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1. Living in the Daze of Deception
2. Life in the Negative World
3. Water: For Health, for Healing, for Life
4. Anarchy and the Kingdom of God
5. Wilson’s War
6. Cancer and the New Biology of Water 
7. Outlive
8. Area 51: An Uncensored History of America’s Top Secret Military Base 
9. How Not to Die: Discover the Foods Scientifically Proven to Prevent and Reverse Disease 
10. Exploring the Southern Tradition
11. Policy of Deceit: Britain and Palestine
12. The Ultimate Guide To Red Light Therapy
13. Lick the Sugar Habit
14. The Anxious Generation
15. Restart Your Heart
16. Herbal Antivirals: Heal Yourself Faster, Cheaper and Safer
17. Calhoun: A Statesman for the 21st Century 
18. The EssentialCalhoun
19. Faith That Will Not Fail
20. Breath: The New Science of a Lost Art

The post 20 Books You Need To Read appeared first on LewRockwell.

Brown University’s cost of the Afghan war project just concluded that America’s longest war cost an estimated $US 2.2 trillion dollars – that’s ‘trillion dollars.”

If we add in George W. Bush’s fake `war on terror,’ Brown’s scholars estimate that the cost rises to US $8 trillion!

Most of this huge amount was financed by loans, not through taxes.  Meaning that every dollar spent must be paid for by borrowing. That means paying interest (raised by taxes) on the borrowed money – $95 billion dollars of taxpayer money that Biden just gave to Israel, Taiwan and Ukraine in a desperate attempt to buy the November election.

Interestingly, the much-ballyhooed war in Afghanistan has all but vanished from the media.  All the CNN generals who postured on TV about the Afghan War have fallen into silence.  They were dead wrong about the war.  The minute Donald Trump ended the Afghan War by cutting off the billions in US money that kept the corrupt US-backed Kabul regime alive, the war ended and the blizzard of propaganda against Taliban abated.  The $2.2 trillion war abruptly became unimportant.

I was blacklisted by top newspapers and TV stations in the US, Mideast and Europe for having predicted that the Taliban resistance movement would win the conflict. I wrote that Taliban was the only legitimate mass political movement in Afghanistan.  America co-opted other groups, like the heroin-dealing Tajik Northern Alliance and some anti-Taliban factions backed by Russia or Iran. The US ended up backing the Afghan heroin trade – which Taliban has completely shut down since it returned to power in Kabul. 

The United States is the most over-propagandized nation on earth.  Americans are barraged around the clock by government propaganda, commercial messages, internet agitprop and pro-war movies.  Even the old Soviet Union was not so flooded by non-stop propaganda. 

Today, we get 24/7 advertising for Ukraine, Taiwan and, of course, Israel.  Women have been a particular target for the anti-Taliban propaganda – the same Taliban that were US allies in the 1980’s, as I saw.  Taliban’s mountaineers are a wild and crazy bunch of warriors.  Everything they believe in runs counter to the overly feminized United States.

The zeitgeist of the Afghan warriors Taliban’s credo is ‘tobacco, guns, and war.’ 

My columns about why war in Afghanistan was a huge mistake made me an object of hate. A former born-again evangelical prime minister of Canada actually sent his flunkies to get my 40-year old column dropped from the nation’s largest newspaper.  He detested what I had to say but apparently lost no sleep over the scores of Canadian soldiers he sent to their death in Afghanistan or the millions wasted on the foolish Afghan War.

Politicians and generals who lose wars and trillions of dollars should admit their folly and resign.  The media that promoted the colonial Afghan war should be rid of the propagandists infesting its ranks.  Today, we see CNN, the New York Times, and Fox, the twin voices of America’s neocons, cheer-leading for the massacres in Gaza.

Instead, those newscasters who shilled for the Afghan War are now busily promoted President Biden’s wars.  They and TV commentators seem to have no shame when it comes to their hugely bloody, expensive errors in Afghanistan.  Nor do we find many commentators or critics who share the least guilt over carpet bombing Afghan villages by B-52 and B-1 heavy bombers.

How many Afghan civilians did we kill?  The Pentagon refuses to release estimates.  The Soviets are estimated to have killed two million Afghans.  I believe the US has killed at least one million.

A trillion dollars here, a trillion dollars there, suddenly we are taking about real money.  Part of the dangerous inflation that today bedevils America was caused by reckless government spending on Afghanistan – as well as Ukraine, Israel and Taiwan. 

The post How To Waste Two Trillion Dollars appeared first on LewRockwell.

These people have to be stopped!

We are talking about the nation’s unhinged monetary politburo domiciled in the Eccles Building, of course. It is bad enough that their relentless inflation of financial assets has showered the 1% with untold trillions of windfall gains, but their ultimate crime is that they lured the nation’s elected politician into a veritable fiscal trance. Consequently, future generations will be lugging the service costs on insuperable public debts for years to come.

