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Almost any viewpoint can be “proven” using the “correct” evidence and logic. Purely as a challenge, I’ve successfully done this in the past with beliefs I consider to be abhorrent and completely disagree with. Once you become familiar with the process, you begin to gain an appreciation for how ephemeral the truth is and how problematic it is that most people have filters they see through reality through that lead to them doing this even if it’s not deliberate (although if you watch carefully for it, you’ll often see non-verbal signs that show they are somewhat aware they are lying to themselves).

For some reason, this realization directly conflicted with my deepest values (which to this day I don’t know the source of as they just existed long before I had learned about the world), so my own way of seeing the world reoriented around trying to discern what was actually true rather than proving I was right (e.g., to hold onto the illusion I know what was going on) in the hopes the truth could become something tangible rather than this ephemeral fiction our hands and minds constantly passed through. In turn, a major reason why I approach most topics I present here by fairly presenting both sides is because I found it was one of the things necessary for me to pass through that ephemeral layer of truth that clouds almost everything.
Note: after going through this process for years, I started being able to tell if what I was exposed to had a “solidity” to it or an “emptiness” and a large part of how I filter reality now is by focusing my attention to the things that appear to have solidity (rather than them conforming to what I want to be true). In the past, I’ve mentioned how I will constantly debate and scrutinize each idea I am considering before deciding which one to adopt (which is important to do), but I view this discernment of solidity and emptiness to be much more important for arriving at what rings true.

Despite this publication being about medicine, I’ve repeatedly focused on highlighting the work of public relations (PR), a massive invisible industry (e.g., 20 billion was spent on it in America last year) that continually shapes our perceptions of reality for its corporate and government clients. Briefly, PR is the incredibly refined science of manipulating the public, and essentially is what lies between propaganda and marketing.

I have done this because as the years have gone by, I’ve come to appreciate how much of what happens in medicine is actually a product of how the consciousness and collective beliefs about our society are altered so that pharmaceutical products can be sold and that it’s often a lost cause to try to debate the science behind a recommendation unless you understand the PR at play.

Note: this is not that different from how many people who have an ulterior financial motive will inevitably arrive at the conclusion which supports their financial interests regardless of how hard you try to convince them not to. For example, listen to this talk below the co-founder of Shots Heard gave about why no one online could possibly have a valid reason to question vaccine safety, that no doctor who promotes vaccines is being paid off to do so, and why it was necessary to censor all of those opinions—while conveniently neglecting to mention he’s received over $200,000.00 from vaccine companies.

PR Campaigns

The “miracle” of PR is how effective it is, and I’ve now lost count of how many times an abhorrent policy that few Americans wanted was pushed through by a well financed PR campaign. In turn, I would argue PR has effectively altered policymaking from being a process of crafting an idea which is acceptable to the public (this is essentially how Democracy is supposed to operate). To simply making sure what is being done isn’t so far out of line it will be prohibitively expensive for a PR firm to sell it to the public.

For reference, some of the common PR tactics include:

1. Organizing a massive amount of coverage of an event which supports someone’s narrative and was crafted to go viral. For example:
•The founder of PR was infamous for convincing women across America to take up smoking by staging a women’s suffrage (right to vote) protest and having them all smoke their “liberation torches” as part of the protest).
•The Gulf War was sold to America by a fake testimony from a Kuwaiti girl (who was the daughter of the ambassador) who was coaxed to say the rampaging Iraqi army was invading hospitals and “taking babies out of incubators and leaving them to die on the cold floor,” a line which was then repeated again and again by politicians (e.g., Bush) around the world.

2. Hiring focus groups to determine what language is the most effective in persuading people to support your position and then blasting it on every public announcement and news station (e.g., the local ones) simultaneously. This often goes hand in hand with producing news programs for the stations (which are effectively PR productions for their sponsors).

3. Creating an endless number of “non-profit” organizations with nice names that actually advance the interests of the sponsoring industry. For example, the “non-profit” Foundation for Clean Air Progress is an industry front group that has aggressively lobbied both the public and the government to reduce the existing air quality standards mandated by the Clean Air Act. Likewise, the National Multiple Sclerosis Society took in 172 million dollars last year and is notorious for blocking many proven treatments for MS from seeing the light of day, while continuously supporting lucrative new drugs to “manage” the disease.

4. Paying off an endless number of experts to promote your message and having them be hosted on networks that are already in your pocket.

I cannot state how effective PR is and how depressing it has been to watch each candidate I supported get torpedoed by the media industrial complex.

However, while the effect of PR is remarkable, many of the people who work in the industry aren’t that talented, and as a result, they will just copy existing (and proven) PR tactics for the current campaign. Because of this, once you’ve seen enough PR campaigns, it becomes very easy to recognize one being enacted.
Note: two things allowed me to accurately predict most of what happened during COVID-19. One was being familiar with the same script having been followed during the HIV epidemic, and the other was seeing the PR campaigns for it be enacted in real time and recognizing the implications of each stage I observed (as the campaigns are typically structured in a sequential series of steps which eventually arrive at their sponsor’s desired outcome).

Censoring the Internet

The primary thing which has allowed the existing PR model to work has been the fact there is an (ever increasing) monopoly over the mass media. Because of this, a chosen PR campaign can be rapidly disseminated across the country while simultaneously, no dissenting narratives are allowed to air that challenge it.

Recognizing that the internet was the fatal weakness of the existing system, I suspect (but can’t prove) that a decision was made to have large internet companies become gatekeepers of information online, and in turn, as these large platforms attracted a large enough audience to become the “trusted sources” of information, they slowly transitioned to censoring things.

In turn, we saw a tug of war occur between the increasing pushes for censorship and the increasing ability of the internet community to bypass the attempts that were made to censor them. This eventually hit a tipping point, when in October 2016, Obama gave a speech at Carnegie Mellon where he declared:

“We’re going to have to rebuild, within this Wild, Wild West of information flow, some sort of curating function that people agree to,” “[T]here has to be, I think, some sort of way in which we can sort through information that passes some basic truthiness tests and those that we have to discard because they just don’t have any basis in anything that’s actually happening in the world.”

Parallel to this declaration, various campaigns were launched. This began with “Fake News” being blared everywhere until Trump attached the label to CNN, at which point the media pivoted. We saw an endless number of media messages about the dangers of “misinformation” ( followed by anything challenging the existing narrative, in turn receiving that label).

Note: public officials (like the instance of Obama mentioned above or Biden throughout the COVID vaccine push) are frequently involved in PR campaigns. For example (as discussed within a recent article on Dermatology’s disastrous war against the sun), in the 1980s, the struggling profession of dermatology spent 2 million dollars hiring a public relations firm to inflate their status and were suggested to rebrand themselves as cancer doctors. This in turn was accomplished by:

1. Offering campaigns beginning in 1985 to provide skin examinations to bring awareness to “skin cancer” and having widespread strategic media coverage of those campaigns.

2. Convincing Ronald Reagan to sign proclamations for “National Skin Cancer Prevention and Detection Week,” and “Older Americans Melanoma/Skin Cancer Detection and Prevention Week.

3. Creating a mortal fear of the sun (which persists to a truly absurd degree these days) despite the fact people that who avoid the sun are 60-130% more likely to die than those who get moderate or high amounts of it (e.g., smokers who get regular sunlight have the same risk of dying as nonsmokers who avoid the sun).

4. Equivocate melanomas (which are rare, dangerous, and caused by a lack of sun exposure) to basal cell carcinomas (which are common, never fatal, and caused by sunlight) since both are “skin cancers” so people can be corralled into regular skin examinations where those skin cancers are identified and quickly surgically removed.

5. Dermatology became one of the highest paying specialties in medicine, and the number of diagnosed skin cancers greatly increased, but there have been minimal changes in the actual death rates of skin cancers. Simultaneously, since those surgeries pay a lot, the profession lost all motivation to determine the actual causes of skin cancer, safe and effective non-surgical treatments for skin cancer, or how to make the sun heal rather than damage the skin.

What I find particularly interesting about Obama’s announcement was that it happened at the same time a coordinated campaign (spearheaded in California) was being conducted to push vaccine mandates across the nation, which were part of a coordinated push by Bill Gates, the WHO, and the WEF (amongst others) to launch a “decade of vaccines” as much of what we saw later throughout COVID-19 was laid out in their documents. Since they knew the public, through the internet would likely oppose this, a lot of investments were made to preempt that. For example:

Note: in this 2020 talk (and many others) PGP’s CEO explains how they monitor all anti-vaccine messages online 24/7 and their plans to pay off local influencers around the country to promote vaccines and to use counter-terrorism tactics to turn everyone on the internet against the anti-vaxxers (who are “not nice people”)—discussed further in this article. Finally, in a later 2023 webinar about inoculating the public against misinformation, the CEO also mentions they regularly use PR techniques. What I personally find amazing about his numerous talks is that he characterizes things being said online (e.g., that monkeypox was a non-issue) as “dangerous misinformation” which has since been proven true. Likewise, I suspect this project was inspired by past pharmaceutical initiatives like this infamous one.

Twitter () and PR

One branch of the misinformation campaign was Peter Hotez going on a national media tour in 2019 about the dangers the country was facing from online vaccine misinformation, which in turn laid the foundation for rapidly censoring any voices online that dissented against the COVID narrative. Because of this, we saw an escalating level of censorship from all the major internet platforms after Obama’s 2016 speech which then kicked into overdrive during COVID-19 to protect us from dangerous misinformation.

At the time this began in 2016, it became very clear to me that major online censorship was occurring, some of which was happening behind the scenes (e.g., shadow banning) and some of which was happening overtly towards easy to target groups (e.g., the alt-right) which I took as a sign more and more aggressive censorship was going to happen, much of which we would not see.

Simultaneously, since the censorship was very selective in who it targeted, based on who it targeted, while I couldn’t “prove it,” I assumed it had to be some type of collaboration between the government and the pharmaceutical sector. This was eventually confirmed by two things:

•Discovering numerous major investments being made by Big Tech into the pharmaceutical industry.

•Elon Musk buying Twitter () and making the choice to publicly release Twitter’s correspondences with the Federal Government, which in turn showed a consistent pattern of Twitter complying with (illegal) requests from the Federal government to censor anything that threatened its narratives. Those documents in turn led to a landmark case that placed an injunction against the Federal Government (which unfortunately was recently overturned by the Supreme Court).

From my perspective, Elon buying Twitter and making free speech on it was monumental as in addition to it being a large venue for free speech, it’s structure was such that it allowed ideas with merit to spread very quickly, and again and again, I saw well packaged bits of truth reach millions of people (and sometimes make national headlines)—something I’d never witnessed before on any media platform.

When I reflected on why this is, I realized that this frequently cited internet quote described it.

It’s not [that] the left can’t meme per say, it’s that their viewpoints rely on a carefully constructed denial of reality, to a far greater extent than any of the cults or religions they seek to supplant. This doesn’t lend itself to simple, easily conveyed messages, because if you rely on your viewers to see things as they are, without providing several layers of carefully selected context, they’ll interpret it the wrong way. The left can’t meme because memes are the antithesis of how they communicate.

Note: I describe myself as “liberal” but the current definition of “the left” is very different from what many of us signed up for when we became Democrats.

Read the Whole Article

The post The Vast Pharmaceutical Conspiracy to Silence Dissent Online appeared first on LewRockwell.

On the eve of the first presidential candidate debate, the Supreme Court gave a huge boost to Joe Biden to help him “fix” the 2024 election with maybe its worst decision of the year. It remains to be seen whether the court’s refusal to stop federal censorship will be a wooden stake in the credibility of American democracy.

The court ruled in the case of Murthy v. Missouri, a lawsuit brought by individuals censored on social media thanks to federal threats and machinations. Court decisions last year vividly chronicled a byzantine litany of anti–free speech interventions by multiple federal agencies and the White House. On July 4, 2023, federal judge Terry Doughty condemned the Biden administration for potentially “the most massive attack against free speech in United States history.” A federal appeals court imposed injunctions on federal officials to prohibit them from acting “to coerce or significantly encourage social-media companies to remove, delete, suppress, or reduce … posted social-media content containing protected free speech.”

State censorship

The decisions documented how the FBI, Biden White House, U.S. Surgeon General, and other federal agencies have sabotaged Americans’ freedom of speech. If you tried to complain about COVID lockdowns, or school shutdowns, or even about whether mail-in ballots caused fraud — your online comments could have been suppressed thanks to threats and string-pulling by the feds or by federal contractors. Conservatives were far more likely to be censored than liberals and leftists.

But the Supreme Court in late June decided to overlook all those abuses. There will be no injunction to stop the White House or federal agencies or federal contractors from suppressing criticism of Biden or his policies before the 2024 election. In a 6–3 decision, the Supreme Court gave the benefit of the doubt to federal browbeating, arm-twisting, and jawboning, regardless of how many Americans are wrongfully muzzled.

The Biden censorship industrial complex triumphed because most Supreme Court justices could not be bothered to honestly examine the massive evidence of its abuses. The majority opinion, written by Justice Amy Coney Barrett, whined that “the record spans over 26,000 pages” and, quoting an earlier court decision, scoffed that “judges are not like pigs, hunting for truffles buried in the record.”

Will that line catch on with school kids? When asked whether they did their homework, they can quote Justice Barrett and tell their teachers that they are “not like pigs hunting for truffles buried in the record” of all their class assignments.

“Lack of standing” a total cop-out

Rather than swine groveling in the muck, the Supreme Court instead disposed of this landmark case on a quibble, putting their legal pinkies up in the air like a white-wine drinker at a cocktail reception. The court ruled that the plaintiffs — including two state governments and eminent scientists banned from social media — did not have “standing” because they had not proven to negligent justices (how many pages in the files did they actually read?) that federal intervention and string-pulling injured them.

Bizarrely, the court denied standing even after conceding that it “may be true” that social-media platforms “continue to suppress [plaintiffs] speech according to policies initially adopted under Government pressure.”

But so why is this not a problem? Did the court decide to hold the government innocent unless there were signed confessions from White House and FBI officials, or what?

Lack of standing was the same legal ploy the Supreme Court used in early 2013 to tacitly absolve the National Security Agency’s vast illegal surveillance regime. After the Supreme Court accepted a case on warrantless wiretaps in 2012, the Obama administration urged the Justices to dismiss the case, claiming it dealt with “state secrets.” A New York Times editorial labeled the administration’s position “a cynical Catch 22: Because the wiretaps are secret and no one can say for certain that their calls have been or will be monitored, no one has standing to bring suit over the surveillance.”

Cynical arguments sufficed for five of the justices. Justice Samuel Alito, writing for the majority, declared that the Court was averse to granting standing to challenge the government based on “theories that require guesswork” and “no specific facts” and fears of “hypothetical future harm.” The Supreme Court insisted that the government already offered plenty of safeguards — such as the FISA Court — to protect Americans’ rights. “Lack of standing” didn’t prevent former NSA employee Edward Snowden from blowing the roof off the NSA.

When the court heard oral arguments in this case in March, most of the justices seemed clueless about the sordid record of government abuses. Maybe the outcome was a foregone conclusion when Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson blathered that “my biggest concern” is “the First Amendment hamstringing the government in significant ways in the most important time periods.” To sanctify censorship, Jackson repeatedly invoked the specter of legions of American teenagers jumping out of windows thanks to a social-media “challenge.”

So to save the children, Jackson tossed the First Amendment out the window instead. Unfortunately, five other justices joined the defenestration. Washingtonians presume the First Amendment is archaic because Americans have become village idiots who must be constantly rescued by federal officials.

But the whole point of the Bill of Rights is to hamstring would-be federal tyrants.

When a federal appeals court heard arguments on the case, Judge Don Willett said he had no problem with federal agencies publicly criticizing what they judged to be false or dangerous ideas. But that wasn’t how Team Biden compelled submission: “Here you have government in secret, in private, out of the public eye, relying on … subtle strong-arming and veiled or not-so-veiled threats.” Willett vivified how the feds played the game: “That’s a really nice social media platform you’ve got there; it would be a shame if something happened to it.”

This case was framed by Team Biden as whether the government would have the freedom to intervene against misinformation. Much of the press presumes that federal agencies are an infallible Oracle of Delphi.

Censorship and disinformation: two peas in a pod

But the issue was censorship, not the latest self-serving definitions of “misinformation” to emerge from inside the Washington, D.C., beltway. Portraying the issue as one of fighting misinformation preemptively grants a halo to federal censors. Too often, misinformation is simply anything that makes people mistrust the government.

The biggest “misinformation” of the COVID pandemic was Biden’s promise during a CNN town hall in July 2021: “You’re not going to get COVID if you have these vaccinations.” Subsequent waves of Delta, Omicron, and other COVID variants ravaged the credibility of Biden and federal COVID policymakers. The Washington Post castigated the CDC for withholding COVID information, noting that its “overly rosy assessments of the vaccines’ effectiveness against delta may have lulled Americans into a false sense of security.” But Biden continued to sound clueless on the issue. Five months after the CDC conceded the failure of the vaccines to prevent transmission, Biden announced in December 2021: “This is a pandemic of the unvaccinated. That’s the problem. Everybody talks about freedom … not to have a shot or have a test. Well, guess what? How about patriotism?”

