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A friend and supporter of this newsletter just sent me a report “that the Trump administration is reportedly negotiating to turn Intel’s $10.9 billion CHIPS Act subsidies into a 10 percent equity stake in the company.” If finalized, Washington would be among Intel’s largest shareholders.

Reporter Vance Ginn at the Daily Economy does a fine job of enumerating why this is a bad idea for U.S. citizens and taxpayers, and I recommend reading his report.

The contemplated U.S.-Intel deal is, it seems to me, an example of yielding to the siren song of Fascist Corporatism.

Nowadays, we think of “Fascism” as a doctrine exemplified by the German police and military state during the Third Reich. However, the roots of this doctrine lie in the writings of the Italian philosopher, Giovanni Gentile, who postulated that the optimal political and economic system is akin to a Merger of State and Corporate Power.

Gentile postulated that this was not only a doctrine of great economic utility, but also the best arrangement for promoting the moral and spiritual health of the modern nation state.

Gentile was probably being sincere when he theorized about this. Nowadays, the primary temptation of Corporatism lies not in its purported utility for forging a strong national identity and allegiance, but in its utility for clever and ambitious money-grubbers.

During the pandemic, we saw companies like Pfizer and Moderna form a symbiotic relationship with officers of various U.S. government agencies, including the Department of Defense — so symbiotic that it became very difficult to delineate the corporations from the U.S. government agencies that extravagantly supported them.

Since the rise of the Military-Industrial Complex during the 1940s and 50s, U.S. industrial corporations have been inextricably linked to U.S. government agencies. To give just one of many examples, Robert McNamara began his career in the military working for General Curtis LeMay. Later he worked for the Ford Motor Company and ultimately became its president, and then he became the Secretary of Defense for Kennedy and Johnson.

Senior officers and directors of the industrial services company, Brown & Root, were key supporters of Lyndon Johnson’s political career, and he rewarded the company handsomely after escalating the war in Vietnam, thereby helping the company to win the moniker “Burn & Loot.”

Donald Rumseld and Dick Cheney enjoyed similar careers, moving back and forth between the private and public sectors. Shortly before Cheney became a key figure in America’s Iraq War fiasco, he was the CEO of Halliburton, whose stock price enjoyed a 5X return between March 2003 and June 2008.

During the bird flu scare of 2005, President Bush asked Congress to allocate $7 billion in emergency funding to prepare for the possibility of the bird flu mutating into a human epidemic. He specifically asked for $1 billion to be allocated for the purchase of Tamiflu, jointly developed by Gilead Sciences and Roche. It just so happened that Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld was a major shareholder who made millions from the trade.

All of these clever and ambitious money-grubbers teach us that fastest way to get rich is to persuade the U.S. government that you are selling a strategic asset.

2005 was a windfall year for the Bio-Pharmaceutical Complex, whose lobbyists worked closely with the Bush Administration to pass the PREP Act. This radical piece of legislation has served as a key instrument for giving U.S. government agencies emergency power and for enriching the pharmaceutical industry in the event of a pandemic—real, perceived, exaggerated, or fabricated.

One of the most powerful supporters of Theranos—the fraudulent blood testing company started by Elizabeth Holmes—was former Secretary of State, George Schultz. He still had cronies in the Pentagon who were keen to purchase Holmes’s bogus machines for the military.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, we saw the blossoming of similar cozy relationships. FDA Commissioner Dr. Scott Gottlieb was appointed to Pfizer’s Board of Directors shortly after he left the agency. Likewise, six months after he gave approval to Moderna’s new COVID-19 vaccine, FDA Commissioner Dr. Stephen Hahn was offered a position at the venture capital firm that was one of Moderna’s primary backers. Among major media players, Jim Smith, the CEO of Reuters, was appointed to Pfizer’s Board of Directors in 2014 and is also on the international business council of the World Economic Forum.

Moncef Slaoui was head of vaccine development at GlaxoSmithKline until 2017. At the time President Trump appointed him to lead Operation Warp Speed, he was a board member of both CEPI and Moderna, a primary candidate for Warp Speed funds. Though he resigned from the Moderna board to avoid a conflict of interest, he retained his stock options, which gained $2.4 million in value on the day the company announced favorable preliminary results of its Phase I trials. This raised concerns about his neutrality in judging its vaccine’s safety and efficacy data, so he agreed to divest his shares of Moderna stock.

Like Krupp and I.G. Farben during the Third Reich, U.S. corporations are bound to U.S. government institutions like the DoD, DARPA, NIH, HHS, and BARDA in an arrangement that strongly resembles Fascist Corporatism.

It seems to me that in trying to understand these relationships, it is useful to consider President Eisenhower’s Farewell Address in 1961. His warning to Americans about the rise of the Military-Industrial Complex is now more relevant than ever, and all Americans should be throughly acquainted with this speech.

This article was originally published on Courageous Discourse – Focal Points.

The post Fascist Corporatist Temptations appeared first on LewRockwell.

“Something happened in 2021” that has jeopardized air travel safety, according to a disturbing report by Dr. Kevin Stillwagon, a retired airline pilot and immunology expert.

Mounting evidence points to the COVID-19 vaccinations that airlines, acting under pressure from the U.S. government, mandated or otherwise coerced their cockpit, cabin, and ground crews into taking.

Since 2021, there has been a marked increase in deaths of “younger” airline pilots while long-term disabilities for pilots have skyrocketed. All of this has been accompanied by an astronomical increase of near-miss incidents at the nation’s airports.

“Incapacitations of pilots are definitely increasing, especially in younger pilots,” Stillwagon said in a video discussion with Nicolas Hulscher, an epidemiologist and administrator at the McCullough Foundation.

“There was a 40% increase in pilots dying early – before mandatory retirement age of 65 – in 2021,” Stillwagon said.

“Starting in 2021, pilot long-term disabilities have tripled,” he noted. “Prior to 2021, there was only one near-miss at the Washington National Airport (DCA).  But after 2021, there were 28 near-misses per year.”

Airline Pilot Incapacitation Crisis After Illegal mRNA Shot Mandates — With Dr. Kevin Stillwagon and Nicolas Hulscher https://t.co/Cps1jGvK42

— Nicolas Hulscher, MPH (@NicHulscher) August 15, 2025

The mRNA COVID-19 jab was illegally forced on airline pilots

Stillwagon maintains that from the outset, the mRNA COVID-19 shots were illegally forced upon the nation’s airline pilots.

“They were illegal because you cannot put an experimental product into a pilot, as found in the ‘Aeromedical Advice Manual,’ given to all aeromedical examiners,” he pointed out.

Commercial pilots are legally prohibited from taking experimental medicines and face losing their medical certification for taking anything other than FAA-approved drugs.

If a pilot takes an unapproved medical product, flight surgeons must take administrative measures to revoke or deny issuance of the pilot’s flight physical certificate until the FAA rules on the safety of that product. Yet UAL encouraged, coerced and even paid pilots to violate this federal law.

Pilots who were forced into submitting to the experimental jabs found themselves trapped in a horrific catch-22, with their careers hanging in the balance. Those who accepted the COVID-19 jab under duress were not only strong-armed into violating their religious beliefs, they were forced to choose between abiding by FAA safety rules or breaching those rules, putting their health and the safety of their passengers at risk.

“This is exactly why we are seeing sudden heart failure in younger and younger people,” Stillwagon said. “We’re also seeing brain fog in pilots and air traffic controllers which can result in their ability to think properly (and) their reaction times.”

The COVID-19 mRNA jab can also induce seizures that, if experienced by an airline pilot during a flight, can produce disastrous results. 

“This is a big deal,” Stillwagon declared. “This is huge.”

mRNA vaccines ‘were never safe nor effective’

mRNA-based injections instruct human cells to produce a genetically engineered version of coronavirus “spike protein” in order to trigger an immune system response.

Developers of the mRNA vaccines failed to foresee that once inside the body, the repeated development of the spike proteins can’t be controlled. For some recipients of the vaccines, their bodies became a human factory for the production of the spike protein, able to travel via the bloodstream from the injection site to their entire body, including major organs, the brain, liver, spleen, bone marrow, and reproductive organs.

As the immune system does its job attacking the cells it recognizes as “infected” due to the presence of the spike proteins, it attacks those organs and tissues, causing inflammation, myocarditis, and grotesque blood clots.

“The spike protein is directly toxic, and can directly damage tissues,” Stillwagon said.

‘Airline pilots are the ‘least monitored component in the cockpit’

Stillwagon said that the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) has failed to sufficiently collect data on the health of pilots since the introduction of the COVID-19 vaccines.

While aviation authorities and airline management focus a great deal of attention on how well pilots comply with general operating procedures while behind the controls in the cockpit – proper maintenance of airspeed, flaps usage, etc. – glaring pilot “data gaps” remain.

For instance, the FAA reportedly keeps no record of pilot injection history, and for some unknown reason, the agency discontinued its centralized pilot incapacitation database in 2022. Stillwagon suspects it’s because aviation authorities didn’t want information contained in the database to be seen by the public.

“The data silence that the FAA has created is preventing systemic trends from being detected,” he said.

“We monitor aircraft oil temperature to within a tenth of a degree centigrade, but we don’t track whether the pilot has the potential for cardiac or cerebrovascular events,” Stillwagon said.

“The pilot is the least monitored component in the cockpit,” he declared. “In modern aviation, we treat the jet like a data-rich spacecraft – and the pilot like a black box.”

“Science has gotten confused over the years,” Stillwagon said. “The problem with vaccines is mainly ideology. It’s almost like a religion.”

This article was originally published on Lifesite News.

The post Sudden Deaths, Incapacitations Soar Among COVID-Jabbed Airline Pilots appeared first on LewRockwell.

Introduction

In an August 1 interview, Tucker Carlson and his guest, Candace Owens, verbally attacked Nick Fuentes. Owens had claimed that after having a very successful interview with Fuentes, who was given free rein on the show to talk about whatever he liked, but had suddenly become “triggered” and continually insulted her after the interview was released for reasons unbeknownst to her. She continues by claiming that Fuentes had attacked the notion of marriage, that he had attacked “non-crazy” right voices like Dave Smith to discredit them, and that he had told Tucker that Fuentes had “little boy insecurity.” Tucker Carlson was incredibly receptive to her claims and added that Fuentes may actually be involved in the American intelligence community because Fuentes knew that Tucker’s dad was CIA before he even did; he ended by claiming that Nick was working on behalf of the CIA to disrupt the election of Joe Kent, whom the CIA supposedly hated, Tucker claimed:

“Nick Fuentes, this child, this little weird gay kid in his basement in Chicago, is participating in a super PAC to bump off Joe Kent. Like, I’ve been around that my whole life, I know what that is.”

Since that interview, this dispute has spread to nearly every major right-wing talking head and organization, which is leading to everyone tearing each other apart. Nick Fuentes has responded to Owens and Carlon on his podcast called “America First.” He claims that it was a well-known fact that Tucker Carlson’s father, Richard Carlson, was heavily involved in CIA activities. This included being appointed the associate director of the United States Information Agency and director of the Voice of America, an organization that was considered to be the “voice of the American government.” Even President Putin, during their one-on-one interview, mocked Carlson for being rejected by the CIA back in his twenties. There are many more accusations and attacks being flung around, including Elon Musk and Milo Yiannopoulos accusing Fuentes of being an FBI asset during January 6th, with Fuentes responding by using text messages by Milo that incriminate him of being an FBI asset. This internal war among these right-wing talking heads is not only ridiculous, but also plays into the hands of the state. Instead of becoming an organized minority and being an effective coalition, they split into factions and destroy each other.

Divide and Conquer

It is not unusual for governments to break the power of rival castles within their sphere of influence, whether this is done by force, by defamation, or through sly tactics, depending on the characteristics of that state. But no matter its character, the organized minority, as prescribed by the elite theorist Gaetano Mosca, will work to lead the disorganized mass but also actively break the power of any attempted coalition. He explains:

“In reality the dominion of an organized minority, obeying a single impulse, over the unorganized majority is inevitable. The power of any minority is irresistible as against each single individual in the majority, who stands alone before the totality of the organized minority. A hundred men acting uniformly in concert, with a common understanding, will triumph over a thousand men who are not in accord and can therefore be dealt with one by one.

This sort of containment is done to both right and left-wing groups; the post-war liberal order had sought to maintain its power through these means. During the Cold War, communists throughout Europe were defanged and their leaders split into factions of pacifists, parliamentarians, and a small shunned faction of idealists and militants. In a 1985 documentary, “The Mayor of Montellimone,” the communist mayor, Dino Labriola, faces this exact problem of complacency and infighting. When a northern company comes to build a dam near the small southern village, Labriola hopes that they will employ some of the many unemployed youths in the village. When the company shuts down his demands, the mayor makes a plea to the Ministry of Labor and the Communist Party Headquarters in Rome, in which he receives no support. Finally, Dino assembles the town’s socialist councilors to organize a strike; the meeting went terribly. Dino begins:

“We tell the provincial employment office that if they don’t meet our demands we’ll start a strike and occupy the site. The battle of the dam is not just about employment, it’s about everything. It’s an historic occasion: if we don’t win now, we never will.

The meeting fell apart; many of the socialist councilors felt as if Dino had cut them out of the loop and was being undemocratic and confrontational, wishing only to make the council into yes-men. These splits were common after CIA attempts to break the power of the Italian Communist Party in Italy. Revealed in the National Security Archives, the US Ambassador to Italy, Clare Boothe, oversaw financial support to centrist Italian parties and awarded union contracts to loyal members to weaken the communist hold on labor unions. By divide and conquer, the communists had lost complete control over Italy, and the end result was ineffective, non-confrontational councils in small towns.

Shattering Organization

In regard to the modern American right, a similar result has occurred in the sheer number of factions and deviations over the past decade. Some of the most popular conservative talking heads of the last decade, such as Ben Shapiro and Charlie Kirk, are seen increasingly as neocons who have a paid interest in keeping Israel first. Other right-wing figures are now facing defamation of character, usually from members of the same political orientation. Carlson and Fuentes accusing each other of being CIA assets or FBI informants will be stains on their reputations where neither can really be trusted. But it seems that these two figures are considered prominent leaders of the America First movement after President Trump had betrayed his campaign promise of peace by backing Israel against Iran and by protecting pedophiles by not releasing the Epstein list, going as far as to say Epstein even stole a girl from Mar-a-lago, putting Trump’s knowledge of Epstein’s activities in question.

Why are these two figures being elevated into leadership positions in the American right? For Nick, online rhetoric places him in a position equivalent to a chosen one, that he is the de facto leader of America First and the future leader of America. This propped-up position of leadership will only cause deeper divides in the American right; one user even claimed that Fuentes was the leader of all white people, but when confronted by a police officer about being a white supremacist, Fuentes had no problem pulling out his Mexican ethnicity to pull the conversation away from there. While he has done impressive research into Tucker Carlson and has been a vocal opponent of Israel, he eventually devolves into ranting and raving. Perhaps this says something about his personality and emotional stability that will make for disastrous leadership, and this is exactly why some may want him as leader of the right.

If Tucker Carlson really is a CIA asset, this opens up a secret aspect about the American government that is anti-Israel. Doing an interview with the Iranian president in the immediate aftermath of the 12 Day War and creating spheres where men and women can come in and talk about the crimes of Israel: segregation in Gaza, war crimes, Mossad and Epstein, and genocide are just some of Tucker’s work within the last two months. John Kiriakou, a former CIA officer and whistleblower, had claimed in interviews that the CIA has a deep-seated hatred for Israel and has a deep mistrust of the Israeli intelligence agencies, going as far as even banning the Mossad from Langley. While the CIA can never be trusted, they do have an interest in maintaining power and stability, something Israel has threatened both directly by attempting to draw America into war with Iran and undermining negotiations, and indirectly by creating a large anti-Jewish sentiment in the United States.

You Killed Us, Dave

The system will deal with Israel in its own way; multiple G7 nations, including Italy and France, have already set plans to recognize Palestine as a state as early as September; the pushback from America has been minimal. Since October 7th, Israel has revealed a nature about itself that will never be cleared. By butchering innocent people and asserting control over foreign governments, it seemingly modeled its image off of Dave Kleinfeld. Israel has crossed lines a nation can never come back from and took America along for the ride; the only question is if America will sink with Israel or leave it to its own “beautiful future.”

The post The Fuentes-Carlson Dispute Reveals the Containment of the Right appeared first on LewRockwell.

“They didn’t act like people and they didn’t act like actors.  It’s hard to explain.”
–  J.D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye

With all the hullabaloo about President Donald Trump’s “peace” gestures toward Russia over Ukraine and the resetting of U.S.-Russia bi-lateral relations, it is worth remembering the “pivot to Asia” announced by the Obama administration in 2011 and the coup d’état it carried out in Ukraine in 2014.  For those who might not remember, I would recommend two films: John Pilger’s The Coming War on China and Oliver Stone’s Ukraine on Fire.

They are two prongs of a long-term U.S. strategy to maintain American preeminence throughout the world by countering Russia and China simultaneously, if not equally at once. Such strategy is not determined by someone like President Donald Trump speaking or acting impulsively, as is his wont, but by bankers, financiers, éminences grises, and pale-faced scholarly guns-for-hire in stately buildings reserved for such deliberations.

Despite rhetoric to the contrary, there is a consistent foundational foreign policy strategy from one American presidential administration to the next with necessary little detours here and there, and arguments within the ruling class about tactics. Long-term strategy is capacious enough to include sudden seeming shifts in policies that are couched in cover stories that beguile even the smartest people. Wishes fuddle the minds of the most astute. They serve to obscure the interests of U.S. dominance of the world, a dominance that is now threatened, and one that Trump is not abandoning, even as he adjusts American tactics on the fly.

The Council of Foreign Relations (CFR) and its magazine, Foreign Affairs are where the ruling elites of the United States debate and determine American foreign policies from administration to administration, regardless of political party. The CFR is the preeminent U.S. think tank; it is over one hundred years old, financed by the Ford, Rockefeller, and Carnegie Foundations and its members have included former CIA Director Allen Dulles, McGeorge Bundy, Henry Kissinger, Zbigniew Brzezinski, and many other high government and financial figures, including David Rockefeller, who served as  chairman between 1970-1985.

“Largely unbeknownst to the general public, executives and top journalists of almost all major US media outlets have long been members of the influential Council on Foreign Relations (CFR).” It is evidence of why the corporate mainstream media is an adjunct of the U.S. propaganda system. To become a member is to be baptized into the U.S. ruling establishment and its vast propaganda network that includes, as former CIA analyst Ray McGovern describes it: the Military-Industrial-Congressional-Intelligence-Media-Academia-Think-Tank complex, MICIMATT.

Donald Trump is a headline grabber who ultimately follows orders. He is not, as claimed, an outlier. Unusual he may be – bizarre in many ways – but he has his supporters within the dueling factions of the ruling elites. Nothing could clarify this more than the events of the past weeks, from his meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin in Alaska to his meeting in the White House with Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelenski, his fellow entertainer, and his European entourage of jugglers and clowns. They didn’t act like people and they didn’t act like actors.

“Whenever I take up a newspaper,” the Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen wrote in his play Ghosts, “I seem to see ghosts gliding between the lines. There must be ghosts all the country over, as thick as the sands of the sea. And then we are, one and all, so pitifully afraid of the light.”

Such is what I see when I read today’s press about Trump, the peacemaker. Having been around a few years, his actions strike no shock of the new in me, but rather bring to mind a walk down a city street where old ghosts meet to whisper a description I once read of most corporate mainstream journalists – “No ideas and the ability to express them.” Or to put it another way – only ideas they have been fed and the ability to regurgitate them. So Trump is either described as a traitor who has been manipulated by Putin or a man genuinely seeking the end of America’s efforts to surround and crush Russia.

Neither is true. We are captives in a contronymal game (a contronym being a word having contradictory meanings, such as “refrain”: to desist from doing something or to repeat).

Someone is playing someone. Who is playing whom and why I will leave as a question for readers’ research. See, for example, the work of another key think tank – the Rand Corporation’s 2019 study, “Extending Russia,” – that cooly sets out various options for the U.S. to use in undermining Russia as if it were suggesting possible menu items at a restaurant. Without a knowledge of history, Donald Trump appears to be a radical departure from past American presidents. That he opened a dialogue when he met with Russian President Vladimir Putin in Alaska seems significant. It is true that talking is better than walking away, but only when the intentions that underlie it are honorable, and in this case, I find that doubtful.