For more than two decades these foolish PhDs and monetary apparatchiks drove the entire Treasury yield curve to rock bottom, even as public debt erupted skyward. In this context, the single biggest chunk of the Treasury debt lies in the 90-day T-bill sector, but between December 2007 and June 2023 the inflation-adjusted yield on this workhorse debt security was negative 95% of the time.

That’s right. During that 187-month span, the interest rate exceeded the running (LTM) inflation rate during only nine months, as depicted by the purple area picking above the zero bound in the chart, and even then by just a tad. All the rest of the time, Uncle Sam was happily taxing the inflationary rise in nominal incomes, even as his debt service payments were dramatically lagging the 78% rise of CPI during that period.

Inflation-Adjusted Yield On 90-Day T-bills, 2007 to 2022

The above was the fiscal equivalent of Novocain. It enabled the elected politicians to merrily jig up and down Pennsylvania Avenue and stroll the K-Street corridors dispensing bountiful goodies left and right, while experiencing nary a moment of pain from the massive debt burden they were piling on the main street economy.

Accordingly, during the quarter-century between Q4 1997 and Q1 2022 the public debt soared from $5.5 trillion to $30.4 trillion or by 453%. In any rational world a commensurate rise in Federal interest expense would have surely awakened at least some of the revilers.

But not in Fed World. As it happened, Uncle Sam’s interest expense only increased by 73%, rising from $368 billion to $635 billion per year during the same period.  By contrast, had interest rates remained at the not unreasonable levels posted in late 1997, the interest expense level by Q1 2022, when the Fed finally awakened to the inflationary monster it had fostered, would have been $2.03 trillion per annum.

In short, the Fed reckless and relentless repression of interest rates during that quarter century fostered an elephant in the room that was one for the ages. Annualized Federal interest expense was fully $1.3 trillion lower than would have been the case at the yield curve in place in Q4 1997.

Alas, the missing interest expense amounted to the equivalent of the entire social security budget!

So, we’d guess the politicians might have been aroused from their slumber had interest expense reflected market rates. Instead, they were actually getting dreadfully wrong price signals and the present fiscal catastrophe is the consequence.

Index Of Public Debt Versus Federal Interest Expense, Q4 1997-Q1 2022

Needless to say, the US economy was not wallowing in failure or under-performance at the rates which prevailed in 1997. In fact, during that year real GDP growth was +4.5%, inflation posted at just 1.7%, real median family income rose by 3.2%, job growth was 2.8% and the real interest rates on the 10-year UST was +4.0%.

In short, 1997 generated one of the strongest macroeconomic performances in recent decades—even with inflation-adjusted yields on the 10-year UST of +4.0%. So there was no compelling reason for a massive compression of interest rates, but that is exactly what the Fed engineered over the next two decades. As shown in the graph below, rates were systematically pushed lower by 300 to 500 basis points across the curve by the bottom in 2020-2021.

Current yields are higher by 300 to 400 basis points from this recent bottom, but here’s the thing: They are only back to nominal levels prevalent at the beginning of the period in 1997, even as inflation is running at 3-4% Y/Y increases, or double the levels of 1997.

US Treasury Yields, 1997 to 2024

Unfortunately, even as the Fed has tepidly moved toward normalization of yields as shown in the graph above, Wall Street is bringing unrelenting pressure for a new round of rates cuts, which would result in yet another spree of the deep interest rate repression and distortion that has fueled Washington’s fiscal binge since the turn of the century.

As it is, the public debt is already growing at an accelerating clip, even before the US economy succumbs to the recession that is now gathering force. And we do mean accelerating. The public debt has recently been increasing by $1 trillion every 100 days. That’s $10 billion per day, $416 million per hour.

In fact, Uncle Sam’s debt has risen by $470 billion in the first two months of this year to $34.5 trillion and is on pace to surpass $35 trillion in a little over a month, $37 trillion well before year’s end, and $40 trillion some time in 2025. That’s about two years ahead of the current CBO (Congressional Budget Office) forecast.

On the current path, moreover, the public debt will reach $60 trillion by the end of the 10-year budget window. But even that depends upon the CBO’s latest iteration of Rosy Scenario, which envisions no recession ever again, just 2% inflation as far as the eye can see and real interest rates of barely 1%. And that’s to say nothing of the trillions in phony spending cuts and out-year tax increases that are built into the CBO baseline but which Congress will never actually allow to materialize.

What is worse, even with partial normalization of rates, a veritable tsunami of Federal interest expense is now gathering steam. That is because the ultra-low yields of 2007 to 2022 are now rolling over into the current market rates shown above—at the same time that the amount of public debt outstanding is heading skyward. As a result, the annualized run rate of Federal interest expense hit $1.1 trillion in February and is heading for $1.6 trillion by the end of the current fiscal year in September.

