pork and the People It Harms

The bill, passed by the House of Representatives and at present under consideration in the Senate, would allocate tens of billions of dollars to pursue President Trump’s cherished but hopeless Golden Dome project, which Laura Grego of the Union of Concerned Scientists has described as “a fantasy.” She explained exactly why the Golden Dome, which would supposedly protect the United States against nuclear attack, is a pipe dream:

“Over the last 60 years, the United States has spent more than $350 billion on efforts to develop a defense against nuclear-armed ICBMs [intercontinental ballistic missiles]. This effort has been plagued by false starts and failures, and none have yet been demonstrated to be effective against a real-world threat… Missile defenses are not a useful or long-term strategy for keeping the U.S. safe from nuclear weapons.”

The bill also includes billions more for shipbuilding, heavy new investments in artillery and ammunition, and funding for next-generation combat aircraft like the F-47.

Oh, and after all of those weapons programs get their staggering cut of that future Pentagon budget, somewhere way down at the bottom of that list is a line item for improving the quality of life for active-duty military personnel. But the share aimed at the well-being of soldiers, sailors, and airmen (and women) is less than 6% of the $150 billion that Congress is now poised to add to that department’s already humongous budget. And that’s true despite the way Pentagon budget hawks invariably claim that the enormous sums they routinely plan on shoveling into it — and the overflowing coffers of the contractors it funds — are “for the troops.”

Much of the funding in the bill will flow into the districts of key members of Congress (to their considerable political benefit). For example, the Golden Dome project will send billions of dollars to companies based in Huntsville, Alabama, which calls itself “Rocket City” because of the dense network of outfits there working on both offensive missiles and missile defense systems. And that, of course, is music to the ears of Representative Mike Rogers (R-AL), the current chair of the House Armed Services Committee, who just happens to come from Alabama.

The shipbuilding funds will help prop up arms makers like HII Corporation (formerly Huntington Ingalls), which runs a shipyard in Pascagoula, Mississippi, the home state of Senate Armed Services Committee chair Roger Wicker (R-Miss).  The funds will also find their way to shipyards in Maine, Connecticut, and Virginia.

Those funds will benefit the co-chairs of the House Shipbuilding Caucus, Representative Joe Courtney (D-CT) and Representative Rob Wittman (R-VA). Connecticut hosts General Dynamics’ Electric Boat plant, which makes submarines that carry ballistic missiles, while Virginia is home to HII Corporation’s Newport News Shipbuilding facility, which makes both aircraft carriers and attack submarines.

The Golden Dome missile defense project, on which President Trump has promised to spend $175 billion over the next three years, will benefit contractors big and small. Those include companies like Boeing, Lockheed Martin, and Raytheon (now RTX) that build current generation missile defense systems, as well as emerging military tech firms like Elon Musk’s Space X and Palmer Luckey’s Anduril, both of which are rumored to have a shot at playing a leading role in the development of the new anti-missile system.

And just in case you thought this country was only planning to invest in defense against a nuclear strike, a sharp upsurge in spending on new nuclear warheads under the auspices of the Department of Energy’s National Nuclear Security Agency (NNSA) has been proposed for fiscal year 2026. Thirty billion dollars, to be exact, which would represent a 58% hike from the prior year’s budget. Meanwhile, within that agency, nonproliferation, cleanup, and renewable energy programs are set to face significant cuts, leaving 80% of NNSA’s proposed funding to be spent on — yes! — nuclear weapons alone. Those funds will flow to companies like Honeywell, Bechtel, Jacobs Engineering, and Fluor that help run nuclear labs and nuclear production sites, as well as educational institutions like the University of Tennessee, Texas A&M, and the University of California at Berkeley, which help manage nuclear weapons labs or nuclear production sites.

Weakening the Social Safety Net — and America

And while weapons contractors will gorge on a huge new infusion of cash, military personnel, past and present, are clearly going to be neglected. As a start, the Veterans Administration is on the block for deep cuts, including possible layoffs of up to 80,000 employees — a move that would undoubtedly slow down the processing of benefits for those who have served in America’s past wars. Research on ailments that disproportionately impact veterans will also be cut, which should be considered an outrage.

Meanwhile, hundreds of thousands of veterans from this country’s disastrous wars in Afghanistan and Iraq will continue to suffer from physical and psychological wounds, including traumatic brain injuries (TBI) and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Cutting research that might find more effective solutions to such problems should be considered a national disgrace. In the meantime, active-duty personnel who are getting a tiny fraction of the potential Pentagon add-on of $150 billion are similarly in need.

Worse yet, turn away from the Pentagon for a moment, and the cuts in the rest of that “big beautiful bill” will likely have an impact on a majority of Americans — Democrats, independents, and MAGA Republicans alike.  Their full effects may not be felt for months until the spending reductions contained in it start hitting home. However, enacting policies that take food off people’s tables and deny them medical care will not only cause unnecessary suffering but cost lives.

As President (and former general) Dwight D. Eisenhower, a very different kind of Republican, said more than 70 years ago, the ultimate security of a nation lies not in how many weapons it can pile up, but in the health, education, and resilience of its people. The big beautiful bill and the divisive politics surrounding it threaten those foundations of our national strength.

Clash of the Contractors?

As budget cuts threaten to make the population weaker, distorted spending priorities are making arms producers stronger. The Big Five — Lockheed Martin, RTX, Boeing, General Dynamics, and Northrop Grumman — produce most of the current big-ticket weapon systems, from submarines and intercontinental ballistic missiles to tanks, combat aircraft, and missile-defense systems. Meanwhile, emerging tech firms like Palantir, Anduril, and Space X are cashing in on contracts for unpiloted vehicles, advanced communications systems, new-age goggles for the Army, anti-drone systems, and so much more.

But even as weapons spending hits near-record or record levels, there may still be a fight between the Big Five and the emerging tech firms over who gets the biggest share of that budget. One front in the coming battle between the Big Five and the Silicon Valley militarists could be the Army Transformation Initiative (ATI).  According to Secretary of the Army Dan Driscoll, one of the goals of ATI is to “eliminate obsolete systems.”

Driscoll is a harsh critic of the way members of Congress put money in the budget — a process known as “pork barrel politics” — for items the military services haven’t even asked for (and they ask for plenty), simply because those systems might bring more jobs and revenue to their states or districts. He has, in fact, committed himself to an approach that’s incompatible with the current, parochial process of putting together the Pentagon budget. “Lobbyists and bureaucrats have overtaken the army’s ability to prioritize soldiers and war fighting,” he insisted.

Driscoll is talking a tough game when it comes to taking on the existing big contractors.  He’s evidently ready to push for “reform,” even if it means that some of them go out of business. In fact, he seems to welcome it: “I will measure it as success if, in the next two years, one of the primes is no longer in business.” (“Primes” are the big contractors like Lockheed Martin and General Dynamics that take the lead on major programs and get the bulk of the funding, a significant portion of which they dole out to subcontractors all over the country and the world.)