Let me use an analogy that may at first seem “by the way” and therefore not apt. I think it is. When it came to the assassination of President Kennedy, the CIA and its media mouthpieces weaponized the term “conspiracy theory” to besmirch the names of those who questioned the Warren Commission Report. The corporate mainstream media (MSM) have echoed this ever since and thus the term came to be one applied to dissenters of all sorts, even those who believe the most outlandish things, such as Elvis didn’t die but was taken up by aliens where he now commands a spaceship called Suspicious Minds, named for one of his hit songs.

Conspiracists were those who had these insane thoughts that there were elements within the government, notably within the CIA, FBI and Pentagon, who would assassinate their own leaders and those devoted to peace. Over the years this term came to be mixed with that of “the deep state,” shadow government, rogue network, etc. The “official” position was that such conspiratorial thinking was undermining the official good government and was the work of lunatics; it assumed that the government didn’t conspire to commit crimes, only lone nuts did, and then crazier nuts tried to pin it on elements within the government such as the CIA. These people were said to be paranoid.

But over the decades scholars have clearly shown that many of the claims of the “conspiracy theorists” were correct despite the best efforts of MICIMATT to create fantastically absurd “conspiracy” stories that they have used to ridicule serious thinkers and researchers. This mode of attack was weakening and along popped Donald Trump “straight” out of the TV screen. A larger than life big mouth who appealed to voters who felt that they were being screwed by the elite elites, which they were and are (Trump, after all, is a super-rich New York City real estate tycoon that no one except the most astute propagandist would choose to run for the presidency). Trump promised he would get to the bottom of many of the “conspiracy theories” – such as the assassinations of JFK, Malcolm X, MLK, Jr., Robert Kennedy, and the events of September 11, 2001, etc. – but he never will. He was going to expose the crooks, clean out the swamp, and make government as pellucid as a pristine mountain stream. Like all the charlatan presidents, he campaigned as a peacemaker and then waged war directly or through barely concealed proxies (war being the lifeblood of the U.S. economy) – Ukraine, Israel, Syrian “rebels” (i.e. terrorists), etc. The charade of his “peacemaking,” although weakening, still casts a spell over many people who fail to understand who formulates American foreign policy strategy.

If there is a so-called deep state responsible for the aforementioned assassinations, etc. and it controls U.S. presidents, then it controls Donald Trump. If Trump is truly trying to end the U.S. proxy war via Ukraine against Russia and establish good relations with its long-term arch-enemy, either the “deep state” has decided this is the best long-term strategy to try to maintain world dominance and it has tricks up its sleeve to attempt to do so, or else it will prevent Trump from carrying out his ostensible intent.

However, if there is no hidden “deep state,” just the official U.S. public state whose policies are largely determined in the dens of the aforementioned think tanks whose works are openly available, a government that does what it wants under various cover stories – two most significant ones being “the deep state” and “conspiracy theory” – then Trump may be its most fantastic contronymal creation, the epitome in his person of what Orwell meant by Doublethink:

Doublethink means the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one’s mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them…. To tell deliberate lies while genuinely believing in them, to forget any fact that has become inconvenient, and then, when it becomes necessary again, to draw it back from oblivion for just so long as it is needed, to deny the existence of objective reality and all the while to take account of the reality which one denies – all this is indispensably necessary.

It is important to remember how all the rhetoric surrounding the term “deep state” has been so craftily used and mixed with that of “conspiracy theory” that it is worth considering it part of a very sophisticated propaganda campaign to scramble minds.

Few would dispute the fact that there is a ruling class in the United States and that its interests are not those of ordinary Americans. This is so obvious I will elide further comments about it. Everyone knows how wealth controls the electoral system; that it has corrupted it beyond repair.

Logic suggests that if a “deep state” is posited opposed to the official “open” government, and if it can be eliminated by a “good” politician, then the good guys will be back in charge and a return to the status quo effected.

So we must ask the question: What is the opposite of a contronym?

Reprinted with the author’s permission.

The post Trump’s Contronymal ‘Peace’ With Russia appeared first on LewRockwell.

The virtually universal ‘history’ of Israel’s founding is that it was done first by a “God” in Genesis as follows:

Genesis 15:18-21

“On that day the Lord made a covenant with Abraham and said, ‘To your descendants I give this land, from the river of Egypt [the Nile] to the great river, the Euphrates, including the lands of the Kenites, the Kenizzites, the Kadmonites, the Hittites, the Perizzites, the Rephaim, the Amoriotes, the Caananites, the Girgashites, and the Jebusites.’”

Deuteronomy 7:1-2

“You must not let any living thing survive among the cities of these people the Lord your God is giving you as an inheritance: the Girgashites, the Amorites, the Caananites, the Perizzites, the Hivites, and the Jebusites. You must put them all to death.”

Deuteronomy 7:16

“Destroy every nation that the Lord your God places in your power, and do not show them any mercy.”

Deuteronomy 20:16-18

“When you capture cities in the land he Lord your God is giving you, kill everyone. Completely destroy all the people: the Hittites, the Amorites, the Caananites, the Perizzites, the Hivites, and the Jebusites, as the Lord has ordered you to do. Kill them so that they will not make you sin against the Lord by teaching you to do all the disgusting things they do in the worship of their gods.”

Israel’s Government takes such passages as ‘justifying’ what they do to Palestinians. And the vast majority of Israelis agree with that viewpoint. America’s Government says it doesn’t like what Israel is doing, but nonetheless continues to provide almost all of the weaponry and satellite intelligence in order to do it.

And then Israel was allegedly (though, as I’ll document, it actually wasn’t at all) recreated in modern times by the British. Britain’s Government was even opposed to the creation of Israel, at the time when Israel was created.

Here, for example, is a popular instagram summary of that alleged recreation of Israel [along with factual corrections by me of it in brackets], reflecting a typical — and entirely Zionist mythological — account of ‘how’ this reincarnated Israel came to be ‘reincarnated’:

In 1916, a Polish [no, Belarusian] Jewish doctor [no, biochemist], named Chaim Weitzmann, had [no, he chose] to go to Manchester England and get a job as a chemist working in a factory [no, as a Senior Lecturer at the University of Manchester]. Britain was in a war and were running out of artillery shells, and one day this Chaim Weitzmann lights a match next to mold on a piece of corn. And it blows up. [No, this was no such happenstance: Churchill in 1915 had requested Weitzmann to produce large quantities of explosives for artillery shells.] And it turns out that Chaim Weitzmann invented acetone which then becomes the major [component of] fuel [no, explosives] for the rest of the British Army during the remainder of WW1, for the artillery shells. So, Chaim Weitzmann just happened to be a Zionist [no, he had actually helped to found the Zionist movement, even prior — for example, he attended the Second Zionist Congress in 1898 and each one thereafter]. And because he developed acetone, Chaim Weitzmann comes into contact with the foreign minister of Great Britain, Alfred Lord Balfour. [No, Balfour had personally known Balfour — then Britain’s Prime Minister — in 1905.] And just at this moment 1917, the British Army is about to defeat the Turks in what was then called Palestine. And Balfour comes up with this notion, I am a religious Christian, I believe that the land of Israel belongs to the Jewish people, I am going to give this land, in the name of the British Empire, to the Jewish people. So Chaim Weitzmann says I know this guy in Washington, his name is Louis Brandeis, and he happens to be a good friend, I think, of Willson, the President. And so they go, Weitzman and Balfour, May 10th, 1917. They go through with Brandeis, into a meeting in the oval office, with Woodrow Wilson. And 12 minutes later they come out with Wilson’s Agreement for this Balfour Declaration. All because an obscure chemist lit up a piece of corn and invented acetone.

For more:

https://winstonchurchill.org/publications/finest-hour/finest-hour-195/unforeseen-consequencesthe-partnership-of-winston-churchill-and-chaim-weizmann/

https://www.chemistryworld.com/opinion/the-weizmann-contribution/3007435.article

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chaim_Weizmann

However, in fact, the Balfour Declaration was ONLY a declaration by the Tory or Conservative Party’s then Foreign Secretary Lord Arthur Balfour, who was backed by Lord Lionel Walter Rothschild, who equated Zionism with ALL Jews, the vast majority of whom actually had no interest in, or else outright opposed the creation or ‘re-creation’ of, an “Israel.” Tory England, Britain’s Government at that time, represented ONLY the aristocracy, all OTHER Jews (and all other British subjects) counted for nothing in this.

The Balfour Declaration was a 2 November 2017 Declaration by the English Government, to Lord Rothschild, which was sent to Rothschild as a letter from Balfour, for Rothschild’s approval and acceptance, which Rothschild promptly did — and then had the letter published in Britain’s newspapers on November 9th. It was a commitment by the Conservative Party, to Rothschild. It was NOT (as Zionists always falsely assume and infer it to have been), some kind of international commitment or “treaty.” It was instead merely an expression of fealty to Lord Rothschild, BY the UK’s Conservative Party, at that time. Here is the document:

Foreign Office,

November 2nd, 1917.

Dear Lord Rothschild,

I have much pleasure in conveying to you, on behalf of His Majesty’s Government, the following declaration of sympathy with Jewish Zionist aspirations which has been submitted to, and approved by, the Cabinet:

“His Majesty’s Government view with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people, and will use their best endeavours to facilitate the achievement of this object, it being clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine, or the rights and political status enjoyed by Jews in any other country”.

I should be grateful if you would bring this declaration to the knowledge of the Zionist

Federation.

Yours sincerely

Arthur James Balfour

Afterwards, as events made increasingly clear that the Zionists in Palestine were doing a lot to “prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine,” non-Tory British Governments (such as immediately after WW2) opposed it, and rejected it. So, by the time when U.S. President Harry Truman, on 14 May 1948, actually created Israel and then promptly sent it weapons to impose it against Arabs both inside and outside the former Palestine (which is what virtually everyone had feared would happen), even Britain’s now-Labor-Party) Government were apalled at what Truman had done. Only inside America was there no effective opposition to it.

U.S. President Harry Truman alone made the decision to create the nation of Israel — no one else, not Britain’s Government, not its Balfour Declaration, and not Chaim Weizmann nor David Ben Gurion, nor any other individual or organization, did. He did it himself.

Here, in his own words — some directly from him, and others from one of his advisors who worked with him on it — is the reasoning that led him to do this:

outtakes from a post-presidency (“early 1962”) documentary about Truman:

“MP2002-345 Former President Truman Discusses Mediating Two Sides”

“There they were on both sides. There I was in the middle between both sides. I was in the position of the referee in a prize ring when the two big wrestlers turned on the referee instead of going ahead with the wrestling. I was in real trouble.” (The Truman Library says that Truman is probably referring there to the arguments over the recognition of Israel, but that film-clip includes no surrounding context, not even the question that he was responding to.)

——

https://web.archive.org/web/20231203203715/https://www.americanheritage.com/exclusive-interview-clark-clifford

https://ghostarchive.org/archive/1YSEK

“An Exclusive Interview With Clark Clifford”

April 1977, American Heritage magazine

Q: What do you think were the motives of those in the State Department who fought so hard against the Jewish state? It has been suggested in some quarters that anti-Semitism was involved.

A: I would not make that charge. The motives, I might suggest, were twofold. To begin with, at that time the British influence on the State Department, particularly when it came to Near Eastern affairs, was very strong. The British had been the mandatory power for all those years, they knew the personalities and the issues and the geography, and they were listened to. Of course, the original British intent under the Balfour Declaration had been to create a Jewish homeland in Palestine. But in 1948 that declaration was “old stuff” to the British foreign office, a policy shaped before some of its members were even born. They were not influenced by it, and as a result, neither was our own State Department. [NOTE: ‘historians’ who presume that the Balfour Declaration played a role in Israel’s coming into existence are not historians. In fact, the UK’s Foreign Office in 1948 was actually opposed to there being any Israel.]

Then, too, our military advisers, with rather unusual prescience, looked twenty-five years ahead and foresaw our coming great dependence on oil. It was rather foresighted of them, in fact. [Not so: FDR was very actively discussing with King Saud the question of a possible Israel becoming established in Palestine, and he knew that in the post-War period, a U.S.-Saudi partnership would be vitally important. This belief came from FDR, not from “the military,” nor from “the State Department.”] But they assumed that the only possible way to secure the oil was to placate the Arabs, because the Arabs were going to win any conflict with the Zionists. I remember Jim Forrestal [first Secretary of Defense, 1947-49] telling me once: “Look, Clark, it’s simple arithmetic. There are 450,000 Jews out there, and thirty-five million Arabs. The Arabs are going to push the Jews into the sea.” [That statement, too, reflects Clifford’s having been close to Truman, never to FDR.]

You see, both the State Department and the military leaders were thinking in purely strategic terms, for which they can’t be blamed. But they were totally ignoring humanitarian and moral considerations. The President understood the strategic problems involved, but he always approached the issue with a deep concern for the fate of the Jews who had suffered so terribly during the war, and with an urge to do something for the survivors. He was always a great fan of the underdog, you must remember, because he identified himself with underdogs. And his own reading of ancient history and the Bible made him a supporter of the idea of a Jewish homeland in Palestine, even when others who were sympathetic to the plight of the Jews were talking of sending them to places like Brazil. He did not need to be convinced by Zionists. In fact, he had to work hard to avoid the appearance of yielding to Zionist pressure, and that was one of the reasons why some Zionist tactics which were blatant and clumsy were actually counterproductive. All in all, he believed that the surviving Jews deserved some place that was historically their own. I remember him talking once about the problems of repatriating displaced persons. “Every one else who’s been dragged away from his country has someplace to get back to,” he said. “But the Jews have no place to go.”

Q: Did he ever talk to you about the role of his friend and former business partner Eddie Jacobsen, who is said to have influenced him in this direction?

A: Yes, he did. But of course it’s important to emphasize that Eddie Jacobsen did not in any way influence Harry Truman’s decision on the recognition of Israel. He did, in fact, as the President stated in his memoirs, come to visit the White House, and he urged the President to see Chaim Weizmann, which he did. The President was glad to see him as an old friend, but he was perfectly aware that Jacobsen was not familiar with the overall situation, and that he had been sent to see him by the Zionists, who naturally would use every conceivable channel to the President. He didn’t mind, but he told me that he said to him, in effect: “Eddie, don’t get involved in this. It’s more complicated than you understand.”

Q: One final question about politics. By the spring of 1948, Henry Wallace was in the presidential race; the Dixiecrat walkout hadn’t happened but was in the offing. Surely some of the President’s advisers must have thought of the political impact of any decision on the Jewish state.

A: By that spring we had polls showing that Wallace was doing very well in New York — that he was murdering us, in fact. He didn’t have a majority, but he was going to get many, many votes — he did wind up with about 500,000—and they would all come from our camp, not from Dewey’s. So, frankly, we had written off New York. We knew Wallace was going to cost us the state, and the President therefore had no possible motive for recognition of Israel that was based on a bid for the “New York Jewish vote.” That was simply not a factor.

——

Furthermore: On 11 July 2024, the “Jewish Journal” headlined “Though some internal disagreements in the U.S. government remained, Truman recognized Israel minutes after its official founding on May 14, 1948.” and reported that Clark Clifford’s statement that Eddie Jacobson had had nothing to do with Truman’s decision (“Eddie Jacobsen did not in any way influence Harry Truman’s decision on the recognition of Israel.”) was entirely false: Jacobsen persuaded the reluctant Truman to meet with Weizmann to hear his case (that approving and arming Israel would weaken the Soviet Union) for approving and supporting Israel, and Weizmann (playing upon Truman’s hatred of communism) convinced Truman; Weizmann was crucial. This means that Jacobsen was also crucial. And behind Weizmann stood the Rothschilds. So, for Truman, it wasn’t ONLY the Bible; it was ALSO his hatred of communists — who are atheists (whom he hated).

In short: Truman assumed that “the Jews” were the “underdogs”; he was the umpire; and God had given that land to “the Jews” who “gave us our moral code entirely”; but he didn’t want to give them everything, because “the Arabs” had oil and wouldn’t tolerate his giving “the Jews” all of the land that the Zionists (which perhaps Truman thought all Jews were) were demanding (his thinking was loaded with unexamined and thus even unstated assumptions) — all of Palestine.

In other words: If the Bible hadn’t said that God gave land there to “the Jews”; or, if Truman hadn’t thought that the Bible instead of the U.S. Constitution “gave us our moral code entirely”; or, if Truman hadn’t thought that the Palestinians (the overwhelming majority population) were the “top dog” on the question of whether a “Jewish nation” should be established on their land; then probably the result would have been no Israel, which his immediate predecessor, FDR, would almost certainly have been intending for the outcome to be — a flat no to the Zionists (whom FDR despised — and he recognized that not all Jews were Zionists; FDR knew the difference between “Zionists” and “Jews”; Truman did not).

Bottom line: If FDR had survived, it’s almost certain that there would have been no Israel. And this had nothing to do with anti-Semitism; it had to do with FDR’s not being racist, in any way except, perhaps, his being anti-Japanese. Also important was that FDR did not believe that “the Jewish people gave us our moral code entirely.” He knew that the Constitution isn’t, at all, based upon the Bible. FDR was a genius, but Truman was anything but that, and quickly reversed FDR’s foreign policies 180 degrees, so that America’s foreign policies after FDR are almost the opposite of what FDR had been aiming for — whereas FDR was intensely anti-imperialistic, Truman aimed to turn America into the world’s first-ever all-encompassing empire, dictating to all other countries. Truman created the Military-Industrial Complex, the “standing army” that America’s Founders had condemned, and the CIA and so much more, including its numerous coups and ongoing “regime-change” operations, to grow the empire. We live in Truman’s world, not in FDR’s (except for his social programs that lasted).

And on 26 May 1948, the New York Times reported that Britain’s Government were furious that Truman had done this:

“PLAN TO AID ISRAEL UPSETS THE BRITISH; New U.S. Policy Development Held to Dim Cease-Fire Hope — Termed Grave Blunder”

LONDON, May 25-The news of President Truman’s projected loan to the State of Israel dropped like a bomb into Foreign Secretary Bevin’s office today as he was talking with United States Ambassador Lewis W. Douglas. The Foreign Secretary, it is understood, had previously told the Ambassador that King Abdullah of Trans-Jordan was prepared to accept a cease-fire in Palestine. Mr. Douglas appeared to have been caught by surprise by the news from Washington. It is believed at the Foreign Office that hopes for a cease-fire have been dimmed although not extinguished. This will be listed by the British in their annals of diplomacy as one more grave blunder by the American President. When Mr. Bevin heard the news, it is reported, he threw up his hands in despair. But he had already turned elsewhere for support, it was disclosed by the Foreign Office. Britain suggested to her four partners in the Brussels Pact that it might be desirable for the five Western European powers allied under that treaty to coordinate their policies on Palestine. No suggestion was made as to a common policy that they might adopt. …

The primary problem is to work on the Arabs, and those in close touch with British Foreign Office affairs in recent weeks know that the British have been trying very hard to bring about a truce. The British policy has been to seek tranquility through the Arabs, whereas it is stated here that American policy has been to strengthen the Zionists in their determination to fight and by so doing has played into the hands of Arab extremists. King Abdullah’s forces are in Jerusalem, say the British, simply because he had to placate his extremists. President Truman’s projected loan to the State of Israel will be interpreted by the Arabs as money to buy arms to fight them, the British believe, and hence the Arab extremists may well get the upper hand and wreck the efforts to achieve a cease-fire. Whitehall was virtually despairing tonight of finding common ground with the United States on the Palestine issue.

On that same day, the NYT also reported that:

WASHINGTON, May 25-Dr. Chaim Weizmann, first President of Israel, met President Truman today and came away with the belief that the embargo on arms for the Middle East would be lifted and that his country would get a loan for arms and reconstruction. It was Dr. Weizmann’s first mission as the head of the state, and it appeared that he had started auspiciously. As he told of the meeting, it was evident that Mr. Truman had given a sympathetic ear to the problems of embattled Israel. Dr. Weizmann appealed for a loan of $90,000,000 or $100,000,000 to arm his country and to bring in 15,000 displaced persons from Germany each month. He also told the Chief Executive that the question of lifting the embargo was urgent. Mr. Truman’s answers to both proposals, according to Dr. Weizmann, were more than perfect. The two Presidents conferred for about a half hour. Mr. Truman had suggested the meeting so they could discuss the problems before Dr. Weizmann returned to Palestine to assume office. Dr. Weizmann said that his impression was that “my plea for a loan was not in vain.” “He [President Truman] said there was no trouble about that because the Jews paid their debts,’ Dr. Weizmann continued. “I believe this is true because I don’t think we owe anybody anything.” He referred to the loan as “a medium-sized loan” but one that by American standards might be considered “a small loan.”