After it became undeniable that the vaccines failed to prevent transmission and infection, the Biden administration trumpeted the notion that the vaccines prevented severe illness that would lead to hospitalization or death. That was the fallback justification for Biden’s dictate in September 2021 that 100 million adults must be injected with COVID vaccines. In a CNN town hall the following month, Biden derided vaccine skeptics as murderers who only wanted “the freedom to kill you” with COVID.

Shortly before Christmas 2021, Biden decreed: “We are looking at a winter of severe illness and death for the unvaccinated.” A few days later, he declared that “almost everyone who has died from COVID- 19 in the past many months has been unvaccinated.” But Team Biden was again pummeling Americans with misinformation.

Federal policymakers knew that the vaccines were massively failing to prevent fatalities but covered it up. In October 2021, the CDC had ceased publishing data showing soaring deaths among the fully vaxxed because the data “might be misinterpreted as the vaccines being ineffective,” the New York Times later revealed. Some state governments continued to publish COVID death data despite the CDC data lockdown. Oregon officially classified roughly a quarter of its COVID fatalities between August and December as “vaccine breakthrough deaths.” According to the Vermont Department of Health, “Half of the [COVID] deaths in August were breakthrough cases. Almost three-quarters of them in September were.” The CDC later admitted that, by early 2022, most COVID fatalities were fully vaxxed.

Team Biden’s censorship went far beyond pressuring social-media companies “to censor misinformation regarding climate change, gender discussions, abortion, and economic policy,” as Judge Doughty noted last year. A confidential 2022 DHS document detailed pending crackdowns on “inaccurate” information on “racial justice, U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan, and the nature of U.S. support to Ukraine.”

Because much of the censorship in recent years was inflicted by federal contractors, the Supreme Court held that Uncle Sam is effectively blameless. But as Justice Samuel Alito dissented, “Government officials may not coerce private entities to suppress speech.” Alito lamented that the court signals that “if a coercive campaign is carried out with enough sophistication,” it could “stand as an attractive model for future officials who want to control what the people say, hear, and think.”

The Supreme Court effectively dropped an Iron Curtain to shroud federal censorship like it previously did for torture atrocities. Two years ago, the court entitled the CIA to continue to deny its outrages despite worldwide exposes of its crimes. The Supreme Court ludicrously declared that “sometimes information that has entered the public domain may nonetheless fall within the scope of the state secrets privilege.” Associate Justice Neil Gorsuch dissented, warning that “utmost deference” to the CIA would “invite more claims of secrecy in more doubtful circumstances — and facilitate the loss of liberty and due process history shows very often follows.” Gorsuch noted that the Supreme Court was granting the same type of “crown prerogatives” to federal agencies that the Declaration of Independence describes as evil.

The federal district and federal appeals court recognized that federal censorship is a clear and present danger to American democracy. What if the FBI browbeats social-media companies into suppressing new revelations of kickbacks Biden received the same way the FBI helped suppress the 2020 New York Post story of Hunter Biden’s laptop?

What if White House aides verbally bludgeon outlets to silence any comments on Biden’s shuffling gait and cluelessness, like they suppressed jokes about COVID policy in 2021?

What if federal agencies again launch a concerted campaign to silence any criticisms on mail-in ballots spurring deluges of fraud, as happened before the 2020 election?

It is a sad day when Supreme Court justices behave like shiftless members of Congress who vote for a thousand-page bill that they never bothered to read. In lieu of constitutional rights and “government under the law,” the Supreme Court tells Americans they only deserve “plausible deniability” for government crimes. If we later learn that federal censorship changed the outcome of the 2024 election, will the Supreme Court shrug and simply tell citizens to recite “Never mind” twenty times? Unfortunately, there is no such thing as retroactive self-government.

This article was originally published in the September 2024 issue of Future of Freedom.

The post Supreme Court Unleashes Censors and Betrays Democracy appeared first on LewRockwell.

One day almost two years ago in October of 2022, I sat down in my reading chair in the small, old house I have lived in (at that point) for 23 years and opened a book I’d just received from Amazon called The Quest for Community by political philosopher Robert Nisbet. Published in 1953, it was the first of the 18 books Nesbit would write, and remains his masterpiece and the book for which he is best known. The book is a study of our shared, if not instinctive, drive to be with others and an indictment of governments the world over, particularly authoritarian governments, in their attempts throughout history to keep us apart. They do this because it is easier to control people who are isolated and lonely.

In one of the many sentences that I underlined in The Quest for Community and that might sum up this entire magnum opus, Nisbet writes: “The prime object of totalitarian government thus becomes the incessant destruction of all evidences of spontaneous, autonomous association.”

If there was ever a time when we suffered a gale force blow of totalitarianism, it was during the government-imposed lockdowns and mandates—social distancing, masking, and so-called vaccines—and the weaponized propaganda and increasing surveillance and invasion of privacy that were thrown into the toxic soup we’d all been force-fed. It not only happened here in America, but also throughout much of the world. It was the most widespread attack on freedom in human history. And all for no reason but for governments nearly everywhere to demolish the lives billions of us had built up and long enjoyed, individually and collectively, and then to claim their control over us. We were told it was all to “stop the spread” of a mysterious and supposedly lethal virus and to “flatten the curve” of rising cases of illness. That was just a ruse, a massive, well-orchestrated, and demonic sleight of hand.

The aftershocks are still with us. And what we experienced during the peak of the so-called pandemic may well come around again. And the next time, it may even be worse. As the billionaire psychopath Bill Gates said (smirking) a few years back, it “will get our attention.” So, I thought it would be a good idea to read about our quest for community and how governments often cleverly and, sometimes, brutally seek to destroy those natural communities while rounding us up into contrived communities of their own making.

At the outset of this essay, I will say this about the quest for community: it never made much sense to me. I love solitude and am very much a loner. Except for 10 years of marriage from 1984 to 1994, I’ve lived by myself. At school, I never joined a team sport nor attended any games or homecoming celebrations or pep rallies. In college, I went to plenty of keg parties in the dank basements of fraternities, but I never even thought of pledging one. More often than not, I’ve traveled alone to places near and far, from the Himalayan mountains in Nepal; to a remote, off-the-grid cabin on the coast of Maine; to the 500-mile Camino de Santiago pilgrimage across Spain; to a motorcycle trip to the end of the road where northern Ontario’s James Bay meets the southern end of the Arctic Ocean. And in all my life, no matter where I’ve been in this big world of ours, I’ve rarely been lonely.

I also wanted to read The Quest for Community because I was curious to find out exactly what this quest was all about. I approached it almost from an outsider’s point of view, as if it were a kind of anthropological study of another culture. But as I got deeper into the book, it prompted me to look at the ways that I sought out community; community that I had not really noticed because it was all around me. For years, I was like those proverbial fish that do not know they’re in the water that sustains their very existence. Nor did I notice how much I had immersed myself in one particular community and had counted on it for emotional and spiritual sustenance, until it was taken away from me. I found, as Joni Mitchell once so famously sang in her hit, “Big Yellow Taxi,”…“you don’t know what you got till it’s gone.”

***

Because I had the good sense not to get injected with a bioweapon (aka, the COVID vaccine), I was not allowed to set foot on the sprawling, countryside campus of the nation’s largest retreat center in the Hudson Valley of New York, where I’d spent some 20 years working in executive positions of marketing and program development. When it reopened in 2022 after the New York State government had shut it down for all of 2020, and then partially for 2021 and 2022, only those who had been fully jabbed and had the papers to prove it were welcome to return to the office and attend programs there. It was as if the unjabbed, like me, had become instant outcasts, like lepers of the days of old. Or, even worse, scapegoats for the world’s ills, as not-my-president Joe Biden declared in the fall of 2021 by pronouncing that there was a “pandemic of the unvaccinated” sweeping o’er the land. Which was a lie; a lie that was turned into a soundbyte and then into sacrosanct truth flogged by the true believers of the COVID cult. I know plenty of other people who did not get jabbed and we never even came down with the sniffles.

A few years before covidmania hit, I had reduced my commitment to the place by becoming a consultant. In that role, I continued to manage a large program with a popular Buddhist teacher who attracted several hundred devotees to her annual retreat on the campus. I was among those devotees. What’s more, I had the enviable pleasure—and the immense responsibility—of overseeing that program for more than two decades. I’d grown fond of the teacher, of her assistants, and of the hundreds—many who returned year after year—who came to be in her wise yet lighthearted presence. And they had grown fond of me. It was always a beautiful community—a kind of joyous but introspective celebration—while we were all gathered there for a weekend. A weekend that gave us fond memories and much food for thought that we took home with us and remembered long after it was over.

But during her annual program there in the spring of 2022, not only was I banned from setting foot on the campus, I also could not even visit with the teacher. I watched the program in sort of sustained state of disbelief, at home and online. It felt like an out-of-body experience. The strangest thing of all was that the only thing said about me during the on-stage welcoming comments that I had facilitated and enjoyed for 23 years and were now being delivered for the first time by someone other than me, was that I “could not be here.” It seemed to me that it was said as an after-thought, a parenthetical note to rush through, like those rapid-fire warnings that you hear on television advertisements about the side effects for whatever pharmaceutical is being pushed. No reason was given for my absence. Had I died? Had I been fired? Did I quit? Had I fled the country? Was I in a coma? Was I in jail?

What was also strange was that no one on the staff, some of whom I’d worked with shoulder-to-shoulder in the trenches for several years, emailed or texted or phoned me to ask me why I “could not be here.” Or even to find out how I felt about being ostracized in this way. For more than two, sometimes difficult yet mostly splendid and fulfilling decades of my existence, this was a community to which I had given all of my professional and much of my personal life. This was my tribe. And now it had spit me out. And all because I’d chosen to draw a line in the sand about what I wanted to do with my own body and not inject myself with a toxin that was known then, if you knew where to look, to be completely useless in protecting anyone from contracting COVID or spreading it.

I did not know until all of this unfolded as I watched the weekend program on my laptop at the breakfast bar in my kitchen, feeling millions of miles away from an event that was geographically only a few miles away, how much I missed being there, missed seeing a teacher I adored and respected. My girlfriend took a photo of me. I look like a person who had just found out that someone close to him had died.

What I also missed was the thrill of hanging onto the teacher’s every word, feverishly taking notes so as not to forget her secrets to living a good and meaningful and, above all, compassionate life. I missed that because now her words rang hollow to me. Here was a teacher whose core teaching, grounded in centuries of Buddhist wisdom, was all about being fearless in the face of life’s uncertainties—even in the face of death. Now I felt betrayed by this same teacher who had succumbed to the very same fears she was teaching the world to face with fearlessness and had willingly taken the jab (which she had to have done to teach there). I also felt betrayed by the organization itself whose foundational mission claims to promote well-being, enlightened living, and community. Suddenly, to me, it was none of those things. Something close to me had died, after all; my faith in a teacher and a group of people with whom I had long aligned myself to “walk the talk.”

Indeed, this organization, which for decades had proudly stood above the fray with its alternative and holistic approaches to healthy living—and for which in its early days was mocked by mainstream American culture—had now become the very thing it scorned. It had now thrown itself into the ring of compliant sycophants; handmaidens to a compromised coalition of alphabet agencies—the FDA, the CDC, the DOH—which, working in cahoots with the pharmaceutical mafia and a shadowy alliance of neo-Marxist globalists, want to maim and kill us. Instead of doing what it was scolded into doing “what you’re told” by another psychopath, Anthony Fauci, the center could have taken the lead and stood up against the toxic jabs and the inhumane mandates just as it had taken the lead in offering alternative and holistic healing modalities upon which it had been founded. But it had chosen to enforce those depraved mandates and divisions. I was devastated.

The incomprehensible hypocrisy I witnessed that day in my kitchen must have shorted the bunch of neurons in my brain that govern reason and logic because, to this day, I still feel the bile simmering in the fortress of my soul and hear a strange hissing in my mind. I walk around feeling slightly off-balance, as if I’d taken a hard whack to the back of my head from which I have not recovered. On my laptop, I watched several hundred masked hopefuls dutifully sitting six feet apart, looking so isolated and, I couldn’t help but think, so sad. There was none of the cheerful talking to each other among the participants. There were none of the warm, lingering hugs, God forbid. Everyone was just sitting there like in a time-out in grade school. I’ll never forget it. Because I thought they must be surely killing their souls in such passive compliance to vicious mandates and agreeing to live with this lack of genuine human contact. Isn’t this genuine human contact precisely what the organization had long claimed to offer people who went there seeking respite and solace from the suffering of their isolated lives? From what I saw of that retreat, I might as well have been watching a live reenactment of one of Dante’s circles of hell.

Read the Whole Article

The post The Quest for Community: A Study in the Ethics of Order and Freedom appeared first on LewRockwell.

Given the contentious topic of money and its influence on the world, I decided to see what ChatGPT “knows” about it.  I was surprised by the breadth of its responses, as well as its information on free market positions, especially those of the Austrian school.

Though my prompts (queries) were exactly as I present them here, ChatGPT was so expansive I had to edit its results due to article length restrictions.  For emphasis and to mark subject headings ChatGPT frequently used bold-face text.  I italicized portions of its replies, which are indented, to stress points I thought were especially important, and I added links in a few cases to augment ChatGPT’s response.

Let’s begin.

Smith: Is it true that money arose from barter as a response to the problem of a double-coincidence of wants? And is it also true that the commodity eventually chosen to serve as a medium of exchange was determined by market participants? And further, is it true that in all of human history no paper money was ever freely chosen as money, and that paper money was always imposed on the market?

After explaining what is meant by the double-coincidence of wants, ChatGPT went on to say:

ChatGPT:

Economists like Carl Menger, a key figure in the Austrian School, argued that money emerged spontaneously from the marketplace, not through government decree. . .

Over time, market participants naturally gravitated toward using certain commodities that had desirable qualities—those that were widely valued, durable, divisible, portable, and had a stable supply. These commodities were easily traded because people generally accepted them as being valuable. . . .

Importantly, no central authority had to mandate that these commodities be used as money. People recognized the benefits of using certain commodities, and through repeated use in trade, these commodities became widely accepted as money.

No Paper Money Was Ever Freely Chosen as Money.

Initially, paper money began as a substitute for commodity money, like gold or silver. . . .

Importantly, people accepted these paper notes voluntarily because they were confident they could redeem them for a tangible commodity, making these notes convenient substitutes for carrying physical gold or silver. . . .

Historically, when governments detached paper money from any redeemable commodity, it was usually under duress . . .

Smith: How did money go from market control to government control?

ChatGPT:

The shift evolved over centuries, largely driven by governments’ desire to centralize power, finance wars, and stabilize or control the economy.

Minting Coins: Governments took control of minting coins from precious metals. In doing so, they could stamp their own symbols, which ensured a standard weight and purity of coins. . . The market still valued these coins based on the amount of metal they contained . . .

Over time, governments would reduce the amount of precious metal in coins (e.g., mixing in cheaper metals like copper) while keeping the face value the same. This allowed governments to produce more coins to finance wars or other expenditures. . . This led to inflation, as the debased currency lost value.

When bank notes emerged, they were a receipt or promissory note issued by private banks, representing a claim on a certain amount of gold or silver held in reserve. . . The value of the note was tied to the gold or silver it could be exchanged for.

Over time, governments began to recognize the power of issuing banknotes themselves. In some cases, governments gave exclusive rights to central banks to issue currency. For example, the Bank of England was granted a monopoly on issuing banknotes in 1694. This gave the government greater control over the money supply, but the banknotes were still convertible into gold or silver, meaning the market ultimately determined their value.

The 19th century saw the rise of the gold standard, which became a key feature of the global monetary system. Under the gold standard, the value of national currencies was directly tied to a fixed quantity of gold. . . Central banks played a key role in managing the money supply, but their actions were still constrained by the need to maintain gold reserves.

The Decline of the Gold Standard and the Rise of Fiat Currency

Several key historical events led to this shift:

Great Depression:  In the U.S., President Franklin D. Roosevelt ended the convertibility of dollars to gold for private citizens in 1933. . .

Bretton Woods System: After World War II, the Bretton Woods Agreement established the U.S. dollar as the world’s reserve currency, with other currencies pegged to the dollar, and the dollar itself was pegged to gold.  This system lasted until 1971, when President Richard Nixon ended the convertibility of the U.S. dollar into gold, effectively ending the gold standard worldwide. This marked the official transition to fiat money.

Conclusion: Money transitioned from being under the control of market participants—where commodities like gold and silver served as money chosen through voluntary exchange—to being under the control of governments through a combination of centralized minting, regulation, and eventually fiat money systems.

Smith: Which has been better for personal liberty and prosperity: An unbacked fiat currency or a metallic-based money (privately minted gold or silver coins) with paper substitutes that promise “payable on demand”?

ChatGPT:

Metallic-based money has three advantages:

Personal liberty: Through decentralized control over money . . . individuals and businesses can own, hold, and trade physical wealth directly.

Limited government power: A metallic standard places strict limits on the government’s ability to print money, thereby restricting its capacity to inflate the currency, fund wars, or finance deficit spending without directly taxing its citizens.

Freedom from Inflation: Under a metallic-based system, inflation is usually minimal or nonexistent, which preserves individuals’ purchasing power. Citizens have greater control over their wealth without worrying about their savings being eroded by inflationary policies.

However, the fixed supply of precious metals can limit economic growth, especially if the economy grows faster than the supply of gold or silver. This can lead to deflation (falling prices), which can discourage borrowing and investment, potentially slowing down economic progress.