Ending pork-barrel politics in favor of an approach in which the Pentagon only buys systems that align with the country’s actual defense strategy, as Driscoll is suggesting, might seem like a significant step forward. But be careful what you wish for. Any funds freed up by stopping congressional representatives from treating the Pentagon budget as a piggy bank to buy loyalty from their constituents will almost certainly go to emerging tech firms ready to build next-generation systems like swarms of drones, weapons that can take out a hypersonic missile, or pilotless land vehicles, aircraft, and ships. Driscoll is a major tech enthusiast, as is his friend and Yale law school classmate J.D. Vance, who was first employed by Palantir co-founder Peter Thiel, who then backed his successful run for the Senate from Ohio.

Since the tech firms don’t have the equivalent of the Big Five’s extensive production networks in key congressional districts, they need to find other ways to persuade Congress to fund their weapons programs. Fortunately, the Silicon Valley militarists have a significant number of former employees or financial backers in the Trump administration who can plead their case.

In addition, military-tech-focused venture capital firms have hired at least 50 former Pentagon and military officials, all of whom can help them exert influence over both the Trump administration and Congress. The biggest “catch” was Palantir’s hiring of former Wisconsin Congressman Mike Gallagher, who had run the hawkish Congressional special committee on Communist China.

Some journalists and policy analysts have wondered whether the feud between Donald Trump and Elon Musk will hurt the military tech sector. Well, stop fretting. Even if Trump were to follow through on his threat to cut the government funding of Musk’s firms, the tasks they’re carrying out — from launching military satellites to developing more secure Internet access for deployed military personnel — would still proceed, just under the auspices of different companies. There would be some friction involved, simply because it’s hard to shift suppliers on a dime without slowing down production.  And the transition, should it occur, would also add cost to already exceedingly expensive programs.

But Trump’s threat to cancel Space X’s contracts may just be more grist for his verbal combat with Musk rather than anything his administration plans to follow through on. Even if Musk and his president never reconcile, the DOGE cuts to international diplomacy and domestic social services that Musk spearheaded will still do serious damage for years to come.

Money Can’t Buy Security

A shift toward emerging military tech firms and away from the Big Five will be about more than money and technology.  Key figures among the growing cohort of Silicon Valley militarists like Alex Karp, the CEO of Palantir, see building weapons as more than just a necessary pillar of national defense. They see it as a measure of national character.

Karp’s new book, The Technological Republic: Hard Power, Soft Belief, and the Future of the West, mixes the Cold War ideology of the 1950s with the emerging technology of the twenty-first century. He decries the lack of unifying concepts like “the West” and sees too many Americans as slackers with no sense of national pride or patriotism. His solution, a supposedly unifying national mission, is — wait for it! — a modern Manhattan project for the development of the military applications of artificial intelligence.  To say that this is an impoverished version of what this country’s mission should be is putting it mildly. Many other possibilities come to mind, from addressing climate change to preventing pandemics to upgrading our educational system to building a society where everyone’s basic needs are met, leaving room for creative pursuits of all kinds.

The techno-optimists are also obsessed with preparing for a war with China, which Palmer Luckey, the 32-year-old founder of the military tech firm Anduril, believes will happen by 2027. And many in his circle, including Marc Andreessen of the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, are convinced that any potential risks from the development of AI pale in comparison to the need to “beat China,” not just in getting to sophisticated military applications first, but in winning a future war with Beijing, if it comes to that. Talk of diplomacy to head off a war over Taiwan or cooperation on global issues like climate change, outbreaks of disease, and building a more inclusive, less unequal global economy rarely come up in discussions among the hardcore militarist faction in Silicon Valley.  Instead, that group is spending inordinate amounts of time and money seeking to influence the future of U.S. foreign and military policy, a dangerous development indeed.

Whether the emerging tech firms can build cheaper weapons with superior capabilities will be irrelevant if such developments are tied to an aggressive strategy that makes a devastating conflict with China more likely. While the fight between the Big Five and the tech leaders may prove interesting to observe, it is also ominous in terms of this country’s future economic and foreign policies, not to speak of the shape and size of our national budget.

The rest of us, who aren’t billionaires and don’t draw $20 million in annual compensation packages like the CEOs of the big weapons firms (directly or indirectly funded by our tax dollars), should play a leading role in rethinking and revising this country’s global role and our policies at home. If we don’t rise to that challenge, this country could end up swapping one form of militarism, led by the Big Five, for another, spearheaded by hawkish, self-important tech leaders who care more about making money and spawning devastating new technologies than they do about democracy or the quality of life of the average American.

Reprinted with permission from TomDispatch.com.

The post Feeding the Warfare State appeared first on LewRockwell.

We live in an age when many scientists still clumsily reduce the mind to nothing more than neurochemical activity, namely, the mere interactions of neurons and neurotransmitters. Such scientists often react with hostility at even the suggestion that substance dualism might be true. Therefore, it is refreshing to witness the person with the world’s highest recorded IQ affirm what theologians, philosophers, and mystics have long understood: that consciousness cannot be reduced to mere matter.

For over a century, prodigies like William James Sidis, whose estimated IQ approached 300, captivated the public imagination but left the deepest questions of life, matter, and mind unanswered. Today, Dr. YoungHoon Kim, whose IQ is reportedly verified at 276 and who holds a bachelor’s degree in theology (perhaps proof that the most intelligent begin with first things), recorded a message three months ago that has since gone viral on  and other platforms, declaring: “Our consciousness continues beyond death, definitely.”

Kim has studied various subjects, including psychology, neuroscience, linguistics, philosophy, and theology. He has also received honorary doctorates in cognitive science, education, and psychology and held research positions at both Cambridge and Yale. This interdisciplinary approach has equipped him well to reflect deeply on the subjects of quantum information, consciousness, the afterlife, and God.

Unlike evolutionary biological models such as neo-Darwinism, which are often accompanied by the philosophical assumption held by many of their adherents (though not logically required by the theory itself) that consciousness ceases entirely once brain function stops, Dr. Kim appeals to quantum physics to argue that information never truly disappears but only changes form. He suggests that if consciousness is a kind of quantum information, it may persist beyond the death of the body, much like data stored in “the cloud.”

It is important to note that information is not bound to a single material medium. It can transfer across various substrates such as a USB key, hard drive, book, or brain without necessarily losing the essential informational content. Even when the material substrate is destroyed, the information it holds can persist. Since the revolutionary work of James Watson and Francis Crick in identifying the structure of DNA, it has become increasingly evident that biology is fundamentally governed by information systems.

This growing recognition of information’s primacy in biology has been a central focus of the Intelligent Design movement. Proponents of Intelligent Design, including William Dembski, Stephen Meyer, and Michael Behe, have increasingly highlighted the challenge that information theory presents to reductionist biology. This challenge has also been acknowledged by philosopher Thomas Nagel in Mind and Cosmos, where he argues that the materialist framework is fundamentally inadequate for explaining the origin of life and the emergence of consciousness.

More importantly, Kim’s public witness does not stop at quantum speculation. In a world that idolizes IQ tests and technocratic expertise, he openly confesses what so many refuse to say aloud: that Jesus Christ is divine. On , where his words reached millions, he declared, “As the world’s highest IQ record holder, I believe that Jesus Christ is God, the way and the truth and the life.” In our day and age, to witness the world’s highest IQ holder publicly and willingly bend the knee to Jesus, an itinerant carpenter from the first century, is a stunning feat that surpasses any viral claim about quantum information or the reality of the afterlife, especially given our culture’s mistaken association of high intelligence with skepticism and nonbelief.