“It would be, first of all,” Dr. Weizmann explained, “for military purposes and also for reconstruction, which is beginning. The first phase of this reconstruction program is to bring in 15,000 displaced persons from Germany monthly. To do that you need housing, transportation and food.

Weizmann got all that he had requested.

On 11 July 2024, the Zionist “Jewish Journal” headlined and reported how Weizmann had managed to get Truman to do this:

“Though some internal disagreements in the U.S. government remained, Truman recognized Israel minutes after its official founding on May 14, 1948.”

As Jehuda Reinharz and Motti Golani recount in their magisterial new biography of Chaim Weitzmann, the State Department under president Harry Truman was inclined against supporting the U.N.’s partition plan. The Zionist leadership was hoping to have Weitzmann, the renowned scientist and internationally respected former head of the World Zionist Organization, champion their cause to the president. But Truman refused to meet with him. Desperate, the Jewish leaders turned to Eddie Jacobson, a Jew from Kansas City. Truman and Jacobson had been haberdashery partners decades prior, having co-run an 18-by-48-foot clothing store together in the Glennon Hotel. Though the business failed, Jacobson remained a trusted friend of Truman over the years and had access to Truman in the White House.

As Reinhartz and Golani tell it, Jacobson “showed up and asked Truman to see Weitzmann. When Truman again refused, Jacobson pointed to the bust of one of Truman’s heroes, President Andrew Jackson. He said that he, too, had a hero, a man he himself had never met, just as Truman never met Jackson. In his opinion, Jacobson said, this man was the greatest Jew of his time … ‘My hero,’ Jacobson told the president, ‘is a gentleman and distinguished statesman. I am speaking’ Truman’s former partner said, ‘of Chaim Weitzmann.’”

Truman agreed to a secret meeting on March 18. Weitzmann, battling years-long health ailments and a high fever, “did not plead nor try to get into Truman’s good graces, nor did he issue threats. He knew that [Secretary of State] Marshall and his State Department team had warned the president that the Yishuv’s left-wing advocated a Jewish state aligned with the Soviet bloc. Weitzmann assured the president that these fears were largely groundless and that the best way to ensure that Israel would align with the West would be to embrace it.” He also, Reinharz and Golani wrote, “made a brilliant pitch about how recognition would win Truman the Jewish vote and swing key states in his favor.” Having argued his case, Weitzmann received a warm handshake from Truman. He then was helped up, escorted out a concealed side door and driven off in a car with curtained windows.

Though some internal disagreements in the U.S. government remained, Truman recognized Israel minutes after its official founding on May 14, 1948. By May 25, Chaim Weitzmann, now president of the State of Israel and no longer having to hide his presence, returned to the White House. He presented Truman with a gift of a Torah scroll in appreciation of America’s support.

Truman went against the advices from his own Administration, and against what Britain’s Government and all of the Arab Governments were urging upon him, and gave this Truman-created Zionist (racist-fascist-imperialist supremacist) nation of Israel all of the money and weapons it needed in order to start their Nakba, the extermination that now is in the process of finally becoming completed in Gaza, and the ethnic cleansing in the West Bank.

This is what the Zionists — including the U.S. Government and its entire empire — DON’T report. This is the history of Israel’s creation, without any of the myths about it.

This article was originally published on Eric’s Substack.

The post How Genocide Against Palestinians Got Baked Into Truman’s Creation of Israel appeared first on LewRockwell.

Part 1

Donald Trump doesn’t really deserve the Nobel Peace Prize. Not after his unprovoked bombing of a country (Iran) that is no military threat whatsoever to the American Homeland. Not after continuing to green-light and arm Israel’s genocidal madness on Gaza and elsewhere. And not, most especially, after fronting for an even bigger defense budget than the bloated $1.0 trillion per year monstrosity that the UniParty already had in place.

Indeed, Washington’s $1 trillion war machine is a dangerous historical aberration on the world stage. It thrives in a tax-adverse democracy only by virtue of funding a vast ecosystem of arms merchants, think tanks, NGOs, PACs, lobbies and war-mongering politicians, which perpetuate a false narrative of foreign perils, threats and enemies that are largely its own self-justifying fabrications.

Still, Trump should get his Nobel prize anyway for breaking out of the Warfare State’s utterly false narrative on Ukraine and blundering his way into an end to the hideous proxy war on Russia being conducted there.

Indeed, you don’t have to read too much between the lines of the Alaska summit to see that a peace fix is in—perhaps to be inked a few weeks hence in Moscow; and that the Donald’s guests at the White House last week—-the un-useful idiot, Zelensky, and the clown car of European leaders—Macron, Merz, Starmer, Rutte and van der Leyen, especially—will be afforded an opportunity to like it or lump it, as they appeared to be doing during this Oval Office stunt staged by the Donald:

The tragedy and outrage, of course, is that the main points of the peace deal coming out of the summit could have been achieved years ago. And sans the sheer waste of $150 billion of US weapons and economic aid, the loss of hundreds of thousands of Ukrainian and Russian lives, and the utter destruction of a country that was essentially taken hostage by the neocon hegemonists and military-industrial complex arms merchants that ruled the roost on the banks of the Potomac until the Donald stumbled into the Oval Office the second time.

After all, anyone with even a modicum of common sense, historical knowledge and minimum regard for human decency should find nothing objectionable in the following apparent “Elmendorf Meeting” formula, And that’s notwithstanding all the Munich-betrayal howling by neocon politicians and MIC bag carriers in the establishment media on both sides of the Atlantic.

Key Elements Of The Elmendorf Formulation:

1. A comprehensive peace deal and sustainable settlement of “root causes” of the current conflict will be agreed upon first to be followed by a cease fire later, not vice versa as had been demanded by Zelensky and his European supporters.
2. Ukraine won’t join NATO or function as a stalking horse to bring NATO’s military capacities to Russia’s back yard.
3. The four Russian-speaking provinces plus Crimea that voted to secede from Ukraine will be permitted to do so after some minor and symbolic “swapping” of territories around the current line of contact. That is, Russia would get all of Donetsk and Lugansk oblasts (i. e. the Donbass) in return for not attempting to capture the small areas of Zaporizhia and Kherson that are still on the Ukraine side of the contact line.
4. A fig-leaf of security guarantees will be afforded to the rump of Ukraine via an ad hoc squad of European, US and other guarantors. This will provide an “article five” type security “commitment” on paper, albeit without any real mechanism to activate and execute it–including no American “peacekeeping” boots on the ground.
5. The rump state of Ukraine will by quasi-demilitarized via a sharp limit on the size of its armed forces and the nature and lethality of its armaments.
6. The Trump-threatened secondary sanctions against India and China for buying Russian oil will be withheld to enable the execution phases of the deal to go forward.
7. No further arms or intelligence support to Ukraine will be provided by the US or NATO during the peace process implementation.
8. A milestone-based lifting of US/NATO primary sanctions on Russia will be phased in—so long as Russia adheres to the deal and stays in the territorial/political lane specified in the upcoming agreement.
9. Various aspirational future economic opportunities for both sides will be appended to the deal as an expression of Trump-style deal-making.
10. Free elections will be held in the rump state of Ukraine upon the implementation of the peace treaty and the exile of current corrupt Ukrainian leaders including Zelensky.

The heart of the deal, of course, is the territorial partition. As is evident from the map below, 95% of Luhansk (dark red area) and 75% of the Donetsk oblast are already under Russian military control and that will go to 100%. On the other hand, the 20% to 25% of Kherson and Zaporizhia claimed by Russia will remain under Ukrainian control (light red area) as is presently the case on the battlefield. This is a far better deal for Ukraine than is likely to occur upon further combat, where its forces have been in relentless retreat for months.

After the proposed “swap”, therefore, roughly half of historic Novorossiya (New Russia) will be ceded back to Russia– from whence it came after being settled and developed during the time of Catherine the Great (late 18th century) by Russians. Indeed, the whole of Novorossiya had been an integral part of the late Czarist Empire during the 19th century. It ended-up inside the borders of what had been a tiny kingdom along the Dnieper River of Cossack warriors and brigands in 1922 for reasons of convenience to the bloody Bolshevik rulers who had sized power during the war-induced collapse of Czarist Russia in October 1917.

Likewise, Crimea lasted as an integral Russian territory even longer. After being purchased by Catherine the Great from the Ottoman’s in 1783, Crimea was solidly Russian—even through the time of the Crimean War of the 1850s when Russian nationalists turned back the imperial advances of England and France; and remained so until 1954, when the Ukrainian-born Soviet tyrant, Nikolai Khrushchev, emerged atop the post-Stalin power struggle and rewarded his Ukrainian comrades on the Politburo with Crimea as a door prize.

It is to be taken for granted that the Donald knows nothing of this history. Then again, perhaps an alert publicist at the White House might note that the Donald’s deal at least unwinds half of the Soviet tyrants’ border drawing with respect to Novorossiya.

Even more to the point, the ethno-linquistic map below fits like a hand-in-glove to the Elmendorf Settlement. That is, when the anti-Russian and neo-nazi nationalists took-over the Kiev government during the CIA-NED-State Department sponsored coup in February 2014, the Russian speaking areas in the yellow portions of the map moved to secede in a manner echoing America’s own Declaration of Independence against a tyrannical ruler.

It was only the subsequent US/NATO funded attack by Kiev on these seceding provinces that started the Ukrainian civil war and ultimately brought about the Russian intervention in 2022.

The fact is, when it comes to sovereignty the present borders of the fake state of Ukraine are what actually materialized under the point of Bolshevik machine guns a century ago. What the Trumpian settlement will actually do is restore the more natural ethno-linquisitic borders that encompassed Novorossiya for a century and one-half prior to the Soviet tyranny.

In any event, the map below tells you all you need to know about why much of the Donbass revolted and sought separation after the ne0-Nazi Maidan coup. To wit, one of the first acts of the new government was to outlaw Russian as an official language for tens of millions of inhabitants in these yellow-marked areas whose mother-tongue was Russian!

For want of doubt, here is a map of the last free presidential election in Ukraine in 2010. The pro-Russian candidate who won, Janukovych, received upwards of 80-90% of the vote in the darker blue areas of the Donbass east and southern rim of the Black Sea. These are the very same territories which are heavily Russian-speaking per the ethno-linguistic map above, and which will be permitted to secede from Ukraine on the settlement implicit in the Elmendorf Deal per the second map above.

Would it actually be too much trouble for the hyperventilating neocons in Washington and the mainstream press to just eyeball these three maps? What is happening is actually a clean-up of 100 years of misbegotten history, not a betrayal of the Ukrainian nation, whatever that actually is; or, most certainly, not a repudiation of Imperial Washington’s phony “rules-based order”.

The truth is, hundreds of thousands of Russians and Ukrainians have died because a viper’s nest of Washington neocons overthrew the winner of the 2010 election as shown below, thereby igniting the bloodbaths and demolition derby’s that have now led to the imminent partition of a communist-built nation that was never meant to last.

Moreover, as we will amplify in Part 2, the claim that this history is irrelevant and that the so-called Budapest Memorandum of 1994 guaranteed the current Ukrainian borders—-drawn by communist tyrants or not—is risible beyond belief. After all, the Budapest Memorandum was inked at the very moment that President Bush, Secretary of State Baker, the German Chancellor and numerous others had also guaranteed Moscow that NATO would not move “one inch to the east”.

As shown below, so much for the utter hypocrisy of the Washington neocons! Since 1997 14 former Warsaw Pact satellite have joined NATO. So bravo to the Donald for having been too lazy to have absorbed their mendacious narrative.

Meanwhile, the European clown car is lined-up in the Oval Office trying to save their own political hides after years of leading their countries down the destructive primrose path of proxy war on Russia. In the case of Germany especially, they have badly wounded their own economies and living standards in subservience to the sanctions and economic warfare leveled against Russia by the War Capital of the World on the Potomac.

No wonder the Donald has rendered them desperate. The upcoming Elmendorf Settlement will reveal them (save for Giorgia Meloni) to be knaves and incompetents who deserve to be driven from office at the earliest possible date.

Part 2

Last Monday was a good day for world peace. Zelensky put on a suit (of sorts) and kept his mouth shut—even as the Clown Car of his European sponsors dutifully sat on the floor of the Oval Office cross-legged and feigning rapt attention to the random stream of consciousness emanating from behind the Resolute Desk.

So, yes, at last the peace fix is in with respect to ending the madness of Washington’s proxy war on Russia. Within weeks there will hopefully be a crowning summit in Moscow where the Donald will earn his Nobel Peace Prize, owing to the inking of some version of the potential 10-point agreement outlined in Part 1.

Alas, the tricky part will be to gussy-up a completely hollow “security guarantee” (item # 4) that will tiptoe around Putin’s understandable red line that there be no NATO boots on the ground in the rump of Ukraine. Still, some version of peacekeepers and trip-wires for the “article-5 like” guarantee will be needed in the deal.

But we think threading that needle won’t be so difficult, either. The Donald has already taken the possibility of American boots on the ground off the table and nobody wants Russian-hating Brits in Ukraine or a return to the Russian borders of German-speakers in uniform for the third time in 110 years.

Then again, it is likely that French soldiers bearing muskets that have never been fired and dropped only once could form the nucleus of an “observers” force. The latter might include a pick-up squad of UN draftees from Algeria, Azerbaijan and Argentina, if they start with the “A”s.

In any event, just about any fig leaf of rag-taggers will do. That’s because the giant lie upon which the whole Ukraine insanity has been predicated is about to be eviscerated. To wit, this has always been about Washington’s aggression against Russia in the form of the pointless and duplicitous expansion of NATO to Russia’s doorstep after 1997; the US-instigated Maidan coup in February 2014 that overthrew the legitimately elected president and ruptured the delicate balance of Ukrainian politics; and the subsequent NATO supplied and funded attack by the neo-Nazi putschists in Kiev on the breakaway Russian speaking provinces of the Donbass and the south, who were fleeing for their lives.

Accordingly, we are about to witness the geopolitical equivalent of the tree falling noiselessly in the empty forest. That is, there will be no Russian forces on the move westward at all.

The truth is, Putin is way too smart, realistic and civilized to attempt to recreate the Soviet Empire as per the false narrative of the Washington/NATO neocons. He never wanted to even rule the Ukrainian, Polish, Belorussian, Hungarian, Romanian and others nationalities who inhabit the left bank of the Dnieper River and in the west and north of Ukraine.

And that’s to say nothing of shooting his own country in the economic and political kneecaps by attempting to occupy and subdue Russian-hating Lithuanians, Estonians, Latvians, Poles, Germans, Danes, and the inhabitants of the hapless bankrupt socialist states further west. And heaven forfend, who in their right mind would think that the degenerate, wokified socialist precincts of the British Isles are any kind of prize whatsoever?

Indeed, the chutzpah of the British pols like Starmer and the UK nomenklatura is a wonder to behold. There is not a would be conqueror on the planet today (or in the known past) who would see anything from the cliffs of Dover to the Scottish Out Stack that is worth the candle of invasion.

In short, the very idea of an expansionist Russia and Putin-with-a-mustache is an utterly bogus lie. There is no there there. Whatsoever.

And the fact that nothing untoward is going to happen when the Donald partitions and cuts loose the fake state of Ukraine is the real reason that he should get the Nobel Peace Prize. The impending “Elmendorf Deal” will knock the props out from under the whole case for Empire and the very business of the War Capital of the World on the Potomac.

At length it will actually make pursuit of the dream that Trump ventured to utter out loud early in his second term about world disarmament and a 50% cut in defense budgets a realistic possibility. That’s because once it becomes clear that there was nothing to the Russian Menace, the case against Red China will become all the more dubious, as well.

After all, the red rulers of Beijing have staked their very tenure in power and likely their lives on the prosperity emanating from becoming the Factory Floor of the planet. And no one, especially the wily comrades of Beijing, are foolish and stupid enough to make war on $3.5 trillion per year of global export customers.

So it just may be that these words the Donald spoke upon being sworn to office for the second time will turn out to be the most powerful and consequential 36 words spoken by any US President. Ever.

“One of the first meetings I want to have is with President Xi of China, President Putin of Russia, and I want to say, ‘let’s cut our military budget in half.’ And we can do that.”

At the time we said, yes, from the Donald’s lips to god’s ear and all that. The practicalities and obstacle-strewn path from here to there seemed will nigh insuperable.

But with the Ukraine Peace Settlement now in tow what our twice-baked President has actually done is to blow the Overton Window of permissible national security discussion wide open. Indeed, once you reach the point were tabling this fear-obliterating idea at a joint summit with the two endlessly demonized heads of America’s purported enemies becomes feasible, everything—and we do mean everything—heretofore prohibited is on the table for fresh, open discussion.

After all, you don’t need to be a student of the intricacies of the $1.0 defense budget to recognize that when you cut the Pentagon’s rations by half the whole globalist national security framework left over from the Cold War’s demise 34 years ago collapses.

That’s because once you ixnay the Russian (and Chinese) Menace and essentially euthanize NATO, as will now happen in the wake of the Elmendorf Settlement, you can bring the Empire home—and all the national security apparatus that goes with it. To wit, 750 foreign bases and 173,000 US troops posted in 159 countries; globe spanning Navy and Air Force 0perations; and alliances large and small, from NATO to the Taiwan Straits, to so-called peacekeeping missions throughout the Middle East and north Africa.

Stated differently, what you can fund on just 50% of today’s defense budget, as we amplify in Part 3, is an invincible strategic nuclear deterrent and an impenetrable defense of America’s coastlines, airspace and sovereign territory.

And yet, and yet. That’s all we actually need!

It would fully accomplish the fundamental national security goal of keeping America’s 347 million citizens free and safe from Bangor Maine to San Diego California.

Indeed, whether he recognizes it or not, President Trump’s bold entreaty would amount to invalidating every notion of Empire. It would pave the way for returning to America’s pre-1914 policy as a peaceful Republic, safely minding its own business behind the wondrous gifts of Providence—the great Atlantic and Pacific Ocean moats which separate the homeland from any serious potential military foe anywhere on the planet.

At the present time and for the foreseeable future, it goes without saying that there are only two nations even remotely capable of posing a military threat to the American homeland—Russia and the People’s Republic of China. Yet the bottom line strategic reality is that Russia doesn’t have anywhere near the requisite economic heft to threaten America, and China doesn’t have a even a semblance of the economic running room to go on a global military aggression campaign.

With respect to Russia and despite all utter demonetization of Putin, which hopefully well now be undone, no one has even attempted to make the case that he’s so stupid as to believe his $2 trillionof commodity-based GDP is any match for the world-leading technology-based $30 trillion GDP of the United States.

Indeed, the whole Russian ogre thing is based on a purely fanciful derivative case. Namely, the aforementioned arm-waving claim that Putin will take the Baltics next, then Poland and thereafter march on thru the Brandenburg Gate into Berlin on the way to France, the Low Countries and across the English Channel to London—again, assuming Putin is also stupid enough to want to occupy the economic basket case of a Starmerized Little England.

In other words, implicit in Washington’s current consensus foreign policy posture is the notion that Russia is actually a big threat to America because it will eventually attack, occupy, pacify and militarize the entire continent of Europe! Well, unless stoutly resisted by the War Capital of the World on the Potomac.

After all, that’s the only scenario by which Moscow could possibly get the economic heft, manpower and military means to materially threaten the US. In the end, therefore, the threat is not posed by Ruuskies per se, but, apparently, by Russified Germans, Poles, Danes, Spaniards and Frogs.

To repeat: There is not a shred of evidence that this is Putin’s plan or that he would remotely have the economic and military wherewithal to accomplish such a sinister purpose were he so inclined, which most evidently he is not. To the contrary, Putin’s aim by the very evidence of the Elmendorf deal he is about to agree to is far more limited and reasonable: Namely, to keep NATO out of his backyard in an ancient piece of the Russian Empire that was called Novorossiya or New Russia during most of its history.