As we see in this last paragraph ChatGPT “believes” an increase in the money supply is needed to sustain economic growth and cautions us about deflation being disruptive of “economic progress” — two positions at odds with historical fact and Austrian School theory.  I tried to get it to admit its inconsistency.

Smith: In the latter part of the 19th century when there was no Fed we had a prosperous economy with price deflation, per officialdata.org.

Specifically, for the period 1879-1912, “The dollar had an average deflation rate of -0.09% per year since 1879, producing a cumulative price change of -3.00%. This means that prices in 1912 are 3% lower than average prices since 1879, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics consumer price index.”

One of the reasons for instituting a central bank was to avoid the Panics that plagued the economy during the 19th century. Yet, the Fed was in charge during the 1929 Crash and the Great Recession of 2008-2009, all the while the dollar continued its nosedive to oblivion. Do you think this is a good report card for the Fed?

ChatGPT:

Prosperity with Deflation: The period from 1879 to 1912 did indeed see price deflation, meaning that the purchasing power of the dollar increased slightly over time.

This deflation was largely due to the gold standard, which limited the money supply and helped stabilize prices. During this period, the U.S. experienced significant economic growth, industrialization, and an increase in real wages, despite the deflation.

Creation of the Fed: The Federal Reserve was established in 1913 partly to address the financial instability and frequent panics of the 19th century. . . .

1929 Crash and Great Depression: Despite the Fed’s creation, the U.S. experienced the Great Depression following the 1929 stock market crash. . . .

Great Recession of 2008-2009: The Fed was also in charge during the Great Recession, another severe economic downturn that exposed weaknesses in the financial system. . . .

Conclusion: A Mixed Legacy

The Fed’s legacy is indeed mixed. While it has played a critical role in stabilizing the economy during certain periods, it has also been associated with significant economic failures, including the Great Depression and the erosion of the dollar’s value. The comparison with the late 19th century highlights that economic growth and stability were possible without a central bank, but also that the absence of a central bank did not prevent severe financial panics.

Those panics are well-known to have been fostered by fractional-reserve banking and the prohibition on branch banking.

Conclusion

I found no evidence that ChatGPT was biased in its responses.  It treated government and free market positions according to the training it received, which was a mixture of statism and free markets.  Users should challenge ChatGPT by questioning its responses with contrary information, as I did with deflation and prosperity of the late 19th century.

If mankind has a future, a flourishing of critical thinking has to start somewhere, so perhaps generative AIs such as ChatGPT can serve as a model and inducement.

The post What Does ChatGPT Know About Money? appeared first on LewRockwell.

On Tuesday the dementia-addled meat puppet who is still officially the President of the United States told the UN that he is working to bring a “greater measure of peace and stability to the middle east,” even as the US government pumps weapons into Israel so that it can continue its bloody massacres in Lebanon and Gaza.

On Wednesday Pentagon spokeswoman Sabrina Singh told the press that “we don’t want to see this escalate” in Lebanon and that the US is working to “avoid a regional war”.

Only an idiot would believe these claims. They are self-evidently false. Nobody who seeks peace finds themselves in a constant state of war. This is true of Israel, and it is true of the US-centralized empire as a whole.

Biden Claims He’s Working for Peace in the Middle East But Continues to Back Israel
Biden made the claim in a speech at the UN General Assembly
by Dave DeCamp@DecampDave #Biden #Gaza #Israel #Palestinians #UNGA79 #UNGA #MiddleEast https://t.co/uXCqVl8csk pic.twitter.com/lBcfUGrd5K

— Antiwar.com (@Antiwarcom) September 24, 2024

It is obviously false to say the US seeks peace in the middle east, but it’s not really accurate to say it seeks war either. To me that would be like saying water seeks wetness or fire seeks heat. War is just what the US empire is made of. It’s the thing that it is.

Everything about the US-centralized power structure is pointed at continuous military expansionism and mass military violence. Once you’ve decided that it’s your job to try to bring the entire population of your whole planet under the rule of a single power umbrella at any cost, you’ve accepted that you will be using violent force in perpetuity, because that’s the only way to subdue populations who have no interest in such an arrangement. You might tell yourself that you want peace, and at times you might even actively try to avoid war, but everything about the way you’ve arranged your operation makes war inevitable.

This is the kind of environment that western empire managers spend their careers being groomed into accepting as normal. So they might actually believe they are telling the truth when they say their government wants peace, but this is the same as a fire saying it’s doing everything it can to cool down the firewood.

It is the fire’s nature to burn, and it is the US empire’s nature to make war. War is interwoven into every fiber of its existence. It’s written into every part of its code. As soon as the mass-scale use of violence ends, the globe-spanning power structure that’s loosely centralized around Washington will end. War is the glue that holds that power structure together.

Look at this graph to see how Gaza has changed everything.

Israel is emboldened to carry out indiscriminate slaughter in Lebanon after almost a year of live-streamed genocide—backed fully by the U.S.—with zero consequences. pic.twitter.com/plhTU0oU8Z

— Assal Rad (@AssalRad) September 25, 2024

Both the mainstream “progressivism” of Bernie Sanders and the right wing “populism” of Donald Trump try in their own ways to argue for a kinder, gentler empire which avoids unnecessary conflicts and abuses, but these arguments are deceptions in and of themselves, because the empire is made of conflict and abuse.

The less war, militarism, economic strangulation and proxy interventionism there is, the less US empire there is. The empire can’t roll back its violence any more than a shark can swim backwards. The only way to end the forward movement of a shark is to end its life.

The wars will not end until the US empire itself ends. This doesn’t mean ending the US as a country, it means ending the globe-spanning power structure comprised of allies, assets and subjects that’s held together by endless violence. Every foreign policy official in Washington, London, Paris and Canberra has been groomed to view this as the worst possible outcome and to avoid it at all cost, and to spend their careers fiendishly dedicated to the project of ensuring that the fire keeps burning and the shark keeps moving forward. Only ordinary members of the public with normal healthy human values will ever be able to see this.

The problem isn’t that western officials keep making bad individual decisions at each individual juncture in foreign conflicts of interest, the problem is that the existence of the western empire guarantees foreign conflicts of interest, and ensures that violent force will be used to control their outcomes.

At some point in the future “They’re bluffing, cross that red line” is going to be one step too far. If we continue along this trajectory, at some point Russia is going to do something horrifying to re-establish credible deterrence. The question we need to ask is: is it worth it? https://t.co/SVJV2ACN9m

— Caitlin Johnstone (@caitoz) September 26, 2024

Those who support the US empire will occasionally look back on history and acknowledge that in hindsight there were some bad individual decisions made with regard to Vietnam or Iraq or wherever, but they’ll never admit there is an innately murderous structure in place that guarantees Vietnams and Iraqs will continue to happen in the future. But that is the reality, and you’ll never hear it acknowledged in the state propaganda services known as the mainstream western press.

Our rulers are too far absorbed into the imperial machine to recognize this as true, so you will reliably hear them babbling about seeking peace and avoiding civilian suffering — even as they take steps ensuring that peace will not happen and civilians continue to suffer. These are the only moves they can see on the chessboard. The options that would lead to real peace are not even recognized as legal moves in the game. So they keep moving the pieces around in accordance with the rules of empire, and saying “Oh how sad” when families are incinerated and children are ripped to shreds, but saying that it was the only move available on the board.

Our world is on fire, and the US-centralized empire is the flame. We ordinary people must find some way to extinguish it, before it torches us all.

______________

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The post The US Empire Does Not Seek Peace; Its Existence Depends on Endless War appeared first on LewRockwell.

Andrei Martyanov has carved for himself a unique, haloed place when it comes to deep critical thinking of all matters of war and peace.

Andrei Martyanov has carved for himself a unique, haloed place when it comes to deep critical thinking of all matters of war and peace.

In his previous books, in his blog Reminiscence of the Future and in countless podcasts, he has become the go-to source when it comes to the inner workings of the Special Military Operation (SMO) in Ukraine as well as The Big Picture of the proxy war between the U.S. and its collective West minions against Russia.

Naturally every new book by this delightful human being with a biting sense of humor is something to cherish – and this one, America’s Final War, the fourth in a series, should be seen as the crowning achievement in his carefully detailed analysis of a real revolution in military affairs that has completely bypassed the “indispensable nation.”

Right off the bat, Martyanov addresses Russophobia – and how this overwhelming, Western-wide pathology “of a much larger scale than mere geopolitical contradictions between nations and states” is “taking on a metaphysical dimension, rising from its racial, religious, and cultural components”.

Russophobia has only been exacerbated by unpleasant facts on the ground concerning the “Real Revolution in Military Affairs”: a true “paradigm shift” in warfare.

Already in the preface, Martyanov outlines the state of things as we speak, or what I have recently defined as a War OF Terror:

“The current U.S. economy and military will not be able to fight Russia conventionally; it would face defeat if it tried. So, the United States and combined West have resorted to terrorism”.

Add to it that concerning the ongoing proxy clashes, “NATO is incapable of fighting a real war of the 21st century”. And even the U.S.’s “shortly to be overcome superiority in satellite constellations and NATO’s ability to fly with impunity in the international air space over Black Sea counts for little in real war, in which NATO would be made blind and its Command and Control disrupted.”

“The best strategic assessment apparatus in the world”

Martyanov engages in a necessary rewind to the situation pre- SMO, in late 2021, when the AFU was massing on the borders of Donetsk and Lugansk: “In a last-ditch attempt to avoid military confrontation with what at that time amounted to the best U.S. (and West) proxy force in history – trained and equipped with many critical C4 elements” – Russia presented the U.S. on December 15, 2021 with what Martyanov describes as a “diplomatic euphemism for demands” on Washington on mutual security guarantees: that was the notorious “indivisibility of security” proposal for Europe and the post-Soviet space.

Martyanov is correct in evaluating that this was not exactly groundbreaking; it was “a reiteration of the same points which Russia had insisted upon since the 1990s”. The crucial point was of course non-expansion of NATO, specifically applied to Ukraine, “which since 2013 was becoming in effect NATO’s forward operational base.”

That was Putin’s diplomatic gambit to prevent war. After all Russia’s political-military establishment had seen which way the dogs of war were barking, and were able to forecast “based on the superb intelligence and arguably the best strategic assessment apparatus in the world – the Russian General Staff, Service of Foreign Intelligence (SVR), FSB and Ministry of Foreign Affairs.”

Moving on down the road, what is now developing in the black soil of Novorossiya – NATO’s impeding humiliation – could not have possibly be understood as “the captains of the combined West” are essentially uber-incompetent: “Western academic and analytic institutions” not only are “not designed” to think strategically in terms of global balance of power and matters of war and peace but clueless on “Statecraft as Art of Governance and Military Art”.

Russia, in contrast, applied creative governance that “manifested itself as an art”, not least through “forecasting and forestalling” NATO’s moves, “but specially so in the military and economic preparation” for the clash, “including through the process of constant adaptation to changing external and internal conditions”. Let’s call it a military art counterpart to the geoconomic intuition by Deng Xiaoping of “crossing the river while feeling the stones”.

Martyanov characterizes the proxy war in Ukraine as a Stupidistan spectacular: “Considering a mediocre at best, at worst non-existent military-engineering background of the most influential actors in Biden’s administration, the difference between starting a war in Vietnam or Iraq, and starting a war on Russia’s threshold (…) was lost on them” – as they failed to realize that “Russia was a military superpower with an extremely advanced ISR (Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance) complex”.

Martyanov correctly dates the dramatic “descent” of the U.S. “from the pedestal of self-proclaimed military hegemony” to the sabotaging of the April 2022 Istanbul agreement – which was on the verge of being signed – when Boris Johnson, “a major in classics from Oxford and a clownish figure with zero grasp of military art, let alone science”, botched it on the orders of the Biden combo.

Going Hypersonic

A highlight of the book is when Martyanov registers the American bewilderment when it comes to high supersonic missiles such as the Kh-32 and especially the hypersonic, Mach-10, Mr. Khinzal – as he had been warning for years in his books and blog that Hypersonic Russia “would render any NATO’s air defenses useless in any serious conflict”.

Cue, for instance, to 2018 when he outlined that “Khinzal’s astonishing range of 2,000 kilometers makes the carriers of such missile, MiG-31K and TU-22M3M aircraft, invulnerable to the only defense a U.S. Carrier Battle Group, a main pillar of U.S. naval power, can mount.”

As the SMO developed, “Russia dramatically ramped up production across the whole spectrum of its missile arsenal”: from the RS-28 Sarmat, which carries the strategic hypersonic Avangard, to “tactical-operational Iskanders, P-800 Oniks, hypersonic 3M22 Zircons, 3M14(M) ship and submarine cruise missiles”, and of course Mr. Khinzal himself.

For NATO’s ISR complex things can only get worse, because the Khinzal is now carried by Su-34 fighter bombers, “which makes the work of identifying which ones are Khinzal carriers very difficult and leaves no time for warning”.

A crucial theme in the book is the relationship between the Hegemon and war: “The U.S. is not just an expeditionary military, it is also imperial military which fights imperial wars of conquest and doesn’t address the concept of defense of a Mother – or Fatherland in its strategic and operational documents”.

The conclusion is stark: “Thus it cannot fight a real conventional combined war of scale against a peer or better-than-peer opponent who fights in defense of their own country.”

Implicit in this concise explanation of the U.S./NATO debacle in Novorossiya is the disproportionate power of the U.S. industrial-military complex: “The U.S. military doesn’t fight in defense of America, it fights for imperial conquests only. Russian soldiers fight in defense of their homeland.”

U.S. conventional military supremacy: a bluff

Martyanov once again details how a real revolution in military affairs is already taking place. From facts on the sea like the ominous Poseidon submarine – “capable to not only devastate shores but hunt down any carrier battle group with impunity” – to the immense gap in “capacity of tools of destruction” between Russia and NATO, complete with “the operational concepts that gave birth to these weapons systems.”

On the inescapable face-off between Russia and the combined West, led by the U.S., Martyanov hits the heart of the matter. It is already global, and “spreads into all domains from the world ocean to space, and encompasses not just military but also related economic, financial and industrial capacities.”

And that, crucially, was the initial operating framework of the SMO. Yet now it’s all evolving into a toxic mix of counter-terror operation and Hot War, potentially more lethal than Cold War 2.0.

At this point in the book, Martyanov goes for the kill, asserting that as facts develop, “the much-propagandized U.S. conventional military supremacy is nothing but a bluff.”

The Hegemon cannot “fight a peer or better than peer opponent and win such a fight”. Apart from an absolute freak out among Brzezinski epigones, one can imagine the desperation among the handful of neo-cons equipped to understand at least a simple mathematical equation.

The only auspicious angle in all this turmoil is the apparent unwillingness by the War Party in the U.S. to “enter into open confrontation with Russia.” Yet what remains is as ghastly as a Hot War: the hybrid War OF Terror – as illustrated by the green light for Kiev to indiscriminately attack civilians inside the Russian Federation.

As the book comes to a close, it would have to inevitably circle back to Russophobia: “Russia’s military record is telling – it has consistently defeated the best the West could throw at it when it mattered.” That’s a source of envy mixed with fear. Moreover, Russia remained Orthodox Christian, which only adds to the unmitigated hatred displayed by collective West elites.

Martyanov comes up with a precious, concise formulation: “Especially after Trotsky has been exorcised by Stalin”, Russia ended up evolving into “a society with primarily conservative values”, very much derived from Orthodox Christianism, which crucially is part of a “non-Crusader historical ethos”.

Whatever happens next, Russophobia simply won’t get erased from the Anglo-American “elite” worldview: “Russia in the form of the Soviet Union defeated the best West’s military force in history and a simple fact of the West’s efforts to rewrite this history by claiming the victory as theirs without acknowledgment of the USSR’s greater role reveals not only an ideological agenda and shoddy scholarship, but a deep lasting trauma.”

The trauma persists and now has metastasized into a New Dementia Cycle – exemplified by the current War OF Terror and NATO’s plans to actually attempt an Operation Barbarrossa remix by 2030, all that while NATO’s “geopolitical humiliation remains a secret only for the most unsophisticated strata of the Western public.”

That’s a diplomatic way of characterizing the relentless brainwashing and imbecilization of the post-modernist, post-Christian collective West.

In Roman Empire days, Latins were able to turn something into a wasteland and declare victory. Martyanov’s chronicle of the fate of contemporary Empire turns Tacitus upside down: before they will be able to turn everything into a wasteland, a counterpower will inflict them inexorable defeat.

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

The post A Wilderness of Mirrors: The Hegemon’s Last War appeared first on LewRockwell.

I attended my 50th high school reunion last Saturday. The turnout for the Class of 1974 was predictably underwhelming. Approximately 35 out of a graduating class of over 400. Even it was actually 40, that’s 10 percent. Well, I don’t know, maybe that’s a good percentage for these things. Or at least average. I’m no expert on reunions.

It just seems like a 50th year reunion is a really big deal. Almost like a 50th wedding anniversary. But in 1974, we’d reached the height of apathy in America. The class of ‘74 was the most apathetic class imaginable. We actually lost pep rallies to the lower classes, something unheard of. It was actually “cool” to not be active in any school activities. I didn’t go to the prom, although I almost asked a lovely girl, but chickened out. I chickened out a lot in those days. I didn’t go to homecoming either, so I missed out on the crowning of the “queen,” who was a big, popular football player. That was our class; not taking anything seriously, no sense of decorum. I guess we were pathfinders; as today, at America 2.0 homecoming dances and proms, you can see biological males crowned as “queens” regularly. The “queen” of the dance was actually at the 50th reunion. I didn’t talk to him. He wouldn’t have remembered me.

