Aggregatore di feed

The United States has focused on the Middle East since World War II, seeking its oil, gas, and other mineral resources and coveting control of its strategic waterways. The old colonial powers and the superpowers of the Cold War era most often backed dictatorial regimes there, because they were easier to control than democracies, and this country also supported the Israeli settler colony as a bulwark of Western interests. President George W. Bush was the first president to depart (at least rhetorically) from America’s romance with regional authoritarians, pledging to “democratize” the Middle East, though he left office with little to show for it. Now, you have to wonder whether, in some strange sense, the shoe is on the other foot and the pathological U.S. support for dictatorships there is now spreading across the Atlantic Ocean, just as the trade winds blow Saharan sand and dust toward the American Southwest.

Democratic Backsliding

Here’s something that should sound familiar in the United States today: Qais Saied of Tunisia, elected president in 2019, campaigned against homosexuality and — yes! — African immigrants. In 2021, he lawlessly dismissed his prime minister and parliament and went on to rewrite the country’s constitution so that he could appoint yes-men to its Supreme Court. Then he began jailing his political opponents. In four short years, Saied undid all the political progress Tunisia had made in the previous decade, creating a dictatorship arguably worse than that of Zine El Abidine Ben Ali, who was overthrown in January 2011 in the first of several major Arab Spring youth revolts.

Worse yet — and this should sound familiar, too — Tunisia seemed to sleepwalk into authoritarianism. Trade unionists hoped the president would reject the neoliberalism of the International Monetary Fund, while civil society organizations hoped he would curb the Interior Ministry’s past repressiveness. No such luck. Europe declined to punish the newly developing dictatorship by cutting off aid, instead rewarding Saied with an economic deal in return for his willingness to crack down on African emigration. Of course, such democratic backsliding has been a feature of the Middle East for decades, since local civil society remains weak, pro-regime billionaires have proliferated, and Western governments have seldom reacted negatively to (and all too often rewarded) any move toward dictatorship.

Now, you might say that the shoe is on the other foot. What Saied did to Tunisia might as well have been a blueprint for Donald Trump. Although he hasn’t yet actually tried to rewrite the constitution, the MAGA leader has been the beneficiary of a decades-long $250 million dark-money plot, led by obscure Federalist Society apparatchik Leonard Leo, to reshape the Supreme Court. The result: a set of justices who are distinctly inclined to let Trump do his damnedest — even expel undocumented residents of the United States to gulags in third-world countries with no court process. Meanwhile, labor union members have too often placed faith in Trump’s pledges to bring back industry by using tariffs to reduce competition. And the centrists of the Democratic Party are the proverbial deer-in-the-headlights, too paralyzed to react effectively as he transforms this country into an ever more autocratic state. They also seem all too inclined to let our democracy slip away, while placing their hopes in a 2026 congressional blue wave that, even if it happens, may be too late to stop Trump from creating his version of a one-party state.

Raw Milk and Vitamin A

Consider it typical of our times that Field Marshall Abdelfattah al-Sisi’s 2013 coup against the only freely elected Egyptian government since the country’s monarchy was toppled in 1952 had no significant adverse consequences in Washington. In 2014, a leading officer in the Egyptian army, which receives $1.3 billion a year in American aid, made quixotic health claims. Major General Ibrahim Abdel-Atti announced that he had personally “defeated AIDS with the grace of my God at the rate of 100%. And I defeated hepatitis C.”  In the process, he confused the foundational nucleic acids DNA and RNA, provoking one Egyptian comedian to suggest that the country’s medical schools should never again accept anyone from Abdel-Atti’s village. However, the North Korean-like pall that has blanketed freedom of speech in Egypt was precisely what permitted such bizarre official behavior, since there was little way for the public to respond to even his most absurd claims.

Yet, imagine this: Abdel-Atti appears almost sane and sober in comparison with the antics of U.S. Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., who has discouraged vaccinations even as a measles outbreak has begun to run wild (and prove fatal in a few cases) 25 years after the U.S. officially eliminated the disease. Kennedy’s proposed treatment for measles?  Raw milk and vitamin A. Sadly, overdoses of the latter have caused liver disease in some children.

Kennedy is also working hard to gut the Department of Health and Human Services and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The damage he’s doing in the Trump era to America’s vital and effective vaccination infrastructure could unleash serial plagues upon the public. And it’s not likely to get better any time soon, given the irrational demagogue now in the White House, just as Egyptians suffer under megalomaniacal generals.

A Kafala System

And here’s another Middle Eastern peculiarity inherited from Western colonialism that will sound all too familiar in Donald Trump’s America: the large numbers of non-citizens and stateless people who suffer from a lack of basic civil and human rights. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, imperial Great Britain made treaties with small sheikhdoms along the coast of the Persian Gulf to ensure the security of its shipping and check rivals like the Ottoman Empire. When the British finally withdrew completely from the Gulf in 1972, they left behind postage-stamp countries with vast oil and gas wealth, which did not have a sufficient native-born population to work the rigs or staff the energy companies. The British Empire had often brought into its colonies, like Kuwait and Bahrain, subjects from British India.

After decolonization, such workers from India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh were coded as foreigners in the Arab Gulf. They began laboring under a “guarantor” (kafala) system in which a local entrepreneur would take responsibility for migrant laborers who often surrendered their passports to him for as long as they were in the country. The guarantor would then take a cut of their wages or business profits. No matter how long such migrants lived in those countries, they and their children almost never became eligible for citizenship, and they could have their visas revoked at any time. Others now have trouble even getting in. Typically, the United Arab Emirates (UAE) in January announced a ban on visas (for Afghans, Libyans, Yemenis, Somalians, Lebanese, Bangladeshi, Cameroonians, Sudanis, and Ugandans). And that should sound familiar, since the Trump regime has already implemented a visa ban on 19 mainly African and Middle Eastern countries. In short, the policies toward immigrant labor in the two regions seem to be converging.

Countries like the United Arab Emirates have a little more than a million citizens and 10 million mostly South Asian guest workers, some of whom have lived there all their lives or are even second or third generation residents. Such migrant workers, however, have no right to form unions or strike. Any encounter with law enforcement, even a fender-bender, can result in their expulsion. New York University Professor Andrew Ross was typically banned from the country simply for researching labor conditions. British academic Matthew Hedges was imprisoned on false espionage charges in 2018, tortured, and threatened with deportation to a UAE black site in Yemen before ultimately being released. New York University has a branch in Abu Dhabi, where the students and faculty have had run-ins with the government of President Mohammed Bin Zayed, which surged in the past two years because the country does not permit social media posts criticizing Israel’s atrocities in Gaza.

And it’s not only migrant laborers in the Middle East who can be denied citizenship despite long residence. Indigenous people, too, sometimes become non-citizens (just as Native Americans were denied U.S. citizenship until 1924). The Arab nationalists of Syria denaturalized some 100,000 Kurdish Syrians in Hasakah Province in 1962 and, over time, that figure grew to several hundred thousand. The Middle East is a patchwork of citizenship hierarchies, where the line can be drawn capriciously by nationalists, fundamentalists, or monarchs.

It does not take much familiarity with Donald Trump’s policies in the past six months to see the ways in which his administration seemingly yearns for similar levels of citizenship and limited residency to be imposed in this country. He has even threatened to deport naturalized American citizens like (can you believe it?) Elon Musk or Zohran Mamdani, the Democratic candidate for mayor of New York City, for their criticisms of him. If his fondest wishes were fulfilled, he might even prefer his country to be more like Israel when it came to anyone he didn’t like living there.

Expelled for Gandhism

An analogy could also be made between the “foreign” migrant workers in the Gulf, who have no local citizenship or rights, and the Palestinians under Israeli rule in the West Bank or Gaza. Like the Syrian Kurds of Hasakah, they have been made stateless in their own country. They lack a national government and the rights and passport it would give them. Palestinians in Area C, the 60% of the West Bank that is directly ruled by the Israeli military, see rights like unionizing or striking routinely curbed. Like Gulf workers, Palestinians are subject to expulsion at the whim of the Israeli military. And keep in mind that, when Israel seized the West Bank and Gaza in 1967, some 300,000 Palestinians were expelled from it or, if working abroad, forbidden to return home.

Some of those trapped by the decades-long occupation have also been subject to arbitrary removal. The Israeli authorities illegally expelled Palestinian pacifist Mubarak Awad from his homeland in 1988 for advocating Gandhi-style nonviolent noncooperation. Tens of thousands of West Bank Palestinians have been forced from their homes in the past two years, as entire refugee camps have been razed, the Israeli military has destroyed homes, and Israeli squatters on Palestinian land have enacted pogroms.& Since the Hamas assault on Israel in October 2023, at least 100,000 Gazans have been forced out of Palestine entirely by Israeli commanders, who have ordered that some 90% of the housing stock there be damaged or destroyed.

Inside the Jewish ethnostate of Israel, the 21% of the population who are of Palestinian heritage are distinctly second-class citizens. Human Rights Organizations like Adalah have identified 65 Israeli laws that discriminate against Palestinian-Israelis. In 2018, the Israeli parliament declared that national sovereignty is invested solely in the country’s Jews. Since October 2023, Palestinian-Israelis have been under strict surveillance and have to be careful about their Internet postings. The Israeli Supreme Court ruled in 2022 that they can be stripped of their citizenship and expelled for breach of loyalty to the Israeli state.

SEVIS Hits

Like the rulers of some Gulf states, Trump and his crew want to treat all noncitizens on visas in the U.S. — and even some naturalized citizens — arbitrarily. Since he returned to power in January, thousands of visas have been revoked for even minor contact with law enforcement, just as happens to hapless migrants in the UAE. Trump officials ran the data in the Student and Exchange Visitor Information System (SEVIS) against police reports and zeroed in on 6,400 of them, terminating their SEVIS entries without notice. That was, of course, in contravention of government regulations. Most of the hits involved cases where charges had been dropped or were minor. Affected students filed more than 60 lawsuits and consistently prevailed in court, forcing ICE to restore the SEVIS records, at least for now.

In addition, Trump and Secretary of State Marco Rubio attempted to revoke the visas of students who had been active in protests against the Israeli genocide in Gaza (in precisely the same way and on the same grounds as the Emirati government does). Among such high-profile cases, the State Department targeted figures like Columbia University graduate and pro-Palestinian protester Mahmoud Khalil, who had permanent resident status in the country but was arrested anyway and sent to a Louisiana prison. Tufts graduate student Rümeysa Öztürk, who had written a mild opinion piece for her student newspaper criticizing her school’s response to events in Gaza, was similarly seized. Apparently, the plan was to avoid letting them appear before a judge and instead summarily deport them, but the courts insisted they be given hearings, upholding the apparently imperiled principle of habeas corpus. Chapters of the American Association of University Professors, along with the Middle East Studies Association, have sued on First Amendment grounds to overturn Rubio’s policy of declaring speech to be a national security emergency, permitting the deportation of visa and green card holders.