Again, that was the name of the Donbas and Black Sea rim region before Lenin and Stalin created the artificial country of “Ukraine” for the purely administrative convenience of operating their brutal tyranny. Yet in even attempting to retake the Russian half of Ukraine, Putin had a hard time mustering the requisite military power—to say nothing of conquering the rest of Europe.

Fortunately, the cat is now out of the bag. The Elmendorf Deal shows exactly why Russia is not on the warpath toward the conquest of Europe. To wit, after the impending Trump-Putin deal there will be no NATO in Ukraine and the country will be partitioned between the Russian-speaking regions of the Donbas, Crimea and the Black Sea rim, on the one hand, and the Ukrainian and Polish speaking regions of the west and on the left bank of the Dnieper River, on the other.

That’s all Putin every wanted anyway, and it will be the proof in the pudding that discredits the hideous notion that Washington must fight Russia by proxy over there in order to not have to fight it in Luxembourg or on the cliffs of Dover.

That is to say, once the war is settled and Ukraine partitioned, Putin’s special military operation will come to an abrupt halt at whatever turns out to be the exact frontier as between the breakaway republics and the rump of Ukraine. In turn, that will prove in spades that there exists not even the remotest prospect of a Russifed Europe, and therefore any real Russian threat to the security of the American homeland.

So, yes, the defense budget can be cut by 50% in part because. among other things, the 62,000 US troops shown above that are now stationed in Europe could be brought home forthwith. Even more importantly, US NATO membership and commitments could also be abandoned, meaning that the ridiculous idea of being committed under Article 5 to the mutual defense of such nationlets as North Macedonia, whose 10,000 man active duty military is smaller than 12,000 man police force of Chicago, would also expire.

Part 3

To repeat: the geopolitical equivalent of a tree is about ready to fall unheard in the global forest. Once the Trump/Putin peace deal is inked, not a single element of the neocons’ scary bedtime stories about Russian aggression will be heard anywhere on the planet.

To wit, Putin has no interest in what will be the nationalist anti-Russian rump of a neutralized Ukraine. There will be no Russian flag flying over Kiev or Lviv.

Likewise, nothing untoward will happen in the three Baltic states, either. That’s in part because once they see that poking the Bear next door doesn’t pay and isn’t safe, the often noisy anti-Russian fulminations of politicians in these countries looking for some cheap campaign demagoguery will go radio silent forthwith.

The same goes for Poland. And why in the world would Putin invade eastern European countries like Slovakia or Hungary, which have stoutly opposed the NATO aggression in Ukraine . And that’s to say nothing of Romania, which actually elected a Russian-favoring president until it was ixnayed by Brussels and the CIA.

Moreover, after having even failed to conquer all of Russian speaking Donetsk, what kind of idiot actually thinks that Germany, Italy, France and England are next in Putin’s alleged expansion plans?.

With respect to China, the single most important thing to recognize is that it is the very opposite of the old Soviet Empire, which was based on economic autarky and scant trading relationships with the world outside of the Warsaw Pact. Accordingly, had it been both inclined and capable of offensive military aggression toward the rest of Europe and or even the US—for which the now open archives of the old Soviet Union reveal scant evidence—there would have been no collateral disruption of its basic economic function. The latter was purely an internally-focused regime of centralized state socialism, which, needless to say, didn’t work but didn’t depend upon commerce with the so-called “free world”, either.

By contrast, after Mao was sent off his rewards in Red Heaven, China pivoted sharply to the outside world under the leadership of Mr.Deng and his successors; and they did so under the banner of so-called Red Capitalism, which amounted to an extreme version of export mercantilism.

Consequently, China’s exports soared by 14X during the two decades between 2000 and 2022, rising from $250 billion to $3.5 trillion per year. So doing, the Chicoms essentially took themselves hostage, meaning that every province, city, village, factory, rail line, trucking operations, warehouse and port operation along the length and breadth of China got deeply entangled with just-in-time economic production for customers across the planet, as depicted in the graphic below. Accordingly, China’s economy would collapse on the spot were Beijing to disrupt the daily flow of $10 billion of merchandise goods to Europe, the Americas and the balance of Asia.

Indeed, had its post-Mao leadership been hell bent on foreign conquest, which most clearly it was not, the Beijing regime’s very survival would have been compromised by the resulting disruption to the greatest factory-economy the world has ever seen.

That’s surely why Washington’s idiotic “domino theory” during the Vietnam era was repudiated in spades by subsequent history. That is, Washington wasted 59,000 American lives and upwards of 3 million Vietnamese lives before eventually fleeing from Vietnam. Yet afterwards the Chinese didn’t even try to capture Hanoi because Beijing was busy building-up a massive manufacturing and export economy.

In other words, China is inherently not a military threat to the US, nor is there any evidence that it is expansionist—even in its own region. There is undoubtedly a reason why after thousands of years, the Chinese, Koreans, Japanese, Indonesians, Malayans and Filipinos stick to themselves; and also why a reunification of the Han Chinese on the mainland with their kin on Formosa would have virtually zero implications for the rest of the region.

The state of Taiwan exits only because Washington stood it up in 1949 when Chiang Kai-shek lost the civil war fair and square to Mao and the reds. Were Washington to step aside, it is likely that in a short time Taiwan would be hardly distinguishable from Shanghai across the Yellow Sea.

That is to say, the US does not need the massively expensive 7th Fleet and US Marines and large parts of the Air Force to contain China. The latter’s giant Ponzi economy perched as it is on $50 trillion of debt and upwards of $3.5 trillion per year of exports does all the containing that America’s military security actually requires.

At the end of he day, if Donald Trump’ impending “America First” foreign policy triumph in Ukraine means anything at all, it’s that the current $1.4 trillion national security budget including foreign operations and veterans is double the size that an adequate homeland defense shield actually requires. Indeed, it is no exaggeration to say that in relentless pursuit of its own self-serving aggrandizement, the military/industrial/intelligence complex has massively inflated America’s Warfare State into an “extra-large” when what is really needed in the world of 2025 is a snug-fitting “small.”

And now, the Donald has dramatically opened the door to downsizing America’s crushing national security budget to exactly that, thereby paving the way for a return to Thomas Jefferson’s wise admonition urging,

“…peace, commerce, and honest friendship with all nations, entangling alliances with none.”

Indeed, the way for the Trump Administration to shoe-horn roughly $1 trillion of DOD spending into a $500 billion budget was laid out a long time ago by the great Senator Robert Taft at the very dawn of the Cold War. He argued that the modest threat to homeland security presented by the war-ravaged corpus of the Soviet Union and the collectivist disaster imposed on China by Mao could have been readily handled with–

• An overwhelming strategic nuclear retaliatory capacity that would have deterred any possibility of nuclear attack or blackmail.
• An invincible Fortress America conventional defense of the continental shorelines and air space that would have been exceedingly easy to stand up, given that the Soviet Union had no Navy worth speaking of and China had devolved into industrial and agricultural anarchy owing to Mao’s catastrophic experiments with collectivization.

That eminently correct Taftian framework has never changed since then—even as the technology of nuclear and conventional warfare has evolved apace. For modest military spending Washington can keep its nuclear deterrent fully effective and maintain a formidable Fortress America defense of the homeland without any of the apparatus of Empire and no American boots on foreign soil, at all.

In fact, the case for a true America First policy––that is, returning to the 1914 status quo ante and a proper Fortress America military posture––has powerfully strengthened during the last three decades. That’s because in today’s world, the only theoretical military threat to America’s homeland security is the possibility of nuclear attack or blackmail. That is to say, the threat that one of its two nuclear adversaries could develop a First Strike capacity so overwhelming, lethal, and effective that it could simply call out checkmate and demand Washington’s surrender.

Fortunately, neither Russia nor China has anything close to the Nuclear First Strike force that would be needed to totally overwhelm America’s triad nuclear deterrent and thereby avoid a retaliatory annihilation of their own country and people if they attempted to strike first. After all, the US has 3,700 active nuclear warheads, of which about 1,800 are operational at any point in time. In turn, these are spread under the seven seas, in hardened silos and among a bomber fleet of 66 B-2 and B-52s–all beyond the detection or reach of any other nuclear power.

For instance, the Ohio class nuclear submarines each have 20 missile tubes, with each missile carrying an average of 4-5 warheads. That’s 90 independently targetable warheads per boat. At any given time 12 of the 14 Ohio class nuclear subs are actively deployed, and spread around the oceans of the planet within a firing range of 4,000 miles.

So at the point of attack that’s 1,080 deep-sea nuclear warheads cruising along the ocean bottoms that would need to be identified, located, and neutralized before any would-be nuclear attacker or blackmailer even gets started. Indeed, with respect to the “Where’s Waldo?” aspect of it, the sea-based nuclear force alone is a powerful guarantor of America’s homeland security. Even Russia’s vaunted hypersonic missiles couldn’t find or take out by surprise the US sea-based deterrent.

And then there are the roughly 300 nukes aboard the 66 strategic bombers, which also are not sitting on a single airfield Pearl Harbor style waiting to be obliterated either, but are constantly rotating in the air and on the move. Likewise, the 400 Minuteman III missiles are spread out in extremely hardened silos deep underground across a broad swath of the upper Midwest. Each missile currently carries one nuclear warhead in compliance with the Start Treaty but could be MIRV’d in response to a severe threat, thereby further compounding and complicating an adversary’s First Strike calculus.

Needless to say, there is no way, shape, or form that America’s nuclear deterrent can be neutralized by a blackmailer. And that gets us to the heart of the case as to how the Trump Administration could actually cut the defense budget by 50%. To wit, according to the most recent CBO estimates the nuclear triad will cost only about $75 billion per year to maintain over the next decade, including allowances for periodic weapons upgrades.

That’s right. The core component of America’s military security requires only 7% of today’s massive military budget as detailed on a system-by-system basis in the table below. Thus, in 2023 the nuclear triad itself cost just $28 billion plus another $24 billion for related stockpiles and command, control, and warning infrastructure.

Moreover, this key component of this nuclear deterrent–the sea-based ballistic missile force–is estimated to cost just $188 billion over the entire next decade. That’s only 1.9% of the $10 trillion CBO defense baseline for that period.

So the question recurs with respect to the DOD’s current spending level. After setting aside $75 billion for the strategic nuclear triad, how much of the remaining $1.0 trillion+ would actually be needed for a conventional Fortress America defense of the continental shorelines and airspace?

The starting point is that neither Russia nor China have the military capability, economic throw-weight or intention to attack the American homeland with conventional forces. To do that they would need a massive military armada including a Navy and Air Force many times the size of current US forces, huge air and sealift resources, and humongous supply lines and logistics capacities that have never been even dreamed of by any other nation on the planet.

They would also need an initial GDP of say $50 trillion to $100 trillion per year to sustain what would be the most colossal mobilization of weaponry and materiel in human history. And that’s to say nothing of needing to be ruled by suicidal leaders—which characterizes neither Putin nor Xi— willing to risk the nuclear destruction of their own countries, allies, and economic commerce in order to accomplish, what? Occupy Denver?

The entire idea that there is currently an existential threat to America’s security is just nuts. After all, when it comes to the requisite economic heft, Russia’s GDP is a scant $2 trillion, not the $50 trillion that would be needed for it to put invasionary forces on the New Jersey shores. And its ordinary defense budget (excluding the SMO) is $75 billion, which amounts to less than four weeks of waste in Washington’s $1.0 trillion monster.

Likewise, China doesn’t have the sustainable GDP heft to even think about landing on the California shores, notwithstanding Wall Street’s endless kowtowing to the China Boom. The fact is, China has accumulated in excess of $50 trillion of debt in barely two decades!

Therefore, it didn’t grow organically in the historic capitalist mode; it printed, borrowed, spent, and built like there was no tomorrow. As we indicated above, therefore, the resulting simulacrum of prosperity would not last a year if its $3.5 trillion global export market–-the source of the hard cash that keeps its Ponzi upright–were to crash, which is exactly what would happen if it tried to invade America.

To be sure, China’s totalitarian leaders are immensely misguided and downright evil from the perspective of their oppressed population. But they are not stupid. They stay in power by keeping the people relatively fat and happy and would never risk bringing down what amounts to an economic house of cards that has not even a vague approximation in human history.

Indeed, when it comes to the threat of a conventional military invasion, the vast Atlantic and Pacific moats are even greater barriers to foreign military assault in the 21st century than they so successfully proved to be in the 19th century. That’s because today’s advanced surveillance technology and anti-ship missiles and flocks of drones would consign an enemy naval armada to Davy Jones’ Locker nearly as soon as it steamed out of its own territorial waters.

The fact is, in an age when the sky is flush with high-tech surveillance assets neither China nor Russia could possibly secretly build, test and muster for surprise attack a massive conventional force armada without being noticed in Washington. There can be no repeat of the Japanese strike force–the Akagi, Kaga, Soryu, Hiryu, Shokaku, and Zuikaku–steaming across the Pacific toward Pearl Harbor sight unseen.

Indeed, America’s two ostensible “enemies” actually have no offensive or invasionary capacity at all. Russia has only one aircraft carrier–a 1980s-era relic which has been in dry dock for repairs since 2017 and is equipped with neither a phalanx of escort ships nor a suite of attack and fighter aircraft–and at the moment not even an active crew.

Likewise, China has just three aircraft carriers–two of which are refurbished rust buckets purchased from the remnants of the old Soviet Union (actually Ukraine!), and which carriers do not even have modern catapults for launching their strike aircraft.

In short, neither China nor Russia will be steaming their tiny 3 and 1 carrier battle groups toward the shores of either California or New Jersey any time soon. An invasionary force that had any chance at all of surviving a US fortress defense of cruise missiles, drones, jet fighters, attack submarines, and electronics warfare would need to be 100X larger.

So let us repeat: There is simply no GDP in the world––$2 trillion for Russia or $18 trillion for China––that is even remotely close in size to the $50 trillion or even $100 trillion that would be needed to support such an invasionary force without capsizing the home economy.

Donald Trump is therefore on to something huge, whether he realizes it or not. To wit, Washington’s globe-spanning conventional war-fighting capability is completely obsolete!

Fully one-third of a century after the Soviet Empire collapsed and China went the Red Capitalist route of deep global economic integration, it amounts to utterly extraneous and unneeded muscle.

For want of doubt, consider that Washington equips, trains, and deploys an armed force of 2.86 million. But rather than being devoted to homeland defense, the overwhelmingly purpose is to support missions of offense, invasion, and occupation all over the planet.

As depicted in the graphic above, this obsolete Empire First military posture still includes among others–

• 119 facilities and nearly 34,000 troops in Germany.
• 44 facilities and 12,250 troops in Italy.
• 25 facilities and 9,275 troops in the UK.
• 120 facilities and 53,700 troops in Japan.
• 73 facilities and 26,400 troops in South Korea

All of this unnecessary military muscle stands as a costly monument to the hoary theory of collective security, which led to the establishment of NATO in 1949 and its regional clones thereafter. Yet the case for Empire and its global alliances was dubious even back then. In fact, the now open archives of the old Soviet Union prove conclusively that Stalin had neither the wherewithal nor intention to invade Western Europe.

What military capacity the Soviet Union did resurrect after the bloodletting with Hitler’s armies was heavily defensive in character and lumbering in capabilities. So the alleged communist political threat in Europe could have been wrangled out by these nations at the polls, not on the battlefield. They did not need NATO to stop an imminent Soviet invasion.

Needless to say, once the Washington-based Empire of bases, alliances, collective security, and relentless CIA meddling in the internal affairs of foreign countries was established, it stuck like glue–even as the facts of international life proved over and over again that the Empire wasn’t needed.

That is to say, the alleged “lessons” of the interwar period and WWII were falsely played and replayed. The aberrational rise of Hitler and Stalin did not happen because the good people of England, France, and America slept through the 1920s and 1930s.

Instead, they arose from the ashes of Woodrow Wilson’s pointless intervention in a quarrel of the Old World that was none of America’s business. Yet the arrival in 1918 of two million American doughboys and massive flows of armaments and loans from Washington enabled a vindictive peace of the victors at Versailles rather than an end to a desultory world war that would have left all the sides exhausted, bankrupt, and demoralized, and their respective domestic war parties subject to massive repudiation at the polls.

As it happened, however, Wilson’s intervention on the stalemated battlefields of the Western Front gave birth to revolution in Russia and Lenin and Stalin, while his machinations with the victors at Versailles fostered the rise of Hitler in the rump of a dismembered and reparations-encumbered Germany.

To be sure, in the end the former did fortunately bring about the demise of the latter at Stalingrad. But that should have been the end of the matter in 1945, and, in fact, the world was almost there. After the victory parades, demobilization and normalization of civilian life had proceeded apace all around the world.

Alas, Washington’s incipient War Party of military contractors and globetrotting operatives and officialdom gestated in the heat of World War II was not about to go quietly into the good night. Instead, the Cold War was midwifed on the banks of the Potomac when President Truman fell under the spell of war hawks like Secretary James Byrnes, Dean Acheson, James Forrestal, and the Dulles brothers, who were loath to go back to their mundane lives as civilian bankers, politicians, or peacetime diplomats.

So, in the post-war period world communism was not really on the march and the nations of the world were not implicated in falling dominoes, nor were they gestating incipient Hitlers and Stalin’s. But the new proponents of Empire insisted they were just the same, and that national security required the far-flung empire that is still with us today.

So there is no mystery, therefore, as to why the Forever Wars go on endlessly. Or why at a time when Uncle Sam is hemorrhaging red ink like never before, a large bipartisan majority has seen fit to authorize $1.2 trillion per year for vastly excessive military muscle and wasteful foreign aid boondoggles that do absolutely nothing for America’s homeland security.

In effect, Washington has morphed into a freak of world history––a planetary War Capital dominated by a panoptic complex of arms merchants, paladins of foreign intervention and adventure, and Warfare State nomenklatura. Never before has there been assembled and concentrated under a single state authority a hegemonic force possessing such enormous fiscal resources and military wherewithal.

Not surprisingly, the War Capital on the Potomac is Orwellian to the core. War is always and everywhere described as the promotion of peace. Its jackboot of global hegemony is gussied up in the beneficent-appearing form of alliances and treaties. These are ostensibly designed to promote a “rules-based order” and collective security for the benefit of mankind, not simply the proper goals of peace, liberty, safety, and prosperity within America’s homeland.

As we have seen, however, the whole intellectual foundation of this enterprise is false. The planet is not crawling with all-powerful would-be aggressors and empire-builders who must be stopped cold at their own borders, lest they devour the freedom of all their neighbors near and far.

Nor is the DNA of nations perennially infected with incipient butchers and tyrants like Hitler and Stalin. They were one-time accidents in history and fully distinguishable from the standard run of everyday tinpots which actually do arise periodically. But the latter mainly disturb the equipoise of their immediate neighborhoods, not the peace of the planet.

So America’s homeland security does not depend upon a far-flung array of alliances, treaties, military bases, and foreign influence operations. In today’s world there are no Hitlers, actual or latent, to stop. The whole framework of Pax Americana and the Washington-based promotion and enforcement of a “rules-based” international order is an epic blunder.

In that regard, the Founding Fathers got it right more than 200 years ago during the infancy of the Republic. As John Quincy Adams approvingly held,

“[America] has abstained from interference in the concerns of others, even when conflict has been for principles to which she clings…She is the well-wisher to the freedom and independence of all. She is the champion and vindicator only of her own.”

Needless to say, peaceful commerce is invariably far more beneficial to nations large and small than meddling, interventionism, and military engagement. In today’s world it would be the default state of play on the international chessboard, save for the Great Hegemon on the banks of the Potomac. That is to say, the main disturbance of the peace today is invariably fostered by the self-appointed peacemaker, who, ironically, is inherently the least threatened large nation on the entire planet.

The starting point for a Trumpian “America First” military posture and a 50% cut of the military budget, therefore, is the drastic downsizing of the nearly one-million man standing US Army.

The latter would have no uses abroad because there would be no cause for wars of foreign invasion and occupation, while the odds of any foreign battalions and divisions reaching America’s shores are virtually non-existent. With a proper coastline garrison of missiles, drones, attack submarines, and jet fighters any invading army would become shark bait long before it saw the shores of California or New Jersey.