Actually, what I found out to my displeasure was that no one seemed to remember me. At least the ones who came to the 50th reunion. I had looked at the list of those who’d RSVP’d “Yes,” and was interested in seeing some of them. Unfortunately, none of them showed up. I questioned why I had decided to go there. It was a long drive, and since it was at a brewery, it would have been natural to try some of their products. But as I said, it was a long drive, and I didn’t want to get my second DWI. I still bitterly recall the first, in 1978, when I was forced to pay the uninsured motorists fee because I couldn’t afford the increased cost of insurance. I can still see the demented ladies of MADD, who sat in the courtroom to pressure the judge to throw the book at all the young, blue collar drunk drivers like me. They have yet to frequent a courtroom where an NFL player, or an illegal immigrant, is charged with drunk driving.

I don’t know what I expected. I just went through the motions in high school. For the only time in my life, I was somewhat of an introvert. I found it incredibly dull, and struggled to stay awake in my classes. The social hierarchy made such an impression on me that it was a major influence in my writing Bullyocracy. Oddly, none of the really popular kids- the “stars” of my high school class- were at the reunion. Well, except for the football player who was “queen” of the homecoming dance. He and a few others segregated themselves outside, just like they still were commandeering the “popular” corridor at Oakton High. They didn’t mingle with the rest of the common riff raff of ‘74. There wasn’t a cheerleader in sight. I can only assume that the most well known jocks, and the hottest girls, all flamed out after high school. Didn’t age very well. Gained a lot of weight, like almost everybody else. Or still thought they were too cool.

My ego is such that I thought maybe a few of my classmates would approach me and mention my writing. I’m friends with several of them on Facebook, and my avatar and profile make it crystal clear that I’m a big shot published author of many books. One guy did mention that he’d read one of my books, but struggled to remember the title- On Borrowed Fame. Still, he said he really liked it. A few girls I didn’t know said “Hi Don” and hugged me. Maybe that was their way of saying they liked my writing? I was hoping to see the class valedictorian, who you’d think would want to be at this thing. I really liked her, and she was the only one who thought I was going to be a writer. We had many political arguments, but in my immature mind, I sensed there was a mutual attraction amid the tension. I obviously didn’t know what I was doing. As I sat there with my wife, I actually wondered, did I really even go to Oakton High?

Overall, the reunion was pretty disappointing. The “In Memorium” page, always a morbid highlight at these events, was decidedly incomplete. I added a few names that I recalled from the list of the 20th reunion, or heard about on Facebook. So who knows how many of my classmates are really dead? Maybe that’s why the cheerleaders weren’t there. You can’t blame someone for not coming if they’re dead, after all. One girl who I was looking forward to seeing had a mild stroke and couldn’t come. That was a stark reminder that we are getting pretty old. We’re 68, and life expectancy is inexplicably falling in America 2.0. It’s a “science” thing, you wouldn’t understand. I’m sure there were others that were simply too sick or incapacitated to come. I have seen some of these classmates on Facebook, and a few still look pretty good. I was hoping to see at least one late 60s hot babe at the soiree. My wife insisted that none of them looked anywhere near as good as I do. She’s probably prejudiced.

So, I started thinking back, to 1974. As a young radical Democrat, I loved Ted Kennedy, and Frank Church, and Birch Bayh. I was pretty naive. I had just started playing guitar, and writing songs. I had also discovered the JFK assassination, which as you all know would become a lifelong obsession of mine. I was a proud cigarette smoker. Marlboros. Later to become Camel Lights. If anyone had asked me not to smoke, I would have reacted indignantly. I paid 45 cents for these cigarettes! It’s good for everyone that I quit smoking in January 1989. I would not have responded well to the draconian crackdown on a fully legal product. In 1974, you could smoke cigarettes anywhere- stores, banks, even hospital rooms. As a young hospital worker, I would usually have a cigarette dangling from my mouth as I pulled a heavy food or laundry cart through the hallways. You’d ground your butt out on the floor. Any floor.

I was never on time for my blue collar job. Always late. We just filled out our time cards at the end of the two week pay period. I always got paid for the full shift. Now, I did make up for being late by leaving early. Sometimes 3-4 hours early. The supervisors let you go when your work was done. No one argued that this was “falsification of time.” No one lectured us that it was “eight hours work for eight hours pay.” I was really spoiled when I wound up with a better job in IT. I could never adjust to having to work an entire shift. In the 1970s, though, this was commonplace. The WWII generation, which was then in charge, was a lot more lenient and flexible than the grown up flower children would be. The one drawback was tucking my shirt in. I strongly protested that. Little did I know, the world would come around to my point of view. It just doesn’t seem as special when everyone tucks their shirt out now.

We smoked dope on our breaks. Sometimes, we smoked dope openly on the job. Understand, this was America 1.0. I paid little attention to any rules or regulations. I was fighting The Man from the moment I got my first job at Wagon Wheel restaurant. The personal liberty we had would astound any Millennial or Gen Zer. Free speech actually existed. I ranted and raved about anything I wanted, to co-workers and management. No one ever suggested I couldn’t. The only snag I ran into was when Safety and Security objected to my getting signatures from employees on a petition to reopen the investigation into the JFK assassination. That’s the only time management ever really said, “you can’t do that.” I chalked it up to the JFK conspiracy being so big that even those who ran the hospital were somehow involved. No one had heard of “hate speech.” There were no such things as “fact checkers.”

As an eighteen year old healthy cisgender, I was like a kid in a candy shop. There were 13,000 employees working for the hospital, and lots of them were young, attractive females. Cisgenders, just like me. I never once worried that some nurse would call human resources on me for trying to converse with her. I don’t know what young male cisgenders do nowadays. Pretend they’re gay so the girl they’re talking to won’t complain? You could compliment women in 1974. Now, it’s somehow offensive if you tell a cisgender female that they look good. In America 1.0, the women tended to look better, anyhow, and were flattered to be told so. Plenty of secretaries were openly sleeping with their bosses. And many of us weren’t above slapping a girl on the butt. I’m pretty sure that would be a crime in America 2.0. So, unaware of the statute of limitations, I’m not confessing to anything specifically.

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The post High School Reunions and Lost Liberties appeared first on LewRockwell.

This raises another question: how will the deflation of the Everything Bubble play out?

Causes generate effects. As noted in my previous post, if causal conditions have changed, the “guarantee” offered by statistics is empty. This leads to a simple question: what’s changed? Have the causal conditions changed enough to generate different results?

The status quo assumes the economy never really changes, and so the stimulus that worked last time will work again. This ignores the fundamental reality that change is constant and once causal conditions change, the effects will necessarily change as well.

So what’s changed in the 42 years since 1982? Why 1982? 1982 marked the end of the stagflationary 1970s and the start of the 40+-year bull market in stocks, real estate, and until recently, bonds.

1. China was just emerging from the Cultural Revolution. After 40 years of astounding growth, it’s struggling.

2. Debt levels across all sectors–public, corporate and household–were low compared to the present.

3. The global Baby Boom was entering peak earning, household formation, home buying, and starting enterprises. Now they’re retiring and entering the phase of selling assets to downsize and fund retirement.

4. Computer technology entered the mainstream economy and boosted productivity. Now we have AI but its long-term effect on global productivity is unproven.

5. Diminishing returns are manifesting across the global economy, as what worked so well in the boost phase no longer generates the same results.

China has changed in many ways. Scale matters. When a company is small and it boosts revenues by $1 billion, the stock rockets to the moon. Once it’s a trillion-dollar company, adding $1 billion no longer has the same effect. In fact, it’s a red flag that growth has slowed. Once profit margins slip, the stock crashes, as the growth story has ended.

The same causal conditions are present in China, which has reached a vast scale at the top of the S-Curve. China boosted its economy for decades by inflating an unprecedented real estate bubble, which created an enormous wealth effect in its burgeoning middle class. But all bubbles pop, and the concentration of household wealth in real estate means the decline is obliterating the heady sense of confidence generated by soaring assets.

China has also reached limits in exports and domestic consumption, for a variety of reasons.

The “never fails” China credit impulse has failed. Every economy that depends on expanding credit for its growth eventually enters a liquidity trap, where lowering interest rates and lending standards no longer boost assets or consumption because 1) households are wary of adding more debt or 2) households cannot afford to add more debt, even at low rates of interest.

China is also mired in the middle income trap, where the elite holds the majority of wealth and the rural populace is still earning very low incomes.

China pulled the global economy out of the 2008-09 Global Financial Meltdown, that’s not going to happen again. Once causal conditions change, so do the results.

The astounding expansion of credit/debt globally is an example of how a “solution” generates “problems” that only get worse the more “solution” is applied. Flooding the economy with low-cost credit works wonders when debt levels are low and there is pent-up demand for credit.

But once an economy is saturated with credit and staggering under the weight of servicing existing credit, adding more debt creates a problem more credit cannot solve: the greater the burdens of debt, the higher the risks of default.

Global debt has been rising on the shaky foundation of the Everything Bubble: as assets have bubbled higher, they expand the collateral available to borrow against. Once the bubble pops, then the collateral evaporates and the lender is under water: the assets is worth less than the loan amount. There is no escape for either borrower or lender.

Demographics have changed. The massive global Baby Boom is exiting the workforce and starting to liquidate assets to fund retirement. This transition from buying assets to selling assets raises the question: who will buy all these assets at today’s nosebleed overvaluations? Younger generations lacks the capital and income to buy assets at these levels of overvaluation, and there is nothing on the horizon that could change that asymmetry.

Selling pushes down asset prices, which then reduces the collateral supporting global debt, which then lights the fuse of a credit crisis that can’t be resolved by lowering credit and lending standards. Diminishing returns are not reversed by doing more of what’s failed–they’re accelerated into unstable crises by doing more of what’s failed.

Read the Whole Article

The post What’s Changed? What’s Different This Time? appeared first on LewRockwell.

The last data point for the net long position for hedge funds was 17 September (COT report) due to be updated on Friday. Since then, open interest has increased by 28,256 contracts on preliminary figures for yesterday (Tuesday). That implies that this category of trader (managed money) is net long of about 240,000 contracts and therefore highly vulnerable to a bear raid by the swaps (bullion bank traders and market makers). And note how the rise in their net position is in lockstep with the price. But there is other evidence which we cannot ignore and is a new factor in the market.

What are the hedge funds selling to buy gold futures? This is my next chart and it is scary:

This death cross on the USD TWI, when the price is below falling moving averages with the 55-day falling below the 250-day and their decline accelerating explains why hedge funds are throwing caution to winds buying gold futures, seemingly at any price.

Another bizarre market reaction has been to China’s PBOC monetary stimulation, which in the grand scheme is not really significant, cutting key interest rates yesterday by 0.2% to shore up its ailing property market and to support the economy. The POBC seems to have caught Keynesian ‘flu. But instead of the yuan drifting lower as the interest differential with US rates increased, the yuan has soared to the highest level since May 2023.

And then we see commodity prices beginning to move higher. Copper, oil, and others are trending higher together. The chart below shows how individual commodity prices have risen over just one week!

The common factor is that the dollar is falling measured by commodity values. Clearly, markets are now reading an inflationary outcome from the Fed’s 50 basis point cut in the Fed Funds Rate last week. Whatever Jay Powell says publicly about a robust economy, off the record it appears that supporting the economy is now a higher priority than tackling inflation.

By way of confirmation, China indeed has a problem which is rarely mentioned. Export sales are under pressure. Why? It’s because major export markets are in recession. The fact that China has decided to act probably confirms the global recessionary fears informing US monetary policy.

So gold is just the canary signalling the early stages of not just a dollar problem, but accompanying factors are likely leading to the end of its reign as a fiat currency. It is the safest of safe havens in these troubled times, and overbought futures are hardly relevant.

Reprinted with permission from MacleodFinance Substack.

The post Gold Rising? No — the Dollar’s Falling appeared first on LewRockwell.

I was pleased to see the news that 22 Attorneys General, including our great Texan Ken Paxton, have just sent a letter to the American Academy of Pediatrics, warning that corrupt organization that it may be breaking the law with its misleading statements about so-called “gender dysphoria” in minors and the best way to treat it. As reported in a press release by the Do No Harm organization:

Twenty attorneys general signed a letter to the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) Tuesday warning the medical association that its statements supporting gender medical interventions for children are “deceptive” and may violate states’ consumer protection laws.

The letter, led by Idaho Attorney General Raul Labrador, asks the AAP to substantiate its claims that puberty blockers are reversible and to provide information on its communications surrounding its gender medicine guidance.

“Amid a fracturing consensus among the medical establishment on sex change surgeries and drugs for minors, the American Academy of Pediatrics has refused to reevaluate their recommendations,” said Do No Harm Senior Fellow Dr. Jared Ross. “We applaud Attorney General Labrador and all the other attorneys general who are holding the AAP accountable for endorsing unscientific, experimental, and potentially harmful treatments.”

The letter pointed to the AAP’s 2018 policy statement – that the organization reaffirmed in August 2023 – that characterized puberty blockers as “reversible.”

“The 2018 AAP policy statement itself demonstrates that the ‘reversible’ claim is  misleading and deceptive,” the letter states. “It acknowledges that ‘[r]esearch on long-term risks, particularly in terms of bone metabolism and fertility, is currently limited and provides varied results.’ The AAP has no basis to assure parents that giving their children puberty blockers can be fully reversed. It just isn’t true.”

As many of us may recall of our own early adolescence, it is a time of great emotional instability in which one’s sense of self may shift radically within a short period of time. The best longterm study (by Dr. Kenneth Zucker) of minors who display symptoms of confusion about their gender shows that the majority of them will experience a resolution of these symptoms around the age of 18 or 19. About 10% of the boys simply come to terms with the fact that they are gay, and do not really long to become girls.

The Italian painter Caravaggio was fond of depicting effeminate looking boys. While often thought to have been a gay man, he once killed a man in a duel over a woman, so it’s not exactly clear where his preferences lay. The following image of an adolescent boy strikes me as very strange and mysterious.

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The post Attorneys General Warn Academy of Pediatrics It May Be Breaking the Law With Child Gender Statements appeared first on LewRockwell.

UPDATE, 24 September 2024: Gallup issued today a new report about the percentage of people in scientifically representative samples of 1,000 people, in each of 140 countries and areas around the world, the percentage who answered “Yes” to “Do you feel safe walking alone at night in the area where you live?” That percentage is the lowest in Ecuador. Gallup’s report is titled “2024: The Global Safety Report”, and its page five is headlined “Ecuadorians Least Likely in the World to Feel Safe.” Shown there is a graph which indicates that whereas prior to 2017 — which happened to be the year when the U.S. Government took over Ecuador’s government (as this article will explain) — that percentage averaged slightly higher than 50%, it headed downward starting in that year and is now only 27%. Gallup reports there that “Excluding active war zones, feelings of safety in [the province of] Guayas, Ecuador, are the lowest in the world [11%],” and also notes that “the country has spiraled into a deep security crisis. Ecuador is an increasingly important node in global cocaine trafficking.”

——

In the March 2022 issue of the academic journal Global Environmental Change, appeared an article by Hickel, Dorninger, Wieland and Suwandi, “Imperialist appropriation in the world economy: Drain from the global South through unequal exchange, 1990–2015”, which reported that:

in 2015 the North net appropriated from the South 12 billion tons of embodied raw material equivalents, 822 million hectares of embodied land, 21 exajoules of embodied energy, and 188 million person-years of embodied labour, worth $10.8 trillion in Northern prices – enough to end extreme poverty 70 times over. Over the whole period, drain from the South totalled $242 trillion (constant 2010 USD). This drain represents a significant windfall for the global North, equivalent to a quarter of Northern GDP. For comparison, we also report drain in global average prices. Using this method, we find that the South’s losses due to unequal exchange outstrip their total aid receipts over the period by a factor of 30. Our analysis confirms that unequal exchange is a significant driver of global inequality, uneven development, and ecological breakdown.

This is being done by the mega-imperialistic U.S. Government and its colonies or ‘allies’, against the global South, and the operation’s center is the U.S. Government, which, itself, is, amongst all of its empire, the paragon of economic inequality: it is the country where 30.3% of U.S. wealth is owned by richest 1%, and where the richest .01% donate 57.16% of all of the political money, so as to control their Government, in order to be able to get for themselves, virtually all of the profits from this looting of the world.

Whereas U.S. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt (FDR) had, during August 1941 till his death on 12 April 1945, been carefully planning his “United Nations” (which he even named), so as to eliminate and replace all empires and imperialisms for after WW2, and produce a U.N. which would be a democratic world federal government of independent nations, his immediate successor Harry Truman reversed all of that planning, on 25 July 1945, and started the planning for the Military-Industrial Complex that he and his personal hero General Dwight Eisenhower, and also the secret Rhodesist Winston Churchill, had advised him to do in order for the U.S. Government, instead of the U.N., ultimately to take control over the entire planet, every nation, including especially all of the Soviet Union. The way that Eisenhower had put this matter to Truman, was that unless the U.S. will control the entire world, the Soviet Union will; and this purely win-lose thinking that excluded any possibiity of a win-win result (plus Churchill’s seconding that) led Truman, on 25 July 1945, to demand from the Soviet Union’s Joseph Stalin, that Stalin grant the U.S. Government a veto power over both the domestic policies and the foreign policies of the nations that the Soviet Union had captured from Hitler’s forces. Truman proudly wrote to his wife that night, saying  that Stalin “seems to like it when I hit him with a hammer.” (In other words: Stalin didn’t like it at all.)