In my own writings, particularly in my book On the Origin of Consciousness and in one of my presentations for the 2020 Science of Consciousness conference, “AI, the Nature of Consciousness, Information, Reality and the Possibility of the Afterlife,” I have argued that materialist accounts of the mind are philosophically inadequate and can be rendered scientifically obsolete. If the mind is merely a by-product of electrochemical signals, then human freedom is an illusion, and so is any hope for meaning that transcends our brief biological existence. It is worth noting that over the past one hundred years, philosophical developments in the philosophy of religion, the philosophy of science, and the philosophy of mind—as well as scientific developments in the fields of cosmology, evolutionary biology, chemical evolution, and neuroscience—have increasingly pointed away from the scientific materialist paradigm.

Dr. Kim’s thought and public profession of faith align closely with the central trajectory of my own research. In my presentation at the 2020 Science of Consciousness conference, I argued that recent developments in artificial intelligence, information theory, and quantum physics have brought the question of the afterlife back into legitimate scientific and philosophical discourse. Kim’s analogy to quantum entanglement and the “cloud” strikingly parallels what I have long maintained: that information, in its most meaningful and structured forms, presupposes intention and is often indicative of mind. Quantum entanglement refers to a phenomenon in which two or more particles become linked so that, regardless of the distance separating them, the change in one simultaneously affects the other.

This broader metaphysical resonance is not unique to Kim. Theoretical physicist Michio Kaku has analogized the multiverse to numerous radio stations occupying the same space, each broadcasting on a different frequency. The implication of this comparison is that even though we perceive only one reality, others may coexist beyond our current perception. This “tuning” metaphor, like Kim’s “cloud” analogy, opens the conceptual space for consciousness to endure across dimensions not subject to physical decay once freed from the body.

Kim points out that quantum mechanics teaches that information never truly disappears but changes form. This aligns with the orchestrated objective reduction (Orch OR) theory developed by mathematical physicist Roger Penrose and anesthesiologist Stuart Hameroff, which I discuss in my research. If consciousness emerges from quantum processes within the microtubules of neurons, it is plausible that it can persist beyond the dissolution of the brain. In other words, the self may survive the body’s decay by virtue of the deeper informational order inscribed into reality by the Creator.

If true, this insight refutes the most reductionist strands of scientific materialism. Even many atheists and futurists now toy with mind uploading or transhumanist hopes to escape death digitally. As I pointed out in my presentation, such visions wrestle with severe philosophical problems of identity and continuity. A digital copy is not you, just as a photograph is not a person. Yet Kim’s quantum perspective points to a better answer: consciousness as a unified, immaterial reality, grounded not in data storage devices and servers but in the very structure of the created order.

In Kim’s viral video, he provides a profound yet simple analogy of a video game avatar, whereby an avatar may disappear from the screen but the player persists. This example conveys a deep theological truth and the possibility that the soul survives physical death and can await the future resurrection, much like the empty tomb of Christ provides the historical context for this possibility.

Read the Whole Article

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Thanks, Johnny Kramer.

The Guardian

 

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See here.  

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A Technician wrote:

These Christian-Zionist nutcases are referring to Genesis 12.

And I will make of you (Abram) a great nation, and I will bless you (Abram) and make your name (Abram) great, so that you (Abram) will be a blessing. I will bless those who bless you (Abram), and him who dishonors you (Abram) I will curse, and in you (Abram) all the families of the earth shall be blessed.

Now note here. ..

And in you (Abram) all the families of the earth shall be blessed.

Genesis 17.

I am God Almighty; walk before me, and be blameless, that I may make my covenant between me and you, and may multiply you greatly.” Then Abram fell on his face. And God said to him, “Behold, my covenant is with you, and you shall be the father of a multitude of nations. No longer shall your name be called Abram, but your name shall be Abraham, for I have made you the father of a multitude of nations.

Note again…

And in you (Abram) all the families of the earth shall be blessed.

Genesis 22…

And Isaac said to his father Abraham, “My father!” And he said, “Here I am, my son.” He said, “Behold, the fire and the wood, but where is the lamb for a burnt offering?” Abraham said, “God will provide for himself the lamb for a burnt offering, my son.”

“By myself I have sworn, declares the Lord, because you have done this and have not withheld your son, your only son, I will surely bless you, and I will surely multiply your offspring as the stars of heaven and as the sand that is on the seashore. And your offspring shall possess the gate of his enemies, and in your offspring shall all the nations of the earth be blessed, because you have obeyed my voice.”

Galatians 3

Now the promises were made to Abraham and to his offspring. It does not say, “And to offsprings,” referring to many, but referring to one, “And to your offspring,” who is Christ.

Hebrews 10

Consequently, when Christ came into the world, he said, “Sacrifices and offerings you have not desired, but a body have you prepared for me; in burnt offerings and sin offerings you have taken no pleasure. Then I said, ‘Behold, I have come to do your will, O God, as it is written of me in the scroll of the book.’”

Did you know that the covenant between God and Abraham were unconditional?

The covenant to the Jews were conditional.

Abraham believed God, and it was counted to him as righteousness.

And the Scripture, foreseeing that God would justify the Gentiles by faith, preached the gospel beforehand to Abraham, saying, “In you shall all the nations be blessed.“

And how shall all the nations be blessed?

And if you are Christ’s, then you are Abraham’s offspring, heirs according to promise.

There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is no male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus.

And in you (Abram) all the families of the earth shall be blessed.

So then, those who are of faith are blessed along with Abraham, the man of faith.

Faith…

Abraham believed God, and it was counted to him as righteousness.

But what does it say? “The word is near you, in your mouth and in your heart” (that is, the word of faith that we proclaim); because, if you confess with your mouth that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved.

Nowhere does it say that you must bless Israel to be saved.

So I ask you, who are Gods people?

 

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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.

____________________________________________________________________________________

di Jeffrey Tucker

(Versione audio della traduzione disponibile qui: https://open.substack.com/pub/fsimoncelli/p/psicofarmaci-e-beni-veblen)

Al liceo nel West Texas alla fine degli anni '70, gli psicofarmaci erano considerati beni Veblen, ovvero prodotti desiderati come indicatori di status. Venivano consumati in modo vistoso dai figli dei benestanti, profondamente consapevoli che i loro compagni di scuola non potevano permettersi né il trattamento, né la presunta cura.

Così i ragazzi – ne conoscevo molti e ogni tanto mi tolleravano nelle loro cerchie – si vantavano della loro diagnosi, delle loro prescrizioni, del mix di farmaci e di come li faceva sentire.

Portavano le loro pillole e le ostentavano, snocciolando i nomi di questo o quel farmaco e ridendo maliziosamente di tutto. Non c'era nulla di particolarmente sdolcinato, se non la loro performance. Erano sinceramente orgogliosi, come si potrebbe essere quando si indossa un cappotto o delle scarpe di lusso e costosi. Le pillole erano solo una parte del mix: ostentavano anche le loro presunte malattie come medaglie d'onore.