Yet the 462,000 active-duty army soldiers at $112,000 each have an annual budget cost of $55 billion while the 506,000 army reserve forces at $32,000 each cost upwards of $16 billion. And on top of this force structure, of course, you have $77 billion for operations and maintenance, $27 billion for procurement, $22 billion for RDT&E, and $4 billion for everything else (based on the FY 2025 budget request).

In all, the current Army budget totals nearly $200 billion, and virtually all of that massive expenditure–nearly 3X the total defense budget of Russia–is deployed in the service of Empire,not homeland defense. It could readily be cut by 70% or $140 billion–meaning that the US Army component of a $450 billion Fortress America defense budget would absorb just $60 billion annually.

Likewise, the US Navy and Marine Corps spends $55 billion annually on 515,000 active-duty forces and another $3.7 billion on 88,000 reserves. Yet if you look at the core requirements of a Fortress America defense posture, these forces and expenses are way over the top, as well.

By core missions we refer to the Navy component of the strategic nuclear triad and the Navy’s large force of attack and cruise missile submarines. As it happens, here are the current manpower requirements for these key forces:

• 14 Ohio-class Strategic Nuclear Subs: There are two crews of 155 officers and enlisted men for each boat, resulting in a direct force requirement of 4,400 and an overall total of 10,000 military personnel when Admirals, overhead, support, and woke compliance is included (or not).
• @50 Attack/Cruise Missile Subs: There are two crews of 132 officers and enlisted men for each boat, for a direct requirement of 13,000 and an overall total of 20,000 including Admirals and overhead etc.

In short, the core Navy missions of a Fortress America defense involve about 30,000 officers and enlisted men or less than 6% of the current active-duty force of the Navy/Marine Corps. On the other hand, the totally unnecessary carrier battle groups, which operate exclusively in the service of Empire, have crews of 8,000 each when you count the escort ships and suites of aircraft.

So, the 11 carrier battle groups and their infrastructure require 88,000 direct military personnel and140,000 overall when you include the usual support and overhead. Likewise, the active-duty force of the Marine Corps is 175,000, and that’s entirely an instrument of invasion and occupation. It’s totally unnecessary for a homeland defense.

In short, fully 315,000 or 60% of the current active-duty force of the Navy/Marine Corps functions in the service of Empire. So, if you redefine the Navy’s missions to focus on strategic nuclear deterrence and coastal defense, it is evident that more than half of the Navy’s force structure is not necessary for homeland security. Instead, it functions in the service of global power projection, policing of the sea lanes from the Red Sea to the East China Sea and platforming for wars of invasion and occupation.

Overall, the current Navy/Marine Corps budget stands at about $236 billion when you include $59 billion for military personnel, $81 billion for O&M, $67 billion for procurement, $26 billion for RDT&E, and $4 billion for all others. A $96 billion or 40% cut, therefore, would still leave $140 billion for the core missions of a Fortress America defense.

Among the services, the $246 billion contained in the Air Force budget is considerably more heavily oriented to a Fortress America versus Empire-based national security posture than is the case with the Army and Navy. Both the Minuteman land-based leg of the strategic triad and the B-52 and B-2 bomber forces are funded in this section of the defense budget.

And while a significant fraction of the budget for the manning, operations, and procurement of conventional aircraft and missile forces is currently devoted to overseas missions, only the airlift and foreign base component of those outlays inherently function in the service of Empire.

Under a Fortress America defense, therefore, a substantial part of the conventional air power, which includes upwards of 4,000 fixed wing and rotary aircraft, would be repurposed to homeland defense missions. Accordingly, upwards of 75% or $180 billion of the current Air Force budget would remain in place, limiting the savings to just $65 billion.

Finally, an especially sharp knife would be brought down upon the $181 billion component of the defense budget which is for the Pentagon and DOD-wide overhead operations. Fully $110 billion or 61% of that huge sum–again more than 2X the total military budget of Russia–is actually for the army of DOD civilian employees and DC/Virginia based contractors which feast upon the Warfare State.

In terms of homeland security, much of these expenditures are not simply unnecessary––they are actually counter-productive. They constitute the taxpayer-funded lobby and influence-peddling force that keeps the Empire alive and fully funded on Capitol Hill via lavish appropriations for every manner of consultancy, NGO, think tank, research institute and countless more.

Even then, a 38% allowance or $70 billion for the Defense Department functions (which include the hidden by currently massive over-funding of the CIA and other intelligence agencies) would more than provide for the true needs of a Fortress America defense.

Overall, therefore, downsizing the DOD muscle would generate $410 billion of savings on a FY 2025 basis. Another $50 billion in savings could also be obtained from eliminating most funding for the UN, other international agencies, security assistance and economic aid. Adjusted for inflation through the next four years of Trump’s term, the total savings would eventually come to $500 billion year.

Fortress America Budget Savings:

• Army: $140 billion.
• Navy/Marine Corps: $96 billion.
• Air Force: $65 billion.
• DOD agency-wide: $111 billion.
• UN contributions and foreign economic and humanitarian aid: $35 billion.
• International Security Assistance: $15 billion.
• Total Savings, FY 2025 basis: $462 billion.
• 8% inflation adjustment to FY 2029: +$38 billion.
• Total FY 2029 Budget Savings: $500 billion.

At the end of the day, the time to bring the Empire home is long overdue. The $1.3 trillion annual cost of the Warfare State (including international operations and veterans) is no longer even remotely affordable–-and it has been wholly unnecessary for homeland security all along.

All of this should have been obvious long ago, but the Overton Window was so narrow that the sheer nakedness of the Empire could not be spoken about in polite company. But now Donald Trump has done exactly that, and it will make all the difference in the world.

So let President Trump’s tripartite summit happen soon and begin the great defunding of the world’s hideously bloated Warfare States. The latter is now 10o-years overdue, but, at last, Donald Trump may be the best hope for peace since August 1914. And for that he deserves a Nobel Peace Prize and then some.

Reprinted with permission from David Stockman’s Contra Corner.

The post How To Bring The Empire Home: A Nobel for the Donald in Three Parts appeared first on LewRockwell.

Writings of H.L. Mencken

(Click on above title)

Guests examined the life and career of journalist H. L. Mencken. He became a reporter for the Baltimore Morning Herald and later joined the Baltimore Sun. He eventually became one of the most influential voices in American literature and was often critical of what he perceived as American weaknesses. He often railed against pretension, provincialism, prudery, organized religion, and the Middle Class. By the 1930s his opinions became increasingly conservative and sometimes reactionary. In The American Language, which was revised several times, he chronicled American expressions and idioms. The program was telecast from Union Square in Baltimore, the site of his family home.

H.L. Mencken: The Joyous Libertarian, by Murray N. Rothbard

The post C-SPAN: Fascinating Program on the Writings of H. L. Mencken appeared first on LewRockwell.

Emperor Trump just issued an executive order against flag burning. This will appeal to Christian Nationalists and “God and Country” Christians who adore Lee Greenwood’s “God Bless the U.S.A.” I will not be writing anything about this because I already have—back in 2020: “Donald Trump, Flag Burning, and the First Amendment.”

The post Trump Is Unhinged appeared first on LewRockwell.

The post Burn A Flag…Go To Jail? appeared first on LewRockwell.

Click Here:

Emanuel Pastreich

 

The post “The Left is not weak; The left is wrong” appeared first on LewRockwell.

The Genocide Called World War I

The Life & Legend of Cecil Rhodes

Steve Sailer’s article posted on LRC, “Carroll Quigley’s Conspiracy Theory: The Milner Group,” is an excellent summary of the important influence in world history played by the imperialist Cecil Rhodes and his Anglosphere heirs. In the Preface to his book, The Anglo-American Establishment: From Rhodes to Cliveden, Quigley noted:

I have been told that the story I relate here would be better left untold, since it would provide ammunition for the enemies of what I admire. I do not share this view. The last thing I should wish is that anything I write could be used by the Anglophobes and isolationists of the Chicago Tribune. But I feel that the truth has a right to be told, and once told, can be an injury to no men of good will. Only by a knowledge of the errors of the past is it possible to correct the tactics of the future.

Although his book was written in 1949 it was not published until after his death in 1981. Ironically Quigley was correct concerning the contents of his expose’. As Murray N. Rothbard pointed out in his semi-autobiographical masterwork, The Betrayal of the American Right, the Midwestern voice of Old Right non-interventionism, Colonel Robert McCormick’s Chicago Tribune, published a contemporaneous series of hard-hitting muckraking articles in 1951 attacking what Rothbard described as “the Wall Street-Anglophile Establishment”: “Rhodes’ Goal: Return U.S. to British Empire,” “Rhodes Ideals Slant State Department Policies,” “Rhodes’ Wards Hawk Global Scheme in U.S.,” “Rhodes Grads Influential in Eastern Press — Aid British, Global Propaganda,” “Even Congress Not Immune to Rhodes’ Ideas,” and “OWI Propaganda Linked to Rhodes Men.” Here are my reflections concerning Carroll Quigley’s later seminal volume, Tragedy & Hope: A History of the World in Our Time. Quigley was the author of two other books, The Evolution of Civilizations: An introduction to Historical Analysis; and Weapon Systems and Political Stability: A History.

Hitler Was a Communist in Early 1919

National Socialism and the Occult

The post Robert Barnes Explains WW1 and the Rise of Adolf Hitler appeared first on LewRockwell.

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 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 la storia di un coyote, che quando non riesce a sfamarsi all'esterno ricorre all'autofagocitazione. Lo stesso accaduto ai membri del G7, dove i sei membri restanti hanno iniziato a fagocitare il settimo: gli Stati Uniti.

____________________________________________________________________________________

di Joshua Stylman

(Versione audio della traduzione disponibile qui: https://open.substack.com/pub/fsimoncelli/p/forgiare-la-classe-degli-spettatori)

Mio padre sapeva smontare e rimontare il motore di un'auto nel nostro garage. Io, come molti della mia generazione, sono stato indirizzato verso la strada “civilizzata”: lavoro d'ufficio, uffici climatizzati e un crescente distacco dal mondo fisico. Mentre sono cresciuto amando lo sport, memorizzando le statistiche del baseball con devozione religiosa e trovando una gioia genuina nelle partite, qualcosa di fondamentale è cambiato nel modo in cui gli uomini oggi si rapportano allo sport.

In stanze scarsamente illuminate in tutta la nazione, milioni di uomini si riuniscono ogni fine settimana, adornati con maglie con i nomi di altri uomini. Ci siamo trasformati da una nazione di giocatori a una nazione di spettatori. Come il panem et circenses di Roma, questo consumo passivo serve a pacificare piuttosto che a ispirare. Le partite in sé non sono il problema: possono forgiare il carattere, insegnare la disciplina e offrire un vero intrattenimento. Amo ancora lo sport, trovandovi una gioia autentica proprio come facevo da bambino memorizzando quelle statistiche del baseball. Ma a un certo punto sono cresciuto e ho capito che dovrebbero completare i successi della vita, non sostituirli. Il pericolo sta in ciò che accade quando gli uomini adulti non compiono mai questa transizione.

Un segmento crescente di giovani uomini si trova ad affrontare una forma ancora più insidiosa di cultura dello spettatore. Mentre i loro padri almeno guardavano veri atleti raggiungere traguardi concreti, molti giovani ora idolatrano personaggi dei social media e creatori di contenuti, diventando osservatori passivi di personaggi creati ad arte che hanno raggiunto la fama principalmente grazie al loro sguardo. Conoscono ogni dettaglio del dramma degli influencer e dei successi nel gaming, eppure non hanno mai incontrato Solženicyn né costruito qualcosa con le proprie mani. Il virtuale ha sostituito il viscerale; il parasociale ha sostituito il personale.

La storia ci mostra un ciclo ricorrente: i tempi difficili creano uomini forti, gli uomini forti creano tempi buoni, i tempi buoni creano uomini deboli e gli uomini deboli creano tempi difficili. Ci troviamo ora nelle fasi finali di questo ciclo, dove il comfort e la comodità hanno generato una generazione di osservatori piuttosto che di costruttori. Il nostro intrattenimento funge da oppiaceo digitale, mantenendo le masse soddisfatte mentre la loro capacità di azioni significative si atrofizza.

Questa trasformazione non è casuale. Come ho scritto nella serie, Ingegnerizzare la realtà, la riformulazione sistematica dell'attività fisica come problematica rappresenta un tentativo calcolato di indebolire la resilienza della società. Importanti organi di stampa come The Atlantic e MSNBC hanno pubblicato articoli che collegano l'attività fisica all'estremismo di destra, mentre le istituzioni accademiche inquadrano sempre più la cultura dell'allenamento come problematica. Persino la proprietà di una palestra è stata definita un potenziale indicatore di radicalizzazione. Il messaggio non potrebbe essere più chiaro: la forza individuale, sia letterale che metaforica, minaccia l'ordine prestabilito.

Questa erosione dell'autosufficienza si estende ben oltre la forma fisica. Un amico che ha trascorso decenni come meccanico mi ha confidato di recente di essere grato di essere prossimo alla pensione. “Queste Tesla”, mi ha detto, “non sono nemmeno più auto: sono computer su ruote. Quando qualcosa va storto, non lo aggiusti; sostituisci solo interi moduli”. Quello che un tempo era un mestiere che qualsiasi persona dedita a esso poteva imparare è diventato un esercizio di dipendenza supervisionata. Persino Klaus Schwab prevede apertamente che entro il 2030 Los Angeles sarà “libera dalle auto private” - solo una flotta di Uber a guida autonoma. Con il devastante incendio di questa settimana in un tunnel di Los Angeles che ha lasciato migliaia di persone bloccate, viene da chiedersi se questi momenti di “ricostruzione migliore” siano esattamente le opportunità necessarie per accelerare queste trasformazioni. Il messaggio diventa ancora più chiaro: non riparerai più le cose perché non le possiederai più.

La risposta al COVID ha rivelato questo programma con sorprendente chiarezza. Mentre i negozi di alcolici sono rimasti “attività essenziali”, le autorità hanno chiuso spiagge, parchi e palestre, proprio i luoghi in cui le persone potevano mantenere la propria salute fisica e mentale. Hanno promosso l'isolamento a scapito della comunità, l'aderenza alla legge a scapito della resilienza e la dipendenza dai farmaci a scapito dell'immunità naturale. Non si è trattato solo di una linea di politica di sanità pubblica; è stata una prova generale della dipendenza dallo stato. Le stesse istituzioni che hanno scoraggiato le pratiche sanitarie di base ora promuovono linee di politica che sostituiscono l'autorità familiare con la supervisione burocratica. Dai consigli scolastici che usurpano i diritti dei genitori ai servizi sociali che intervengono nelle decisioni familiari, stiamo assistendo alla sostituzione sistematica della figura paterna capace con uno Stato-paternalistico in continua espansione.

Ma la vera mascolinità non è mai stata solo una questione di forza fisica. I più grandi esempi di virtù maschile della storia non erano solo uomini d'azione: erano uomini di principi, saggezza e coraggio morale. Da Marco Aurelio a Omar Little, come ho esplorato nei miei scritti precedenti, il filo conduttore era avere un codice incrollabile: la volontà di restare saldi nelle proprie convinzioni anche quando ciò comporta un costo personale.

Pensate a quanti uomini oggi acconsentono silenziosamente a linee di politica che sanno essere sbagliate, abbracciano narrazioni di cui dubitano in privato, o si sottomettono a pressioni istituzionali che violano la loro coscienza. Durante il COVID abbiamo visto uomini che comprendevano l'importanza dell'immunità naturale, dell'esercizio fisico all'aria aperta e dei legami comunitari, tuttavia hanno imposto linee di politica che danneggiavano i loro quartieri e le loro famiglie. Hanno preferito l'adesione alle istituzioni al coraggio morale, la sicurezza professionale al dovere civico, l'approvazione della maggioranza alla convinzione personale.

La vera forza non si trova nell'aggressività anonima o nell'atteggiamento digitale. L'ho imparato in prima persona durante il COVID, quando mi sono espresso contro l'obbligo di vaccinazione e sono diventato un emarginato per aver difeso la scelta personale e l'autonomia corporea. Mentre tanti “leoni da tastiera” mi hanno attaccato online, un episodio mi è rimasto impresso. Un amico mi ha inoltrato un thread di Reddit in cui qualcuno aveva pubblicato informazioni personali sulla mia famiglia e su di me, sperando di incitare all'odio nei miei confronti, tutto perché difendevo l'autonomia corporea e mi opponevo alla segregazione biomedica arbitraria. Le iniziali lo hanno tradito: era il mio vicino, qualcuno che conoscevo da anni.

Quando l'ho affrontato di persona, si è trasformato all'istante in un topo spaventato. Lo stesso uomo che aveva audacemente invocato la mia distruzione da dietro il suo schermo, credendo di essere anonimo, ora stava tremando davanti a me, con le mani sudate, la voce tremula, incapace persino di incrociare il mio sguardo.

Questa debolezza spirituale e intellettuale rappresenta una minaccia ben più grande di qualsiasi declino delle capacità fisiche. Una società di uomini fisicamente forti, ma moralmente conformi, è vulnerabile tanto quanto una di uomini fisicamente deboli. La vera forza maschile richiede il coraggio di pensare in modo indipendente, di mettere in discussione l'autorità quando necessario, di proteggere coloro che dipendono da voi anche quando ciò comporta un rischio. Richiede la saggezza di distinguere tra autorità legittima e consenso artificiale, tra competenza genuina e controllo istituzionale.

La storia ci offre una lezione: le civiltà prosperano quando diverse virtù lavorano in sinergia, ovvero costruttori e nutrici, protettori e guaritori, forza in equilibrio con l'empatia. L'attuale erosione sistematica di entrambe non è casuale, ma calcolata. Mentre gli uomini vengono spinti verso un consumo passivo e le donne lontano dalla loro saggezza intuitiva, entrambi vengono sostituiti dall'autorità istituzionale: uno Stato-paternalistico che cerca di ricoprire entrambi i ruoli senza raggiungere nessuno dei due.

Prendiamo in considerazione il meccanismo in atto: i programmi statali separano sempre più i bambini dall'influenza della famiglia in età precoce, mentre i programmi scolastici promuovono ideologie che offuscano deliberatamente la realtà biologica. Dalla scuola materna all'università, le istituzioni allontanano sistematicamente i figli dai valori dei genitori. Come la moneta fiat che ha sostituito il denaro reale, ora abbiamo relazioni fiat attraverso i social media, successi fiat attraverso i giochi ed esperienze fiat attraverso il metaverso. Ogni sostituzione ci allontana sempre di più dall'autentica esperienza umana verso una dipendenza progettata. Quando i figli non capiscono più cosa significhi essere maschi o femmine, quando viene loro insegnato a guardare alle istituzioni piuttosto che ai genitori per una guida, la vittoria dello stato è quasi completa.

Il risultato è una società di spettatori piuttosto che di costruttori, di consumatori piuttosto che di creatori, di seguaci piuttosto che di leader. Una società in cui gli uomini barattano i veri successi con l'intrattenimento virtuale e il coraggio da tastiera, mentre la saggezza femminile genuina è sostituita da stereotipi approvati dalle aziende.

Lo stato può espandersi solo nel vuoto lasciato da uomini indeboliti e donne isolate. Si nutre della nostra impotenza progettata, rafforzandosi man mano che diventiamo più dipendenti. Chi riconosce questo schema si trova di fronte a una scelta semplice: rimanere comodi spettatori del proprio declino, o rivendicare quelle virtù autentiche che ci rendono umani.

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

Supporta Francesco Simoncelli's Freedonia lasciando una mancia in satoshi di bitcoin scannerizzando il QR seguente.

You may have heard that the SSPX has joined the Jubilee pilgrims in the Eternal City in the past few days. I remember reading somewhere that when Pope St. John Paul II saw the same pilgrimage process through the streets in 2000, he told Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger that the SSPX dialogue needed to be resolved!

I don’t know if that’s true or not, but I hope this procession makes a good impression on Pope Leo. I’m sure it’s made an impression on literally everyone who saw Roman Catholic priests acting with the proper gravitas and celebrating the ancient Roman rite in Roman basilicas:

The SSPX English website notes this:

The SSPX has participated in the Jubilee Year in an official capacity for the last 50 years, being led by Archbishop Lefebvre himself in 1975.