Stalin couldn’t accept Truman’s demand, any more than Truman would have accepted a similar demand from Stalin about the nations that America and its colonies such as the UK had conquered in Europe. Stalin (like FDR would have done if he had survived) made no such demand upon Truman or anyone else; and, from that date forward, Stalin recognized that unless he could change Truman’s mind on this (which never happened), the U.S. Government would be at war against the Soviet Government. It turned out to be (on the American side at least) a war not actually between capitalism versus communism (as Truman, Ike, and Churchill, propagandized it to be) but instead between the U.S. against the entire world — to take all of it — as was made clear when U.S. President GHW Bush started, on 24 February 1990, secretly instructing his stooge leaders, such as Helmut Kohl and Francois Mitterrand, that their war against the soon-no-longer-communist Russia would secretly continue until it too becomes a part of the U.S. empire — that America’s NATO will expand all the way up to Russia’s borders.

So, America’s Deep State was born on 25 July 1945, when the U.S. Governmental Executive decision was made that not the United Nations — as FDR had intended — but instead the U.S. Government itself, should take control over the world after WW2 ends. Until 25 July 1945, Truman had been undecided about this, but now he made the decision for a future all-encompassing global American empire, and this decision has profoundly affected the U.S. Government in all of the years that followed. It was the actual beginning of America’s Deep State: the rule over the U.S. Govenment by America’s super-rich, for unlimited expansion of their empire to control the entire planet. It’s a money-funnel not merely from all Americans to America’s few super-rich, but from all people throughout the world, to America’s few super-rich. And that is how it operates, while cutting in the local aristocracy within each colony, to split with them the local take.

Althouth many examples of this imperial rule over its colonies (or ‘allies’) by the U.S. Government are well known, such as the entirely lie-based U.S. invasion of Vietnam (for ‘democracy and freedom’), and the entirely lie-based invasion of Iraq (against ’Saddam’s WMD’), plus numerous U.S. coups such as against Iran and Guatemala and Chile and Ukraine, many other such cases are little known, such as in Ecuador, which is the example that will be discussed here:

An excellent article about how corrupt the U.S. Government is was published on 8 February 2022 and headlined “What if, instead of a movie, I got flung in jail? This lawyer who fought Chevron was”, by Erin Brockovich. It described the case of the U.S. lawyer for Ecuador, Steven Donziger, whom the U.S. regime imprisoned for having won a court case against Chevron/Texaco, to pay a nearly $10 billion fine for having recklessly poisoned indigenous Ecuadorians. The polluter refused to pay, and U.S. courts instead sent to prison Ecuador’s lawyer — and had him disbarred. The victims got nothing. The question of Chevron/Texaco’s guilt was ignored: the fine was simply cancelled. Crucial to Donziger’s penalties was the decision by what Brockovich referred to as “In 2018, an international tribunal ruled that Chevron had been previously released from liability for pollution in the Amazon and ordered Ecuador not to enforce the $9.5bn judgment.” But that ‘tribunal’ wasn’t actually a court-case; it was an arbitration-case, and Ecuador had never authorized sidelining their case, moving it out of the courts and into the extremely corrupt ICSID private system of international arbitration that the U.S. Government had largely created in order to protect the investment assets of its billionaires. Actually, ICSID was started by the U.S. controlled World Bank in 1966, to provide ICSID “arbitration panels” to settle ISDS disputes that international corporations have against governments, substituting for law courts and judges, so as to give corporate investors rights above and beyond those which governments have (rights against foreign governments); therefore, this was a straight-out fascist (or libertarian/neoliberal) invention by the U.S. regime with the cooperation of its colonies. In fact, the entire ISDS system had first been proposed and instituted in 1959, by the former leading Nazi banker Hermann Abs, along with Britain’s Baron Shawcross. ICSID’s real growth that made these fascist (or ‘libertarian’) arrangements common started with Nixon in 1974, and then expanded afterwards by Clinton’s NAFTA treaty, and then by Obama’s proposed TPP, TTIP, and TISA, treaties — and all of that since 1974 has veered way off the rails of the U.S. Constitution, but the U.S. Supreme Court has deferred to the other branches of the U.S. Government, to interpret the Constitution regarding commercial treaties, because America’s billionaires like it that way — regardless of what the Constitution says about ALL treaties (and even though the Supreme Court was, by its passivity on this matter, allowing, basically authorizing, blatant violation of the Treaty Clause in the U.S. Constitution, by allowing the Legislative and Executive Branches of the Government to interpret the Constitution — as-if allowing that didn’t itself violate the Constitution and its separation-of-powers clauses). So, the corruptness here runs as deep as possible.

Though the initial case between Ecuador and Texaco/Chevron was about pollution and deaths from it, that case was nullified by Chevron’s amassing a team of hundreds of lawyers from 60 firms who swamped Donziger and financially destroyed him and got a far-rightwing U.S. judge to convict him with the federal crime of racketeering, by the judge’s accepting the bribed testimony of the Ecuadorian judge who had assessed the $9.5B fine against Chevron, to testify that he had been bribed by Donziger to rule in his country’s (Ecuador’s) favor against Texaco/Chevron. There was no evidence that Donziger had bribed him, but clearly Chevron did, and yet the ‘trial’ judge (whom Chevron had managed to get to handle this case) arbitrarily chose to believe him and thus absolved Chevron of any wrongdoing, and disbarred Donziger and placed him into prison.

Even Wikipedia’s article on Donziger makes clear that his treatment by the U.S. regime was barbaric, corrupt, and illegal, but the regime prides itself not on adhering to any international laws-based order, but instead to its own international rules-based order (where those ‘rules’ are whatever the U.S. regime says they are — no democratic procedure produces them). ICSID is setting some of those “rules.” WarOnWant.org concluded, about the Texaco-v.-Ecuador case: “This case is unprecedented, as far as we know, in directly overturning a democratically accountable, national court judgement. Until now, ISDS tribunals have, on occasion, been asked to order legal proceedings to be put on hold until after the outcome of an ISDS case, but no more. The Chevron case sets an incredibly dangerous precedent that could lead to ISDS tribunals trespassing into domestic courts all over the world, rewriting justice in favour of corporate power.”

In fact, the judge’s ruling against Donziger was so corrupt so that on 26 February 2020, the ABA Journal headlined “Lawyer blasted by judge for conduct in Chevron case should get his law license back, ethics referee says”. The referee was highly critical of the judge, Lewis A. Kaplan, who found Donziger to have committed fraud against Texaco/Chevron, and the referee brought forth character witnesses who were themselves highly credible, saying that Donziger is a person of extraordinary integrity and courage. One of these character witnesses was John Perkins, author of Confessions of an Economic Hit Man and other books against megacorporate criminality and governmental corruption, who is certainly an expert on the subject and who said “from knowing Steve he is incredibly honest.” The referee also grilled Donziger himself, and found him persuasive that Judge Kaplan’s allegations against him were false and that Donziger had presented to Kaplan evidence to that effect, which Kaplan simply ignored in the opinion he wrote. The referee then noted that the susequent Appeals Court decision made at least one crucial false statement in affirming Kaplan’s ruling. There were other remarkable findings by the referee, such as “A total of fifteen to seventeen judges reviewed the Chevron charges of fraud and concluded ‘…contrary to Judge Kaplan.’” The referee noted that “There appears to be no case like this. While Respondent is often his own worst enemy and has made numerous misjudgments due to self-confidence that may border on arrogance, and perhaps too much zeal for his cause, his field of practice is not the usual one.” He urged “that Respondent’s suspension immediately be ended and that he be restored to the bar of this State.” However, it was not done.

On 24 January 2022, the 67-page detailed “Report of monitors: United States v. Steven Donziger” headlined and documented “Donziger Criminal Contempt Proceedings Violated International Human Rights Law and Standards”, and concluded:

After carefully reviewing the transcripts and relevant laws and standards, the Panel’s unequivocal assessment of the criminal contempt proceedings against Steven Donziger is that he has been subject to multiple violations of his internationally protected human rights, including his right to a fair trial by an independent and impartial tribunal and his right to the presumption of innocence. These violations have resulted in prolonged arbitrary detention for Mr. Donziger [which still continues]. …

In instance after instance, when a procedural rule could be deployed against the defendant, the prosecutor and judge did so. Judge Kaplan and Judge Preska consistently interpreted and deployed laws and rules in ways that gave a “rule by law” air of legitimacy to proceedings aimed toward seemingly predetermined conclusions while disregarding fundamental principles of the rule of law. The result was multiple violations of international human rights law and standards. …

The Panel further notes that a proposed visit from the UN Special Rapporteur on the independence of judges and lawyers has been outstanding since 2014, and recommends that the visit be arranged on an urgent basis.

On 27 January 2022, The Nation headlined “Chevron’s Prosecution of Steven Donziger: Documents reveal a close collaboration between the oil giant, its law firm, and the ‘private prosecutor’ who sent the environmentalist lawyer to federal prison.” Donziger, who still was in prison, was quoted: “Private corporations aren’t supposed to be able to help put people in prison, which is what Chevron did to me. Corporations can sue you in a civil proceeding, but they aren’t allowed to finance a criminal prosecution. If Chevron gets away with this, what kind of a country are we living in?” Of course, the answer is clear.

This case had been dealt with first by a criminal court in Ecuador, against Texaco/Chevron, during the Presidency of that country’s progressive President Rafael Correa, in order to deal with illegal pollution and resulting illnesses and deaths, that were due to Texaco then Chevron’s dumpings of toxic wastes into the forest. In February 2011, an $18 billion judgment — later reduced to $9.5 billion — was rendered against Chevron by the Ecuadorian court. On 4 March 2014, the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York (in Manhattan) ruled that the $9.5 billion Ecuadorian judgement was the product of fraud and racketeering activity, and thus unenforceable.

Read the Whole Article

The post The U.S. Government’s Viciousness & Hypocrisy (Ecuador’s Experience) appeared first on LewRockwell.

di Mike Hobart

Se il commercio è considerato la linfa vitale di un'economia, allora sicuramente l'energia è l'essenza della vita stessa. Senza energia il commercio non ha fondamenta su cui reggersi. Ciononostante alcuni sembrano intenzionati a diminuire la capacità del mondo di generare questa stessa essenza vitale, mentre altri si stanno svegliando e affrontando la cosa.

Tante grazie ai criteri ESG per i guai scatenati

Il 7 agosto dell'anno scorso l'agenzia di rating S&P Global ha annunciato che non avrebbe più utilizzato i criteri ESG per determinare la qualità del credito delle società quotate. Un portavoce di S&P Global ha anche affermato (citato da Bloomberg) che la loro decisione di “non fare più affidamento sui criteri ESG nei rating del credito” non influirà sulle filosofie dell'azienda verso gli obiettivi ESG, o sul modo in cui l'organizzazione valuta l'affidabilità creditizia di un'azienda.

Tutto questo è avvenuto dopo anni di campagne di pubbliche relazioni contro petrolio e gas, con sforzi concertati per tentare di ostacolarne le operazioni di produzione e lavorazione. Solo il tempo ci dirà a cosa porterà questa svolta nei confronti dei criteri ESG e della mania per le emissioni e il loro impatto sul cambiamento climatico.

C'è una cosa che non posso fare a meno di dirvi...

È incredibile quanto non si possa non vedere l'irrazionalità di una cosa, ignorando dati e logica, finché il fallimento e i guai non ci guardano in faccia. Se c'è un lato positivo in tutta questa storia è che ci stiamo ancora aggrappando alla nostra umanità. Questa capacità di fare errori grossolani, che producono conseguenze disastrose, dimostra che (almeno finora) non ci siamo ancora trasformati in cyborg.

Ora non solo dobbiamo annullare tutti i danni che sono stati inflitti al petrolio e al gas nella discussione pubblica, ma dobbiamo anche spiegare quanto siano importanti gli idrocarburi per la produzione di energie rinnovabili e perché una carenza di oro nero è un male per tutti e ha impatti significativi su tutte le forme di energia.

Acque agitate per petrolio e nucleare

Ciò che davvero conferma questo punto è la relazione di Goehring & Rozencwajg del 31 maggio 2023. La produzione di petrolio convenzionale non-OPEC è notevolmente diminuita, mentre la produzione non convenzionale non-OPEC (che sostanzialmente significa US Shale) si è bloccata. Il problema è che, secondo Goehring & Rozencwajg, il bacino del Permiano ha rappresentato il 75% di tutta la crescita dell'offerta non convenzionale sin dal 2016: dei 7,4 milioni di barili al giorno il Permiano ne ha forniti 5,4.

“Beh, Mike, questo vale solo per la produzione non-OPEC. Stai facendo sembrare che sia tutto un disastro, ci sono ancora i produttori OPEC”. Sì, avete ragione. Tuttavia Goehring & Rozencwajg sono dell'opinione che la produzione OPEC sia diventata negativa, un'opinione che ho sentito da più fonti diverse e che condivido (prendetela con le pinze). Questo ci fornisce due motivi per essere preoccupati riguardo i numeri della produzione:

1. Se la maggior parte della crescita dell'offerta globale è dovuta all'espansione nel Permiano, e ora è passata, ciò suggerisce che domanda e offerta continueranno a invertirsi. Come spiegano Goehring & Rozencwajg, si prevedeva che la domanda di petrolio sarebbe diminuita dopo il 2019 e invece è tornata a ruggire con violenza. E questa non è solo una situazione di “ritorno alla normalità”, la domanda continua a espandersi e ciò significa che i prezzi dell'energia dovrebbero esplodere in uno scenario del genere, portandosi dietro anche i costi di tutto il resto. Ergo: il ritorno dell'inflazione. Preparatevi.


2. Se la crescita dell'offerta si blocca solo sul lato non-OPEC dell'equazione, ciò metterà l'America in una situazione non proprio simpatica. La nostra produzione di petrolio ci ha dato autosufficienza e se non fossimo più in grado di ampliare l'accesso alla nostra fornitura di petrolio, ciò ci azzopperebbe come nazione. E se capite qualcosa di politica (e commercio) ogni vantaggio a vostra disposizione è cruciale quando le cose arrivano al tavolo delle trattative. Per fortuna gli Stati Uniti hanno ancora bacini su cui appoggiarsi tra California, Alaska, Louisiana, ecc. Tuttavia questi sono molto più piccoli di quelli in Texas e tutti insieme suggeriscono, secondo i miei calcoli approssimativi, circa 20-25 miliardi di barili di produzione potenziale.

Questa considerazioni hanno implicazioni su tutto, ma non solo sui prezzi di beni come il cibo o la benzina alla pompa, anche sull'espansione di tutte le fonti energetiche, sia rinnovabili che di idrocarburi. I pannelli solari e le turbine eoliche richiedono input di idrocarburi, per non parlare delle loro batterie. Lo stesso vale per la produzione di infrastrutture di trasmissione, ovvero ciò che porta l'elettricità alle nostre case e alle nostre aziende. Ciò complica ulteriormente il dibattito sulla diversificazione delle fonti energetiche, poiché l'eolico e il solare hanno un problema: producono le loro maggiori quantità di energia al di fuori della finestra di picco della domanda. Questa domanda in genere si riversa tra le 14:00 e le 20:00, quando le famiglie e gli individui tornano a casa a fine giornata e accendono i sistemi di aria condizionata centralizzati, le TV, i computer, i dispositivi di ricarica, i videogiochi e vari elettrodomestici.

Anche il nucleare non esce da questa conversazione senza subire qualche colpo. I reattori richiedono un investimento iniziale significativo, non solo in capitale ma anche in terra e acqua. Sebbene i reattori possano non richiedere quasi la stessa quantità di spazio delle loro controparti solari ed eoliche, è comunque preferibile costruirli vicino a fonti d'acqua: la produzione di energia non deriva dalle radiazioni delle barre di combustibile stesse, ma le radiazioni riscaldano l'acqua e generano vapore, cosa che fa girare le pale delle turbine ed esse generano l'elettricità. Oh, e quell'acqua aiuta con la dissipazione del calore. Quindi sì, vorrete un lago o un fiume nelle vicinanze per quel reattore... e costruire un bacino artificiale è un'impresa che la maggior parte preferirebbe evitare.

Entra in scena il mining di Bitcoin

È qui che entra in gioco Bitcoin. I reattori nucleari possono essere limitati nella fattibilità del progetto, poiché le loro posizioni possono essere piuttosto distanti da comunità e città. Ciò significa che tali operazioni richiederebbero significativi investimenti nelle infrastrutture di trasmissione per “collegarsi” alla rete e fornire energia. Ciò significa anche che potrebbe volerci del tempo e che potrebbero essere investite molte centinaia di milioni di dollari prima che il progetto sia in grado di generare un ritorno, se l'ambiente ideale non è disponibile.

I miner di Bitcoin sono in una posizione unica per questa precisa situazione. Mentre un progetto di reattore è in attesa che l'infrastruttura di trasmissione sia completata e connessa, si potrebbe collaborare con i miner per “trasferire” e aumentare le loro operazioni fornendo una domanda praticamente immediata. Ancora meglio, la generazione nucleare è costante e la domanda di energia del mining di Bitcoin è costante, quando le operazioni sono gestite correttamente e le attrezzature sono sottoposte a manutenzione sono richiesti pochissimi tempi di inattività da entrambe le parti di questa equazione.