C'era sempre un'aria di distacco nella cultura di questi ragazzi, un disprezzo noncurante per tutti i sistemi, che fossero la scuola, la famiglia, la chiesa, persino la società in generale. Si sentivano al di sopra di tutto, e i farmaci e la condizione che stavano affrontando ne facevano parte. Era praticamente un segno distintivo. C'era persino un accenno di politica, un'evidenziazione e un'esibizione di alienazione. Erano allo stesso tempo il vertice della gerarchia sociale, ma lo disprezzavano.

La maggior parte di questi ragazzi eccelleva nei voti e puntava in alto nelle domande di ammissione all'università, senza alcun dubbio sul successo. Ci riuscivano nonostante la loro grave condizione mentale, che attribuivano ai genitori, alle strutture sociali, agli insegnanti, ai protocolli e alla macchina sociale in generale. La società li aveva resi malati, ma i farmaci davano loro la libertà di fluttuare al di sopra di tutto.

Da allora non ho più seguito le loro vite. Forse li hanno abbandonati dopo l'università e hanno vissuto normalmente. Forse no. Probabilmente nessuno scriverà un memoir, quindi non lo sapremo mai. In ogni caso nei decenni successivi questo bene Veblen ha seguito la stessa strada di tutti gli acquisti di lusso: è diventato mainstream. Gli psicofarmaci sono ormai comuni tra adulti e bambini. È un'industria enorme: come i cellulari e le TV generazioni fa, hanno attraversato la struttura sociale anno dopo anno.

Ora arriva Unshrunk di Laura Delano, un libro che potrebbe cambiare tutto. Se non fosse un'autobiografia, renderebbe popolare la grande narrativa gotica dell'epoca vittoriana. Anche se eliminasse ogni commento sul merito di tutte queste presunte malattie e cure, sarebbe comunque un dramma fantastico dall'inizio alla fine.

Niente di ciò che dico può prepararvi all'avventura che questo libro porta con sé. È perfettamente strutturato in modo quasi poetico per trasmettere al lettore la sensazione reale di attraversare ogni fase di un decennio e mezzo di cocktail di farmaci, istituti psichiatrici, ospedali e molto altro, fino alla sua auto-motivata emancipazione dall'intera industria.

Temo che l'argomento da solo scoraggi i lettori. Non dovrebbe, però. Leggetelo come fareste con una grande opera di narrativa. Rende ancora più avvincente rendersi conto che si tratta di un'opera autentica – una persona vera – con tutto il dolore che ogni autore dovrebbe provare nel riversare su carta stampata la propria anima in questo modo. È un'esperienza rara, unica nel suo genere ai nostri tempi.

Inoltre anche se estrapolaste tutte le critiche mediche dettagliate su sperimentazioni farmacologiche, effetti collaterali, equivoci di mercato da questi farmaci e le trasformaste in una monografia a sé stante, avrebbe un valore enorme.

Quindi abbiamo davvero tre libri in uno: un brillante dramma con un arco narrativo fantastico, un'autobiografia di una giovane donna in un mondo a parte che la maggior parte di noi non conoscerà mai e un trattato medico tecnico su un intero settore.

Incombe nella narrazione la questione della classe sociale. L'autrice è nata in un mondo sconosciuto ai più, quello di Greenwich, Connecticut, discendente di un presidente in carica per tre mandati, laureata in una scuola preparatoria e destinata ad Harvard, beneficiaria di ogni privilegio finanziario e sociale, a cui è stata offerta la migliore assistenza psichiatrica disponibile al mondo.

Non è stata maltrattata. È stata curata, lo dice lei stessa:

Una volta ero malata di mente e ora non lo sono più, e non è stato perché mi è stata fatta una diagnosi sbagliata. Non sono stata curata in modo improprio o eccessivo. Non sono guarita miracolosamente da presunte malattie cerebrali che alcuni dei migliori psichiatri del Paese mi avevano detto che avrei avuto per il resto della mia vita. In realtà ho ricevuto una diagnosi corretta e sono stata curata secondo gli standard di cura dell'American Psychiatric Association. Il motivo per cui non sono più malata di mente è che ho deciso di mettere in discussione le idee su me stessa che avevo dato per vere e scartare ciò che ho scoperto essere in realtà finzione.

La migliore assistenza, i migliori medici, le migliori istituzioni, le migliori consulenze, i migliori farmaci costantemente perfezionati dagli esperti: un po' più di questo, un po' meno di quello ed eccone una nuova. Quando la diagnosi di Laura passò da bipolare a borderline, fu affidata alle cure del padre stesso della presunta malattia: il dott. John G. Gunderson del McLean Hospital di Harvard (che aveva visitato anche Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton e Susanna Kaysen).

Aveva tutte le ragioni per fidarsi degli esperti, tranne una: non migliorava mai, peggiorava solamente. Con il tempo, concluse gradualmente che il suo vero problema era iatrogeno, ovvero causato proprio dagli stessi farmaci che si diceva fossero la soluzione.

Asking Psychiatrists Q: How many patients have you cured? pic.twitter.com/S4ix6DXflK

— Camus (@newstart_2024) June 22, 2025

I primi accenni di vera guarigione colpiscono il lettore quando Laura iniziò a frequentare gli Alcolisti Anonimi, dove tutti applaudivano quando i presenti rivelavano da quanto tempo erano sobri. Leggendo mi ha colpito il fatto, sebbene l'autrice non lo dica, che praticamente tutti capiscono che l'alcolismo è un problema enorme e che la via più sicura per tutti è la sobrietà. Nessun medico raccomanda di bere di più, più alcolici, diversi tipi di alcolici, più cocktail, come soluzione a qualsiasi problema.

Ciononostante per i cocktail farmaceutici più potenti si applica uno standard completamente diverso. Vengono somministrati a milioni di pazienti, con l'avvertenza di non saltarli mai; questo è ciò che fanno solo quei pazienti cattivi.

Le persone che tentano imprudentemente di farne a meno vengono ridiagnosticate con la “sindrome da sospensione” – come se l'eliminazione delle tossine creasse una nuova malattia – il che, naturalmente, richiede nuove prescrizioni.

L'intero sistema è costruito per far sì che le persone continuino a prendere farmaci. E quando si cerca di eliminarli, il corpo assuefatto reagisce con sintomi che sembrano rafforzare la diagnosi e la soluzione... speriamo che capiate perché vi abbiamo prescritto questi farmaci!

Perché questo giudizio capovolto contro una tossina (l'alcol) e a favore di tutte le altre? Ecco il nocciolo del vero scandalo: riguarda l'enorme potere dell'industria, il misticismo della scienza, il prestigio del mondo accademico e le associazioni di classe legate alle diagnosi di alto rango e alle presunte soluzioni.

Questa linea di pensiero apre a ulteriori critiche all'intero sistema medico e, più in generale, ai prodotti farmaceutici. Questo libro sgretola la comprensione popolare della malattia mentale e la capacità della classe degli esperti di affrontarla. Le lezioni sono così sconvolgenti che nessun lettore guarderà i prodotti farmaceutici standardizzati allo stesso modo.