Wait, what? That was in the midst of the SSPX’s canonical suppression and Lefebvre’s suspension a divinis. This was when Pope Paul VI sent a canonical visitation to the Society and these “canonical visitators” made passing comments like questioning the bodily Resurrection of Jesus Christ. That’s what made the Archbishop make his famous declaration of 1974, whose ambiguous words, he admitted, were overzealous.[1] (Certainly he could have worded it better, but if you know the context you can interpret his words for the best.) But this hasty declaration gave the Archbishop’s enemies all the ammo they needed to condemn him and his canonical Society in toto. What was the response of this so-called Arch-schismatic?

Archbishop Lefebvre replied in three ways: at Pentecost of that holy year, the archbishop and his seminarians joined in the magnificent pilgrimage of the Credo Association to show with the faithful their attachment to the Rome of all time; then, from Albano on May 31, he wrote a letter of submission to the successor of Peter containing a request for review of his trial; finally, on June 5, he lodged an the appeal with the court of the Apostolic Signatura against Bishop Mamie’s decision [to canonically suppress the SSPX]. It was not the Bishop of Fribourg, he wrote, but the Holy See that had the power to suppress the Society (this first point is debatable); next, he has been judged on the doctrine and only the sacred Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith is competent in this matter; finally, if his declaration [of 1974] deserves to be condemned, the condemnation should concern him and not his work.[2]

Well, I don’t know about you, but those are all pretty schismatic things to do, wouldn’t you say?

And so, keeping their schismatic attitude, the good priests of the SSPX have again come to Rome to show “their attachment to the Rome of all time.” Back in February of this year, the announcement was made to the SSPX faithful with these words:

For the third time in its history, the SSPX will have the distinguished grace of experiencing the 25-year Roman Jubilee. In 1975, in the presence of its founder, Monsignor Marcel Lefebvre, and then in 2000, the St. Pius X Fraternity pilgrimaged to Rome to participate in this great spiritual event. Between August 19 and 21, 2025, the District of France of the SSPX will carry out its jubilee pilgrimage to Rome and hopes, on this occasion, to bring together as many faithful as possible.

We will go to Rome to walk those streets laden with the history of the Church, to pray in the basilicas following in the footsteps of so many saints and holy men and women, in the footsteps of so many Christians who came to visit the tombs of the Apostles.

We will go to Rome, Catholic Rome, Apostolic Rome, the Rome of the martyrs, to proclaim our faith, to sing our love for Our Lord Jesus Christ, to reap the abundant fruits of His Redemption.

We are going to Rome to purify ourselves of our sins, to obtain indulgences for our sins and to sanctify our souls in this city of grace. Let us make a pilgrimage of faith, of prayer, of penance, to obtain those indulgences that the Church draws with particular generosity from her spiritual treasury during this Holy Year and distributes them widely for the salvation of our souls.

We will go to Rome to proclaim and manifest our unwavering attachment to the Apostolic See, to the Pope successor of Peter and Vicar of Christ, to the bishops successors of the Apostles, to the priests their collaborators, and to the Catholic, Apostolic and Roman Church.

We will go to Rome, simply because we are Catholics, children of the Church, and because we want to remain Catholics no matter what happens.

And it is precisely because we are and want to be Catholics that, during this Jubilee pilgrimage, with a special intensity (although, of course, we already do it every day), we will pray for the Pope, for the bishops, for the priests, for the whole Church, so that, in the terrible crisis she is going through, to which we are all sorrowful witnesses and victims, she may regain her splendor, with a faith fully rooted in her bimillennial Tradition and intrepidly proclaimed for the salvation of the world.

We will therefore go to Rome “for the glory of the Most Holy Trinity, for the love of Our Lord Jesus Christ, for the devotion to the Most Blessed Virgin Mary, for the love of the Church, for the love of the Pope, for the love of the bishops, priests, and all the faithful, for the salvation of the world, for the salvation of souls,” and first and foremost for the salvation of our own souls (emphasis mine).

Can you believe these schismatics? Spending their time, money, energy and lots of sacrifices… and for what? To “manifest our unwavering attachment to the Apostolic See, to the Pope successor of Peter and Vicar of Christ.”

Read the Whole Article

The post Vatican Sends SSPX Pilgrimage Down the Memory Hole? appeared first on LewRockwell.

Were one to conduct a survey of modern-day Americans, taken at random, it is likely that not one in a hundred would have heard of the poet Richard Crashaw. Were one to cross the Atlantic and conduct a similar experiment with modern-day Englishmen, it is likely that the result would be the same. This neglect and ignorance of one of England’s greatest poets says more about the barbarism of the age in which we live than it does about the merits of the neglected poet.

Richard Crashaw (1613-49) was one of the greatest poets of his age, or indeed of any age. He is one of what might be called the magnificent seven of 17th-century poets (not to be confused with the “secret seven” poets whom we discussed earlier), the other six being Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, John Donne, George Herbert, John Milton, and John Dryden.

Although every member of this “magnificent seven” deserves recognition as a great poet, most of them do not deserve recognition as heroes of Christendom, either sung or unsung. Let’s consider them individually.

Shakespeare qualifies most emphatically as an unsung hero and has already been the subject of an essay in this series; Ben Jonson converted, possibly under Shakespeare’s influence, but then apostatized; John Donne was raised Catholic and was related to the martyr St. Thomas More but became antagonistic to the faith of his fathers; George Herbert, a minister of the Church of England, never seems to have contemplated conversion; and John Milton was virulently anti-Catholic. By contrast, the final member, John Dryden, was a convert to the Faith who should also be numbered among our unsung heroes. More on him presently, but let’s return to Crashaw.

Richard Crashaw was the son of the puritan clergyman and preacher William Crashaw, who had fulminated against Shakespeare and the theatre. In a sermon delivered in London in 1608, he had condemned “ungodly plays” for being

a bastard of Babylon [a derogatory synonym for Rome in puritanical Biblespeak], a daughter of error and confusion; a hellish device—the devil’s own recreation to mock at holy things—by him delivered to the heathen and by them to the Papists, and from them to us.  

These words encapsulate the iconoclastic spirit of puritanism, reflecting the puritan disdain for Western civilization. In one terse, bombastic sentence, the entire legacy of the West is dismissed as being a contagious disease, passed from the devil to the “heathen” Greeks and Romans, and then to the “papist” Catholics until finally, via Shakespeare and his fellow playwrights, it had contaminated modern England. It is no surprise that the puritans would shut down the theaters after they seized power following the English Civil War, as well as banning “papist” feasts, such as Christmas and Easter.

In February 1610, two years after the sermon in London, William Crashaw was warning the Lord Governor of Virginia of the greatest threat to the newly founded colony: “We confess this action hath three great enemies: but who be they? even the Devil, Papists, and Players.”

Ironically, William Crashaw’s son, Richard, born three years after these splenetic words were spoken, would become a Catholic, converting during the Civil War and being forced into exile in consequence. Living in abject poverty in Paris and then in Rome, he was eventually appointed, in April 1649, to the post of subcanon of the Shrine of Loreto in Italy, dying only four months later. A devotee of St. Teresa of Avila, he is a poet of the stature of the great St. John of the Cross, that other great poet and follower of St. Teresa who also suffered greatly for the Faith.

Apart from the many poems written in his native tongue, Crashaw published a noted volume of Latin verse, Epigrammatum Sacrorum Liber, which contains the sublime line on the miracle at Cana: Nympha pudica Deum vidit et erubuit (“the modest water saw its God and blushed”). He is best known, however, for the two poems inspired by St. Teresa of Avila, “A Hymn to the Name and Honour of the Admirable Saint Teresa” and “Upon the Book and Picture of the Seraphical Saint Teresa,” the latter of which is quite simply one of the most beautiful prayers ever written. As for the self-sacrificial spirit that pervades his work as it pervaded his life, it is encompassed in his personal motto:

Live Jesus, Live, and let it be
My life to die, for love of thee.

One of the finest tributes to Richard Crashaw was paid by that fine literary scholar R.V. Young. Writing in the St. Austin Review, Young lauded Crashaw’s “meekness in persecution and his patience in suffering” and emphasized his “continuing significance for twenty-first century Catholics and the abiding power of his poetic vision”:

As a man, he is a model of fidelity under circumstances when adherence to the Catholic Faith put him in conflict with both his family traditions and wider English society and left him in great uncertainty as to his future in the world. In his poetry, he offers breathtaking depictions of the joy of union with Christ without neglecting the cost in earthly suffering or the doctrinal meaning of devotional experience.

Having allowed this finest of scholars to wax lyrical on this finest of poets, let’s conclude by turning our attention, albeit all too briefly, to the final member of the “magnificent seven” to warrant a place among the unsung heroes. This is John Dryden (1631-1700), whose greatest work, The Hind and the Panther, published in 1687, two years after his conversion to Catholicism, is a monumental apologia for the Catholic Faith and an equally monumental rebuttal of the claims of Anglicanism.

Like Crashaw, Dryden suffered persecution for his fidelity to the Faith and, like Crashaw, he is a true literary giant whose neglect by the modern world is scandalous. He deserves, like Crashaw, to become much better known. Perhaps in healthier and happy times this dynamic duo, part of the magnificent seven, will rise from the ashes of present neglect like a phoenix of faith, resurrected and born again within the hearts of new generations of civilized readers.

This article was originally published on Crisis Magazine.

The post English Poet, Catholic Exile appeared first on LewRockwell.

Last week Argentina’s Javier Milei regime tried to roll over bonds by offering investors an insane 69% interest rate, and only succeeded in rolling over 61% of them. Even a 69% annual interest rate isn’t enough to tempt investors to risk lending to the Milei ponzi, which means they either expect a default very soon, or they expect price inflation to exceed 69% over the next year. This was an ice-cold bucket of reality poured on the delusional talk of an economic miracle by the clown who plays a free market economist on TV and has been placed in the presidency to revive Argentina’s largest industry: sovereign bond pump-and-dumps.

Even if the bond auction had succeeded, it is difficult to see how Argentina could possibly avoid default and/or very high inflation in the rest of Milei’s term. According to Grok, Claude, ChatGPT, and basic common sense, no country has ever offered a yield higher than 30% on its bonds and avoided default, hyperinflation, or an IMF bail-out within the next three years. Failing to sell a bond at more than double that yield means the writing is on the wall, and you can safely ignore the media hype about an ‘economic miracle’. As I discussed last year,[1] Milei is just another inflationist president, and the inevitable consequences are rearing their ugly head.

During his first year in office, Milei used his free marketeer TV routine to pretend to bring economic freedom to the Argentine economy, but reneged on his campaign promise to shut down the central bank, and instead went about attempting to save it by adding its debt to the government’s debt; reneged on his promise to fight inflation by doubling or tripling money supply measures; reneged on his promise to not raise taxes; sought an IMF bail-out; and hired the same J.P. Morgan bankers, who had entrapped Argentina into tens of billions of dollars of debt, to head the most important positions in his administration and central bank. Old habits die hard, and all of the free market bluster on the campaign trail gave way to the same old fiat banksterism.

In his second year, as the peso continued to decline and his international reserves refused to recover, Milei cried and begged and brown-nosed his way to getting an IMF bail-out, as his talk of pivoting away from China and hysterically crying in Netanyahu’s arms seem to have succeeded in getting the IMF to unreasonably accommodate him[2]. In all the history of the IMF, its loans have always been the last resort of failed governments, an admission of economic failure, and a pawning of national sovereignty and future generations’ wealth in search of a few quick bucks to help failed leaders stay in power. But Milei and his bankster buddies have hilariously and shamelessly treated the new IMF loan like a triumph, with Luis Caputo giving a speech thanking his wife and children for their support during the negotiations, like he was winning an Oscar, when he had just succeeded in saddling generations of Argentines with USD debt.[3] I don’t recall seeing any government celebrating an IMF loan like this before.

With this new $20b in IMF loans, Argentina now has the highest outstanding debt to the IMF in IMF history. Argentina’s borrowing is now at 1,352% of its IMF quota, the highest excess over quota in IMF history. High-ranking IMF officials resigned, were fired, or refused to green-light this reckless loan that contravenes even the IMF’s own recklessly low standards.[4] The IMF’s own report on the debt practically acknowledged that the country’s debt is unrepayable.[5] Argentina’s loans now likely constitute more than 40% of the IMF’s entire lending portfolio! It’s fair to say at this point that the IMF primarily exists to lend to Argentina, thanks to the endless supply of Argentine scammers willing to pawn off their future generations’ wealth. But it doesn’t just stop at the IMF! Milei has also borrowed another $12 billion from the World Bank (WB), and $10 billion from the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB), for a total of $42 billion borrowed from international institutions to add to the already enormous public debt. The cost of servicing this and the existing debt is enormous, and makes all adjustments to the budget inconsequential. And the cherry on top: Milei shipped off the little that remained of Argentina’s once significant gold reserves to London in search for a quick yield buck.

So what has this extreme inflation and indebtedness gotten Argentina exactly? If you read the economically illiterate international financial press[6], then Milei has presided over a supposed economic miracle because GDP growth has rebounded, while inflation and poverty have declined, and the budget has been balanced. This is nonsense, and the fact that it is being promoted so heavily speaks volumes about the role that the international financial press plays in promoting IMF and bankster debt slavery and the bond market shitcoin casino.

In the real world, away from bond shitcoin promotional fiat media, the Argentine peso has barely stopped declining, and consumer prices have been constantly rising, exactly as you would expect from a drastic increase in the money supply. Continued intervention in the foreign exchange market has now made Argentina expensive even in dollar terms[7]. The black market peso exchange rate has dropped 30% against the dollar in just 21 months, during which time the dollar itself has been dropping against most major foreign currencies. The official rate, on the other hand, has dropped by around 70%, from 400 pesos per dollar to 1,300 pesos per dollar. Just in the last month of July, both rates dropped around 13%, which suggests Argentine people and the banking speculators already see the writing on the wall.

It is of course important to remember that government inflation statistics are obviously always and everywhere manipulated to understate the true extent of inflation, and in Argentina this is taken to absurd lengths.[8] And yet, even by the government’s own ridiculous numbers, the situation is a monstrous travesty. After year-on-year price inflation rates rose to almost 300% in the first few months of his presidency, it has declined to the 30-40% range in recent months, and the cumulative price inflation since Milei has taken office is 155%, a figure that can in no way be explained away or blamed on predecessors. That the inflation has slowed down to these high levels is no triumph whatsoever. It is very uncommon to maintain price inflation above 200% for a long period of time. After doubling and tripling the money supply, an insolvent government can meet most of its obligations in its own currency, and more excessive money creation is not necessary or useful anymore, because very little purchasing power is left in the currency, and increasing its supply just translates to quick devaluation and very little seigniorage.

After almost two years in office, it would have been absolutely trivial for Milei to bring price inflation down to close to zero with the one simple trick that the Austrians he claims to adore have always stood by: stop creating money. Price inflation is not some act of god, natural disaster, or inexplicable spiritual malady; it is not something governments need to fight; it is something only governments and central banks can cause; it is the inevitable consequence of increasing the money supply, and that was entirely Milei’s choice. He ran on a platform of ending inflation, had the mandate to close the central bank, which was the easiest way to achieve it, but he reneged on his promise and abjectly failed at his stated mission. After all this time, the blame for this failure lies entirely with Milei. It was his choice to keep the central bank running and to massively increase the money supply. He can keep hysterically crying about the socialists and Kirchnerists all he likes, but this is now fully his presidency, and this inflation today is entirely his making.

It’s very telling here to compare Argentina to Lebanon, another hyperinflationary basket case which went through hyperinflation over the past six years and has seen its currency devalue even more than the peso. After year-on-year price inflation rose north of 100% and the lira was devalued by more than 95% against the dollar, the government could meet its lira liabilities, and it stopped increasing the money supply significantly, with year-on-year price inflation coming down to 14% in recent months. During this period, Lebanon witnessed a massively destructive war, and for much of the period it did not even have a president. An economic miracle, this was not. Everyone understands this is just the inevitable winding down of hyperinflation, a central bank taking a break after its currency has been completely destroyed and more money creation becoming futile. With very little wealth held in liras, increasing the supply of the lira can barely generate any seigniorage for the government, just very quick devaluation. Nowhere in the fiat cartel media is anyone lauding this as an economic miracle, or recommending war and political vacuum to achieve it. And yet, with a price inflation rate more than double that of Lebanon, Milei is being lauded as a genius. The difference is that he has taken billions in loans from the IMF, WB and IDB, and is allowing Wall Street and bond traders to profit from his central bank destroying the peso to pay exorbitant bond yields. His despicable groveling to the genocidal Zionist regime couldn’t have hurt, too.

A Tale of Two Shitcoins: Which is the economic miracle and which is the result of war and a political vacuum?

The hype around free market reforms has also sadly tempted a lot of Argentines to deposit billions of US Dollar cash savings into the banking system[9], where they are likely to disappear into the black hole of government debt ponzi. Milei and Caputo are currently trying to force the banks to buy more government bonds, yet again using the savings of Argentinians to prop up the government’s unsustainable debt, which is crashing the banks’ stocks and bringing back painful memories of the Corralón of 2001.[10] Another IMF bailout so soon after the last one seems highly unlikely, although Milei is actually offering to give the genocidal monster Netanyahu an honorary residency[11] so you never know.

Fiat cartel media is also lauding Milei for achieving GDP growth, but this is also ridiculous, given how much inflation he has created. It is always possible to pump GDP numbers in the short run with money creation, but the cost is paid in the future through debt servicing, fiscal and monetary crises, and burst economic bubbles. Another ridiculous stat being lauded by economically-illiterate fiat bankster media is a sharp decline in the poverty rate. All government produced statistics are creative accounting nonsense, but poverty rates are one of the most creative and nonsensical. The poverty rate is calculated by comparing incomes to living costs, and at a time in which the currency is devaluing as quickly as it is in Argentina, this becomes a futile exercise in creative and arbitrary accounting, as all incomes, prices, denominators, and numerators shift quickly, and the statistician can take extreme liberties with his choices of deflators and real adjustments. It is inconceivable that millions of Argentines have escaped poverty as their currency has been destroyed, prices have risen in pesos and dollars, and unemployment[12] and the tax burden have risen. On the contrary, one of the most reliable indicators that the Milei miracle is fake is how soon it came after he came into office. If he were to indeed create an economic miracle, it would definitely not happen overnight. It would require economic decisions extremely unpopular in the short term, it would cause an economic recession as countless people lose their fake fiat jobs, as labor and capital are reallocated to uses determined by the market rather than government and fiat inflation. Milei’s decisive electoral victory seemed a unique opportunity to pull this off, using the popular mandate to close the central bank and grit the nation’s teeth through the pain until the benefits materialized, but he chose immediate gratification through inflation and debt instead.

All talk of a free market is empty rhetoric as long as the government manipulates the money, which is a part of every economic exchange in the market, and in Argentina, government control of the money is complete. The money supply continues to increase, and the central bank is imposing an interest rate of 65%, making speculation on the government’s bonds the only possibly profitable industry. Restrictions on foreign currency are still in place in spite of all the talk of liberalization.[13]

Milei seems to have managed to balance the budget, but this is not the win his promoters think it is.[14] The budget is only balanced if one does not count the cost of servicing the debt, which is enormous. Balancing the budget while piling on more debt and enormously growing the cost of debt servicing is like closing the barn door after the cows have already left; it’s not going to bring them back. Further, he has raised taxes in spite of promising to cut his arm before raising them.[15] This just means an increased burden of the state on society, primarily to pay off bond speculators. He may have reduced government spending, which seems admirable on its face, but in reality this has come mainly in the form of cuts to public works like road maintenance, which will mean decrepit infrastructure, and cuts to retirement and pensions[16], exacerbating the poverty his sycophants in the media pretend he has reduced. The viral video of him eliminating entire government ministries is yet another broken campaign promise, with most of these being renamed into secretaries and the total cost savings amounting to a rounding error.[17] He has also vowed to quadruple spending on the military[18], a ridiculous waste for a bankrupt government under no threat from its friendly neighbors, and likely an expensive stunt to curry favor with the global arms industry and the US and Israeli governments in the hope of getting more loans.