Ciò fornisce una via per una rapida monetizzazione dei progetti nucleari futuri. Le cose migliorano ancora di più quando la rete viene collegata direttamente a chi genera l'energia; i miner possono essere selezionati come partner che forniscono una domanda costante e fungono da bilanciatori di carico (come hanno fatto Riot e Marathon in Texas). I miner sono nell'effettivo mercenari della domanda di energia.

CleanSpark (CLSK) è un ottimo esempio del successo per un progetto nucleare già avviato che incorpora il mining di Bitcoin come potenziamento del servizio. Di recente il team di CLSK ha rilasciato una relazione sui guadagni, vantando grandi rendimenti sulla produzione dell'asset Bitcoin, e sul suo progetto di espansione che si tradurrà in un ampliamento del 77% dell'hashrate portandolo (prevedibilmente) a 16 EH/s.

Per coloro che non sono esperti nella terminologia del mining, “hashrate” si riferisce al numero di tentativi che una macchina per il mining esegue affinchè riesca a scoprire la soluzione necessaria per minare il blocco corrente. La stragrande maggioranza dei miner utilizza pool di mining, un servizio che consente a un numero qualsiasi di organizzazioni o individui di dedicare le proprie risorse (hashrate) per coordinare gli sforzi e minare il blocco successivo. Poiché questi servizi aggregano tanto hashrate e la probabilità di ricevere la “ricompensa” è maggiore rispetto al lavoro puramente individuale, tali pool funzionano dividendo i rendimenti in base alla % di lavoro svolto da ciascun partecipante. Si tratta di un flusso di reddito relativamente costante per i miner collegati a queste pool.

Un altro aspetto interessante dell'ultima conferenza stampa di CleanSpark sono stati i numeri riportati sui costi energetici totali, i quali ammontano a soli $0,041 kWh, ovvero una riduzione dell'11% rispetto al trimestre precedente. CLSK attribuisce questa riduzione dei costi alla sua “strategia di gestione attiva dell'energia”. Non so cosa potrebbe essere in termini tecnici, ma immagino che sia una strategia che bilancia il carico per le città in cui opera. Essa ridurrebbe il costo dell'energia non consumando durante le ore di punta della domanda, consentendo anche di ridurre i prezzi dell'energia per la comunità durante tali periodi.

CleanSpark è arrivata persino a migliorare ulteriormente la qualità della vita della comunità con cui ha stretto una partnership in Georgia. Matt Schultz, vice presidente di CleanSpark, ha detto che il budget di Washington, Georgia è aumentato da $16 milioni a $30 milioni basandosi esclusivamente sulle attività commerciali di CleanSpark.

Mining eolico e solare

C'è poco che si può dire in questo contesto. Queste fonti di energia sono in grado di trarre vantaggio dall'incorporazione del mining di Bitcoin in un modo molto simile al nucleare. La differenza è che, piuttosto che rispondere strettamente alla domanda, queste energie rinnovabili devono essere in grado di generare entrate al di fuori della finestra di picco della domanda. Quando la vostra finestra di picco della domanda non corrisponde a quella richiesta in generale, è necessario reperire strategie aggiuntive per generare entrate e coprire il delta. Il mining di Bitcoin copre questo delta e può andare offline in risposta a qualsiasi richiesta da parte della rete, consentendo alle operazioni eoliche e solari di continuare a generare entrate al di fuori della finestra di picco della domanda.

Conclusione

Dobbiamo affrontare i fatti qui: il mondo sta cambiando e ci stiamo dirigendo verso una serie di difficoltà e complicazioni che richiederanno un aggiornamento degli incentivi all'energia. Credo che il mining di Bitcoin ci possa aiutare in modi che cambieranno l'America e il mondo in meglio. Esso fornisce una strategia di monetizzazione per tutte le forme di generazione di energia, inclusi petrolio e gas. Non mi interessa se vi definite un “bitcoiner”, non mi sono mai interessato di tribalismo o dogmi. Ciò che mi interessa è il progresso sociale e la spinta verso un futuro di energia economica e abbondante.

È un mondo che mi è stato promesso da bambino ed è un mondo che merita di essere realizzato. Potrebbe non essere una soluzione “perfetta” ai vostri occhi, ma è una soluzione migliore rispetto a tutto ciò che viene offerto al momento.

Con questa strategia si genera più energia, si migliorano le condizioni del mondo e si fanno anche un po' di soldi nel frattempo.

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

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

International Man: The Soviet Union used the diagnosis of mental illness as a tool to silence political dissenters. It was a practice known as “psychiatric repression.”

Dissidents who spoke out against the government were often declared insane and forcibly institutionalized in psychiatric hospitals, where the government subjected them to inhumane treatment and abuses.

The diagnoses were often based on political rather than medical criteria and were used as a means of punishment and control.

What is your take on this practice?

Doug Casey: Well, before we get into what happened in the Soviet Union, and what seems to now be happening in the US, we really have to address the validity of psychiatry as a science to start with, and mental illness as being a real illness.

Dr. Thomas Szasz, who died some years ago, made the case that mental illness is not a medical concept and does not have a biological basis. He believed that what people commonly refer to as “mental illness” is actually a label used to describe deviant behavior, emotions, and thoughts that do not conform to social norms. He argued that mental illnesses are not diseases in the traditional sense, as they cannot be objectively measured or diagnosed like physical conditions such as cancer or arteriosclerosis. He wrote numerous books debunking psychiatry; I highly recommend them.

My own view is that people have always had psychological problems, worries, and aberrations. These things were once dealt with by talking to friends, counselors, or religious figures. Since the time of Sigmund Freud, however, “treating” mental conditions has been turned into the business of psychiatry.

Psychiatry has set up a priesthood of doctors who look at what people think, say, and do, and offer opinions as to whether or not it’s healthy. Of course, there’s nothing wrong with studying the way the mind works. The problem arises when a practitioner can impose his opinion on another person. If a surgeon thinks you should have a heart operation, he can’t impose that on you. But if a licensed psychiatrist thinks you should be incarcerated and subjected to various drugs and “therapies,” there may not be much you can do about it.

Coming back to what happened in the Soviet Union, State officials found psychiatry was an excellent way to keep dissidents under control. It’s one thing to be prosecuted because the government thinks you’re politically unreliable and your views are wrong, but another to be punished because a medical practitioner claims you’re insane for holding them. Psychiatry—which I view as a pseudoscience—can easily be used to give a patina of science to political views.

But by saying they were crazy, the Communists were able to attack the actual essence of a person. This is one more thing that made the Communists not just nasty and dangerous, but evil. Evil is a word that’s fallen into disrepute in recent years, perhaps because it’s been used so indiscriminately by poorly educated Bible thumpers. My own view is that many, or most, supposed psychiatric disorders are a consequence of doing evil; if a person can’t confront these things, he may act irrationally, and be viewed as neurotic or psychotic. But putting yourself under the control of a person who’s taken some courses about other doctors’ opinions is rarely a cure.

It’s funny that psychiatrists, as a group, are usually looked down upon by other members of the medical profession. They may have real medical training, but when they go into practice all they basically do is sit behind a couch and listen to people rap about their problems, then experiment with psychoactive drugs, hoping for magic to happen. It’s not a bad gig to sit and listen for several hundred dollars per hour.

In using Freudian talk therapy, psychiatrists are basically no better than a friend or counselor, and often worse. I suspect many are just voyeurs who like to hear about others’ problems, perhaps just looking to compare them with their own. In fact, it can be worse. A lot of people become psychiatrists because they themselves are troubled and they like the idea of listening to other people’s problems and bouncing their arbitrary thoughts back at them.

Worse, the public thinks that psychiatrists actually know how the mind works, and can magically know what they’re thinking. The public thinks shrinks have special powers, like modern witch doctors. That fear, ridiculous as it is, gives them genuine power. That in itself draws the wrong kind of person to psychiatry. There’s a reason why Hannibal Lecter was portrayed as a psychiatrist as opposed to an accountant or an engineer or a salesman.

The process is disguised and legitimized by classifying problems using, among other things, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (called DSM-5 in its latest edition). Unlike a real medical or surgical manual, the book is mostly guesswork and opinion, a modern version of the medieval Malleus Malificarum, which classified everything known about witchcraft.

Although most Freudian talk therapy is actually bunkum, simply allowing a troubled person a chance to talk, even for just 55 minutes, can sometimes be helpful. But the usual cure prescribed today is some type of drug affecting brain function. Most of these drugs only disguise the problem by clouding the mind. These drugs can actually alter the cells in the brain—what they do, and how you think. There are hundreds of psychiatric drugs now—Ritalin, Zoloft, Xanax, and Prozac are common ones—but there are many more that are seriously dangerous.

As a by-the-way, it turns out that FTX had a psychiatrist on the payroll at their Bahamas hangout. The shrink, one Dr. George Lerner, apparently had about 20 FTX employees as private patients at one time. Sam Bankman-Fried himself has stated that he’s been on the antidepressant Emsam for “half his adult life.” It’s a bad idea to invest in a company that has a staff psychiatrist, where lots of people are on psych drugs. What they needed wasn’t a pill pusher, but a decent human who was interested in ethics, and concepts like right and wrong.

In their belief that there’s “bad think” and that they have a right to alter it, psychiatrists have gotten into things like electroshock therapy, which physically destroys people’s brain calls, and prefrontal lobotomies performed by taking an ice pick, going through the side of the eye, and purposefully destroying part of people’s brains.

One of the most inhuman things about the Soviet Union, which was full of bad things, may have been the way it perverted medicine, endorsing psychiatry, to destroy the human spirit itself. This concept is finding its way into the US and the West. Corrupt psych specialists use pseudoscience to prove that people the government deems to have crazy political ideas are indeed crazy. “Crazy” is being defined as not believing what they believe, and saying things that are politically incorrect.

I would submit psychiatry is a phony and dangerous specialty to start with. And putting psychiatric pseudoscientists in charge of determining what’s “good think” and “bad think” is very dangerous.

Medicine shouldn’t be involved in politics, which is certainly the major takeaway of Dr. Fauci’s role in the recent COVID hysteria. And that goes double for psychiatry. Professional associations—like labor unions—are always looking to increase political power and economic wealth for themselves and their members. Bar associations do it for lawyers, the NEA for teachers, the AMA for doctors, and the American Psychiatric Association for shrinks. They’re all dangers to society. But the APA more than most.

To give you an example, I once met a prominent shrink in Washington, DC. He advocated requiring psychiatric tests for all high government officials, to keep dangerous nutcases out of office. That’s understandable. But what if the tests in question skew against certain political, economic, and philosophical beliefs? At this point, it could only play into the hands of those with power.

Remember, control freaks—people that like to control other people—aren’t interested so much in controlling the physical universe as manipulating and controlling other people. They tend to go into government. And when they go into medicine, they’re often drawn to psychiatry.

If you can disguise your desire to control and manipulate your fellow humans by claiming you have medical necessity on your side, you become much more effective and much more dangerous.

International Man: During the Covid mass psychosis, there were reports of certain medical agencies in Canada that suggested refusing the vaccine was a sign of psychiatric problems.

We’ve also seen proponents of climate change hysteria use language to describe skeptics as mentally ill.

What are the implications of this?

Doug Casey: The politicization of psychiatry—trying to control what people think—is really, really dangerous. It’s a trend that has been building for a long time, and I think it’s getting worse.

Once upon a time, somebody was deemed insane if they were manifestly irrational, walking down the streets yelling and screaming. Someone obviously unable to maintain themselves. They’ve always existed, but as a teeny-weeny portion of society. If they committed an actual tort, it was a matter for the police and the courts. If they didn’t commit an actual crime, then they were just a nuisance—and life is full of nuisances. Historically, crazy people were non-problems. Unless, of course, they got into government…

In the last 100 years, the number of diagnosable psychiatric disorders has grown like topsy. There are hundreds and hundreds of things that are now deemed psychiatric disorders. Enough that almost everybody can now be said to need a psychiatrist. Personal quirks, eccentricities, and non-mainstream beliefs have been made into psychiatric disorders, listed in the DSM, requiring a “qualified” professional to cure. They pretend to do this by bouncing their own personal opinions off of you with talk therapy, or by putting you on dangerous psychiatric drugs.

Soon I expect we’ll see public health used as an excuse to shut down beliefs which don’t suit a certain class of people. It’s very dangerous and it’s very unnecessary.

I’m not saying all psychiatrists are bad. But most are necessarily living in an echo chamber that reinforces bad tendencies. Look at it this way. Not all economists are bad, but they live in a Keynesian echo chamber in today’s world; as a result most economists wind up making bad recommendations. The same is true for psychs, even the ones who join the profession because they really want to help people.

International Man: Where is this trend going? What can the average person do about it?

Doug Casey: We’re facing a multi-front war against Western Civilization in general.

It’s not just a physical war. It’s not just an ideological war. It’s not just a political war. It’s turned into a psychological war.

One of the fronts of attack is to convince the general public—who don’t think about much outside the narrow confines of their own life and watching sports and television—that people who don’t believe a given narrative are, in fact, crazy. The psychiatric profession is very involved in the process.

In my view, this is further proof that many psychiatrists are dupes of evil people. At best.

What can you do about it?

Call out BS wherever you see it. Don’t automatically accept the opinions of people just because they’ve been granted a degree or license. Think critically, and demand logical answers to impolite questions.

Since this is a psychological war more than anything else, speak out whenever you can. Staying quiet makes you complicit in the crime by subtly agreeing with it.

Reprinted with permission from International Man.

The post Dangerous Trend of ‘Psychiatric Repression’ appeared first on LewRockwell.

From World War I to the Present: Dollar denominated debt has been the driving force behind all US led wars.

Wall Street creditors are the main actors. 

They were firmly behind Nazi Germany. They financed Operation Barbarossa and the invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941.

“On January 4th, 1932, a meeting was held between British financier Montagu Norman (Governor of the Bank of England), Adolf Hitler and Franz Von Papen (who became Chancellor a few months later in May 1932) At this meeting, an agreement on the financing of the Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei (NSDAP or Nazi Party) was reached.

This meeting was also attended by US policy-makers and the Dulles brothers, something which their biographers do not like to mention.

A year later, on January 14th, 1933, another meeting was held between Adolph Hitler, Germany’s Financier Baron Kurt von Schroeder, Chancellor Franz von Papen and Hitler’s Economic Advisor Wilhelm Keppler took place, where Hitler’s program was fully approved.” (Y. Rubtsov, text below)

Upon the accession of Adolph Hitler as Chancellor in March 1933, a massive privatization program was initiated which bears the finger-prints of Wall Street.

Dr. Hjalmar Schacht –re-appointed in March 1933 by Adolph Hitler to the position of President of The Reichsbank— was invited to the White House (May 1933) by President Franklin D. Roosevelt.

“After his meeting with the U.S. President and the big bankers on Wall Street, America allocated Germany new loans totalling $1 billion” [equivalent to $23.7 billion in 2023, PPP estimate] (Y. Rubtsov, op cit)

Newspapers.com 

Barely a year later, in April 1934, The Economist “reported that military expenditure was forcing the Minister of Finance to look for new resources” including the privatization of the Deutsche Reichsbahn (German Railways) (quoted in Germa Bel, p. 20). The Nazi government also sold off State owned shipbuilding companies, State infrastructure and public utilities.

With a “Nazi- Neo-Liberal” slant, –no doubt with “conditionalities”- the privatization program was negotiated with Germany’s Wall Street creditors. Several major banking institutions including  Deutsche Bank and Dresden Bank were also privatized.

“[T]he government of the Nazi Party sold off public ownership in several State-owned firms in the mid-1930s. These firms belonged to a wide range of sectors: steel, mining, banking, local public utilities, shipyards, ship-lines, railways, etc.

In addition, the delivery of some public services that were produced by government prior to the 1930s, especially social and labor-related services, was transferred to the private sector, mainly to organizations within the party.” (Germa Bel, University of Barcelona)

The proceeds of the privatization program were used to repay outstanding debts as well as fund Nazi Germany’s buoyant military industrial complex.

Numerous U.S. conglomerates had invested in Nazi Germany’s arms industry including Ford and General Motors:

Both General Motors and Ford insist that they bear little or no responsibility for the operations of their German subsidiaries, which controlled 70 percent of the German car market at the outbreak of war in 1939 and rapidly retooled themselves to become suppliers of war materiel to the German army.

… In certain instances, American managers of both GM and Ford went along with the conversion of their German plants to military production at a time when U.S. government documents show they were still resisting calls by the Roosevelt administration to step up military production in their plants at home. (Washington Post,  November 30, 1998)

“A Famous American Family” Sleeping with the Enemy. The Role of Prescott Bush

Of significance: “A  famous American family” made its fortune from the Nazis, according to John Loftus’ documented historical analysis.

Prescott Bush (grandfather of George W. Bush) was a partner in Brown Brothers Harriman & Co. , and director of the Union Banking Corporation , closely linked to the interests of German corporations, including Thyssen Stahl, an important company involved in the arms industry of the Third Reich.

The Bush family links to Nazi Germany’s war economy were first brought to light at the Nuremberg trials in the testimony of Nazi Germany’s steel magnate Fritz Thyssen.