Nel periodo del Covid, ricorderete, anche il rispetto dei protocolli era un fattore determinante. Solo le persone di cattivo gusto reclamavano la propria libertà, osavano girare per i negozi senza mascherina, o non rispettavano il distanziamento sociale negli ascensori. I tipi trasandati protestavano contro i lockdown. Camionisti canadesi, certo! Cos'altro c'è da sapere? Le brave persone, i professionisti di successo e ben pagati che usavano il computer portatile, restavano a casa, guardavano film in streaming e si tenevano lontani dagli altri.

Ricordo di essere stato sgridato mentre camminavo all'aperto senza mascherina.

“Le mascherine sono socialmente raccomandate”, urlò un uomo, storpiando alcune parole. C'era furia nella sua voce perché qualcuno di così miserabile come me osava trovarsi nel suo quartiere, senza dubbio diffondendo il Covid. Mi ero snaturato rifiutandomi di coprirmi il viso, come se mi fossi rivelato un vettore di diffusione della malattia.

Il panorama morale è diventato cristallino con la distribuzione dei vaccini. Le persone pulite li facevano, le persone sporche li rifiutavano. Il modello era estremamente primitivo, ma con un pregiudizio di classe che sfociava in una sorta di bigottismo regionale: automaticamente gli stati con un'alta percentuale di persone non vaccinate votava per Trump. Intere città sono diventate segregate, come culmine di una prospettiva di classe che ci ha separato da loro (si veda la mia teoria del pulito contro lo sporco come lente attraverso cui comprendere l'intero periodo).

Non avevo mai avuto molta consapevolezza della classe sociale e del suo significato in politica prima di quel periodo. Improvvisamente era tutto ciò che contava, con le agenzie governative che delineavano chi era essenziale e chi no. Né m'era venuto in mente che protocolli e prodotti medici erano emersi come un bene Veblen, qualcosa da consumare con orgoglio nella propria posizione elevata negli strati sociali, come l'arte moderna e la filosofia postmoderna.

È stato geniale da parte dell'industria della medicina psichiatrica promuoversi – a partire da molto tempo fa – come un bene di lusso, un indicatore di classe, un prodotto destinato al consumo dei privilegiati. C'è qualcosa che non va in ogni vita. Le persone di successo lo risolvono con le pillole. Prendete le vostre medicine: non siete un tossicodipendente, ma un paziente altamente responsabile che può permettersi le migliori cure. Come dice la canzone, il diavolo indossava un camice.

Il libro di Laura Delano intreccia questi elementi in un racconto allarmante di tragedia seguito da un'ultima speranza. Dal primo capitolo in cui iniziano i presunti problemi, passando per gli alti e bassi e le storie di 21 farmaci diversi, non vedevo l'ora di vedere come l'autrice avrebbe gestito il finale.

Gli ultimi capitoli sono perfetti in modi che non rivelerò per paura di fare spoiler. La mia ulteriore speranza è che questa breve recensione ispiri molte altre persone a percorrere lo stesso cammino dell'autrice e a trarne insegnamenti profondi.

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

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Allow me a moment to preface what I want to say with a disclaimer. That is, I hate politics. Oh, I know I’ve written about politics in the past, talking about the actions of one politician or another and how that might affect you and I; but I certainly didn’t do that out of any love for politics or the political process. I’ve spent all my life voting against candidates, more than voting for them, because I really haven’t seen all that many candidates who truly embodied my beliefs. So, I find myself voting against the one who is furthest from where I stand, by voting for the other one. What a crazy way to run a railroad.

This is not to say that I am against democracy, even though we’re not one (we’re a constitutional republic, which is not the same thing). Nor am I against our country. We’re still the greatest country on the face of the earth, despite our flaws. We didn’t become greatest by eliminating our flaws, but because our flaws pale in comparison to other countries, both past and present. We’re far from perfect, but at least we’re working on it.

Nonetheless, even though I hate politics, I see the need for it. One has to look no further than the many examples of countries where governments have fallen, to see the need for politics. Even with all it gets wrong, it is the political process that allows us to live together under a set of laws that have been created with the intent of treating all people equally.

As I look at the political landscape today, I can’t help but think that if there’s anything that will tear this country apart, it’s politics. We find ourselves living in a time where the political divide (which has always existed) is deeper and wider than ever before. Most people, on both sides, live in an echo chamber, only listening to voices which parrot their own political thoughts. The idea that I grew up with, that both sides sit down at the table and find a middle ground which works for everyone, is long gone.

We are probably headed towards another civil war and it will be just as ugly as the last one was. That one was over political issues as well (slavery was a political issue in those days). The big difference is that the lines between the two sides won’t be as clean cut as they were before. That will likely lead to many non-combatants falling victim to the battle. But the biggest casualty will be our nation itself.

What happens when that system collapses?

There have been a fair number of examples of political and economic collapse that we can find in history. Almost universally, the lack of a solid political system has led to anarchy, with warlords rising up to take control. Those warlords strive to gain territory, fighting between themselves for supremacy. Through that, it is the innocent people in the population who suffer.

It’s kind of funny that our news media even tries to make some of these warlords look good. They are no better off than a barbarian chieftain who invades and conquers. The occasional acts of mercy they might display are carefully crafted to make them look good, often with some personal benefit to the warlord at the same time. They are takers, even more so than our current crop of politicians.

There are many of us who look all but look forward with anticipation to a societal collapse. We want a release from the oppressive burden of our political overlords and want to put our survival knowledge to work, living as we’ve always dreamed; self-sufficient masters of our own fate.

Sadly, that’s a false image. While we would have to put our survival skills to use and be self-sufficient, we wouldn’t be living in an ideal world. That is, unless you happen to have the keys to the lost valley of Shanga La. Rather, we would find ourselves living in the midst of gang warfare, with constant battles all around. If any of the warring factions even suspected that we had a stockpile of supplies, they would attack us, over and over again, until they killed us. I know you probably think you can survive that; think again… there are more of them, than there are of us.

So, what’s the answer?

The more I’ve studied this out, the more I’ve realized that part of our survival strategy has to be the restoration of local government; the quicker, the better. I’m not sure yet what to do about higher levels of government and I’m not really all that sure that we can do anything; but if we want to live in any semblance of peace, we’re going to have to do something at the local level.

That means someone stepping up to take the place of leading the people, while talking about the need to reestablish the local government. If you and I don’t do that, someone will; and we might not be all that happy about who that someone is. They might be those very same warlords that I’m talking about avoiding and they might be socialist politicians, who are going to come after us, just because we have resources they need to redistribute, in order to make themselves look good. Either way, it won’t be good for us if they get into power.

That leaves us with two viable options. The first is to take power ourselves and the second is to get behind someone we can trust, helping them to take power. The problem with supporting someone else, of course, is that we don’t really know how much we can trust them. Even our best friend could turn against us, wanting to redistribute our stockpile in order to garner political favor, as soon as they realize they don’t need us anymore.