In sum, Milei has increased inflation, taxation, and public debt, the unholy trinity of cardinal sins for the Austrian school economists he claims to adore. He has also increased military spending and supported the supreme statist crime of genocide. And what did Argentina get in return for these five indelible abominations? Just a highly volatile shitcoin casino in the form of volatile peso and government bonds with enormous yields, making bond and foreign exchange speculation the only path to financial security in Argentina, albeit a very risky one. And his fans also got empty stupid theatrics with chainsaws and profanity-laden speeches.

The sad reality is that the depreciation of fiat creates a demand for chasing yield from government bonds, and all over the world, a lot of money is forced by government regulation to go into government bonds, under the ridiculous pretext that they are the safest investment. This means a giant captive market of helpless suckers for insiders and banks to pump-and-dump government bonds on, and the fiat financial media is the pied piper luring people worldwide into these scams. The situation is identical to how shitcoin scammers invent ridiculous narratives to promote premined shitcoins, which cryptocurrency media spreads to tempt gamblers to invest in them while the makers of these coins dump their premined coins as they inevitably go to zero. “Argentina’s economic miracle” is just another scam narrative to pump and dump Argentina bond shitcoins, like “Turing-complete world computer”, “smart contract platform”, and “real estate on the blockchain” are scam narratives to pump premined scamcoins. The average macro analyst mainly differs from the average crypto influencer social media account in having better grammar and lower income. And Milei now has the rare distinction of being a seasoned veteran of both markets, as he combined ‘economic miracle’ bonds with tweeting to encourage suckers to invest in a memecoin to support Argentina’s economic growth and small businesses, then proceeded to rugpull them in hours, with his team making off with tens of millions of dollars.[19]

Without ending inflation, Milei’s libertarian and Austrian economics theatrics have been hijacked to serve the most unlibertarian and un-Austrian ends imaginable. Just when it seemed like the fiat bond ponzi in Argentina had ended and could no longer be salvaged, the same banksters who had gotten Argentina to this place plucked this clown from TV studios to pretend-play an anti-inflationist Austrian economist at the Presidency, creating the illusion that Argentina’s government’s finances and peso can be saved, tricking millions of Argentines into depositing their cash dollar savings back into the black hole of the Argentine banking system, and getting more suckers to play the government bond shitcoin casino instead of having productive jobs.

All of this would have been avoided if Milei had done what he promised in his election campaign: close the central bank. Inflation would have ended, the government would have had to actually balance its budget, and after a painful adjustment period in the first year of his presidency, Argentina would already be on the road to recovery today, with no inflation. The peso would even have likely appreciated once the money printer that creates it was destroyed, as had happened in Iraq when the US military destroyed the Iraqi central bank.[20] Instead, Argentina has now been through two years of painful volatility, growing unemployment and price rises, and it is yet to face the real pain from the growing debt burden and inflation.

When the ponzi collapses, as it always does, Argentines will have lost their cash savings, and most suckers who invest in bonds will have been ruined, but the fiat cartel banks will walk away well-fed, as they always do. Milei will discredit Austrian and libertarian ideas for decades to come by associating them with their diametrical opposites: inflation, indebtedness, bond market pump-and-dumps, and genocide. It is only his constant invocation of the Austrians that makes me take time from my busy schedule to discuss this con artist and his unfortunate country. Socialists of the world, you can now laugh at us libertarians for stealing from you the same line for which we have mocked you for decades: but it wasn’t real libertarianism!

In a fantastic revelation of his character after the memecoin shitcoin he promoted collapsed, Milei had the audacity to go on TV to abdicate all responsibility for the losses among his followers, and effectively told his countrymen: NO CRYING IN THE CASINO![21] We can only hope Milei takes his own advice when his peso and bonds scams implode and spares us the repulsive spectacle of his demonic plastic-surgeoned face crying.

References

A particularly helpful resource for me in writing this piece was the work of Nick Corbishley on Naked Capitalism.

[1] https://x.com/saifedean/status/1877717156420341885 [2]https://nakedcapitalism.com/2025/04/why-did-us-treasury-sec-scott-bessent-visit-argentina-yesterday-just-three-days-after-another-massive-unpayable-imf-bailout.html
[3] https://x.com/SchamneNicolass/status/1910835804282249343
[4] https://nakedcapitalism.com/2025/08/less-than-four-months-after-imf-bailout-and-lifting-of-currency-controls-argentina-is-back-in-crisis-mode.html?utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_medium=twitter
[5] https://lapoliticaonline.com/economia/el-fmi-reconoce-en-el-nuevo-acuerdo-que-la-deuda-de-argentina-es-practicamente-impagable/
[6]
https://thefp.com/p/niall-ferguson-mileis-manmade-miracle-argentina-economy

https://ft.com/content/7b687fd9-41ce-41ab-ae73-93b96e11b666 https://telegraph.co.uk/business/2025/07/19/when-will-world-wake-up-argentinian-miracle/
[7] https://lanacion.com.ar/el-mundo/como-la-argentina-paso-de-ser-un-pais-barato-en-dolares-a-uno-de-los-mas-caros-de-america-latina-nid23012025/
[8] https://bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-03-19/milei-s-inflation-miracle-distorted-by-obsolete-items-in-argentina-index
[9]https://reuters.com/world/americas/argentina-tax-amnesty-push-pulls-18-billion-deposits-2024-10-31/#:~:text=BUENOS%20AIRES%2C%20Oct%2031%20Reuters,an%20official%20said%20on%20Thursday.
[10] https://lapoliticaonline.com/economia/el-gobierno-le-declaro-la-guerra-a-los-bancos-y-les-impuso-un-corralito/
[11] https://nakedcapitalism.com/2025/08/netanyahus-argentina-conundrum.html
[12] https://perfil.com/noticias/bravotv/el-empleo-privado-no-logra-repuntar-y-volvio-a-caer-en-marzo-se-perdieron-mas-de-siete-mil-puestos-de-trabajo.phtml
[13] https://bcra.gob.ar/SistemasFinancierosYdePagos/Regulaciones_exterior_y_cambios_i.asp?utm_source=chatgpt.com
https://ambito.com/economia/para-las-empresas-el-final-del-cepo-debera-esperar-cuales-son-las-restricciones-que-quedan-vigentes-n6134370
[14] https://mises.org/power-market/when-balancing-budget-hurts-economy
[15] https://elespanol.com/opinion/tribunas/20250817/falso-milagro-economico-milei/1003743885755_12.amp.html
[16] https://elespanol.com/opinion/tribunas/20250817/falso-milagro-economico-milei/1003743885755_12.amp.html
[17] https://letrap.com.ar/puro-humo-el-recorte-del-gabinete-javier-milei-representa-el-000142-del-presupuesto-n5405158?utm_source=chatgpt.com
[18] https://economist.com/the-americas/2024/08/22/javier-milei-is-splurging-on-the-army & https://cnnespanol.cnn.com/2024/09/16/argentina-gasto-defensa-milei-orix
[19]
https://x.com/saifedean/status/1890724929168912636. The case of this shitcoin is still being tried in American courts and Milei may yet find himself in serious trouble over it.
https://lapoliticaonline.com/entrevista/agost-carreno-en-la-causa-de-estados-unidos-empiezan-a-nombrar-a-karina-milei/
[20] https://mises.org/free-market/dinars-or-dollar [21] https://x.com/100xgemfinder/status/1891963507215622432

The post Javier Milei Unraveled appeared first on LewRockwell.

After four years of unnecessarily confrontational foreign policy under President Biden, Americans elected Donald Trump in part for his promise to put America first at home and overseas. He promised a war-weary America that he would start no new wars and would get us out of the existing ones. Eight months into his second Administration it appears his promise remains to be fulfilled, as his approval rating continues to slip.

On Ukraine, President Trump wisely observed coming into office that the conflict is “Joe Biden’s war” not his own. Unfortunately he could not resist the temptation to get involved in the conflict, even under the guise of “peacemaker.” I’ve often said that getting out of conflicts overseas is not that complicated: we should just come home. Even when there are no troops involved, “just come home” means disengage from the conflict. But President Trump wants to play referee in the war while arming and supporting one side. Is it any wonder he is making no progress in ending the war?

Likewise with Israel and Gaza, Trump’s promise to put America first has faltered. President Biden put Americans on the hook for additional billions of dollars to support Israel’s actions in Gaza without even a word about the slaughter and destruction. As more Americans become disgusted by Israel’s obliteration of the property and population of that tiny strip of land, Trump shows no signs of shifting from Biden’s approach. More money and more weapons are sent as starvation claims more and more children each day. Trump has reportedly remarked to a donor that his own base is turning against him because of his Israel policy. Yet he refuses to alter course and “just come home.”

Trump has even returned to the failed Latin America policy of his first Administration, in last week’s move toward a military confrontation with oil-rich Venezuela. Trump sent two warships and 4,000 US troops to the waters near Venezuela under the highly suspect accusation that the country’s president is actually head of an international drug cartel. He should have learned from the almost comical recognition of Juan Guaido as the real president of Venezuela in his first term that meddling in that country is not in America’s interest. It seems the neocons around him, including warhawk Marco Rubio, are sucking him into another unnecessary conflict.

Add in Trump’s military attacks on Yemen and Iran and the balance sheet thus far does not point to an “America first” foreign policy.

There is still time for President Trump to change course and fulfil his promises to the American people. Put Ukraine and Russia on notice that from this point the US is withdrawing from any role in the conflict. Let the Europeans work it out if they feel it is in their interest. Getting us out of NATO is also a good idea.

End US financial and military support for an Israel that cannot seem to get along with its neighbors. Perhaps without the US backstopping Israel’s warmongering, the country and its leadership would start to reflect on the wisdom of starting wars with multiple countries in its neighborhood.

Stop trying to overthrow Venezuela’s Maduro and everyone else the neocons have placed on the “hit list.” End all sanctions and open up trade instead. Maduro’s failed socialist economic policies will be his undoing, not American sanctions or saber-rattling.

America first above all means “just come home.” It’s that simple.

The post President Trump Should Return to an ‘America First’ Foreign Policy appeared first on LewRockwell.

When I first applied for a driver’s license, I was asked if I wanted to designate myself as an organ donor. Given my learned distrust of societal institutions (e.g., medicine) and a few concerning stories I’d come across, I opted to not be an organ donor. However, I also felt quite conflicted about doing so, particularly since I strongly believe in following the golden rule (treat others as you would want to be treated) and knew that if I needed a transplant I would be desperate for the appropriate donor to be willing to give the gift of life to me.

Since that time (when information challenging the mainstream narrative was quite difficult to find), I’ve come across much more information on the topic which paints a rather disturbing but also amazing profoundly paradigm shifting perspective on the topic (e.g., this article will detail the tangible spiritual consequences of receiving an unethically harvested organ).

However, due to my inherent conflict over this topic (e.g., many people need organs so I don’t want to discourage donations—particularly since organ shortages cause even more unethical steps to be taken to procure organs), I focused on other topics and only started this article in July. To my great surprise, a few weeks later, RFK Jr. did something I never anticipated and formally announced that there were widespread failures of the ethical safeguards in our organ donation system, after which, the Overton window was blown open and others (e.g., the head of the Independent Medical Alliance) began discussing the grim reality organs were being taken from still living people.

The Value of Organs

I have long observed that as long as enough money is on the line, there always will be a portion of people who are willing to do horrific and unimaginable things (e.g., slaughter people in overseas wars for profit). As such, I always consider the actual incentives at work when trying to appraise the reality of worrisome situations I come across.

One of the great accomplishments of the medical system was it creating the mythology it could conquer death, after which it gradually pivoted to being viewed as essential for remaining alive, and then to something which was necessary to continuously consume for “health”—all of which allowed it become incredibly profitable (and consume an ever increasing share of America’s GDP—currently totaling over 17.6% of all money spent in the United States).

Note: Medical Nemesis was an insightful 1976 book which predicted much of what followed. In Chapter 5 (pages 64–77—which can be read here), Ivan Illich highlights how the cultural conception of death evolved from an intimate, lifelong companion we had no separation from to a feared, medicalized entity to be conquered. He traced this shift through six historical stages, from the Renaissance ‘Danse Macabre’ to modern death under intensive care, where death is defined by the cessation of brain waves.

Illich argued that this medicalization, driven by the medical profession’s growing control, stripped individuals of autonomy, turned death into a commodity, and reinforced social control through compulsory care. This Western death image, exported globally, then supplanted traditional practices, contributing to societal dysfunction by alienating people from their own mortality. I agree with this, but feel the impacts of this were far more profound than even Illich hinted at.

In tandem with this, medicine began performing medical “miracles” such as being able to raise the dead (via cardiac resuscitation) and transplant organs. Opening the previously insurmountable boundaries between life and death, in turn, earned the discipline immense credit in the eyes of the public, and hence allowed it to justify being paid obscene amounts for its services (whereas in the past, doctors were paid very little and frequently only if they were able to get others better).
Note: as I will discuss in this article, crossing that boundary also called into question the materialistic (non-spiritual) paradigm modern science rests upon.

Because of this, coupled with how limited viable donor organs are, transplants rapidly became an incredibly valuable commodity (e.g., the cost of a transplant ranges from $446,800 to $1,918,700 depending on the organ—with the heart being the most expensive). As such, given how desperate many are for the organs, and how much money is at stake, it felt reasonable to assume some degree of illegal organ harvesting would occur given that people are routinely killed in other contexts for profit (e.g., in overseas wars, with a pharmaceutical company pushing lucrative drug they know can kill, or the brutal cartel violence done to establish territory).

Over the years, I then found various pieces of evidence suggesting this was happening, the worst of which I was unsure if they indeed transpired. As this is disturbing, you may want to skip the rest of this section. These included:

•Individuals being tricked into selling a kidney (e.g., in 2011, a viral story discussed a Chinese teenager who did so for an iPhone 4—approximately 0.0125% of the black market rate for a kidney, after which he became septic and his other kidney failed leaving him permanently bedridden and in 2023, a wealthy Nigerian politician being convicted for trying to trick someone into donating a kidney for a transplant at an English hospital).

•A 2009 and 2014 Newsweek investigation and a 2025 paper highlighted the extensive illegal organ trade, estimating that 5% of global organ transplants involve black market purchases (totaling $600 million to $1.7 billion annually), with kidneys comprising 75% of these due to high demand for kidney failure treatments and the possibility of surviving with one kidney (though this greatly reduces your vitality). Approximately 10-20% of kidney transplants from living donors are illegal, with British buyers paying $50,000–$60,000, while desperate impoverished donors (e.g., from refugee camps or countries like Pakistan, India, China and Africa), receive minimal payment and are abandoned when medical complications arise, despite promises of care. To quote the 2009 article:

Diflo became an outspoken advocate for reform several years ago, when he discovered that, rather than risk dying on the U.S. wait list, many of his wealthier dialysis patients had their transplants done in China. There they could purchase the kidneys of executed prisoners. In India, Lawrence Cohen, another UC Berkeley anthropologist, found that women were being forced by their husbands to sell organs to foreign buyers in order to contribute to the family’s income, or to provide for the dowry of a daughter. But while the WHO estimates that organ-trafficking networks are widespread and growing, it says that reliable data are almost impossible to come by.

Note: these reports also highlighted that these surgeries operate on the periphery of the medical system and involve complicit medical professionals who typically claim ignorance of its illegality (e.g., a good case was made a few US hospitals like Cedars Sinai were complicit in the trade).

• A 2004 court case where a South African hospital pled guilty to illegally transplanting kidneys from poorer recipients (who received $6,000–$20,000) to wealthy recipients (who paid up to $120,000).1,2

• Many reports of organ harvesting by the Chinese government against specific political prisoners.1,2,3,4,5,6 This evidence is quite compelling, particularly since until 2006, China admitted organs were sourced from death row prisoners (with data suggesting the practice has not stopped).
Note: harvesting organs from death row prisoners represents one of the most reliable ways to get healthy organs immediately at the time of death.

• Over the years, I’ve read allegations Israel illegally harvested organs from murdered Palestinians.1,2,3 I have never known what to make of these, as while some of the evidence appears compelling, neither the sources nor the evidence are definitive (often coming from those politically opposed to Israel), and logistically, collecting organs from someone who was just murdered on the battlefield before the organ expires is very difficult (and would require a specialized harvesting team to be there—something I’ve never seen reported). However, it has been officially admitted longer lasting tissues (e.g., corneas) were harvested without consent from Israelis and Palestinians bodies until the practice was banned in the 1990s.
Note: I’ve also read reports of organ harvesting occurring in Middle East conflict zones, by ISIS and in the Kosovo conflict, and with drug cartels.

Given all of this, I am unsure of the extent of “unethical” organ harvesting, but I am sure it happens (including in the most horrific manner we can imagine) and that there are likely far more cases of which have been successfully swept under the rug. Simultaneously, I strongly suspect the state sanctioned form has gradually decreased as more awareness was brought to the problem (however this may be counterbalanced by the blackmarket as the demand for organs continues to increase).

Note: many other valuable tissues (e.g., tendons and corneas) can be harvested from dead bodies. Significant controversy also exists with the ethics of how these are collected (e.g., the respect given to the bodies or how profit focused that industry is). As there is less oversight with these transplants, a significant amount of questionable conduct is rarely reported, but as the primary ethical concerns are not applicable (e.g., harvesting from a non-consenting living donor), this topic will not be discussed in this article.

Locked-In Syndrome

Since so many different parts of the brain control different facets of our being, individuals who are still conscious can sometimes completely lose control of their bodies or the ability to community with the outside world (termed Locked-in syndrome).

In one famous case, Martin, a 12-year old who fell ill with meningitis entering a vegetative state, was sent home with his parents to await his death, but instead remained alive and was brought by his father to a special care center at 5 am each day. When he turned 16, he began regaining consciousness, by 19 became fully aware of everything around him, then gradually regained some control of his eyes, and at 26 (long after he’d become a background object), a caregiver realized he was showing signs of awareness, at which point he was tested, giving a communication computer, and gradually regained his functionality (eventually getting married).

Note: two aspects I never forgot from his memoir were the years he spent being haunted by his exasperated mother (without thinking) once saying “I hope you die” and him sharing “I cannot even express to you how much I hated Barney” as the care center he spent years at, assuming he was vegetative, had him watch Barney the Dinosaur re-runs each day.

Since our ability to perceive and interact with the world depends upon many different regions of the brain, those capacities also fade as one is nearing death. However, rather than being a random process, certain functions are lost before others. In turn, it’s frequently observed within the palliative medical field (where support is offered to dying individuals) that touch and hearing are the last two senses to disappear (e.g., this study showed hearing is preserved at the end of life). As such, I often think of Martin’s story (with people who are assumed to be unaware of their environment) and periodically tell grieving families there is a possibility their “brain dead” (or soon to die) loved one can either hear their voice or feel their touch as this often provides a significant degree of closure for them (and every now and then I hear a story suggesting that final communication was perceived).

Note: a strong case can be made that modern medicine functions as the state religion of our society (with many of its rituals and behaviors having strong parallels to what was seen in other religions such as doctors’ white coats being equivalent to a priest’s robes or vaccines being its holy water you are baptized in). Cardiac resuscitation (“raising the dead”) likewise is a powerful miracle which many have argued helped cement our modern faith in medicine. What’s less recognized (as it challenges science’s spirit-denying dogma that insists consciousness resides solely within the brain) is that many resuscitated individuals have had replicable “near death experiences” where they were aware of their surroundings (often from outside their body) when their brain was “dead.” This is turn suggests that other “less recognized” senses may also persist at the time of brain death.

In parallel, while rare, every now and then cases occur when “dead” people come back to life (e.g., a Mississippi man who’d been in a body bag for a while woke up right before being embalmed—and numerous other cases exist of someone declared dead by multiple physicians later waking up1,2,3).

The Specificity of Brain Death

Sensitivity designates being able to spot something that is there while specificity designates not erroneously spotting something which wasn’t actually there (a false positive). In most cases, it is impossible to have perfect sensitivity and specificity, as once you increase one, you inevitably decrease the other (e.g., tough on crime approaches reduce crime but also inevitably result in innocent people being arrested and convicted).