In 1945, the case of Bridges v. Wixon established that not just citizens but all people residing in the United States enjoy the protection of the Bill of Rights. As the Cold War heated up in the 1950s, however, the court did allow a few deportations of non-citizens due to their membership in the Communist Party (as in Harisiades v. Shaughnessy in 1952). Eighty years later, in a distinctly new world, Rubio and his colleagues wish to reverse Bridges and make the U.S. a giant version of the United Arab Emirates, functionally an absolute (Trumpian) monarchy. Instead of emulating the best of Middle Eastern values such as generosity to guests and love of learning, Trump and crew seem to admire only Western-imposed authoritarianism.

Ironically, in the second Trump era, America’s billionaires and corporate elites have decided that this country should be ruled with some of the same techniques that they and their Middle Eastern proxies have long used abroad. Instead of America democratizing the Middle East, it’s increasingly clear that Trump and crew have decided to Middle-Easternize the United States.

Reprinted with permission from TomDispatch.com.

The post We’re All Palestinians Now appeared first on LewRockwell.

On July 17th, an Israeli strike on Gaza’s only Catholic parish killed three—including two elderly women—and left many wounded, including the pastor. The next day, Babylon Bee Editor Joel Berry had this to say about the victims: There are “only about 200 professed Catholics still living in Gaza and they all support Hamas.” They “aid and support the terror regime,” he added.

On July 16th, one day before the attack on the church, U.S. Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee stated this in response to Irish lawmakers trying to hold radical Israeli extremists accountable for nearly destroying a church in the only remaining all-Christian village in the Holy Land: “Did the Irish fall into a vat of Guinness?…Sober up Ireland!”

These aren’t just flippant remarks. They are theological signals, cultural relics, and dangerous political weapons. What unites them is a Protestant-inflected security: mock the Catholic, disclaim the non-white Christian, demonize the immigrant—all while draping the rhetoric in Christian respectability.

Berry’s remarks don’t just amount to a geopolitical argument but a theological one. He claimed “true Christian faith still exists in Gaza, but it’s all underground. Anyone allowed by Hamas to practice openly is allowed to do so only because they aid and support the terror regime.”

In other words, he divided Gaza’s Christians into two categories: the visible, sacramental Church—painted as collaborators with terror—and the “true” underground believers, invisible and therefore morally acceptable.

This isn’t satire. It’s an erasure. Berry’s words echo centuries-old Protestant suspicion toward Catholicism and Orthodoxy—faith too public; too ritualistic; too embodied in visible, sacramental witness and liturgy to be “real.”

For Berry, the Christians sheltering in Gaza’s church, caring for neighbors and praying in a bombed-out sanctuary, don’t count as disciples. They’re not martyrs; they’re moral liabilities to the tame, civic religion that blends in with (rather than standing as a sign of contradiction to) the princes of this world.

But they are not erased. In the smoldering rubble of St. Porphyrius Orthodox Church and beneath the shell-shattered roof of Holy Family Catholic Church, ancient hymns still rise. The Eucharist is still celebrated. That is the scandal Berry cannot abide: the visibility of a Church that endures not underground but under fire.

Meanwhile, Mike Huckabee reached back into 19th-century nativist archives to belittle Irish Catholics. By asking if Ireland had “fallen into a vat of Guinness” and telling them to “sober up,” Huckabee resurrected the “drunken Irish” trope that once animated Know‑Nothing anti-Catholic cartoons and fueled waves of discrimination.

The Ancient Order of Hibernians condemned Huckabee’s remarks, calling them a revival of “19th-century anti-Irish caricatures.” Yet the ambassador’s comment passed largely unchallenged in American media—because anti-Catholicism still enjoys a cultural hall pass here.

Embedded in Huckabee’s quip is the same Protestant suspicion of Catholicism as in Berry’s post: Catholics are an unserious, simplistic, primitive tribe. Our public faith is at best irrelevant, but it is treacherous when it takes real public action—in which cases we ought to expect a condescending rebuke from our cultural betters.

This rhetorical pattern isn’t confined to Gaza or Ireland. Once, Irish and Italian Catholic immigrants were widely seen as existential threats to American Protestant identity. Today, that role is also assigned not only to the Catholic and Orthodox victims of Israeli violence in the Holy Land and Gaza but to Catholic immigrants from Latin America and Africa.

The language is remarkably unchanged: these Catholics, you will hear, are emotional. Superstitious. Un-American.

And immigrants are painted with the same brush as Gaza’s Catholics—complicit in uncivilized chaos, tolerable only if invisible.

Catholics must not make the mistake of viewing remarks like Huckabee’s and Berry’s as haphazard, unrelated expressions of ignorance. They are reasserting an old theological hierarchy. For civilization to flourish, they believe, whiteness and Protestantism must remain on top, while ancient Catholicism must remain under suspicion.

Racism sparks backlash. Anti-Semitism rightly draws condemnation. But anti-Catholicism? Huckabee jokes, Berry dismisses, few care. This prejudice is so culturally acceptable that it flies under the radar—even among Christians.

This latent bigotry corrodes the universality of the Church. When we allow it, we side with power not the Cross.

It is true: the underground Church in Iran is growing explosively. Their faith is courageous and inspiring. But the visible, embodied faith of Gaza’s Christians is no less heroic.

Priests celebrating the Eucharist amid falling bombs. Nuns sheltering Muslim neighbors. Lay Catholics forming human shields for the elderly. This is Christian witness in its most raw and public form. To erase them because they refuse to go underground is to redefine martyrdom into invisibility—into conformity with the world.

Catholicism claims universality. Her sacraments are for all: Irish, Palestinian, Iranian, and, in a word, “the foreigner.”

G.K. Chesterton reminds us: “If there is anything more absurd than Liberalism it is conservatism. If it is true that the earth belongs to the living, it belongs to the dead whom they have taken into their keeping.”

The Church remembers the dead. It defends the living. And it refuses to bow to tribal gods of race, nation, or political expediency.

This article was originally published on Crisis Magazine.

The post Guinness, Gaza, and the Gospel: When Ethno-Nationalism Masquerades as Faith appeared first on LewRockwell.

DNI Gabbard stated on Wednesday that she was referring former President Barack Obama for criminal charges to the Department of Justice (DOJ). Key elements of her statement are as follows.

• We have referred and will continue to refer all these documents to the Department of Justice and the FBI to investigate the criminal implications of this. The evidence that we have found and that we have released directly point to President Obama leading the manufacturing of this intelligence assessment. There are multiple pieces of evidence and intelligence that confirm that fact.
• The Obama administration manufactured the January 2017 Intelligence Community Assessment that they knew was false, promoting the LIE that Vladimir Putin and the Russian government helped President Trump win the 2016 election.
• In doing so, they conspired to subvert the will of the American people, working with their partners in the media to promote the lie, in order to undermine the legitimacy of President Trump, essentially enacting a years-long coup against him.
• President Obama, former Director of the CIA John Brennan, and others fabricated the Russia Hoax, suppressed intelligence showing Putin was preparing for a Clinton victory, manufactured findings from shoddy sources, disobeyed IC standards, and knowingly lied to the American people.
• CIA Director Brennan, FBI Director Comey, DNI Clapper and others included the Steele Dossier in the 2017 ICA, thereby overruling senior Intel officials who warned them it was fabricated and should not be used.
• Obama ordered the Intelligence Community to create an Intelligence Community Assessment they knew was false, promoting a contrived narrative, with the intent of undermining the legitimacy and power of a duly elected President of the United States, Donald Trump.

I have been following this story closely since 2017, and I find Gabbard’s conclusions to be consistent with my overwhelming impression from the outset that the Trump-Russia Collusion narrative was a treasonous intrigue against President Trump and the U.S. Constitution.

The U.S. Justice Department should perform a thorough criminal investigation of President Obama and the other key players in this conspiracy. If DNI Gabbard’s interpretation of the evidence is proven to be correct in matters of fact and law, the conspirators should be swiftly prosecuted.

NOT theatrical Congressional hearings with grandstanding Representatives and Senators, but a criminal prosecution appears to be warranted.

For more information about this story, see DNI Gabbard’s post on X.

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

The post DNI Gabbard Refers Obama for Criminal Charges appeared first on LewRockwell.

How many atrocities can the federal government get away with? Americans are still vexed by the answers that Congress failed to deliver in 1995. Thirty summers ago, Washington was fixated by a Capitol Hill showdown over the greatest federal abuse of power of the decade.

Unfortunately, trusting congressional hearings to discover the truth is like trusting a roomful of monkeys with typewriters to write great novels—it might happen, but only in an eternity. As comedian Milton Berle quipped long ago, “You can send a man to Congress but you can’t make him think.”

On February 28, 1993, scores of federal Alcohol Tobacco and Firearms (ATF) agents launched an attack on the home of the Branch Davidians. The ATF’s lead investigator had previously rejected an offer to peacefully search the Davidians’ home for firearms violations. Four ATF agents and six Davidians were killed in the fracas that day.

The FBI’s Hostage Rescue Team took over the scene and 59 days later, FBI tanks collapsed much of the Davidians’ ramshackle dwelling while heavily gassing the women, children, and men inside the building and nearby shelter. A fire erupted and 76 corpses were dug out of the rubble. The Clinton administration had begun a cover-up long before the final assault. (Check out Scott Horton’s superb thirtieth anniversary podcast series on Waco as well as plenty of zesty articles on this website.)

On the evening of the Waco fire, Attorney General Janet Reno went on Nightline and announced, “I made the decision. I’m accountable. The buck stops with me.” Reno then asserted that the fiery end was all somebody else’s fault: “I don’t think anybody has ever dealt with a David Koresh, who would purposely set people afire in that number.” Nightline host Ted Koppel asked Reno why the feds used “tanks to ram the compound down.” Reno replied, “I think that what we were trying to do was to give everybody an opportunity to come out in the most unobtrusive way possible, not with a frontal assault.” Because she had a lofty federal job title, nobody called out her “unobtrusive” 54-ton tank BS.

Snap polls just after the Waco fire showed that the American people overwhelmingly supported the FBI assault. A few days after the fire, the opening of a congressional appropriations committee hearing had to be delayed so senators could have their pictures taken with Attorney General Reno, who became a national hero for her “the buck stops with me” pretense.

Reno received a different reception from Rep. John Conyers (D-MI) when she testified at a House hearing. Reno cried when Conyers berated her for authorizing the final assault. Talk show host Rush Limbaugh, reflecting the conservative idolization of law enforcement, slammed Conyers for being disrespectful to Reno and accused him of grandstanding. Perhaps the most honest statement of congressional sentiment came from Rep. Jack Brooks (D-TX), chairman of the House Judiciary Committee. Brooks declared that the Davidians were “horrible people. Despicable people. Burning to death was too good for them.”

In November 1994, Republicans captured control of Congress. On the second anniversary of the final FBI assault at Waco, a truck bomb killed more than 170 people at a federal office building in Oklahoma City. When news of that atrocity hit, a top New York op-ed editor told his colleagues, “These are Jim Bovard’s friends!” Waco had become a rallying cry for folks who distrusted Washington, creating new pressure to expose federal wrongdoing. In a May 1995 Wall Street Journal piece headlined, “Waco Must Get a Hearing,” I warned, “The ghosts of Waco will continue to haunt the U.S. government until the truth is told about what the government did and why.” I also hammered the Waco coverup in the The New Republic, Washington Times, and other publications.