Start in Your Neighborhood

The first place to start any rebuilding of the government is right there where you are. I’ve written before about working together with neighbors in a time of crisis. Being the one who brings order to your neighborhood and ensures your neighbors’ survival will naturally put you in a position of leadership within your neighborhood. As word gets out and more people join your neighborhood survival team, that leadership will naturally spread to include a broader area.

This won’t be hard to accomplish, as most people will be looking for some sort of leadership to rise up and tell them what to do. Your challenge in this case will be to make people realize that any help you offer comes with a price tag. That is, they’re going to have to work for the betterment of the survival group, doing their part to help make sure that everyone survives, even if that work is something that they consider to be beneath them.

Considering today’s entitlement society, this may be harder than it sounds. There will likely be plenty of people around, who are expecting the government to take care of them. These people may look at you as the government, even before there is any government in place, and thing that they are entitled to whatever help you can give them. the easy solution to that problem, is to just kick them out of the group. When they come back, and they likely will, they need to sign on the dotted line, indicating they understand that they need to work in order to receive anything.

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The US Senate worked through the weekend on the “Big Beautiful Bill.” The goal was to pass it quickly to ensure the House will then pass it and send it to President Trump’s desk before the July 4th holiday.

However, disagreements among Republican Senators over reductions in spending on programs including Medicaid and food stamps as well as language in the bill eliminating “clean energy” tax credits were preventing Senate Republican leadership from getting enough votes to pass the bill.

Also, some Republicans disagree with other Republicans in both the House and Senate on increasing the state and local tax (SALT) deduction. Many conservatives see this income tax deduction as encouraging states to maintain high taxes to fund big governments.

One item in the BBB that few Republicans are objecting to is the bill’s increase in military spending. The House version of the BBB added 150 billion dollars to the Pentagon’s already bloated budget. The Senate bill gave the military-industrial complex 156 billion dollars.

Increasing military spending contradicts President Trump’s promise to stop wasting money on endless wars that have nothing to do with ensuring the security of the American people.

Some of the BBB’s military spending will be used to put troops on the border. I support strengthening border security. However, I do not support using the military for domestic law enforcement, which includes enforcing immigration laws. Soldiers are trained to view people as potential enemies, not as innocent civilians to be protected. Introducing this mindset into domestic law enforcement will lead to abuses of liberty.

Increasing spending on militarism while cutting spending on programs that help low-income Americans is bad politics and bad policy. Polls show that the majority of Americans, including many Republicans, do not support overseas intervention.

The growing opposition to our hyper-interventionist foreign policy is easy to understand. The US has engaged in numerous military actions in many countries including Iraq, Afghanistan, and Syria since the beginning of the 21st century. The American people pay for this militarism in several ways. One is the “inflation tax” imposed by the Federal Reserve in order to monetize the debt incurred by the US government for endless wars. President Trump has turned his back on his antiwar supporters by bombing Iran and by increasing military spending to over a trillion dollars.

The Republican insistence on increasing military spending is the main reason Congress cannot cut taxes without increasing the debt, making cuts in domestic welfare programs, or both. If the Republicans want to be the Make America Great Again party, they need to embrace a true America First foreign policy. This means no more regime change wars or US taxpayer supported “color revolutions.” Instead, America should return to the Founders’ vision of a country that, in the words of John Quincy Adams, does not go “abroad in search of monsters to destroy” and instead is “the well-wisher to the freedom and independence of all” while “the champion and vindicator only of her own.”

A return to a noninterventionist foreign policy is the only way we will be able to begin to pay down the national debt and restore a government that adheres to the constitutional limits on its powers and respects all the people’s rights all the time.

The post A Big Beautiful Bill for the Military-Industrial Complex appeared first on LewRockwell.

The unforgiving war will be long and bloody. Yet the Angel of History seems to have caught a second wind.

It’s one of the most mesmerizing passages in the history of knowledge. In the 9th of his Theses on the Philosophy of History, Walter Benjamin – Jewish, tragic figure, solitary genius – dissects Paul Klee’s haunting painting Angelus Novus and graphically explains to posterity the drama facing the Angel of History:

“His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events: he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing in from Paradise; it has got caught in its wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. The storm propels him into a future to which his back is turned – whilst the pile of debris before him goes even higher. This storm is what has been called progress.”

The time has come to go beyond what may be read as a very apocalyptic Christian parallel between divinity and violent retribution. As Alastair Crooke detailed in his astonishingly perceptive 2010 book, Resistance: The Essence of the Islamist Revolution, it was the need to restrain the furies of “divinely inspired” violence that led Hobbes to conceptualize Leviathan, where he called for a social contract between the individual and a necessarily strong, implacable government.

Moreover, it was the Hobbesian version of a social contract that laid the basis for John Locke to assert a dubious “natural goodness” of humanity, complete with a – very private – “pursuit of happiness” and the general welfare gleefully coalescing via the work of an invisible hand.

This fallacy/fairy tale shaped Western thought for over the next 300 years.

Now it’s a completely different ball game. We have been prisoners of Hobbes and Locke for too long: such a seductive pole dancing of legitimacy around which the Western-conceived nation-states grouped to protect and legitimize themselves and their plunder of the rest of the world.

Lately, the contemporary specter of “divine violence” was marketed to everyone from Africa to Asia as armed Islamist resistance. But now this mask has also fallen. The “new” Syria shows to everyone how al-Qaeda R Us – and always was.

Shelter from the – ultimate – storm

The time has also come to re-evaluate the plight of the Angel of History. No, he is not transfixed by “divine” rage; that’s actually quite man-made. Meanwhile, what continues to propel him forward – even as he casts his eyes to the past (“the backward half-look, over the shoulder, toward the primitive terror”, in T. S. Eliot’s striking image) is the wind of secular, Darwinian, tech “progress” – a single, unified catastrophe much more that a chain of historical events.

Yes, he continues to contemplate the tragedy; he badly wants to awaken humanity to the extent of the disaster; but the rush of now tech “progress”, AI-tinged, inevitably sweeps him away.

The Global South now seems to have a crystal clear perspective of the new contours of the catastrophe laid at the feet of the Angel of History.

The top two contemporary agents of the catastrophe have been fully identified: a psycho-pathological, genocidal death cult composed by elements of a self-appointed chosen tribe; and the post-historical elites of a dwindling empire. A deadly embrace – if there ever was one.

Yet now they have met an immovable symbol of Resistance. And they had to back off. To the astonishment of the Angel of History himself.

Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei laid it all out in a few sentences:

“The key point I wish to emphasize in my speech is that in one of his remarks, the President of the United States declared that Iran must surrender. Surrender! The issue isn’t about enrichment or the nuclear industry anymore. It’s about Iran surrendering.”

This is the voice of an ancient civilization-state – in contrast to post-modern, out of control barbarism: “Our cultural and civilizational wealth is hundred times greater than that of the US and other similar countries (…) The Iranian nation is noble and will remain noble.”

An irrational, and certainly not “divine” storm now aims to totally paralyze the Angel of History – imprinting on the narrative their revamped but equally tawdry notion of “end of History”, applied to the circumscribed space of West Asia.