Image: (right) Senator Prescott Bush with his son George H. Walker Bush. (1950s)

Thyssen was a partner of  Prescott Bush.

“From 1945 until 1949 in Nuremberg, one of the lengthiest and, it now appears, most futile interrogations of a Nazi war crimes suspect began in the American Zone of Occupied Germany.

Multibillionaire steel magnate Fritz Thyssen –-the man whose steel combine was the cold heart of the Nazi war machine– talked and talked and talked to a joint US-UK interrogation team.

… What the Allied [Nuremberg] investigators never understood was that they were not asking Thyssen the right question. Thyssen did not need any foreign bank accounts because his family secretly owned an entire chain of banks.

He did not have to transfer his Nazi assets at the end of World War II, all he had to do was transfer the ownership documents – stocks, bonds, deeds and trusts–from his bank in Berlin through his bank in Holland to his American friends in New York City: Prescott Bush and Herbert Walker, Thyssen’s partners … were the father and father-in-law of a future President of the United States. (John Loftus, The Dutch Connection, September 2002).

John Loftus was  a (former) U.S. Department of Justice Nazi War Crimes prosecutor. during the Nixon Administration.

The American public was not aware of the links of the Bush family to Nazi Germany because the historical record had been carefully withheld by the mainstream media. In September 2004, however, The Guardian revealed that:

George Bush’s grandfather, the late US Senator Prescott Bush, was a director and shareholder of companies that profited from their involvement with the financial backers of Nazi Germany.  … 

His business dealings, which continued until his company’s assets were seized in 1942 under the Trading with the Enemy Act, has led more than 60 years later to a civil action for damages being brought in Germany against the Bush family by two former slave labourers at Auschwitz and to a hum of pre-election controversy.”

( Ben Aris and Duncan Campbell, How Bush’s Grandfather Helped Hitlers Rise to Power,  Guardian, September 25, 2004, emphasis added)

Prescott Bush entered politics in 1950. In 1952 he was elected Senator for Connecticut, a position which he held until January 1963.

Evidence of the Bush family’s  links to Nazism was available well before George Herbert Walker Bush (Senior) and George W. Bush entered politics, not to mention Bush Senior’s stint at the CIA.

The U.S. media remained totally mum. According to John Buchanan (New Hampshire Gazette, 10 October 2003):

“After 60 years of inattention and even denial by the U.S. media, newly-uncovered government documents in The National Archives and Library of Congress reveal that Prescott Bush, the grandfather of President George W. Bush, served as a business partner of and U.S. banking operative for the financial architect of the Nazi war machine from 1926 until 1942, when Congress took aggressive action against Bush and his “enem\\y national” partners.

The documents also show that Bush and his colleagues, according to reports from the U.S. Department of the Treasury, tried to conceal their financial alliance with German industrialist Fritz Thyssen, a steel and coal baron who, beginning in the mid-1920s, personally funded Adolf Hitler’s rise to power by the subversion of democratic principle and German law. Furthermore, the declassified records demonstrate that Bush and his associates, who included E. Roland Harriman, younger brother of American icon W. Averell Harriman, and George Herbert Walker, President Bush’s maternal great-grandfather, continued their dealings with the German industrial tycoon for nearly a year after the U.S. entered the war.

While Prescott Bush’s company’s assets, namely Union Banking Corporation  were seized in 1942 under the Trading with the Enemy Act (See below), George W. Bush’s grandfather was never prosecuted for his business dealings with  Nazi Germany.

“In 1952, Prescott Bush was elected to the U.S. Senate, with no press accounts about his well-concealed Nazi past.

There is no record of any U.S. press coverage of the Bush-Nazi connection during any political campaigns conducted by George Herbert Walker Bush, Jeb Bush, or George W. Bush, with the exception of a brief mention in an unrelated story in the Sarasota Herald Tribune in November 2000 and a brief but inaccurate account in The Boston Globe in 2001.” (John Buchanan, op. cit)

Up until Pearl Harbor (December 1941), Wall Street was trading with Germany.

In the wake of Pearl Harbor (1941-1945), Standard Oil “was trading with the enemy” selling oil to Nazi Germany through the intermediation of so-called “neutral countries” including Venezuela and Argentina.

Read the Whole Article

The post History: Adolph Hitler Was Financed by Wall Street, the U.S. Federal Reserve and the Bank of England appeared first on LewRockwell.

“The greatest tyrannies are always perpetrated in the name of the noblest causes.”—Thomas Paine

The government wants your money.

It will beg, steal or borrow if necessary, but it wants your money any way it can get it.

The government’s schemes to swindle, cheat, scam, and generally defraud taxpayers of their hard-earned dollars have run the gamut from wasteful pork barrel legislation, cronyism and graft to asset forfeiture, costly stimulus packages, and a national security complex that continues to undermine our freedoms while failing to making us any safer.

Americans have also been made to pay through the nose for the government’s endless wars, subsidization of foreign nations, military empire, welfare state, roads to nowhere, bloated workforce, secret agencies, fusion centers, private prisons, biometric databases, invasive technologies, arsenal of weapons, and every other budgetary line item that is contributing to the fast-growing wealth of the corporate elite at the expense of those who are barely making ends meet—that is, we the taxpayers.

This is what comes of those $1.2 trillion spending bills: someone’s got to foot the bill.

Because the government’s voracious appetite for money, power and control has grown out of control, its agents have devised other means of funding its excesses and adding to its largesse through taxes disguised as fines, taxes disguised as fees, and taxes disguised as tolls, tickets and penalties.

No matter how much money the government pulls in, it’s never enough (case in point: the endless stopgap funding deals and constant ratcheting up of the debt ceiling), so the government has to keep introducing new plans to empower its agents to seize Americans’ bank accounts.

Make way for the digital dollar.

Whether it’s the central bank digital currency favored by President Biden, or the cryptocurrency being hawked by former President Trump, the end result will still be a form of digital money that makes it easier to track, control and punish the citizenry.

For instance, weeks before the Biden Administration made headlines with its support for a government-issued digital currency, the FBI and the Justice Department quietly moved ahead with plans for a cryptocurrency enforcement team (translation: digital money cops), a virtual asset exploitation unit tasked with investigating crypto crimes and seizing virtual assets, and a crypto czar to oversee it all.

No surprises here, of course.

This is how the government operates: by giving us tools to make our lives “easier” while, in the process, making it easier for the government to crack down.

Indeed, this shift to a digital currency is a global trend.

More than 100 other countries are considering introducing their own digital currencies.

China has already adopted a government-issued digital currency, which not only allows it to surveil and seize people’s financial transactions, but can also work in tandem with its social credit score system to punish individuals for moral lapses and social transgressions (and reward them for adhering to government-sanctioned behavior). As China expert Akram Keram wrote for The Washington Post, “With digital yuan, the CCP [Chinese Communist Party] will have direct control over and access to the financial lives of individuals, without the need to strong-arm intermediary financial entities. In a digital-yuan-consumed society, the government easily could suspend the digital wallets of dissidents and human rights activists.”

Where China goes, the United States eventually follows.

Inevitably, a digital currency will become part of our economy and a central part of the government’s surveillance efforts.

Combine that with ESG (Environmental, Social and Governance) initiatives that are tantamount to social media credit scores for corporations, and you will find that we’re traveling the same road as China towards digital authoritarianism. As journalist Jon Brookin warns: “Digital currency issued by a central bank can be used as a tool for government surveillance of citizens and control over their financial transactions.”

As such, digital currency provides the government and its corporate partners with a mode of commerce that can easily be monitored, tracked, tabulated, mined for data, hacked, hijacked and confiscated when convenient.

This push for a digital currency dovetails with the government’s war on cash, which it has been subtly waging for some time now. Much like the war on drugs and the war on terror, this so-called “war on cash” has been sold to the public as a means of fighting terrorists, drug dealers, tax evaders and even COVID-19 germs.

In recent years, just the mere possession of significant amounts of cash could implicate you in suspicious activity and label you a criminal. The rationale (by police) is that cash is the currency for illegal transactions given that it’s harder to track, can be used to pay illegal immigrants, and denies the government its share of the “take,” so doing away with paper money will help law enforcement fight crime and help the government realize more revenue.

According to economist Steve Forbes, “The real reason for this war on cash—start with the big bills and then work your way down—is an ugly power grab by Big Government. People will have less privacy: Electronic commerce makes it easier for Big Brother to see what we’re doing, thereby making it simpler to bar activities it doesn’t like, such as purchasing salt, sugar, big bottles of soda and Big Macs.”

This is how a cashless society—easily monitored, controlled, manipulated, weaponized and locked down—plays right into the hands of the government (and its corporate partners).

Despite what we know about the government and its history of corruption, bumbling, fumbling and data breaches, not to mention how easily technology can be used against us, the shift to a cashless society is really not a hard sell for a society increasingly dependent on technology for the most mundane aspects of life.

In much the same way that Americans have opted into government surveillance through the convenience of GPS devices and cell phones, digital cash—the means of paying with one’s debit card, credit card or cell phone—is becoming the de facto commerce of the American police state.

At one time, it was estimated that smart phones would replace cash and credit cards altogether by 2020. Since then, growing numbers of businesses have adopted no-cash policies, including certain airlines, hotels, rental car companies, restaurants and retail stores. In Sweden, even the homeless and churches accept digital cash.

Making the case for a digital wallet, journalist Lisa Rabasca Roepe argues that there’s no longer a need for cash. “More and more retailers and grocery stores are embracing Apple Pay, Google Wallet, Samsung Pay, and Android Pay,” notes Roepe. “PayPal’s app is now accepted at many chain stores including Barnes & Noble, Foot Locker, Home Depot, and Office Depot. Walmart and CVS have both developed their own payment apps while their competitors Target and RiteAid are working on their own apps.”

So what’s really going on here?

Despite all of the advantages that go along with living in a digital age—namely, convenience—it’s hard to imagine how a cashless world navigated by way of a digital wallet doesn’t signal the beginning of the end for what little privacy we have left and leave us vulnerable to the likes of government thieves, data hackers and an all-knowing, all-seeing Orwellian corpo-governmental state.

First, when I say privacy, I’m not just referring to the things that you don’t want people to know about, those little things you do behind closed doors that are neither illegal nor harmful but embarrassing or intimate. I am also referring to the things that are deeply personal and which no one need know about, certainly not the government and its constabulary of busybodies, nannies, Peeping Toms, jail wardens and petty bureaucrats.

Second, we’re already witnessing how easy it will be for government agents to manipulate digital wallets for their own gain in order to track your movements, monitor your activities and communications, and ultimately shut you down. For example, civil asset forfeiture schemes are becoming even more profitable for police agencies thanks to ERAD (Electronic Recovery and Access to Data) devices supplied by the Department of Homeland Security that allow police to not only determine the balance of any magnetic-stripe card (i.e., debit, credit and gift cards) but also freeze and seize any funds on pre-paid money cards. In fact, the Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that it does not violate the Fourth Amendment for police to scan or swipe your credit card. Expect those numbers to skyrocket once digital money cops show up in full force.

Third, a government-issued digital currency will give the government the ultimate control of the economy and complete access to the citizenry’s pocketbook. While the government might tout the ease with which it can deposit stimulus funds into the citizenry’s accounts, such a system could also introduce what economists refer to as “negative interest rates.” Instead of being limited by a zero bound threshold on interest rates, the government could impose negative rates on digital accounts in order to control economic growth. “If the cash is electronic, the government can just erase 2 percent of your money every year,” said David Yermack, a finance professor at New York University.

Fourth, a digital currency will open Americans—and their bank accounts—up to even greater financial vulnerabilities from hackers and government agents alike.

Fifth, digital authoritarianism will redefine what it means to be free in almost every aspect of our lives. Again, we must look to China to understand what awaits us. As Human Rights Watch analyst Maya Wang explains: “Chinese authorities use technology to control the population all over the country in subtler but still powerful ways. The central bank is adopting digital currency, which will allow Beijing to surveil—and control—people’s financial transactions. China is building so-called safe cities, which integrate data from intrusive surveillance systems to predict and prevent everything from fires to natural disasters and political dissent. The government believes that these intrusions, together with administrative actions, such as denying blacklisted people access to services, will nudge people toward ‘positive behaviors,’ including greater compliance with government policies and healthy habits such as exercising.”

Short of returning to a pre-technological, Luddite age, there’s really no way to pull this horse back now that it’s left the gate. To our detriment, we have virtually no control over who accesses our private information, how it is stored, or how it is used. And in terms of our bargaining power over digital privacy rights, we have been reduced to a pitiful, unenviable position in which we can only hope and trust that those in power will treat our information with respect.

At a minimum, before any kind of digital currency is adopted, we need stricter laws on data privacy and an Electronic Bill of Rights that protects “we the people” from predatory surveillance and data-mining business practices by the government and its corporate partners.

As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, the ramifications of any government having this much unregulated, unaccountable power to target, track, round up and detain its citizens is beyond chilling.

The post Hidden Agendas: Beware of the Government’s Push for a Digital Currency appeared first on LewRockwell.

As Israel butchers hundreds of civilians in its latest attacks on Lebanon, leaked documents have surfaced revealing that US Secretary of State Antony Blinken knowingly lied to congress about Israel’s siege warfare against civilians in Gaza.

ProPublica’s Brett Murphy, who has been covering aspects of this story for months, has a new article out titled “Israel Deliberately Blocked Humanitarian Aid to Gaza, Two Government Bodies Concluded. Antony Blinken Rejected Them.” In it we learn that both USAID and the State Department’s Bureau of Population, Refugees and Migration produced two separate reports this past spring concluding that Israel was deliberately blocking much-needed humanitarian aid from Palestinian civilians in Gaza, which under US law should have led to the suspension of US weapons supplies. Blinken dismissed these findings, as did the rest of the headless cohort known as the Biden administration.

Days after receiving these reports, Blinken delivered a statement to congress that he knew to be false, saying, “We do not currently assess that the Israeli government is prohibiting or otherwise restricting the transport or delivery of U.S. humanitarian assistance.”

This was a lie. Blinken’s own people were telling him Israel was obstructing aid, but he lied to congress about it in order to ensure that Israel would keep receiving the weapons it needs to keep killing Palestinian and Lebanese civilians.

Blinken needs to resign. There need to be calls from Dem senators demanding it. https://t.co/61X6KyIZ14 pic.twitter.com/dhsSlsyNAg

— austerity is theft (@wideofthepost) September 24, 2024

This is what happens when you don’t prosecute your war criminals. Blinken lied to congress that Israel wasn’t assessed to have been blocking aid when both USAID and the State Department’s refugees bureau had indeed assessed that the Israeli government is doing precisely that, because he knew he’d never be jailed for lying in facilitation of horrific war crimes.

Blinken has watched George W Bush’s entire cabinet not only walk free but continue to have high-profile careers in government, punditry, think tanks and the military-industrial complex, when they all should have been caged for two decades now. He watched CIA officials like Michael Hayden lie to congress about the agency’s torture program without ever facing any consequences. He watched Director of National Intelligence James Clapper lie to congress about the NSA’s surveillance program without ever facing any consequences. He knew he could lie to congress about some of the worst atrocities his nation has ever participated in because he knew there would never be any consequences for this.

None of the world’s worst people are in prison, but if you ever did anything to try to bring them to justice yourself you’d spend the rest of your life behind bars, or be executed. The law doesn’t exist to protect ordinary people from the worst of our society, it exists to protect the worst of our society from ordinary people.

Unchecked massacres in Lebanon. A continuing genocide in Palestine. The state just murdered an innocent man.

Y’all know that a democratic administration is in power right now? Just wanted to point that out… pic.twitter.com/Dan5iMXLyl

— Greg J Stoker (@gregjstoker) September 24, 2024

It’s worth noting here that while powerful men in Washington break the law and lie in facilitation of mass atrocities, the US is executing Black men without evidence of their guilt. The state of Missouri just executed a man named Marcellus Williams despite objections from prosecutors, jurors, and the victim’s own family due to a lack of solid evidence that he actually committed the murder he was convicted of. Days earlier, Khalil Divine Black Sun Allah was executed in North Carolina despite the key witness in his case recanting his testimony against him.

Both men were Black, and both men were Muslim. As men with white skin lie with impunity to help butcher brown-skinned civilians in the middle east, I personally find this noteworthy.

This has been going on a long time. In 1902, the renowned attorney Clarence Darrow said the following in a speech to inmates at the Cook County Jail in Chicago:

“Those men who own the earth make the laws to protect what they have. They fix up a sort of fence or pen around what they have, and they fix the law so the fellow on the outside cannot get in. The laws are really organized for the protection of the men who rule the world. They were never organized or enforced to do justice. We have no system for doing justice, not the slightest in the world.”

It’s just as true in 2024 as it was in 1902.

_______________

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The post Blinken Lied to Congress About Israeli War Crimes Because He Knows He’ll Get Away With It appeared first on LewRockwell.

With less than a month before the crucial BRICS annual summit in Kazan under the Russian presidency, serious informed discussions are raging in Moscow and other Eurasian capitals on what should be at the table in the de-dollarization and alternative payment system front.