After two House committees scheduled joint hearings for July, then-Rep. Charles Schumer (D-NY) denounced holding any hearings: “It’s pandering to a paranoid fringe in America that wants to believe that Waco was a conspiracy.” Treasury Undersecretary Ron Noble warned that extremists might view the hearings “and decide to blow up some other building.” After the main hearings began, President Bill Clinton condemned them as part of a Republican “war on police,” and declared that “there is no moral equivalence between the disgusting acts which took place inside that compound in Waco and the efforts law enforcement officers made to protect the lives of innocent people.” The Treasury Department mass-faxed a letter from Secretary Robert Rubin warning journalists that federal action at Waco “cannot be understood properly outside the context of Oklahoma City.” An alleged truck bomber invoking Waco in 1995 miraculously vindicated the feds killing American citizens in 1993.

The hearings exposed how vast amounts of the key documentation and videotapes vanished in the maw of federal agencies. The ATF claimed it never had a formal, written raid plan prior to launching the largest military-style attack in the agency’s history. Apparently no ATF agents made written statements after a raid in which four ATF agents died. Rep. Henry Hyde (R-IL) observed, “It’s very unusual that nobody connected with this debacle made a written statement. I think that classifies as a unique event in the history of law enforcement.” The Treasury Department quickly recognized that ATF agents’ statements could blight or destroy any federal court case against surviving Davidians; agency bosses were paranoid of creating exculpatory evidence that would expose ATF outrages.

Congressional Democrats rushed to dehumanize the government’s victims. The toxic gas that may have killed dozens of children on April 19 was a volatile issue for the hearing. Though CS gas previously killed dozens of children in the Gaza Strip, Democrats portrayed it as innocuous as a Flintstone vitamin. Benjamin Garrett, executive director the Chemical and Biological Arms Control Institute in Alexandria, Virginia, observed that the CS gas “would have panicked the children. Their eyes would have involuntarily shut. Their skin would have been burning. They would have been gasping for air and coughing wildly. Eventually, they would have been overcome with vomiting in a final hell.” Rep. Steven Schiff (R-NM) declared that “no rational person can conclude that the use of CS gas under any circumstances against children, would do anything other than cause extreme physical problems and possibly death…I believe the deaths of dozens of men, women and children can be directly and indirectly attributable to the use of this gas in the way it was injected by the FBI.”

The confidential FBI report that Janet Reno received before approving the attack stated that the impact of the CS gas on “infants and children cannot be ignored because gas masks are not available for infants and younger children.” When Reno testified on the final day, Committee Chairman Rep. John Mica (R–FL) presented her with a gas mask to illustrate that it could not have fit children. Reno casually tossed the mask on the floor and announced that “it’s not very helpful, in terms of trying to understand what happened there, to just show gas masks. We’ve got to show the people what went into the process.” Mica told me that even if the children didn’t die directly from the CS gas, “we sure as hell tortured them for six hours before they died.” (See my 2023 photo of the vault where women and children were gassed.)

The gaudy grandeur of the House Judiciary Committee hearing room could not disguise a vast moral and mental wasteland. Most of the committee members were absent for most of the hearings. The rules seemed crafted to deter disclosing facts that would embarrass officialdom. Each congressman received only five minutes to question witnesses per round of questioning (which could last hours). Witnesses knew that the more they blathered, the less they’d need to disclose. Many Republicans groveled before the FBI officials they were supposed to be cross-examining—as if the G-men could give absolution to any politician who doubted their holy status. The typical congressman’s idea of oversight of law enforcement is to assure that he is included in photo opportunities after federal busts in his home district. “How are you so great and how can we help you?” is the usual response when the FBI director testifies on Capitol Hill, as Guardian columnist Trevor Timm noted.

The five-minute rule exemplified the pro forma pursuit of truth in Washington. Hearing co-chairman Bill McCullom (R-FL) repeatedly cut off Republican members following vital lines of questioning, rescuing one fabricating federal agent after another. At the end of the hearings, Schumer—who did everything except call for the public hanging of  the surviving Davidians—praised McCullom for his bipartisan spirit, and McCullom beamed like a cocker spaniel.

A few Republican congressmen doggedly pushed federal officials for the hard facts. But near the end of the hearings, one Republican staffer complained to me that the Republican “members were real pansies this morning” in their questioning of federal witnesses. Many Republican congressmen lacked the courage to challenge any federal agent. Few members of Congress could ask intelligent follow-ups because all they knew was the specific question or two aides had printed on a piece of paper for them to recite. Jason Whiting, press spokesman for Rep. John Shadegg (R-AZ), observed, “We didn’t really want to use any of the questions the committee prepared. Not only were the questions soft, but they weren’t well planned. There were stacks and stacks of [confidential] documents that went untouched.”

At one point during the hearings, I went to the committee’s Republican staff room to get a copy of an earlier statement from a Republican member. Sitting at the entrance desk was a twenty-something blond haired dude with a cowlick. He was swiveling in his chair and looking slightly bored yet immensely proud of his title—“legislative assistant.”

The Clinton administration had delayed turning over Waco-related records to Republicans until the week before the hearings began. Dozens of legal-type boxes were stacked on desks and on the floor.

I asked whether this was the documentation from the FBI and other agencies. The young guy nodded, glanced over his shoulder at the boxes, and lamented, “We don’t know what to do with them.”

“Have you thought about reading them?” I replied.

The staffer shrugged, sighed, and wondered how soon I would cease darkening their doorway.

Republican congressmen were shooting blanks while here was an ammo cache that could have blown half the witnesses through the roof. Unfortunately, reading is the only unnatural act on Capitol Hill. I salivated just looking at those boxes but knew I’d never be permitted to delve into this treasure trove. (The average House member spent less than twelve minutes a day reading on the job, according to an earlier congressional survey.)

I usually avoided sitting at the hearing room tables reserved for the press. Some reporters saw the hearings as an outbreak by right-wing Know-Nothings—a new McCarthyite inquisition, with Janet Reno and the FBI as victims. Some “Step ‘n Fetch It” journalists were willing to pick up and print anything that a Clinton administration official scattered at their feet.

But there were some hardline exceptions to the prevailing docility. I had lunch a time or two with Jim Pate, a reporter from North Carolina who was working as a consultant for ABC News. Pate would be summoned to testify at the Timothy McVeigh trial because McVeigh had several Soldier of Fortune magazines with Pate’s Waco articles in his car when he was arrested. I bantered several times with Mike McNulty, a gun rights zealot who was later the co-producer (along with Dan Gifford and William Gazecki) of the movie Waco: Rules of Engagement, which won an Emmy and was an Oscar finalist for best documentary.

After ten days of hearings, most of the congressmen finally recognized that the ATF and FBI were different federal agencies. But that was the limit of the learning curve for some of those politicians. The grand finale of the Waco Follies was the August 1 testimony of Janet Reno.

Republicans squandered hours trying to get Reno to admit that the FBI’s final assault was approved by the White House. The New York Times reported that Republicans “seemed to lose their focus gradually as they unsuccessfully tried to force Ms. Reno to acknowledge that she had erred.” But most Republicans did not have any focus to lose. Reno dodged key questions and used enough complete sentences to awe the Washington press corps.

Rep. Shadegg challenged Reno as to why tanks had repeatedly smashed into the compound during the final assault. Reno responded by claiming that the tanks’ entry into the building (via demolishing the walls and 25% of the compound) had merely been an “inadvertent crushing of a back support.” Shadegg burst out laughing and noted that FBI tanks had “inadvertently” smashed into the compound eight different times. The FBI plan for the tank assault specifically called for the destruction of the building—regardless of whether occupants exited. Reno’s claim that the tanks’ destruction of much of the building was “inadvertent” was either feeble perjury or gross stupidity, though it was often difficult to tell the difference with Clinton administration appointees.

Rep. Bill Zeliff (R-NH) pushed Reno on the use of 54-ton tanks to smash into a building that she knew was occupied by women and children. Zeliff asked, “When military weapons are turned on American people, who makes that decision?”

Reno replied that she didn’t consider the tanks as a military vehicle—instead, they were “like a good rent-a-car.” Her comment reflected the Clinton administration’s view that Waco was a routine law enforcement effort, except for the number of toe tags needed afterwards.

I showcased Reno’s rent-a-tank line in a Wall Street Journal piece the following day that detailed how the hearings shattered the government’s credibility on Waco. My article concluded:

“The evidence of a coverup and gross federal misconduct is far stronger in the Waco hearings than in the Whitewater investigation. The Republican leadership in Congress should seize upon the recent revelations to demand a special counsel to be appointed to investigate possible federal crimes and coverups regarding Waco.”

My article may have been the only piece in the national media that skewered Reno’s bizarre exoneration of the military assault on American citizens.   

The Clinton administration correctly predicted that House Republicans would not have the courage to have a second round of hearings to deal with questions raised or information withheld in the July hearings. White House officials ridiculed GOP congressmen as “Branch Republicans” due to their supposed failure to find a smoking gun.

In July 1996, the House Republicans released their official findings from their investigation of Waco. According to Republican congressional leaders, a key lesson of Waco was that the FBI’s Hostage Rescue Team should be expanded. Congress had already sharply increased the FBI budget.

At a sparsely-attended press conference in the House press gallery, I asked whether federal agencies had “fully opened their doors” to congressional investigators. Rep. Zeliff, the co-chairman of the committee, replied, “Not totally… We couldn’t get any information from the Department of Defense… We didn’t get all the information we were looking for” from other agencies, either. I was stunned by the Winnie the Pooh “oh bother” response to the Pentagon’s Waco stonewall. Congress controlled the Pentagon’s budget and a simple rider could have been added to an appropriations bill compelling disclosure of any Waco-related Pentagon evidence.

The Clinton administration swayed the media to portray Waco as a battle of good versus evil—with the feds as the saviors, naturally. The Clinton team pulled off that con thanks to the failure of congressional investigators to timely find and reveal evidence that would have utterly obliterated all federal credibility. Respectable opinion—at least in Washington—lapsed to pretending no Waco debacle had occurred. The Women’s Bar Association of the District of Columbia created a special award to honor the nation’s first female attorney general: the Janet Reno Torchbearer Award. The first recipient, in 1997, was Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor; the award was presented by Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg

Shortly after the hearings ended, former federal lawyer David Hardy began hounding ATF with Freedom of Information Act requests. In 1999, Hardy received documents revealing that nine days before the February 28, 1993 raid, ATF agents invited David Koresh to go target shooting. They had a fine time, with Koresh providing the ammo and the ATF agents allowing Koresh to fire their guns. Koresh strongly suspected the guys were undercover feds but went shooting with them anyhow. One ATF participant wrote a memo to headquarters on the shooting party and noted that “Mr. Koresh stated that he believed that every person had the right to own firearms and protect their homes.” With such crazy ideas, the feds had no choice but to destroy Koresh. If Americans had learned during the hearings that the ATF had scorned an ideal opportunity to easily arrest Koresh, ATF credibility never would have recovered.