And that brings us to how the Resistance will have to delve deep into the nitty-gritty, as in the practicalities of deterrence and defense, so the Angel of History may reinvent himself.

Cut to the Yemeni Armed Forces – this bastion of rectitude, a military organization guided by spiritual power: “The US and Zionist entity’s ceasefire agreement with Iran highlights that military force is the only language they understand.”

Add to it the number one lesson from the 12-day war: whoever controls the skies eventually will control the lands.

Iran’s leadership, as the fulcrum of Resistance, has some serious decisions to make. The most important, on the “language” issue as framed by the Houthis, is to trust Russia to help it set up a comprehensive, multi-layered offense/defense system, complete with hardware, combat and control centers, long-range radar stations, electronic warfare equipment, and badass jet fighters.

As Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov made it quite clear ahead of the meeting one week ago between President Putin and Iranian FM Abbas Araghchi:” It all depends on what Iran needs right now.”

They need serious backup. The Majlis – Iran’s Parliament – delayed for over a month the ratification of the comprehensive strategic partnership signed with Russia after the Duma approved it in late May. That includes weapons sales, military inter-connection and deep intel exchange – even if it does not imply a full military alliance.

Previous Iranian president Ebrahim Raisi clearly saw The Big Picture. He went full “Look East” – as in Eurasia integration. The current, meek Pezeshkian presidency attempted a “Look West” – naively trusting that the Empire of Chaos would actually practice diplomacy. They were in for a rude awakening.

The unforgiving war will be long and bloody. This is just the beginning – current pause included. Yet the Angel of History seems to have caught a second wind. Looks like his warnings about the catastrophe were finally understood by the overwhelming majority of the Global South. As we sift through the accumulated debris, Resistance is at hand – sheltering us from the ultimate storm.

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

The post The Angel of History as a Symbol of Resistance appeared first on LewRockwell.

One of the key themes I’ve tried to illustrate throughout this publication is that chronic illness has vastly increased over the last 150 years. Furthermore, again and again, doctors of each generation who observed each successive wave of that increase noticed that the treatments they learned at the start of their careers were much less effective for treating the patients they saw at the conclusion of their careers.

For example, here recent article, I discussed this collective loss of vitality in more detail, and listed what I believed were the primary culprits (which has been quite a challenge as there are now so many unhealthy things in our environment). In addition to listing the key culprits many are familiar with (e.g., the vaccination program has had a horrific impact on our health), I proposed another primary cause of chronic illness was modern life being highly disruptive to the natural rhythms the body depends upon for self-regulation and self-repair.

I believe this concept is relatively under appreciated within Modern Medicine (Allopathy) because, unlike almost any other medical system in history, our scientific approach to understanding the body does not recognize the concept of an innate “health” of the body, and as such, many Allopathic treatments are based around doing what they can to stabilize (e.g., in the ICU) or alter the body (e.g., through a surgery) and then hoping the body eventually works things out from there. In contrast, most other medical systems focus on what can be done to augment this innate capacity for recovery (health) and trust that through doing so, the present issue will resolve itself.

Note: typically the Allopathic approach (forcing the body to assume the state deemed necessary for the patient) is ideal to utilize for acute conditions, whereas the health-augmenting approach is what gets the best results for chronic conditions (something Allopathic medicine is well-known for struggling with).

At this point, I believe there are three reasons why we utilize the Allopathic model (discussed further here) rather than the health-focused model:

• The Allopathic model lends itself to creating a large number of perpetual treatments and diagnostic services for each person. Because this is so lucrative, it inevitably incentivizes its proponents to monopolize the entire medical market and healthcare practitioners to prioritize creating and utilizing its therapies.

• One of the fundamental psychological neuroses that exists in our culture is the need to control things and believe one knows exactly what’s happening. Because of this, our culture tends to default towards adopting methods and models that dominate nature rather than working in harmony with it and refusing to accept the inherent uncertainty that trusting in the path nature takes entails. Trusting in the health of the body to cure illness hence is opposed to the cultural philosophy Allopathy emerged from.

• Knowing if a therapy actually “works” is quite challenging, especially if the change can only be observed over a long time. Because of this, most medical research is based on whether an overt change can be consistently observed within a patient (e.g., lowering their blood pressure) and hoping that change will yield a long-term benefit rather than evaluating the long-term prognosis of people who receive a medical intervention. Because of this, medical research is strongly biased towards evaluating treatments that create an overt change (e.g., pharmaceutical drugs) rather than ones that augment the body’s health and lead toward a gradual recovery. Likewise, it is much easier to diagnose someone by their symptoms (and prescribe drugs to treat those symptoms) than it is to identify the root cause of their disease.

Self Regulating Cycles

The “health” of the body is highly dependent on the normal functioning of a variety of repeating cycles that occur within it.

For example:

• Practicing slow, smooth, and expansive nasal breathing has a profound impact on one’s health and longevity because breathing regulates many different critical physiologic functions.

• Normal exposure to sunlight serves a variety of critical functions for health, and once it is lost, one’s risk of dying doubles, and a variety of other conditions, such as depression set in (discussed further here).

• People need regular physical activity, whereas once they become sedentary, a variety of significant health issues arise. In turn, we have all noticed individuals who make a point to walk daily have dramatically improved longevity.

• The mind is designed to alternate between periods of rest and activity. Yet, in our modern era, we have to think constantly, which often occurs in conjunction with significant stressors.

• Humans are meant to alternate between periods of eating and not eating (fasting) rather than continually eating.

In short, many of the natural rhythms our bodies rely upon for self-regulation are heavily disrupted in modern society, which in turn results in a variety of consistent derangements to normal physiology that are now seen throughout the population.

Note: based on how much we frequently see people’s health improve once they restore their natural rhythms, I now believe their disruption is a primary cause of the widespread health dysfunction we see now.

The Importance of Sleep

Throughout my career, I’ve met countless integrative practitioners who believed that one of the most important things to do when treating a chronic illness is to normalize their patient’s sleep, as this cyclical process is one of the foundational methods the body uses to restore its health. Unfortunately, patients with chronic illnesses tend to have highly disrupted sleep cycles which are often very challenging to correct (e.g., insomnia is fairly common following a COVID-19 vaccine injury).

The important thing to understand about sleep is that it is a tightly regulated cycle which is both highly responsive to signals from the environment and also responsible for maintaining many of the other critical rhythms within the body.

During sleep, the body cycles through different phases of sleep, each of which performs a critical function (e.g., deep NREM sleep heals the brain and allows toxins to drain out of it through the glymphatics, while REM sleep consolidates memories and allows one to process the emotions of their experiences). A typical sleep cycle goes as follows:

Note: since REM sleep predominates later at night, not sleeping long enough disproportionately disrupts REM sleep.