Earlier this month Andrey Mikhailishin, head of the task force on financial services of the BRICS Business Council, detailed the list of top projects under consideration. They include:

• A common unit of account – as in The Unit, whose contours were first revealed exclusively by Sputnik.
• A platform for multilateral settlements and payments in BRICS digital currencies, connecting the financial markets of BRICS members: that’s BRICS Bridge, which bears similarities with the Bank of International Settlements-linked MBridge,  already in effect. That will complement intrabank systems already in action, as in Russia’s SPFS and Iran’s CPAM settling financial transactions – and 60% of their trade – in their own currencies.
• A blockchain-based payment system that entirely bypasses the US dollar: BRICS Pay. Arguably 159 participants may be ready to adopt this sanction-evading, similar-to-SWIFT mechanism right away.
• A settlement depository (Clear).
• An insurance system.
• And crucially a BRICS rating agency, independent from the Western giants.

What’s at stake is the extremely complex design of a brand-new financial system – decentralized and using digital technology. BRICS Clear, for instance, will be using blockchain to record securities and exchange them.

As for The Unit, the value of the common unit of account is pegged by 40% to gold and by 60% to a basket of BRICS member’s national currencies. The BRICS Business Council considers The Unit a “convenient and universal” instrument, since a unit can be converted into any national currency.

That would definitely solve the nagging problem of exchange rate volatility when cash balances accumulate from settlements in national currencies; for example, a mountain of Indian rupees used to pay for Russian energy.

Who Do I Call to Talk to BRICS?

I asked a very direct question to two Russian analysts, one of them a finance tech executive with vast experience across Europe, and the other the head of an investment fund with global reach. Considering the sensitivity of their posts, they prefer to remain anonymous.

The question: Is BRICS ready to become an actor in Kazan next month, and what should be on the table in terms of the strategy to establish an alternative payment system?

The Answers. Analyst 1:

“Time has come for BRICS to become a real actor. The world demands it. The leaders of BRICS countries clearly understand it. They have the moral power and the political will to set up an organization to provide a number for BRICS to be called in – that’s the best question for the upcoming summit.”

The analyst is referring to what could be dubbed “the Kissinger moment”, when Dr. K famously quipped, in the Cold War era, “when I want to talk to Europe, who do I call?”

Now to Analyst 2:

“For a BRICS agreement amongst countries to mean something, countries need to agree on a framework of action and that means accepting some responsibilities in exchange for certain rights. And it sounds there’s no better way to achieve that than to arrive at mutually agreed obligations on settlement of financial transactions.”

One of the analysts added a very important, specific point: “By now the situation is pretty clear, to properly address the issue of cross-border payments. The best mechanism should be based on the New Development Bank (NDB), given that Russia has a mandate to propose the new president of that organization. Whoever the candidate will be, cross-border payments should be at the top of his agenda.”

The NDB is the BRICS bank, based in Shanghai. The analyst hopes this decision on the future of the NDB will be made before the BRICS summit: “Given the diplomatic and political considerations, the candidate should be made known, formally or informally to the member countries.”

New BRICS blockchain payment system to be game-changer amid ‘unstoppable’ dedollarization – expert

Moscow’s decision to create a new BRICS blockchain-based payment system is a “game changing” development for the multipolar world, Christopher Douglas Emms, head of the Brokerage… pic.twitter.com/4cEBFb3c7c

— Sputnik (@SputnikInt) September 4, 2024

As it stands, the talk of the town in Moscow informed circles is that Alexey Mohzin, the IMF’s executive director for Russia, has a 60% chance to be appointed to the NDB. In parallel, Ksenia Yudaeva, a former G20 sherpa and former deputy of Russia Central Bank’s Elvira Nabiullina, may become the new representative with the IMF.

So what may be in the cards is a NDB/IMF reshuffle on the Russian front. The focus should be on the potential for future productive change – rather than missed opportunities; the NDB’s policies so far have not been exactly revolutionary – considering that the bank’s statutes are linked to the US dollar.

The new deal could place the NDB as leverage for a reform of the IMF, rather than an alternative to it.

The “Kissinger moment” does play a key role in this equation. It will highlight that until the moment turns into reality, the NDB should be the sole actor for effective changes in crucial matters like the stability of the financial infrastructure.

And from that perspective, as one of the analysts note, “The UNIT and all other similar projects may be presented as complementary risk management tools hedging against reckless monetary policies and Global Financial Crisis-2 risks.”

Time though is running out – fast. President Putin recently met with the Russian Union of Industrialists. They have sent a letter to the administration and the Russian Central Bank outlining what they consider the most promising ideas.

The Unit is one of them. Prime Minister Mishustin’s government is now on the final stages of deciding which projects to support: for the BRICS summit in Kazan, and one week before, for the annual summit of the BRICS Business Council in Moscow.

A BRICS Bretton Woods?

I posed the same BRICS question to the Russian analysts also to indispensable Prof. Michael Hudson – who actually provided a concise in-depth critique of what may be on the table, while offering a different solution.

For Prof. Hudson, “a new institution has to be created – a Central Bank empowered to issue credit to finance the trade and payments deficits of some countries, with an artificial bancor-type SDR [Special Drawing Rights].”

Prof. Hudson argues “this would be different (his italics) from a clearing house system for existing banks. It would be a BRICS’ IMF. Its bancors credit or balance sheet would only be for settlements among governments, not a generally traded currency. Indeed, making the bancor widely traded as a speculative vehicle (such as the UNIT is) would introduce major instability and have nothing to do with the needed bank transfer balance sheet.”

A reformed NDB, possibly next year under a new Russian presidency, should have all it takes to become a “BRICS’ IMF.”

Prof. Hudson adds that “to succeed, the Kazan conference should be a full-fledged BRICS Bretton Woods. Maybe it is too soon to actually introduce a fait accompli. Perhaps it would be a venue to throw open a set of alternatives — including what would happen by ‘doing nothing’ and going with the current IMF system. The fact that the IMF just cancelled its trip to analyze the Russian economy may be a catalyst.”

Prof. Hudson in fact refers directly to Executive Director for Russia, Alexey Mohzin, who confirmed that the IMF should have come to Russia for consultations, part of their annual review of the Russian economy, but cancelled it because of “technical unpreparedness”.

All that brings us once again to the “Kissinger moment”; it’s unclear whether Kazan will come up with a “BRICS number” anyone could call.

Leaving the dollar-based system for good: What are the digital ruble and BRICS Bridge?

By July 1, 2025, the largest Russian banks will have to provide their clients with the ability to conduct transactions in digital rubles, according to the Russian Central Bank. Pilot testing… pic.twitter.com/fXlp0He0X3

— Sputnik (@SputnikInt) September 16, 2024

Prof. Hudson makes an essential last point on the Global South’s dollar debt: he stresses “how to handle BRICS members existing overhang of dollar debts” is a major problem.

What is clear is that “the BRICS bank [the NDB] should not finance deficits by member countries for such payments. In practice, there would have to be a moratorium on such payments – in view of the present weaponization of Western finance.”

Prof. Hudson recalls the chapter in his book Super Imperialism “on how the US moved against Britain in 1944 to get an agreement that it then presented as a pro-US fait accompli to Europe.” The book “reviews all the arguments that took place there.”

Prof. Hudson wishes he would be part of the new, ongoing process. Imagine if BRICS+ manages to pull it off: getting a Global Majority-approved agreement on a new, equitable, fair financial system then presented to the $35 trillion-indebted superpower as a fait accompli.

This originally appeared on Sputnik News.

The post Will a BRICS Bretton Woods Take Place in Kazan? appeared first on LewRockwell.

We are weeks away from another national election and still staring at ugly political realities—an election in which the propaganda machine and its celebrity buffoons prop up an unpopular Marxist; and a nonstop campaign of ballot hijinks and judicial malfeasance. One man is the singular enemy of the Left, the bullseye for several assassination crews. The foundations of our storied American experiment are covered in graffiti, riddled with tunnels, and stinking of weed. As dismal as our political prospects appear now, our post-2020 apocalypse has served at least one useful function; it has pulled off the masks to reveal two very real spiritual forces at work in our world.

Those of us who grew up in the 1970’s and 1980’s remember a time when such spiritual realities weren’t yet forced to the surface. The average American wasn’t drawn to visceral ideologies. Being a Democrat simply meant cheering for the working man, with the requisite affinities for taxes, labor unions, and women’s rights. Being a Republican likely meant you championed wealth creation and embraced free markets and lower taxes, with little patience for social agitators. Neither party seemed eager to welcome illegals or publicly snuggle with communists—although the Left has always made room for them.

For a few post-war decades, and even in the Cold War’s nuclear fears, our political parties carried on with their usual theater. Average people had no real audience for strident opinions—we had no Facebook rants—and nobody except Hitler himself was called a “literal Hitler”. The Constitution wasn’t decried as a racist blueprint for inequity and oppression. The state didn’t shamelessly prosecute the incumbent’s political rivals. For many, beliefs filed neatly into the “religious” and “political”—the former regarded as a benign but private affair, and the latter aired only at election time. Simply put, most were aware of neither the deep magic nor the deep state, content and safe enough with a two-dimensional understanding of life.

Yet during those decades of sleepy prosperity, the Left slowly gathered its own faithful through their unified appetite for all sorts of darkness. They knew the American electorate couldn’t stomach the hard stuff yet—and Rome wasn’t built in a day—so transformation would require patience and shrewd calculations. It helped that Americans were prosperous, entertained, and unsuspicious; America was strong, free speech was good, Marxism was bad, and there were two genders. Common ground like this gave cover for dirty work behind the scenes in Capitols, schools, and churches. The Left’s quiet capture moved along with the help of complacent and distracted citizens, hastening their transformation into willing dupes.

Moms and dads would always need to send kids to schools, and that is where the long-game has seen its great successes. Textbooks and teachers undermined the fussy old experiment; they praised the Great Society, riots, and the United Nations but cast shade on “greedy” capitalists and religious conservatives. Outside the classroom, decades of well-trained sheep would welcome government programs and echo talking points of the fifth estate—Oprah, Dan, and Katie seemed so smart! Nobody needed to know about dusty stuff like the Constitution, regulatory agencies, or federal judges; journalists were keeping an eye on those things. Fortunately for the Left, political news was often dismissed as mere partisanship, anyways; and without spiritual eyesight, Americans continued to ignore the threats.

Patience has paid off handsomely. Medicine, education, and government are now fully enveloped in the Left’s death culture—as witnessed in the drugged masses, dismembered unborn, and “nonbinary” children that epitomize its celebrated programs. The American idea isn’t enough to stave them off anymore; the safety net is gone, citizenship is meaningless, and the Constitution is trampled. The fumes of hell will continue to ignite the Left’s multiplying evils; and dependably, they will also inspire the cowardice and compromise of blind enablers on Right.

For a surface understanding of our perils, we can trace our own steps down to the pit by reading history and economics. We can read of wicked tyrants, communism’s lies, death camps, and failed utopian schemes. We can even connect our cultural decay—broken homes, riots, perversions, addictions— with data that proves the collective failure of all sorts of compassionate federal remedies and social movements. Such facts do tell part of the story.

For a deeper understanding, though, we must look beyond timelines and statistics to see what bubbled beneath the surface. For this, we can’t rely on historians or political theorists—not even the good ones. Proverbs teaches, “The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom,” and only with such wisdom can we see through headlines to the old enemy, lurking and lusting for unwary souls as he did in the ancient garden.

Read the Whole Article

The post Dancing Around the Fires of Hell appeared first on LewRockwell.

In the summer of 2006 I found myself, by a strange twist of fate, attending an afternoon party in Saint-Tropez hosted by P. Diddy and Paris Hilton at one of the tony town’s beach clubs. Immediately upon walking into the pool area, I felt a strong antipathy to the event’s energy and atmosphere. Both Paris and Diddy seemed uncomfortable, and their body language and affect spread to the other party-goers.

It was still early and few had drunk enough alcohol or yet taken ecstasy or cocaine to overcome their self-consciousness about being at a party in Saint-Tropez hosted by Paris Hilton and P. Diddy. It occurred to me as I sipped my glass of rosé that the stiffness could be remedied by a good music soundtrack. Alas, the “music” consisted entirely of a thunderous beat, with no discernible harmony or melody.

Sensing the low energy, Diddy grabbed a microphone and yelled, “It’s time to get the women wet!” which prompted a few half-hearted cheers from the crowd. “Throw them into the pool!” he yelled. On his command, a few bikini-clad girls were flung into the water.

A few seconds later I noticed that a brunette was suspended motionlessly and face down in the pool, apparently unconscious. Luckily someone from the club staff noticed her at the same time I did, and quickly jumped in and hauled her to the steps. Blood was flowing from her nose and it appeared that she had dove into the shallow end and struck her face on the bottom. I feared she had broken her neck, but then she seemed to revive. A few minutes later paramedics arrived, and I suppose they took her to the local clinic.

The point of this introduction is not to judge the desire to attend a Bacchanalia—to experience a dopamine rush of intoxication and sexual desire induced by the presence of beautiful women. While I am not advocating that people participate in such parties, I can understand why they would want to.

The trouble is that if chasing this kind of dopamine rush becomes your primary pursuit, you are likely to grow bored with ordinary pleasure and seek to obtain the same high through darker, more taboo means. This is the affliction of sexual sadists who find themselves needing to exert power and to inflict pain on their partners to obtain satisfaction from the sexual encounter.

Diddy was, I thought, an icon of our debased era.

Observing him hunched over with the microphone, wearing ridiculous clothes, and occasionally shouting silly exhortations, I contrasted him with Nat King Cole—a splendid musician and a perfect gentleman. While Cole ultimately became famous for his silky voice, he was also one of the finest jazz pianists of all time.

I thought of the ridicule that Cole had to endure when prominent blacks such as Thurgood Marshall called him an “Uncle Tom” because he was well-spoken, had fine manners, and wore fine suits.

“I think P. Diddy’s music and style suck,” I remarked to my party companion. “And it wouldn’t surprise me if he is involved in serious criminal activity.”

This morning I was reminded of this party 18 years ago when I read the INDICTMENT of the United States District Court, Southern District of New York. Count One—if proven to be true at his trial—is consistent with my perception at the time I observed him.

I was right about P. Diddy and Thurgood Marshall was wrong about Nat King Cole. Cole was not an “Uncle Tom,” but an artist who loved music and wanted to focus entirely on his craft. Under constant pressure to get involved in politics, his hand was forced when he was attacked at a 1956 performance in Birmingham, Alabama by three Klan members. I have long wondered if these idiot goons were incited to do this by an agent provocateur. The timing—right as Cole was under maximum pressure to become a political activist—and the theatrical quality of the attack strike me as suspicious.

At Cole’s funeral, Jack Benny captured his character with the following eulogy:

Nat Cole was a man who gave so much and still had so much to give. He gave it in song, in friendship to his fellow man, devotion to his family. He was a star, a tremendous success as an entertainer, an institution. But he was an even greater success as a man, as a husband, as a father, as a friend.

American culture needs far more guys like Nat King Cole and far fewer like P. Diddy.

This originally appeared on Courageous Discourse.

The post P. Diddy Is Icon of Our Debased Era appeared first on LewRockwell.

ProPublica headlines:

Israel Deliberately Blocked Humanitarian Aid to Gaza, Two Government Bodies Concluded. Antony Blinken Rejected Them.

The selected formulation is unfortunately not covering the real issue at hand.

U.S. law prohibits military aid to countries which are hindering U.S. humanitarian aid.

Two government entities subordinated to the State Department concluded, in writing, that Israel was blocking their humanitarian aid to the people of Gaza.

The Secretary of State, Antony Blinken, reported to Congress the opposite conclusion because he intended to deliver more military aid to Gaza.

By misleading Congress on humanitarian aid to Gaza Blinken deliberated broke the law.

That should have been the headline:

The U.S. government’s two foremost authorities on humanitarian assistance concluded this spring that Israel had deliberately blocked deliveries of food and medicine into Gaza.

The U.S. Agency for International Development delivered its assessment to Secretary of State Antony Blinken and the State Department’s refugees bureau made its stance known to top diplomats in late April. Their conclusion was explosive because U.S. law requires the government to cut off weapons shipments to countries that prevent the delivery of U.S.-backed humanitarian aid. Israel has been largely dependent on American bombs and other weapons in Gaza since Hamas’ Oct. 7 attacks.

But Blinken and the administration of President Joe Biden did not accept either finding. Days later, on May 10, Blinken delivered a carefully worded statement to Congress that said, “We do not currently assess that the Israeli government is prohibiting or otherwise restricting the transport or delivery of U.S. humanitarian assistance.”

This case should be sufficient for Congress to open an inquiry and to demand under oath witness statements from Blinken and others involved in the affair. It could be a great instrument during the current election campaign to damage the position of Democratic candidates.

However that is unlikely to happen.

Unfortunately Blinken lied to Congress about Israeli war crimes because he knew that he would get away with it.

The uni-state, the foreign policy conglomerate which resides in both parties and the bureaucracy, will not allow that U.S. war-crimes or those of its associated forces will ever be prosecuted. The Bush administration did get away with lying about weapons of mass destruction. The CIA and the Pentagon got away with torturing hundreds of innocent people.

Would the Republicans prosecuted Blinken as they should they would have to break with their own support and commitment to Zionist supremacy. With their own candidate’s campaign depending on donations from Zionist billionaires there is no chance that the Republicans will break away from their previous policies.

The will of the people, as enacted in laws, gets ignored in favor of monies that allow established politicians to continue their games.

Reprinted with permission from Moon of Alabama.

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