In 1999, film maker and private investigator Mike McNulty discovered shell casings in a Texas Ranger evidence locker that proved the FBI had fired pyrotechnic grenades at the Davidians prior to the fatal fire. That discovery nuked the Clinton administration’s perpetual denials that the FBI had any role in starting the conflagration. The FBI was caught in a massive cover-up; Newsweek reported that “as many as 100 FBI agents and officials may have known about” the military-style pyrotechnic explosive devices used by the FBI at Waco.

Republican congressmen momentarily pretended to be indignant about the fresh revelations of FBI perfidy. But, a few weeks later, Rep. Mark Souder (R-IN) declared that Republicans were suffering from “Waco fatigue…There’s a feeling that the political risk may be higher than the political gain of pursuing this subject at this time.” The only “fatigue” most congressmen experienced was the nuisance of responding to constituents who believed that their representative should give a damn. The Republican leadership decided that the “risk” of pursuing more Waco disclosures outweighed the political profits—without even knowing what new investigations might discover. Besides, they were too busy with their Bill Clinton panty chases to pay attention to how American citizens were being oppressed by Washington.

I thought Waco should have been the most important education lesson of the 1990s for our nation. But the real lesson was: Truth delayed is truth defused. Congressional failures on Waco vivify the folly of expecting checks and balances in Washington to protect the Constitution.

Waco exemplified the Capitol Hill version of “Attention Deficit Democracy”—congressmen clueless and careless about the atrocities they bankrolled. That near-total default foreshadowed similar congressional pratfalls on the Iraq War, the Afghanistan War, and the bombing of Libya, Syria, Somalia, Pakistan, et.al. “Oversight” is a polite term for rote congressional procedures designed to avoid discovering embarrassing information. A senior House Republican admitted in 2004, “Our party controls the levers of government. We’re not about to go out and look beneath a bunch of rocks to cause heartburn.”

During the Joe Biden administration, congressional oversight became completely depraved. The Select Committee to investigate the January 6 [2021] Attack on the U.S. Capitol was so skewed that those members of Congress chose to destroy “evidence” they had gathered during their kangaroo court effort to vilify anyone who protested at the Capitol. The January 6 Committee was the first congressional oversight effort that required a presidential pardon to absolve everyone involved—including the committee members, all the staffers, and all the Capitol Police and DC police who testified.

The failure of congressional oversight exemplifies why “Leviathan Democracy” is a fatal contradiction in terms. Once the government becomes so vast, elected representatives become increasingly inept or unwilling to pull in the reins. Members of Congress rise to the top by championing the worst abuses that federal agencies inflict. Congressmen are proud to receive the Agency Seal Medal from the Central Intelligence Agency as a reward for covering up CIA crimes. In 2017, Georgetown University Professor P.G. Eddington, a former CIA official, lamented “the House Intelligence Committee’s slow degeneration from overseer to cheerleader of surveillance” over the previous quarter century.

Only a vast rollback in political control over American life could allow Congress to fulfill its duty to protect citizens against the executive branch. But few members of Congress have the courage or comprehension to even attempt that constitutional rescue mission. A more likely outcome is Congress imitating how the Roman Senate elevated Roman emperors. Congress can simply designate U.S. presidents as living gods—thus ending the need for any limits or controls on government power.

This article was originally published on The Libertarian Institute.

The post Waco and the Death of Congressional Oversight appeared first on LewRockwell.

Thanks, Johnny Kramer. 

The post Tucker’s 2 Epstein Theories appeared first on LewRockwell.

Thanks, David Krall. 

The post Real EPSTEIN COVER UP Story Too Dangerous For The Public To Hear with Robert Barnes appeared first on LewRockwell.

Thanks, John Frahm.

The Federalist

The post The 7 Media Mouthpieces Touted Lie That Russia ‘Hacked’ ’16 Election appeared first on LewRockwell.

Il manoscritto fornisce un grimaldello al lettore, una chiave di lettura semplificata, del mondo finanziario e non che sembra essere andato “fuori controllo” negli ultimi quattro anni in particolare. Questa è una storia di cartelli, a livello sovrastatale e sovranazionale, la cui pianificazione centrale ha raggiunto un punto in cui deve essere riformata radicalmente e questa riforma radicale non può avvenire senza una dose di dolore economico che potrebbe mettere a repentaglio la loro autorità. Da qui la risposta al Grande Default attraverso il Grande Reset. Questa è la storia di un coyote, che quando non riesce a sfamarsi all'esterno ricorre all'autofagocitazione. Lo stesso è accaduto ai membri del G7, dove i sei membri restanti hanno iniziato a fagocitare il settimo: gli Stati Uniti.

____________________________________________________________________

(Versione audio della traduzione disponibile qui: https://open.substack.com/pub/fsimoncelli/p/debito-leva-finanziaria-e-denaro)

Il denaro ha sempre avuto una valenza strategica e ha costituito per secoli il fondamento di nazioni e imperi.

Possedere capitale e controllarne il flusso non è solo una questione di sopravvivenza: significa costruire qualcosa di duraturo.

Se la conferenza Bitcoin 2024 ha rappresentato l'anno in cui c'è stata l'invasione politica e del riconoscimento da parte dell'intelligence, quella del 2025 ne è stata la conferma.

La mia conclusione è che ciò che è iniziato come un comportamento emergente, Bitcoin, ha raggiunto un ruolo centrale nella formazione del capitale del XXI secolo. I dollari della nuova era sono nuovamente coperti da strati di moneta solida e da tecnologie innovative (stablecoin) che amplieranno la nostra capacità di costruire il futuro sia nel mondo digitale che in quello fisico.

La conferenza di quest'anno ha illustrato come Bitcoin e le stablecoin saranno integrate nei bilanci, nelle riserve nazionali e fungeranno da asset di riserva finanziaria, supportando asset tradizionali e nuovi strumenti finanziari (bitbond) e ridefinendo il panorama geopolitico, stimolando al contempo la crescita nel XXI secolo.

«Bitcoin sta diventando una delle più grandi classi di asset al mondo. [...] Gli Stati Uniti devono essere in grado di difenderlo o di usarlo come arma offensiva [...].» ~ Fred Theil, MARA

«L'Ordine Esecutivo ha specificamente nominato Bitcoin [...] come asset strategico a causa della sua scarsità [...] e questo è stato un segnale inviato alla popolazione americana così come alla popolazione globale [...]. Il governo degli Stati Uniti vede Bitcoin come un asset strategico [...]. È questo il segnale di un cambiamento strategico? [...] Penso che sia ancora una domanda a risposta aperta, ma credo che stiamo propendendo per il sì.» ~ Matthew Pines

«Le riserve strategiche non riguardano più solo petrolio, o formaggio svizzero. Riguardano Bitcoin e il futuro del denaro come arte di governare.» ~ Matthew Sigel, VanEck

Una prospettiva storica su come siamo arrivati a Bitcoin

Il denaro ha avuto origine con re e fabbri, poi si è spostato verso caveau e rotte commerciali con l'ascesa delle nazioni industrializzate. Per alimentare questa evoluzione, è emersa una rete globale di informazione e logistica: cavi si estendevano attraverso i continenti, chiatte trasportavano l'oro da un porto all'altro e uomini sul campo raccoglievano informazioni locali, per poi instradarle attraverso i think tank governativi e i desk di negoziazione delle principali banche globali. Queste reti antiquate e manuali sono ciò che ha alimentato la macchina monetaria del dollaro, creando un motore di capitali senza pari negli Stati Uniti.

Tra gli anni '60 e '80 iniziò una nuova era. I derivati divennero la norma e le informazioni si muovevano più velocemente, rendendo necessario disporre di desk di trading finanziario in tutto il mondo per acquisire informazioni redditizie e sostenere la sicurezza nazionale. I banchieri regnavano sovrani. Bitcoin 2025 ha reso chiaro che c'era nuovo capitale in città, ma questa volta non era diverso.

Negli ultimi decenni i social network hanno iniziato a superare diplomatici e spie. Il capitale si è spostato da asset tangibili a strumenti liquidi e digitali. Questo ha accelerato il ritmo del nostro mondo. Dobbiamo ricostruire quella complessa rete di banche globali, ma con il vantaggio dei nodi rispetto agli edifici. Nel nuovo mondo venture capitalist, sviluppatori di software e ingegneri dominano sovrani.

Se un tema è emerso durante la conferenza di quest'anno, è proprio questo: le informazioni monetarie sono un'arma e la rete del dollaro ha bisogno di un'estensione. Una nuova innovazione per far sì che il suo peso si estenda in tutto il mondo e più velocemente. Ecco perché Bitcoin è più di una tecnologia a rialzo numerico.

Durante la conferenza, se l'avete sentito almeno una volta, l'avrete sentito innumerevoli volte. Bitcoin non sostituirà il dollaro, ma espanderà e approfondirà il vasto potere della sua rete. In futuro BTC sarà la base della formazione di capitale, del potere d'acquisto e del vantaggio geopolitico. La sua volatilità sarà sfruttata e incorporata nei bilanci delle società quotate in borsa (Bitcoin Treasury Companies).

Le stablecoin erano ovunque

More milkshake talk than orange coin go up talk @SantiagoAuFund

Il post qui sopra è divertente e riassume la mania delle stablecoin. Era un percorso inevitabile e non si è persa l'occasione di inserirlo in quasi ogni sessione. Le stablecoin guideranno la trasformazione del nostro mercato monetario e delle reti di pagamento in dollari. Li aggiorneranno con le tecnologie moderne e renderanno il “denaro” completamente digitale e utilizzabile.

Far muovere il denaro alla velocità con cui le persone vivono oggi. Paolo Ardoino di Tether (USDT) lo ha dimostrato nella sua sessione. Ha dimostrato efficacemente che stiamo passando da un'era di stack tecnologici a un'era di stack tecnologici monetari.

Se si vuole valore, questo deve essere supportato da verità e sostenibilità; non da retorica, corruzione, circonlocuzioni e nullità.

Sotto la stablecoin più popolare, USDT, ci sono: asset monetari solidi (Bitcoin e oro), asset monetari fruttiferi (Titoli del Tesoro USA), profitti di aziende private, mining di Bitcoin e infrastrutture di data center basate sull'intelligenza artificiale, strumenti per i media indipendenti, strumenti di chat per la privacy e molto altro. Tether ha costruito il futuro di quello che probabilmente sarà uno stack tecnologico monetario. Una combinazione di tutte le forme di asset che potremmo desiderare nella nostra società odierna.

Come abbiamo visto nel corso dei secoli, l'intelligenza sta tornando a essere integrata e sincronizzata. Con il passaggio del potere alle reti tecnologiche, stiamo assistendo all'importanza che questi leader stanno ricoprendo nel governo.