Matthew Walker is one of the world’s most vocal sleep researchers. In his book Why We Sleep, he argues that some of the most important functions of sleep include:

• Maintaining circulatory health and preventing heart attacks.
• Ensuring proper metabolic health (e.g., sleep deprivation causes hunger, diabetes, and weight gain).
• Ensuring proper immune function (e.g., you are more likely to get the flu if you are sleep deprived).
• Preventing cancer.
• Preventing fatigue and brain fog (which are typically the most overt symptoms we notice from sleep deprivation).
• Remaining awake and alert.
• Healing and restoring the brain (e.g., Alzheimer’s disease is strongly linked to poor sleep).
• Regulating hormonal function and maintaining fertility (e.g., sleep deprivation lowers testosterone levels).
• Processing emotional trauma (e.g., sleep is typically disrupted in PTSD, and PTSD often significantly improves once a drug is given which prevents PTSD from disrupting sleep).
• Integrating one’s sense of reality and accurately interpreting emotional signals from one’s environment.
• Sleep allows the rational mind (the prefrontal cortex) to control counterproductive impulses (e.g., emotional outbursts, or binge eating).
• Maintaining one’s mental health (e.g., it’s well known that a variety of psychiatric conditions, such as bipolar episodes are triggered by periods of sleep deprivation).
• Maintaining one’s sense of reality (e.g., prolonged sleep deprivation can trigger psychosis, and sleep is known to be disturbed in schizophrenic patients).
• Facilitating creativity (e.g., many paradigm-shifting discoveries came from dreams, Thomas Edison was well-known for using dreams to concoct his inventions, and when people are woken up from REM sleep, they often demonstrate a radically improved abstract problem solving capacity).
• Reducing one’s sensitivity to pain (whereas sleep deprivation increases it).
• Facilitating the long-term retention of memories.

I generally agree with this list (and will cite more studies supporting it later in the article). Likewise, I am sure many of know firsthand how bad you feel when you are sleep deprived. Here are some of my personal experiences with sleep:

•I am fairly sensitive to the baselines within my body and I immediately notice that things within me go awry if I’ve had insufficient sleep. For example, I notice impairments in a variety of neurologic functions (e.g., I become significantly less able to tolerate the cold, my coordination worsens, and it’s much harder for me to maintain my focus in either an intellectual or social task).

•During periods of significant sleep deprivation, I will notice I have fleeting pain within the heart muscle and periodic arrhythmias. This is corroborated by a study that found one night of modest sleep reduction (as little as one or two hours) quickly increased one’s heart rate and blood pressure.

•During periods of insufficient sleep, I experience general mental fogginess that persists until I get a good night’s sleep (and sometimes two).

•I have repeatedly observed that one’s recovery from a traumatic brain injury is highly dependent upon whether they get significant sleep after the incident, something I in part attribute to improved venous and lymphatic drainage (e.g., most glymphatic drainage occurs during NREM sleep and when you are lying down, there is much greater venous drainage than while standing). Likewise, research shows that a significant part of the gradual recovery from strokes occurs while sleeping.

•Before high school, I accidentally figured out how to use sleep to facilitate the long-term retention of information. This “lifehack” allowed me to memorize large volumes of information in very little time, and was the main reason I was able to get through the academic system while simultaneously teaching myself a separate curriculum (e.g., I spent more time studying things I was not assigned to learn during medical school than the material I was expected to learn). I mention this because the rules I discovered through experimenting with my “lifehack” matched what Walker’s own data demonstrated (although some of them also went beyond the scope of what Walker looked at).

Note: NREM sleep is responsible for eliminating unnecessary memories, whereas REM sleep processes the day’s experiences and reinforces them into long-term memory.

•I tend to gain weight during periods of poor sleep.

Finally, Walker cites many examples of severe consequences occurring after prolonged periods of significant sleep deprivation (e.g., death or psychosis). I have also seen similar things occur. For instance, periodically I will have a patient who comes to me after engaging in an unsafe spiritual practice which involved staying awake for multiple days, after which they developed a permanent psychiatric or spiritual disorder (discussed further here).

Quantifying the Importance of Sleep

Any individual, no matter what age, will exhibit physical ailments, mental health instability, reduced alertness, and impaired memory if their sleep is chronically disrupted.

Even when controlling for factors such as body mass index, gender, race, history of smoking, frequency of exercise, and medications, the lower an older individual’s sleep efficiency score, the higher their mortality risk, the worse their physical health, the more likely they are to suffer from depression, the less energy they report, and the lower their cognitive function, typified by forgetfulness.

Immunity

During periods of sleep deprivation, immune system function significantly decreases. Some of the consequences of this include:

Cancer—Numerous studies have found an association between sleep deprivation and cancer (while conversely, others have not—which I believe is due to the difficulty of properly studying this topic). Data supporting the link includes:

•In 2010, using all the available evidence, the WHO classified shift work (one of the most reliable ways to heavily disrupt natural sleep cycles and something many workers in the healthcare field experience) as a probable human carcinogen. This link is also supported by a 2023 review paper.

• An English study of 10,036 people over 50 found that poor sleep resulted in a 33-62% increased risk of cancer.

• A study of 23,620 Europeans found that those who slept for less than 6 hours per day were 43-46% more likely to develop cancer.

• When mice were intentionally sleep deprived, they experienced their speed and size of cancer growth roughly doubled, relative to the well-rested group.

• When healthy young men slept for four hours, compared to nights where they slept eight hours, there was a 72% decrease in their circulating natural killer cells (which are responsible for eliminating cancers).

• Two different studies found sleep apnea (which disrupts healthy sleep) caused a large increase in one’s risk of dying from cancer.

• Existing data shows that sleeping pills (which disrupt normal sleep) are associated with a large increase in one’s risk of cancer.

Note: the increased cancer risk from poor sleep may also be due to disturbances in the body’s normal release of melatonin or insufficient tissue oxygenation.

Infections—individuals who are sick are more likely to develop infections (e.g., most times I get sick are after periods of prolonged poor sleep). Some of the evidence to substantiate this common observation includes:

• Rats that are not allowed to sleep deteriorate and eventually die. When death occurs, it is typically due to sepsis from their gut bacteria.
Note: humans also can develop blood infections from their gut bacteria, but it typically requires circumstances that predispose them to it (e.g., on a central venous catheter as that provides a site bacteria in the blood stream can adhere to, or following a bowel rupture).

• A study determined how much sleep research subjects had had in the last week and then exposed them to the common cold virus (by squirting it in their nose). It found those who had averaged less than 7 hours of sleep were 2.94 times more likely to develop a cold than those who had more than 8 hours. It also found those with poor sleep efficiency (how much of the time bed you are asleep) were 5.50 times more likely to develop a cold than those with good sleep efficiency.

A study of 56,953 nurses found women who slept 5 hours or less were 1.7 times as likely to develop pneumonia over a 4-year period compared to those who slept 8 hours a night.

• A 2002 study compared 14 healthy young men who slept for 7.5-8.5 hours a day to 11 others who restricted their sleep to 4 hours a night for 6 days, after which all 25 received a flu shot. The sleep-deprived group was observed to produce less than half the vaccine antibodies seen in the control group, and this loss continued after normal sleep had been restored

Note: this association has also been seen with other influenza vaccines along with hepatitis A and B vaccines.

• When patients take sleeping medications that interfere with the sleep cycle, they have a significantly increased rate of infections (e.g., one large study found they increased one’s risk of pneumonia by 54% and one’s risk of dying from pneumonia by 32%).

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