This concept is typically looked at with medical diagnoses (e.g., not missing a cancer that is there but also not erroneously diagnosing a cancer and putting someone through a harmful and unnecessary cancer protocol—which for example is a common issue with routine screening mammograms), but also applies to many other fields to. In turn, I believe many issues in society boil down to finding the best possible balance between the two, but frequently, issues become polarized and irreconcilable as neither side is willing to consider the other (sensitivity or specificity) or alternately, only one side is publicly presented and we never hear about the other (e.g., we are constantly told about the dangers of not vaccinating and catching diseases but rarely if ever about the far more frequent injuries that result from vaccination).

Since organs rapidly lose their viability once someone dies, the only consistent way to ethically obtain them is from someone who has already “died” but whose body is still keeping the organs alive—in other words, from someone who is brain dead.

Given that the potential exists for individuals who are brain dead to still be alive (e.g., consider the examples I just provided) and how much money is on the line for transplants, this naturally led me to wonder if the specificity of that diagnosis might have been lowered to meet the needed quotas.

For example, The New York Times published an essay two weeks ago advocating for increasing the sensitivity for detecting brain death which many understandably found quite disturbing. To quote it:

Donor Organs Are Too Rare. We Need a New Definition of Death.

A person may serve as an organ donor only after being declared dead…Brain death is rare, though.

The need for donor organs is urgent. An estimated 15 people die in this country every day waiting for a transplant.

New technologies can help. But the best solution, we believe, is legal: We need to broaden the definition of death.

Fortunately, there is a relatively new method that can improve the efficacy of donation after circulatory death. In this procedure, which is called normothermic regional perfusion, doctors take an irreversibly comatose donor off life support long enough to determine that the heart has stopped beating permanently — but then the donor is placed on a machine that circulates oxygen-rich blood through the body to preserve organ function. Donor organs obtained through this procedure, which is used widely in Europe and increasingly in the United States, tend to be much healthier.

But by artificially circulating blood and oxygen, the procedure can reanimate a lifeless heart. Some doctors and ethicists find the procedure objectionable because, in reversing the stoppage of the heart, it seems to nullify the reason the donor was declared dead in the first place. Is the donor no longer dead, they wonder?

Proponents of the procedure reply that the resumption of the heartbeat should not be considered resuscitation; the donor still has no independent functioning, nor is there any hope of it. They say that it is not the donor but rather regions of the body that have been revived.

How to resolve this debate? The solution, we believe, is to broaden the definition of brain death to include irreversibly comatose patients on life support. Using this definition, these patients would be legally dead regardless of whether a machine restored the beating of their heart.

So long as the patient had given informed consent for organ donation, removal would proceed without delay. The ethical debate about normothermic regional perfusion would be moot. And we would have more organs available for transplantation.

Apart from increased organ availability, there is also a philosophical reason for wanting to broaden the definition of brain death. The brain functions that matter most to life are those such as consciousness, memory, intention and desire. Once those higher brain functions are irreversibly gone, is it not fair to say that a person (as opposed to a body) has ceased to exist?

In 1968, a committee of doctors and ethicists at Harvard came up with a definition of brain death — the same basic definition most states use today. In its initial report the committee noted that “there is great need for the tissues and organs of the hopelessly comatose in order to restore to health those who are still salvageable.”

This frank assessment was edited out of the final report because of a reviewer’s objection. But it is one that should guide death and organ policy today.

Read the Whole Article

The post The Unseen Cost of Organ Transplants: Ethical Issues and Spiritual Implications appeared first on LewRockwell.

If you listen long enough, people will eventually tell you exactly what they truly believe. Unfortunately, we have just learned what Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky truly believes about the war with Russia, and it is not good news at all. Apparently Zelensky is convinced that there will not be a permanent state of peace until all of Donetsk, all of Luhansk and all of Crimea belong to his government. Needless to say, the Russians will never hand all of Donetsk, all of Luhansk and all of Crimea over to Ukraine willingly, and so they will need to be taken by force. Since the Ukrainians cannot do this alone, they will be seeking to enlist the help of others, and that is what should deeply alarm all of us.

The mainstream media’s fawning coverage of Zelensky’s Independence Day speech makes him sounds like some sort of a great peacemaker.  Here is just one example…

President Volodymyr Zelensky said Ukraine would continue to fight for its freedom “while its calls for peace are not heard,” in a defiant address to the nation on its independence day.

“We need a just peace, a peace where our future will be decided only by us,” he said, adding that Ukraine was “not a victim, it is a fighter”.

He continued: “Ukraine has not yet won, but it has certainly not lost.”

That makes him sound so incredibly reasonable.

But the mainstream media did not report on any of the troubling parts of Zelensky’s speech.

I went and found a transcript of the speech, and it reveals Zelensky’s real goals…

And now, in a full-scale war for independence, it is here, on Maidan, that one can find such important symbols. Symbols of how we fight, what we fight for, and how we are overcoming this war.

These symbols are all around us. In this Independence Monument. Inside, it has a reinforced concrete frame and can literally withstand a hurricane. In the same way, our Ukraine has withstood the great calamity that Russia brought to our land. In this “Zero Kilometer” point. It is the starting point where distances to Ukrainian cities are written: to our Donetsk, our Luhansk, our Crimea. Today, these markers have a completely different meaning. They are no longer just about kilometers. They remind us that all of this is Ukraine. And there are our people, and no distance between us can change that, and no temporary occupation can change that. One day, the distance between Ukrainians will disappear, and we will be together again as one family, as one country. It is only a matter of time. And Ukraine believes it can achieve this — achieve peace, peace across all its land. Ukraine is capable of it.

This is what started the war in the first place.

Western leaders gave Zelensky a green light to break the Minsk agreements, and so he gathered a 70,000 soldier invasion force along the borders of the DPR and the LPR.  The Ukrainians were shelling the living daylights out of the most heavily populated cities in the DPR and the LPR and were preparing to move in when the Russians intervened.

Zelensky’s obsession with conquering Donetsk and Luhansk precipitated this entire crisis, and now 1.7 million Ukrainians are dead.

But instead of being willing to accept the compromise deal that the Russians are now offering, in his speech Zelensky defiantly proclaimed that Ukraine will never accept any “compromise” that comes from the Russians…

This is Ukraine now. And this Ukraine will never again in history be forced into the shame that the “Russians” call a “compromise.”

Yes, Zelensky is calling for a temporary ceasefire along the current line of contact, because Ukraine has been steadily losing more territory.

But in Zelensky’s mind the purpose of such a ceasefire would be to regroup and rearm in preparation for taking all of Donetsk, all of Luhansk and all of Crimea.

That is why Ukraine’s plan is to bring as many western troops into Ukraine once a temporary ceasefire has been established.

Once they are there, it will be far easier to drag western nations into the war.

The Ukrainians aren’t stupid.  They have already lost 1.7 million soldiers and they know that the only way that they can militarily defeat Russia is with NATO’s help.

And so that is why Ukraine has been attempting to provoke Russia into doing something really dramatic over and over again.  The goal is to get the Russians to escalate matters so much that NATO will feel forced to come riding to Ukraine’s aid.

For instance, the Ukrainians just attacked a nuclear power plant deep inside Russian territory…

A fire has been put out at a nuclear power plant in Russia’s western Kursk region and air defences have shot down a Ukrainian drone, Russian officials have said.

The drone detonated when it fell and damaged a transformer, but radiation levels were normal and there were no casualties, a post from the plant’s account on messaging app Telegram said.

The United Nations’ International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) has repeatedly called on both Russia and Ukraine to show maximum restraint around nuclear facilities in the war.

Why would the Ukrainians do such a thing?

The answer is obvious.

They want the Russians to strike back so hard that western leaders will finally feel compelled to join the conflict.

At one point the stunts that the Ukrainians have been pulling almost worked.  There were plans to strike decision making centers in Kyiv with Oreshnik missiles, but Russian President Vladimir Putin wisely vetoed those plans…

Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko on Friday told reporters in an anecdote given to a press conference that Russian authorities had plans to directly attack Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky’s office in Kiev, but that President Putin rejected the proposed action.

What’s more, Lukashenko said, is that it would have happened with the new Oreshnik missiles, which are medium-range hypersonics that Russian officials have touted as having the same destructive power as a low-yield nuclear strike.

But it is just a matter of time before the Ukrainians successfully push the Russians too far.

When that time arrives, we could find ourselves directly fighting a nation that has more nukes than we do…

Moscow continues to hold nearly 4,400 nuclear warheads, over 1,500 of which are “strategically deployed” while the U.S. possesses more than 3,700 warheads in its stockpiles with 1,400 deployed, according to the Arms Control Association.

And as I have extensively documented, Russian missiles are far superior to what we possess, and Russian anti-missile systems are far superior to what we possess as well.

We must not get into an apocalyptic conflict with the Russians.

But if the Ukrainians get their way, that is precisely what is going to happen.

Meanwhile, it appears that there will be no peace in the Middle East either.

On Sunday, the IDF conducted an enormous bombing campaign in the capital of Yemen…

Israel bombed Houthi rebel targets in Yemen’s capital on Sunday, including a military site near the presidential palace.

The attacks by the IDF, which also included strikes on the Asar and Hizaz power plants, came after the Houthis fired a “multi-headed” warhead at Israel for the first time on Friday.

The use of the munition presents a new challenge for the Israeli defence system, which up until now has successfully repelled most of the Houthis’ attacks.

Sunday’s attacks sent huge fireballs into the sky over Sanaa, the Yemeni capital, as the IDF said it had struck a “significant electricity supply facility for military activities” for the Houthis.

And it is being reported that a “defining battle” between Israeli troops and Hamas is imminent…

On Saturday, Israeli tanks and troops began maneuvering ever closer to Gaza City’s outskirts in preparation for a full-scale offensive. Eyewitness accounts reported intensified shelling as Israel is moving toward what could be the defining battle of its war against Hamas terrorists: the capture of Gaza City.

Israel’s security cabinet approved the operation, known as Gideon’s Chariots B, and has deployed up to five IDF divisions toward the city’s outskirts—a highly significant mobilization. Thousands of reservists—some 60,000—have been called up.

John Spencer, chair of urban warfare studies at the Madison Policy Forum and executive director of the Urban Warfare Institute, told Fox News Digital the scale of this operation is unprecedented. “This will be a bigger challenge than anything the IDF has faced, arguably ever. It is the densest location in Gaza, the heart of Hamas’s stronghold. And you don’t really know what the tunnels are until you get into them.”

If Hamas would have just released all of the hostages, so much bloodshed could have been avoided.

But that never was going to happen, was it?

Unfortunately, just about everyone seems to have come down with a really bad case of “war fever”.

Leaders all over the planet want to fight, and so that is what they will get.

Reprinted with permission from The Economic Collapse.

The post Has He Gone Completely Insane? Zelensky Announces That There Is Not Going To Be Peace appeared first on LewRockwell.

Recently, I looked up the official population numbers for America 2.0. Even with birth rates plummeting at warp speed, some 57.8 percent of the populace remains White. I was actually astonished at this figure. One gets the distinct impression that Whites are already a minority, a situation gleefully forecast and anticipated by the elite.

The picture above reveals a reality that once existed, albeit not to such an idealized extent, not that long ago in this country. White people were large and in charge. America was a Patriarchy, run by White men. Whites were visible everywhere, from the guy who pumped your gas (there was no “self serve” in that full service era) to the clerk at any retail store to the president of every company. Every job paid a living wage, and nearly every job was done by a White person. Over 89 percent of Americans were White in 1960. Every year, the White percentage drops, and the nonwhite percentage rises. It’s about the most obvious trend one could imagine. But still, despite the anti-White propaganda and the phenomenon of self-hating Whites, we remain a large majority of the population. So what do we do other than vacation?

Now, in my own very quiet suburban neighborhood, things often resemble the 1950s. It’s overwhelmingly White, and not a single person seems compelled to ever “keep it real.” But they are mostly older Whites, many of whom bought these houses new in the late 1970s. Back when Whites were still starting families. Those children have long grown, leaving a lot of gray haired retirees wandering around their gardens, or anxiously awaiting the arrival of the mail (which is always delivered by a “person of color”). You’ll see lonely copies of the Washington Post at the end of their driveways. Only old people still read the newspaper. But some of them are still young enough to be in the workforce. That’s the question that intrigues me. Who do they work for? They must be doing pretty well financially, to live in this neighborhood. Do they all work from home? Are they all “consultants” who don’t get to experience a commute?

Recently, I’ve spent far more time than I’d like, visiting three different loved ones in hospitals, rehab centers, and nursing homes. Walking through any of them is a surreal experience. Virtually the entire staffs at all these places is nonwhite, consisting largely of African immigrants. Not a single attractive young White nurse, the kind that filled the hospital I worked in back in the mid-1970s. Did White girls just stop becoming nurses? It was a very prestigious job, and paid extremely well. Even the doctors are almost all nonwhite. No more brusque White guys in white coats, with stethoscopes hanging around their necks. Now it’s nonwhite guys who struggle to speak English. And you see less of them. Several times, we didn’t see a single doctor while spending six hours or more at one of these dark, depressing facilities. And if you thought it was hard getting a hot White nurse to come help you, try ringing for a nonwhite nurse.

Well, I do live in the Washington, D.C. suburbs, so I’ve always known lots of government workers. Beltway bandits. So, maybe that’s where all the White people work now? Try again. The DMV? Don’t make me laugh. When I had to represent the interests of my brother in person at a local Social Security office, there wasn’t a White employee in sight. I haven’t had to actually visit any other government agencies lately, but I’ve telephoned a bunch of them. And again, the phones are always answered by a rude, obviously Black woman. Yeah, I know it’s “racist” to suggest that one can determine the race of a person by their usage of crude Ebonics. I have had many family members working for the government, and some still do. But they’re all approaching retirement age. Odds are they will be replaced by a member of the 42.2 percent of the population that isn’t White. The math just doesn’t add up, unless we’re going full Common Core. The Whites have to work somewhere.

I go to the grocery store on the rare occasions my Hall of Fame wife shopper isn’t available. I see a lot of diversity in the staffs. But oddly, the shoppers are always almost all White . So what employers are providing them with the wherewithal to afford all the wildly overpriced items in the aisles? But you’ll at least see a few Whites, usually oldsters, still working at grocery stores. Other retail stores? Forget it. You can still be waited on by White servers at the restaurants I go to, but the staffs at all these places are becoming increasingly “diverse.” When I have to go the local AT&T store, to get my latest upgrade or ask inanely for some advice on how to use some feature on my “smart” phone, the person assisting me is always nonwhite. And someone who is a caricature of the character Apu on The Simpsons is going to be behind the counter at every convenience store. I understand the show actually eliminated poor Apu, as he was considered stereotypical. But undeniably a very accurate stereotype.

I have never been waited on by a White teller at my regular bank. Ever. How about construction? I recall lots of strapping young White guys who worked construction during the summer, because it paid very well and helped them stay in shape. But that was the 1970s, in a galaxy far, far away from here. As I drive around my area, I am constantly dealing with lane closures, accompanied by signs warning drivers that there is “Road Work Ahead.” When you see any evidence of this road work, it consists of nonwhites in yellow jackets, holding signs that say “slow” or “stop.” Not a strapping White guy in sight. I have only faint hopes of ever seeing one of these “diverse” crews actually performing any “road work.” I can see that the roads continue to be cracked and full of pot holes. Perhaps their real assignment is to make sure the roads don’t turn “racist.” That was, after all, one of our former beloved president Joe Biden’s primary concerns. At any rate, they’re being paid for something.

How about good old telemarketing? The black hole where people who couldn’t find work used to go. Nope, not there either. Those who are bothering you to buy something you don’t want or need will now almost always be someone with a thick Indian accent, comically given an American name like “Kyle” to make you think they’re from this country. And when you call for say, cable service, you’ll almost always get these same Indians with fake English names, and you’ll struggle to understand them. I think that’s the point, to have government agencies choose rude Black women to “help” you, and for companies to select outsourced foreign visa workers to “help” customers with their cable, phone, and other warranty questions. You’d think that a company would want someone who represents them on the phone to be exemplary in every way. Or at least somewhat like the White women who used to be receptionists. Receptionists have gone the way of the dodo.

Maybe it’s just my area. I don’t have any reason to go to CIA or FBI or Homeland Security headquarters, for instance, so it’s possible those agencies are stacked with White employees. But if one judges by local media, all across this country, again one would think that Whites are a rarely seen, tiny minority. Like Jews, for instance. Who, of course, are often visible and even more often found behind the scenes in positions of real power. I don’t watch the news much at all, but whenever I happen to pass by the television when my wife is checking the weather or something, or I’m trapped in an office or business where the television is on some news channel, I’m struck by the dearth of Whites onscreen, especially White males. Even the wannabe actresses that used to dominate the screen at every network, are becoming scarce. When a hot girl can’t become a Victoria’s Secret model any longer, because they’re pushing “Plus” size acceptance, what are they supposed to do? Well, there’s always Only Fans.

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The post Where Do All the White People Work? appeared first on LewRockwell.

Recent data reveal a startling decline in childhood vaccination rates, with kindergarten coverage now dropping to about 92 %, far below the 95 % threshold needed for herd immunity.

Exemptions have increased to 3.6% nationwide, and more than half the states experienced declines in coverage for MMR, DTaP, polio, and varicella for the 2024-25 school year. Meanwhile, measles cases have reached a 33-year high, along with a disturbing rise in whooping cough cases, more than doubling in 2025 compared to the previous year.

Why are parents becoming more skeptical of routine childhood vaccinations?

The core reason is trust, with trust eroding so deeply that it may become permanent.

That erosion directly results from government actions, missteps, and malevolence during the COVID era. Health authorities at the local, state, and national levels imposed mandates and restrictions on a whim, based on political rather than medical science. They broadcast a cascade of contradictory messages that shattered the public’s faith in health institutions. Let’s review some of these failures.

First, masks, mandates, and COVID origins. These were the initial cracks in the foundational credibility of medical institutions.

The sudden implementation of lockdowns, the flip-flopping on mask effectiveness during the pandemic, and the insistence on mandates created an environment where government directives felt coercive and punitive rather than consultative and altruistic.

Americans who were told that lockdowns were only temporary (remember “15 days to slow the spread”) and then saw those same lockdowns extended multiple times felt proud to comply.

However, much of the public grew increasingly uneasy as scientific explanations kept changing week after week. That growing unease planted doubt, even among those who initially followed orders, which spread beyond just the immediate COVID pandemic.

Liquor stores and strip clubs could stay open, but churches and schools could not. Big Box stores stayed open while small businesses closed. Going into a building without a mask was a super spreader event, while marching with thousands of unmasked protesters was considered safe.

Second, confusion about COVID vaccines with declining confidence in government proclamations. Starting with the jabs. Despite initial hopes, vaccine messaging remained unclear, including claims about efficacy, mandates, and the need for boosters upon boosters.

We were told that if we took the experimental gene therapy (vaccine), we would neither catch nor spread COVID. President Biden promised (lied), “You’re not going to get COVID if you have these vaccinations.”

Yet, we saw our fully vaccinated friends and family repeatedly get COVID.

A Cleveland Clinic study confirmed that more vaccine doses were linked to a higher rate of COVID infection.

Parents watched as health agencies revised their safety statements. Talk of long-term adverse effects, including myocarditis, blood clots, and aggressive cancers, was initially dismissed, only to be quietly investigated and confirmed.

Meanwhile, the VAERS system was misused in public forums to tally raw adverse event reports without proper context, fueling fears instead of easing them. This fostered an environment of understandable parental hesitation that went beyond COVID shots to include routine childhood immunizations.

Third was the misinformation feedback loop and the government’s woefully inadequate response.

While many blame social media disinformation, it’s important to see that misinformation thrived where institutional trust had fallen. Nature abhors a vacuum. Health authority statements, echoed by a pharmaceutical-supported corporate media, created the gap that social media and independent journalists stepped into.

Social media’s echo chambers amplified anti-vaccine stories. Many tales and conspiracy theories, some used as clickbait and others proven true, eroded trust in the “official narrative”.

Physicians and scientists questioning the new situational science were threatened with losing their jobs or licenses, just as I was in the early COVID days.

Yet the government’s approach remained reactive, debunking rumors instead of building trust, and repeating talking points rather than acknowledging uncertainty. In many communities, especially rural or lower-income areas, access to trusted local medical voices was already limited, and pandemic-era messaging only widened that gap.

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