Proprio come abbiamo visto con le vecchie porte girevoli di Wall Street, che permettevano ai leader di rimbalzare avanti e indietro tra Goldman, JP Morgan, Black Rock, la Federal Reserve e altre istituzioni governative, ora stiamo assistendo allo stesso fenomeno anche con le aziende tecnologiche.

Considerando l'atteggiamento nei confronti di Bitcoin e dell'intelligenza artificiale, non sarebbe una sorpresa se le aziende che operano nel settore Bitcoin e delle stablecoin diventassero il prossimo vettore. Dopotutto il potere di una rete monetaria risiede nelle informazioni e nei profitti controllati dai suoi operatori.

Con l'intensificarsi della concorrenza dei capitali è chiaro che il predominio economico e persino la guerra si sono spostati dai campi di battaglia alla larghezza di banda.

Tutto ciò, l'integrazione di Bitcoin, l'ascesa delle stablecoin e l'evoluzione delle tecnologie monetarie indicano una verità più profonda: il nostro attuale sistema finanziario non si sta solo adattando, ma è sotto pressione, mentre l'architettura monetaria sta rapidamente diventando il prossimo campo di battaglia.

Questa tensione deriva da un difetto di progettazione insito nel sistema stesso: la sua dipendenza da una crescita infinita. La sua dipendenza da una crescita sostenuta dal debito.

Il problema della misura e della crescita costante 

Ciò che Lyn descrive qui con l'analogia dello squalo è la premessa del libro di Geoffrey West, Scale.

Alla fine i sistemi di crescita superesponenziale (come i sistemi finanziari) raggiungono una singolarità temporale finita, in cui l'energia e la crescita necessarie per mantenere il ritmo diventano catastroficamente insostenibili.

L'unico modo per evitare il collasso è attraverso l'innovazione. Ironia della sorte Bitcoin è un'innovazione sia per il nostro sistema finanziario che per il nostro sistema informativo. Entrambi sono su percorsi di consumo di risorse insostenibili solo per mantenersi. Per il sistema finanziario, è un problema di debito; per Internet, è un problema di energia e volume di contenuti/informazioni/valore.

Questi dilemmi, sebbene non siano quelli di Triffin, rendono i punti evidenziati dal vicepresidente J. D. Vance ancora più importanti.

Per cominciare, ha chiarito che Bitcoin è ormai una questione politica; sono necessari voce e azione costanti. Come ha affermato, Bitcoin e intelligenza artificiale, insieme, dovrebbero essere considerati i due strumenti più importanti per il nostro futuro.

Ricordiamo che imperi e stabilità si fondano sulla capacità di raccogliere, elaborare e trarre profitto dalle informazioni. Entrambi funzionano bene in queste funzioni, quindi l'interesse indebito ha senso.

Ricordiamo che coloro che regnano sono coloro che meglio dimostrano la capacità di monetizzare il valore delle reti.

Ciò che gli stati, gli enti pubblici e coloro che detengono poteri di governo comprendono è che siamo passati da un mondo in cui “chi detiene l'oro detta le regole” a un mondo in cui “chi detiene i dati ottiene il valore”.

Sembra ormai una corsa agli armamenti per vedere chi riesce ad accumulare capitale critico, perché in tempi di instabilità geopolitica le risorse strategiche sono ciò che dà il controllo; sono ciò che porta alle transizioni storiche. Ancora una volta, ci troviamo nel mezzo di un cambio di paradigma, con Bitcoin al centro.

Denaro, informazioni e catene di fornitura sono i campi di battaglia del momento che definiranno le rotte del futuro. 

E tuttavia, sebbene le conversazioni della conferenza su Bitcoin abbiano toccato argomenti quali geopolitica, teoria delle reti e fragilità sistemica, quest'anno ha avuto anche un risvolto personale.

Un momento che ha colto questo cambiamento nella narrazione è stato nientemeno che Jack Mallers.

Mallers sta invecchiando... La chiusura della conferenza

Infine una conferenza su Bitcoin non sarebbe completa senza un finale appassionato di Jack Mallers.

Tuttavia quest'anno la situazione è stata un po' diversa. Invece di promuovere l'HODLing, o l'accumulo di satoshi all'infinito, Mallers ha promosso lo spendere bitcoin e persino l'ottenere prestiti... debiti... perché la realtà è che, diventando adulti, ci sono cose nella vita che Bitcoin non può comprare. Ci sono momenti reali, vere banconote quotate e accettate solo in dollari. Questa consapevolezza ci aiuta a comprendere la semplice frase di Jack:

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

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

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: the seeds of this economic crisis were sown the moment we let COVID panic override common sense.

We injected trillions into the system under the guise of “relief,” inflated asset bubbles, distorted labor incentives, and trained both Wall Street and Main Street to expect free money forever. We turned off the economy, paid people not to work, and then acted shocked when inflation spiked, supply chains broke, and productivity cratered.

And when the bill came due? The Fed panicked in the opposite direction—cranking rates higher and faster than any time in modern history, breaking the very consumers it claimed to protect.

Now, the cracks are no longer theoretical—they’re everywhere you look.

The latest economic signals paint a stark and unsettling picture: the American consumer has hit a wall, and the broader economy is teetering on the brink. This isn’t just a seasonal blip; it’s a fundamental shift, with deep implications for the coming months.

The most direct and alarming indicator of consumer health lies in their paychecks. For the first time since August 2020, average weekly paychecks declined on a three-month basis through June 2025. This “highly unusual weakness” has only occurred a handful of times in the last three decades , each instance coinciding with severe economic contractions like the dot-com recession (September and October 2001) or the 2008-2009 financial crisis. Even the solitary occurrence in the 2010s, October 2012, prompted the Federal Reserve to embark on its third round of quantitative easing.

The impact on spending is undeniable. Real personal consumption expenditures have been negative on a five-month basis for the entire first five months of 2025 – a situation not seen since 2020. Retail sales fell in January 2025, and overall Personal Consumption Expenditures (PCE), which includes spending on services, have followed suit through the first half of the year, up to May, the latest available data. The only exception was a small pickup in March, which was largely attributed to consumers rushing to beat anticipated tariff price changes that, for the most part, haven’t materialized since.

Adding to these worries, consumers are actively pulling back on credit. Revolving consumer credit, primarily credit card debt, declined by a significant $3.5 billion in May 2025, following a $7.5 billion increase in April.

This sharp reduction puts greater emphasis on hard data over mere sentiment surveys. This behavior follows a clear change in credit card usage observed around March 2024 , with growth in aggregate revolving credit balances slowing to practically zero by August 2024. Consumers are consciously refraining from adding to credit lines, applying for fewer cards, and in more extreme circumstances, even paying down existing debt. These are prudent, defensive tactics reserved for when a large proportion of workers are unsure about their job prospects and worried about their incomes.

The labor market, often presented as a picture of strength by official narratives, is also revealing its cracks. While headline payroll numbers might appear deceptively positive, the underlying data tells a starkly different story. The hours index, a critical measure of labor input, slid by 0.3% in June, marking the worst monthly decline in a year.

This directly contradicts the notion of a substantial increase in employees, suggesting any gains were likely part-time or similar. Furthermore, employment itself utterly collapsed in May and June, down by a combined 600,000 in those two months. Perhaps most alarming, the labor force itself shrunk by three-quarters of a million , not due to vacation or retirement, but because “there is no work”. This explains why the adjusted unemployment rate, which attempts to capture these dropouts, is nearing 5% and continues to rise.

The struggles of businesses further reinforce this grim outlook. Many online merchants, who are integral to the broader retail landscape, are increasingly unable to offer discounts. Their margins are already being pressed down too far, and with sales weak and costs rising, employers are broadly cutting back on expenses, including employees. This creates a self-reinforcing loop: consumers, seeing their incomes in jeopardy, pull back on spending, which puts even more pressure on employers to cut labor, and so the cycle continues.

Even central bankers are quietly acknowledging the dire circumstances. The Federal Reserve’s New York branch recently published a post titled “The zero lower bound remains a medium-term risk,” effectively admitting the “distinct nonzero possibility” of a return to Zero Interest Rate Policy (ZIRP). This marks a significant concession, especially given that New York Fed President John C. Williams is an author on the piece. This represents a profound shift from the days when officials like Bill Dudley dismissed market signals from Eurodollar futures as “just a bunch of hedging”. The markets, particularly the interest rate swap market, have consistently signaled lower rates for longer , a reality the Fed is now beginning to grapple with.

The “uncertainty” that the Fed now points to when explaining why the probability of hitting zero rates is the same now as in 2018, despite current rates being substantially higher, is no mystery to those paying attention to market fundamentals. As economists themselves have begun to grudgingly admit, their models often failed to incorporate the financial system. This means that despite starting from a higher interest rate point, the economic circumstances are such that the chances of reaching zero remain uncomfortably high.

The truth is becoming increasingly evident: the American consumer, once the engine of growth, has remembered how to hit the wall. It’s not just a passing “sentiment” issue; it’s deeply rooted in tangible and established weakness across the labor market and consumer spending. And the data is screaming it from every angle.

This article was originally published on Rational Ground.

The post Blame Covid: America’s Economy Hits a Wall appeared first on LewRockwell.

Gang violence is a problem in every major city in the United States and membership is on the rise.

• Be confident and make brief eye contact. Don’t look like a victim but check your ego and show respect.
• Maintain situational awareness. Scan waists and hands for weapons.
• Learn what gangs are active in your area, how to identify members.
• Learn what kinds of crimes they commit and how it goes down. Understanding that, you can reduce both your risk and your exposure to it.
• Caches give you the ability to start over should you be forced by a superior force to capitulate or flee.

Gangs

When readers were asked what the greatest threat was in their neighborhoods, the number one answer was … gangs! I can’t say I’m surprised at that.

Gangs are already a serious problem in the US today, with more than a million and a half members of street gangs, but in the chaos and disorder of emergencies, gang membership skyrockets, making gangs an even bigger pro problem whenever the rule of law gives way to anarchy.

At times like these, people want to know that somebody has their back, so the stress, volatility, and change that accompanies catastrophes drives people to group up. Prison gangs are a well-known example of this behavior.

Situational Awareness & Avoidance

Learn what gangs are operating in your area and how they operate. Each gang has its own SOP and its own IFF (Identification Friend or Foe). Depending on the type of gang, they may use colors (hats, T-shirts, bandannas) or tattoos. Biker gangs, for example, will often wear sleeves (tattoos on their forearms) with symbols that carry meanings to anyone familiar with them. Catalogs of gang tattoos are available from various law enforcement agencies online. Download catalogs and research gangs active in your area. The gang units of police departments and correctional facilities sometimes have online resources such as catalogs of gang tattoos where you can look them up and decipher their meanings.

In an area of Brazil that I visit, two of the local gangs are called Estados Unidos (United States) and Al-Qaeda. And the EU (US) gang used the US Flag as their colors, which I found out when I brought Zippo Lighters emblazoned with the US Flag to give away as souvenirs. I wanted to bring something made in the USA but could have caused trouble for people I liked if they used them in public.

On situational awareness, in the favelas (slums), Brazilian gangs employ low-tech methods to warn the residents of raids by the police or by rival gangs. Chief among these fireworks touched off by lookouts. They are cheap and effective. When people hear them, they know to get behind hardcover because bullets are about to fly.

Two examples of SOP of Brazilian gangs are robbing buses and kidnapping. With the fall of the Soviet Union, Cuban communist revolutionaries experienced major cashflow problems. One of their solutions was to train operatives to carry out kidnappings for ransom, some of which took place in Brazil. Some claim that when the communist kidnappers were caught and imprisoned, they trained Brazilian criminals to carry out kidnappings, but judging by the SOP, I think the idea was more largely disseminated through the media, giving small gangs the idea that they could make money by pulling off kidnappings for ransom, mostly without professional training.

Aware of the fact that local gangs kidnap foreigners to make money, I investigated restraint escape and SERE techniques, started restraint escape training, and integrated restraint escape gear into my EDC.

In the bus robbery scenario, armed thugs board a bus. One puts a handgun to the driver’s head to stop the bus and the other walks from one end of the bus to the other with a backpack or bag. He instructs everybody to drop their wallet, cellphone and jewelry in the bag. If someone doesn’t hand it over and he feels like they are holding out, he unceremoniously shoots that individual in the head and moves to the next person.

Where possible, use superior situational awareness to avoid problems. That doesn’t mean that when you see them, and they see you, you stop, turn around and head in the other direction. That will make you look like prey, triggering a predatory pursuit response. You wouldn’t do that with a dog and it won’t be any more effective here.

Do what you should be doing anytime you come in sight of another on the street, scan their waist and hands for weapons.

Reduce Risk & Exposure

Understanding the SOP greatly improves one’s chances of surviving this type of robbery, not to mention limiting exposure to lose. To mitigate risk in this scenario, as well as muggings, my wife and I, employ various techniques:

• Don’t Say, “What?” – Understand criminal SOP and stay alert. Even if you speak the same language (more or less), it may be hard the slang of some thug’s slang. Just hand over what you have. My brother-in-law was walking with some Americans one night and this very situation happened. The gangbanger lifted his shirt to show them his handgun, one of the Americans didn’t have his head on a swivel and didn’t understand what was happening or what the guy he was asking. It didn’t go like the scene in Pulp Fiction Jules tell the kid to, “Ask me, ‘What!’ one more time!” either. The banger got frustrated and shot the guy in the head. Fortunately, he lived and made a full recovery, but gunshot wounds to the head don’t always work out like that.
• Report Binder Money Clips – When carrying a lot of cash, break it up into smaller amounts instead of rolling it in a single, easy to find roll of cash. That way you lose some of your money, not all of it. With minor modification, the handles on the report binder clips can open a range of handcuffs and it’s easy to pinch one-off.
• Drop Wallet – Put some expired credit cards and a believable amount of cash in a wallet so you have a wallet to drop in the bag.
• Decoy Cell Phone – Robberies and muggings are so common that quite a few locals save their old cellphones when they upgrade. They carry their old cellphone in their hand or back pocket and their new cellphone goes in their waistband, at least while out on the street.
• Don’t Wear Expensive Jewelry – This should just be common sense, but then every time I look at an EDC group or an EDC lineup on Uncrate, all the jewelry, expensive watches, and matching everything make me wonder. I suppose you could have that rare survival situation in Beverly Hills or on 5th Avenue in Scottsdale, where you need to impress some gold digger while simultaneously saving the day but why would you want to? And carrying a bunch of expensive accessories makes you a target everywhere else.
• Carry Concealed – If things do go sideways, sometimes your chances of survival are better if you fight. Train regularly and learn when it’s better to fight and when it’s better not to. I carry concealed in the USA, but for the time being Brazil is a non-permissive environment, so I only carry what I can get away with there. Fortunately, Brazil has a new president and his platform included the restoration of gun rights, which Brazilians voted for in a referendum. Unfortunately, last time around, they voted a corrupt socialist regime into power that refused to approve any permits, arguing that the country had enough police to protect the citizens.

Respect

Gangs are usually trying to control what they see as their territory. When you disrespect a gang banger, you might as well break out the dueling pistols because it’s the modern-day equivalent of removing your glove to slap him across the face with it or insulting a gentleman in public. Only he and his buddies are going to jump you five to one. Once you disrespect him, he has no choice but to act or he’ll lose face with other gang members, pissing away hard-earned street cred.

When you encounter someone on the street that you think might despite what you may have heard, don’t avoid eye contact. Walk confidently, make brief eye contact and give one of them a curt nod to acknowledge their presence. Don’t scowl or frown in disapproval, but don’t smile either. Give them the respect they are looking for. If challenged, verbalize the message, “I’m not disrespecting you.”

Read the Whole Article

The post How Survive in a Gang-controlled Neighborhood appeared first on LewRockwell.

Former Republican senator and presidential candidate John McCain (1936-2018) would be thrilled to know that the United States bombed Iran’s nuclear facilities last month. President Trump claimed that the strikes “completely and totally obliterated” Iran’s nuclear enrichment facilities, but this has been questioned.

Although I am opposed to the United States bombing Iran (or any other country), I don’t want Iran to have nuclear weapons. But this is not because I hate the government of Iran, hate Islam, hate Muslims, hate the people of Iran, want to weaken the enemies of Israel, or think that Iran is a threat to the United States or Israel.

Don’t think that I am being naïve. The Islamic Republic of Iran is an oppressive theocratic state that drastically and harshly intervenes in the economy and society and heavily restricts the liberty and freedom of Iranians. But this is not why I don’t want Iran to have nuclear weapons.

I don’t want Iran to have nuclear weapons because I don’t want any country to have nuclear weapons. As Murray Rothbard concluded: “The use of nuclear or similar weapons, or the threat thereof, is a sin and a crime against humanity for which there can be no justification.” This is because nuclear weapons kill people collectively and indiscriminately. They cannot be used for targeted killing on the battlefield. They can only be used for offensive and aggressive purposes. They are “ipso facto engines of indiscriminate mass destruction.”

The United States helped develop Iran’s civil nuclear program in the 1950s. Iran signed the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT) in 1968. (Israel, like India and Pakistan, has never signed). The supreme leader of Iran issued a fatwa forbidding nuclear weapons. U.S. intelligence reports have consistently confirmed that Iran was not attempting to build or acquire nuclear weapons. The Iranian government maintains that the purpose of its nuclear program is to produce electricity.

After the United States bombed Iran, an Iranian representative went on American television and said Iran has an “inalienable right” to a peaceful nuclear program. He is exactly right. And every county has the same right. But I would go further than that. Iran also has an “inalienable right” to a nuclear weapons program.

The wrong assumption about Iran’s nuclear weapons program is that Iran should not be permitted to acquire or develop nuclear weapons.

In addition to the United States, Russia, China, France, Israel, Great Britain, India, Pakistan, and North Korea have nuclear weapons. Who are these countries (mainly the United States and Israel) to say that Iran should not have nuclear weapons? Who are Trump and Netanyahu to say that Iran should not have nuclear weapons? Who are you and I to say that Iran should not have nuclear weapons? Who is anyone to say that country x should or should not have this weapon or that weapon?

The United States has more than 5,000 nuclear warheads that are a threat to the entire planet. Every country in the world — not just Iran — is justified in obtaining nuclear weapons to protect itself against the country that was the first to develop nuclear weapons, the country that has the largest stockpile of nuclear weapons, and the only country to ever use nuclear weapons — the United States.

Why is it widely accepted that only the United States and a handful of other countries should be allowed to possess nuclear weapons but that Iran—which is surrounded by U.S. military bases and nuclear powers Israel, Russia, India, and Pakistan—should not?

How many Americans who just assume that Iran should not have nuclear weapons could locate Iran on a map unless it was labeled with big letters saying IRAN? How many Americans who think that Iran is a threat to the United States know whether Iran is a Shiite or Sunni Muslim state or what the difference is between the two branches of Islam? How many Americans know that all of the issues with Iran stem from the CIA overthrowing the democratically elected prime minister of Iran in 1953 and restoring to power the autocratic Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi?

I suspect very few.

But regardless of whether Iran’s nuclear program is for electricity or for bombs, the United States should mind its own business and not bomb Iran or any other country.

The post The Wrong Assumption About Iran’s Nuclear Program appeared first on LewRockwell.

“Now by coming in and being part of the cover-up, the Trump administration has become part of it. I mean, it’s just you cannot see it any other way.”—Alex Jones, InfoWars

Once again, the American police state is choosing to protect predators, not victims.

Jeffrey Epstein—the hedge fund billionaire/convicted serial pedophile and sex trafficker—may be dead, but the machinery that empowered and protected him is still very much alive.

You see, the Epstein case was never just about Epstein—it was about the entire edifice of power that shields the ruling class, silences victims, and erases accountability.

Thus, the latest about-face declarations from the Trump administration—that Epstein had no client list, that he did in fact kill himself, and that there’s nothing more to discuss or investigate so we should just move on—have only reinforced what many have suspected all along: the system is rigged in order to protect the power elite because the power elite are the system.

In this age of partisan politics and a deeply polarized populace, corruption—especially when it involves sexual debauchery, depravity and predatory behavior—has become the great equalizer.

With the reemergence of Jeffrey Epstein’s ghost in the public discourse, we are once again reminded of just how deep the rot goes.

Politics, religion, entertainment, business, law enforcement, the military—it doesn’t matter the arena or affiliation: all are riddled with the kind of seedy, depraved behavior that gets a free pass when it involves the powerful.

For years, the Epstein case has stood as a grotesque emblem of the depravity within America’s power elite: billionaires, politicians, and celebrities who allegedly trafficked in sex with young girls while insulated from accountability.

It is believed that Epstein, who died in jail after being arrested on charges of molesting, raping and sex trafficking dozens of young girls, operated a sex trafficking ring not only for his own personal pleasure but also for that of his friends and business associates.

According to The Washington Post, “several of the young women…say they were offered to the rich and famous as sex partners at Epstein’s parties.”

Despite the government’s insistence there’s nothing more to see, here’s what the public record already reveals:

• Epstein ferried his friends about on his private plane, nicknamed the “Lolita Express” after the Nabokov novel, due to the presence of what appeared to be underage girls on board.
• Both Bill Clinton and Donald Trump were counted among Epstein’s friends.
• Both Clinton and Trump were at one time passengers on the Lolita Express.
• Both Clinton and Trump are renowned womanizers who have been accused of sexual impropriety by a significant number of women over the years. In fact, The Rutherford Institute represented Paula Jones in her landmark sexual harassment lawsuit against then-President Clinton—a case that helped expose how far the political establishment will go to shield its own.

So you have to wonder… when President Trump, who has used his administration’s war on human trafficking to justify expanding the government’s police state powers, quietly dismantles the very government agencies tasked with investigating and exposing sex trafficking… what exactly is going on?

The message from the top is clear: there will be no accountability.

President Trump has flatly refused to appoint a special prosecutor. His allies in Congress have gone silent. And the same politicians who demand the harshest punishments for undocumented immigrants, protesters, or whistleblowers have nothing to say about the systematic abuse of minors by men in their own orbit.

This isn’t justice. It’s a double standard—one set of rules for the untouchables, and another for everyone else.

If it looks like a cover-up, smells like a cover-up, and appears to benefit all the usual suspects, is it so far-fetched to suspect that the government is once again closing ranks to protect the members of its power elite?

We’ve seen it before: from the CIA’s MK-Ultra experiments and the FBI’s COINTELPRO operations to the Pentagon Papers, Iran-Contra, CIA black sites, and NSA mass surveillance.

Each time, secrecy protected the powerful and betrayed the people.

And it will keep happening—again and again—unless we confront the truth hiding in plain sight: that abuse of power is not an aberration of the system—it is the system.

Nowhere is that more apparent than in the shadow economy of sex trafficking, where power, profit, and predation converge.

The trafficking of children, the shielding of perpetrators, the systematic silencing of victims—this isn’t a conspiracy theory. It’s a business model.

This is America’s seedy underbelly.

Child sex trafficking—the buying and selling of women, young girls and boys for sex, some as young as 9 years old—has become big business in America. It is the fastest growing business in organized crime and the second most-lucrative commodity traded illegally after drugs and guns.

Adults purchase children for sex at least 2.5 million times a year in the United States.

It’s not just young girls who are vulnerable to these predators, either. Boys account for over a third of victims in the U.S. sex industry.

Who buys a child for sex?

Otherwise ordinary men from all walks of life. “They could be your co-worker, doctor, pastor or spouse,” writes journalist Tim Swarens, who spent more than a year investigating the sex trade in America.

Ordinary men, yes. But then there are the so-called extraordinary men—like Jeffrey Epstein—with wealth, connections, and protection who are allowed to operate according to their own rules.

These men skate free of accountability because the criminal justice system panders to the powerful, the wealthy and the elite.

Over a decade ago, when Epstein was first charged with raping and molesting young girls, he was gifted a secret plea deal with then-U.S. Attorney Alexander Acosta, President Trump’s first term Labor Secretary, that allowed him to evade federal charges and be given the equivalent of a slap on the wrist: allowed to “work” at home six days a week before returning to jail to sleep.

That secret plea deal has since been ruled illegal by a federal judge.

Yet here’s the thing: Epstein did not act alone.

I refer not only to Epstein’s accomplices, who recruited and groomed the young girls he is accused of raping and molesting, but his circle of influential friends and colleagues that at one time included Bill Clinton and Donald Trump.

As the Associated Press points out, “The arrest of the billionaire financier on child sex trafficking charges is raising questions about how much his high-powered associates knew about the hedge fund manager’s interactions with underage girls, and whether they turned a blind eye to potentially illegal conduct.”

In fact, a decision by the Second Circuit Court of Appeals allowing a 2,000-page document linked to the Epstein case to be unsealed references allegations of sexual abuse involving “numerous prominent American politicians, powerful business executives, foreign presidents, a well-known Prime Minister, and other world leaders.”

This is not a minor incident involving minor players. Nor are these partisan missteps.

They are systemic betrayals. The predators wear red and blue alike, and the silence spans both aisles of power.

This is the darkness at the heart of the American police state: a system built to shield the powerful from justice.

Sex slaves. Sex trafficking. Secret societies. Powerful elites. Government corruption. Judicial cover-ups.

Once again, fact and fiction mirror each other.

Twenty years ago, Stanley Kubrick’s final film Eyes Wide Shut provided viewing audiences with a sordid glimpse into a secret sex society that indulged the basest urges of its affluent members while preying on vulnerable young women. It is not so different from the real world, where powerful men, insulated from accountability, indulge their base urges.

Kubrick suggested these secret societies flourish because the public chooses not to see what’s right in front of them, content to navigate life in denial about the ugly, obvious truths in our midst.

In so doing, we become accomplices to abusive behavior in our midst.

This is how corruption by the power elite flourishes.

For years, investigative journalists and survivors have documented how blackmail, intelligence agency ties, and financial leverage helped shield elite sexual predators—not just from prosecution, but from public scrutiny.

For every Epstein who is—finally—called to account for his illegal sexual exploits after years of being given a free pass by those in power, there are hundreds (perhaps thousands) more in the halls of power and wealth whose predation continues unabated.

While Epstein’s alleged crimes are heinous enough on their own, he is part of a larger narrative of how a culture of entitlement becomes a cesspool and a breeding ground for despots and predators.

Power corrupts. Worse, as 19th-century historian Lord Acton concluded, absolute power corrupts absolutely.

Give any one person—or government agency—too much power and allow them to believe that they are entitled, untouchable and will not be held accountable for their actions, and those powers will be abused.

History proves it. The present moment confirms it.

We see this dynamic play out every day in communities across America.

A cop shoots an unarmed citizen for no credible reason and gets away with it. A president employs executive orders to sidestep the Constitution and gets away with it. A government agency spies on its citizens’ communications and gets away with it. An entertainment mogul sexually harasses aspiring actresses and gets away with it. The U.S. military bombs a civilian hospital and gets away with it.

It’s no coincidence that the same administration dismantling offices tasked with fighting human trafficking is also defunding the few agencies left to hold law enforcement accountable.

Under President Trump, the Department of Justice has been restructured to prioritize loyalty over justice, protection over prosecution. Offices once dedicated to civil rights enforcement, police oversight, and public accountability have been gutted or quietly sidelined.

Consider the case of former Louisville officer Brett Hankison, who blindly fired ten rounds into Breonna Taylor’s apartment during a botched no-knock raid. Hankison was ultimately convicted—not for killing Taylor, but for depriving others of their civil rights. And yet Trump’s DOJ asked the court to sentence Hankison to one day in prison—the equivalent of time served during booking.

In other words, in Trump’s view, the powerful and their enforcers should walk free while the dead are buried and the public is told to move on.

And it’s not just trigger-happy policing that goes unpunished.

Across the country, law enforcement officers have repeatedly been caught running sex trafficking rings, abusing women and girls in their custody, or exploiting their badge to coerce sex—with little to no consequence.

From Louisiana to Ohio to New York, officers have been arrested for trafficking underage girls, assaulting vulnerable women, and raping detainees—often shielded by unions, prosecutors, or a blue wall of silence.

This isn’t a few bad apples. It’s a culture of impunity baked into the system.

This is how the system works, protecting the untouchables—not because they’re innocent, but because the system has made them immune.

Abuse of power—and the ambition-fueled hypocrisy and deliberate disregard for misconduct that make those abuses possible—works the same whether you’re talking about sex crimes, government corruption, or the rule of law.

It’s the same old story all over again: man rises to power, man abuses power abominably, man intimidates and threatens anyone who challenges him with retaliation or worse, and man gets away with it because of a culture of compliance in which no one speaks up because they don’t want to lose their job or their money or their place among the elite.

Sexual predators aren’t the only threat.

For every Epstein or Clinton, every Weinstein, Ailes, Cosby, or Trump who eventually gets called out for his sexual misbehavior, there are hundreds—thousands—of others in the American police state who are getting away with murder—in many cases, literally—simply because they can.

Unless something changes in the way we deal with these ongoing, egregious abuses of power, the predators of the police state will continue to wreak havoc on our freedoms, our communities, and our lives.

For too long now, Americans have tolerated an oligarchy in which a powerful, elite group of wealthy donors is calling the shots.

We need to restore the rule of law for all people, no exceptions.

The rule of law means no one gets a free pass—no matter their wealth, status, or political connections.

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 empowerment of petty tyrants and political gods must end.

This article was originally published on The Rutherford Institute.

The post The Untouchables: The Sexual Predators Within America’s Power Elite appeared first on LewRockwell.

With President Trump’s MAGA supporters in full rebellion over his refusal to release all the records relating to the Jeffrey Epstein pedophilia investigation, get ready for a big crisis in foreign affairs designed to distract attention from the Epstein scandal.

It certainly wouldn’t be the first time a ruler engaged in such a strategy. In fact, it’s a time-honored way to get people to set aside their rebellion and instead “rally ’round the flag.”

Consider the immortal words of James Madison, the father of the Constitution: “The means of defense against foreign danger have been always the instruments of tyranny at home. Among the Romans it was a standing maxim to excite a war, whenever a revolt was apprehended.”

Madison was saying that in the old Roman Empire the populace would periodically go into rebellion mode, rebelling against things like exorbitant taxation or monetary debasement at the hands of their rulers.

Whenever that would happen, the emperor would simply instigate a war against some scary foreign enemy, which would stir up both fear and patriotism within the populace. People would forget their rebellion in order to be kept safe from the new official enemy with which they were now at war.

Recall that at the end of the Cold War, most Americans were calling for a “peace dividend.” What they meant was that they were protesting the enormously high amount of money that was still being spent on the national-security establishment. They were demanding a “peace dividend” that would entail a massive reduction in national-security-state spending, which would have meant an equally massive reduction in taxes.

But notice what happened as soon as the 9/11 attacks took place. Most everyone put their “peace-dividend” demands aside and, amidst a climate of great fear and patriotism, called on the federal government to do whatever was necessary to keep them safe. The demands for a “peace dividend” disappeared permanently. The national-security establishment has been flooded with taxpayer largess ever since.

Let’s not forget what brought about those 9/11 attacks. No, it wasn’t hatred for America’s “freedom and values,” as U.S. officials maintained. It was instead what Madison said. Faced with demands for a “peace dividend,” U.S. officials had gone into the Middle East on a spree of death, destruction and humiliation, which ultimately generated so much anger and hatred that it produced retaliation in the form of the 9/11 attacks.

What might U.S. officials do this time to distract people away from Jeffrey Epstein? The Ukraine-Russia war provides an excellent opportunity to do that. All that needs to be done is furnish Ukraine with long-range missiles that are used to attack Moscow, St. Petersburg, or other big Russian cities. In that case, Russia will be tempted to strike at NATO countries that are providing such missiles and obviously using Ukraine as a proxy to destroy Russia. What better way to create a diversion away from Jeffrey Epstein than producing the prospect of all-out nuclear war between the United States and Russia?

Of course, there is also China, especially given the mindset of hatred for China that has been inculcated in the American people in the recent past. Ginning up a crisis with nuclear-armed China, say over Taiwan, would be another excellent way to cause people to stop thinking about Epstein.

There is also, of course, nuclear-armed North Korea. As we learned in the first Trump administration, it is fairly easy to stir up a crisis with that communist regime. Even if North Korea might not be able to strike the U.S. with its nuclear missiles, it can certainly strike South Korea and Japan. Would that prospect be enough to get people’s minds off Jeffrey Epstein? I would think so.

Needless to say, Iran is always available whenever a scary official enemy and a big foreign-policy crisis is needed. All that needs to be done is to proclaim that Iran is still producing nuclear weapons and plans to use them against Israel or the United States. Voilà! A big, scary official enemy and another big foreign crisis that would easily cause all those MAGA people to forget Jeffrey Epstein.

One thing is certain: Given the fact that Epstein obviously had very wealthy and very powerful clients — and, more important, given the very real likelihood that Epstein had connections to either Israeli or U.S. intelligence or both — there is no reasonable possibility that Trump is going to order the release of all the federal investigative files in the Epstein case. Will his MAGA supporters simply accept the inevitable and give up? If they don’t, then everyone should prepare himself for the prospect of a big foreign crisis in the near future.

Reprinted with permission from Future of Freedom Foundation.

The post Get Ready for a Big Foreign Crisis appeared first on LewRockwell.

Whenever I think of the behavior of the Democratic Party and the political left in general I can’t help but think of the philosophy of Batman’s nefarious arch-nemesis, The Joker. And yes, I’m saying that to understand leftists all you really need to do is read comic books.

Batman, of course, represents unflinching law, order and justice. He’s a vigilante, but a vigilante with more respect for the law than most police and politicians in his fictional realm of Gotham City. The Joker, on the other hand, represents pure chaos and the unhinged, unadulterated desire for power. Not traditional power (the means to control) but the archaic power to corrupt and destroy.

The Joker is a pure psychopath that believes his evil is a universal truth; that normal people hide behind “social constructs” to avoid admitting they want to burn down the world just like he does. He revels in the despair of calamity and the fall of moral righteousness.

I’m specifically reminded of Christopher Nolan’s film ‘Batman Begins’ in which Commissioner Gordon first warns Batman about “escalation” and reveals the calling card of the Joker:

“What about escalation? …We start carrying semi-automatics, they buy automatics. We start wearing Kevlar, they buy armor piercing rounds…And, you’re wearing a mask. Jumping off rooftops…”

In my past analysis of the political left and their habits I’ve noted many times that they seem random and unstable but they do follow some limited rules.

Rule #1 is: Leftists never admit they are wrong.

Rule #2 is: Leftists ALWAYS double down.

In other words, when they think they are losing the ability to disrupt public order and upend societal norms, they will escalate. Diplomacy is not in their nature.

The Republican Party, conservatives, moderates and even some liberals turned to Donald Trump because of his uncompromising stance on the chaos embraced by Democrats. This madness led us down a dark path of medical tyranny. It led us to woke indoctrination in public schools, race riots in American streets, trannies in the military, a stagflationary crisis and a president with a brain like cabbage.

This is not to say that Trump doesn’t have his failings; we all know he does. However, many people are willing to overlook those shortfalls as long as his administration continues to remove the leftist cancer from our fragile institutions.

When confronted with hard questions on why progressive activists do things that violate their own supposed code of ethics, invariably they will say that logic does not matter.  Their goal is to “burn it all down”. That’s it. There are no ethics. There is no other rationale (it’s the Joker philosophy incarnate).

Trump gained massive favor because he promised to bring the hammer down on these arsonists without remorse.

In the beginning the political left didn’t know what hit them. Federal funding was cut off and NGOs were throttled. Their historic sources of financial support are disappearing. Corporations that backed them a year ago are running in the other direction. They used to be able to operate nationally with impunity but now they’re relegated to petty mob actions in deep blue cities like LA, New York or Seattle where they can still find support among Democrat officials.

That said, I suspect what we are seeing the past month in New York with the rising success of Mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani is not desperation, but escalation.

Democrats as a party have rarely been grounded in moderation, but they have always been careful to hide their true intentions when it comes to their political goals. Socialism in the US is treated as a four-letter-word and most Dems have long sought to water down their association with the term. Whenever conservatives accuse Democrats of engaging in socialist or communist agendas they quickly accuse us of being “conspiracy theorists”.

But that tactic no longer works and instead of seeking to sterilize their image the Democrats are now doubling down and openly embracing the socialist/communist platform.  They are no longer compromising by trying to hide their true intent. They are going full bore hammer and sickle with no shame.

In other words, leftist insanity pushes moderates further to the right, and the further to the right people go, the more extreme leftists will become. Think they can’t get any worse than they are now? Think again…

Democrat leaders initially criticized Mamdani’s campaign as going too far, but his appeal among New York’s progressive population is undeniable. They claim it’s because he argues his ideas with clarity, but I would say that his policies are in fact a mish-mash of socialist and Marxist mechanics that have failed time and time again throughout history.

Mamdani will drive out most major businesses and wealthy taxpayers (who already provide around 50% of all tax revenues in NYC).  Jobs will disappear.  Government interference in housing markets, including rent freezes, will force property owners to sell instead of lease. Efforts to construct government funded housing will take a decade or longer and the cost to taxpayers would be immense. The housing supply will implode and lower income workers will not be able to find a home, so they will all leave.

It’s not difficult to predict how the situation will go if this guy becomes mayor. Yet, the progressive media is starting to court Mamdani and promote his campaign. Democrats are saying that the candidate represents a new path for their party. Keep in mind that Mamdani’s theories on society are built on the same woke nonsense that led to the complete obliteration of the Democrats in 2024. So, why are they doubling down?

Again, socialism/Marxism/communism are the archetypal counterpoints to the things leftists hate most:  Conservatives, Capitalism (free markets), Christian morality, law and order, western culture and nationalism at the expense of globalism. They might not realize it yet, but they are looking for a Joker to counter our Batman and they think they’ve found him in the costume of hardcore socialism.

They could admit they are wrong; that their ideals do not appeal to the public and that their efforts to “deconstruct” American social norms are rooted in malice rather than good intentions. They could accept that they do not represent the majority of the population as they originally assumed. They could apologize and promise to stop forcing their degenerate views on the masses.

But then again, that would require them to violate Rule #1.

And so, as “populism” continues to gain public favor and Americans focus more on America and less on globalism, Democrats and liberals will drift further and further from the shore into the frenzy of the socialist storm. They may even find some initial success there.

We saw this in Canada where liberal voters in that country chose to replace Justin Trudeau (an insufferable woke leftist that nearly destroyed their economy) with an even more militant leftist/globalist in the form of Mark Carney.

Leftists in the US will rally around uncompromising socialists like Mamdani because they’re tired of pretending that they care about “democracy”, free markets, property rights, moral codes or freedom in general. They need an all encompassing vision, even if it’s a monstrous and dystopian one. And, they want leadership that is transparent and unapologetic in its psychopathic intent. They don’t want to play the role of humanitarians anymore – They want to take the mask off and taste the flavors of blood and power.

They want to unleash their inner Joker.

For the rest of us this means there will be many more clashes, more mob actions, more violence and very little peace for the foreseeable future. Remember, the goal is to “burn everything down” so that the left (and the globalists) can rebuild the nation with their own agenda in mind. Democrats will welcome the most extreme leaders, because if they don’t they know they will be forced to do the worst thing imaginable: Self reflect and change their ways.

This article was written by Brandon Smith and originally published at Birch Gold Group

The post Batman vs The Joker: Democrats Will Double Down On Chaos To Save Their Party appeared first on LewRockwell.

A doctor in Gaza named Nick Maynard reports that Israeli snipers are now shooting starving civilians in different body parts on different days, based on the injuries people show up with for treatment. There’s a head day, a leg day, a genitals day, etc.

“The medical teams here have also been seeing a clear pattern of people being shot in certain body parts on different days, such as the head, legs or genitals, which seems to indicate deliberate targeting,” Maynard says.

I keep thinking there’s nothing Israel could do that would shock me anymore, but they keep finding ways.

❖

The Israeli military has attacked the residence of World Health Organization staff, detaining multiple medical workers. This comes as Israel’s Trade Envoy Fleur Hassan-Nahoum tells Channel 4 News that “most doctors in most hospitals in Gaza” are “involved in terrorist activities”.

Possibly the single dumbest thing Israel and its apologists ask us to believe is that Israel has been systematically demolishing Gaza’s healthcare infrastructure because the healthcare infrastructure is full of terrorists, and not because they want to commit genocide.

❖

The Gaza Health Ministry announced on Monday that among the 130 Palestinians killed in the daily death toll of Israel’s genocidal onslaught, 99 were killed while trying to obtain food from aid sites.

At some point you just run out of words for talking about how evil this shit is.

❖

If you want to find out who someone truly is, surrender fully to their will and give them everything they want. They’ll show you.

Zionism is showing us what it truly is right now. This is what it looks like when the Zionists are allowed to do exactly what they want to do.

❖

Hasbarists have been going nuts on social media lately. Whenever Israel is acting more evil than usual the online Israel apologia always kicks into high gear.

Words words words words words words words. They love their words. They think if they say enough words with enough feigned conviction people will go “Oh okay well maybe starving civilians to death is actually fine and normal after all.”

❖

I’ll never get used to the way I’m watching my own government and its allies support the most nightmarish shit I’ve ever seen in my life every single day in the middle east and yet people keep trying to convince me to be really fearful and hateful toward Muslims.

❖

❖

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has been having a public tantrum on Bluesky because of the leftist backlash from her vote against an amendment which would have blocked funding for Israel’s missile defense system and her garbage justification of that move, angrily proclaiming that her “record on Palestine speaks for itself” and claiming that the opposition has created a “threat environment” that is “scary”.

That AOC chose to throw this fit on Bluesky rather than Twitter is telling; she got so mad that she ran to the liberal echo chamber where she’s adored in order to complain about how the left won’t even let her support just a little bit of genocide as a treat.

This is just her yelling at people for not loving her when she does gross swamp monster things. But it doesn’t work that way. You don’t get to be the beloved leftist people’s champion and also be the person who votes against an amendment to withhold $500 million of military funding for a genocidal state and then justifies it with obnoxious lies. You don’t get to do the darling of the left thing and also do the weird Zionist swamp creature thing. You have to pick one, because you can’t be both. No amount of yelling at ordinary people is going to change that.

AOC and her supporters wouldn’t have to spend days frantically justifying her refusal to support Palestine and oppose genocide at every opportunity if she would simply support Palestine and oppose genocide at every opportunity. That’s normal. Just be normal. Do the normal thing.

_________________

The best way to make sure you see everything I write is to get on my free mailing list. My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece here are some options where you can toss some money into my tip jar if you want to. Click here for links for my social media, books, merch, and audio/video versions of each article. All my work is free to bootleg and use in any way, shape or form; republish it, translate it, use it on merchandise; whatever you want. All works co-authored with my husband Tim Foley.

The post Israel’s Depravity Will Always Find New Ways To Shock You appeared first on LewRockwell.

First of Its Kind

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Significance

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

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

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

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

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

Follow-Up

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Complicity

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

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

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

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

No Pause

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

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

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

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

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

The original source of this article is Global Research.

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

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

Sun Tzu, Art of War, III.18

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Reprinted with permission from Moon of Alabama.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Let’s summarize AI’s fundamental weaknesses:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This describes AI agents in a nutshell.

Read the Whole Article

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Fed’s Beige Book shows a weakening economy

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

What is the Beige Book?

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

What is the purpose of the Beige Book?

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

By Fed Region

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

Economy at Stall Speed

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

New York and Philadelphia declined “modestly”

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

This post originated on MishTalk.Com.

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