Finally, even as the run-rate of interest expense has been soaring, the bureaucrats at the US Treasury have been drastically shortening the maturity of the outstanding debt, as it rolls over. Accordingly, more than $21 trillion of Treasury paper has been refinanced in the under one-year T-bill market, thereby lowering the weighted-average maturity of the public debt to less than five- years.

The apparent bet is that the Fed will be cutting rates soon. As is becoming more apparent by the day, however, that’s just not in the cards: No matter how you slice it, the running level of inflation has remained exceedingly sticky and shows no signs of dropping below its current 3-4% range any time soon.

What is also becoming more apparent by the day is that the money-printers at the Fed have led Washington into a massive fiscal calamity. It is only a matter of time, therefore, until the brown stuff hits the fan like never before.

Reprinted with permission from David Stockman’s Contra Corner.

The post The $1.3 Trillion Elephant in the Room appeared first on LewRockwell.

To be crucified is to suffer and die slowly and agonizingly.  It was a common form of execution in the ancient world.  It is generally associated with Rome’s killing of Jesus and carries profound symbolic spiritual meaning for Christians.  In its figurative sense, it refers to many types of suffering and death inflicted on the weak by the strong, such as the ongoing genocidal slaughter of Palestinians by the Israel government.

Twenty or so years ago when the wearing of crosses by all types of people was the cultural rage, a woman I know said she was thinking of getting one.  When I asked her why, since she was Jewish, she said it was because she thought they were beautiful.  She seemed oblivious to the fact that to Christians they were gruesome but revelatory spiritual symbols, the equivalent of the electric chair or a noose, but linked to the Easter Resurrection and the non-violent triumph over death that is at the core of Christianity.

Her focus on beauty forcibly struck me that secular culture had triumphed in its establishment of an anti-creed creed wherein the pursuit of a sense of well-being and aesthetic tranquility had trumped traditional belief, while it used all faiths in its pursuit of a self-centered nihilism through a faux-spirituality linked to a precious aesthetic of beauty.

Philip Rieff noticed this in the mid-1960s when he wrote in The Triumph of the Therapeutic:

To raise the question of nihilism, as sociologists since Auguste Comte have done, demonstrates a major change in tone: the note of apprehension has gone out of the asking. We believe that we know something our predecessors did not: that we can live freely at last, enjoying all our senses – except the sense of the past – as unremembering, honest, and friendly barbarians all, in a technological Eden. . . . this culture, which once imagined itself inside a church, feels trapped in something like a zoo of separate cages. Modern men are like Rilke’s panther, forever looking out of one cage into another.

While today those cages would better be described as cells – as in cell phones – Rieff’s point was prescient in the extreme, echoing in its way Max Weber’s 1905 prophecy in The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism of the coming “iron cage.”

It would be understandable if you assumed the photograph of the crucifix that precedes my words was taken in a church since its foregrounding before the apse of the Medieval Spanish church of San Martin at Fuentidueña makes it seem so.  It was not, except if you realize that museums have become the modern churches, where people flock to revere art for art’s sake and perhaps to find some consolation they have lost at a deeper level.

Museums that have been built and maintained by the very rich to serve as their own churches to the glory of mammon and their own self-deluded immortalization.

Mammon that has been built on the backs of the poor and working class, just as these edifices have.

Beneath all high cultural institutions such as museums and arts venues like The Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, Lincoln Center in New York, etc., lies the expropriated labor and land of the lower classes, the same classes whose sweat and blood was exploited throughout capital’s historical transmutations from commercial to industrial to financial to create the immense wealth of the super-rich.

There is a reason the nineteenth-century America industrialists such as Vanderbilt, Mellon, Carnegie, Rockefeller, et al. were called “The Robber Barons.”  They were crooks.  They are still with us, of course, aided and abetted by today’s latest billionaire class.  They build and finance the aforementioned cultural institutions as well as own and operate the major institutions of mass communication and entertainment, such as newspapers, television networks, telecommunication corporations, film studios, etc. – the entertainment industrial complex.  In this direct communication capacity, they control the mediation of “reality” to the general population.  They serve the interests of what the great crusading sociologist C. Wright Mills called the power elite in and out of government, of which they are an interlocking part, and through which they move smoothly in a game of revolving chairs.  They operate the great Spectacle for the general population while moving the levers of power backstage.

When he died, Mills was working on a massive book exploring what he provisionally titled The Cultural Apparatus.  He defined this complex as follows:

The cultural apparatus is composed of all the organizations and milieux in which artistic, intellectual, and scientific work goes on and of the means by which such work is made available . . . it contains an elaborate set of institutions: of schools and theaters, newspapers and census bureaus,  studios, laboratories, museums, little magazines and radio networks. . . Inside this network, standing between men and events, the images, meanings, and slogans that define the worlds in which [we] live are organized and compared, maintained and revised, lost and cherished, hidden, debunked, celebrated.  Taken as a whole the cultural apparatus is the lens of mankind through which men see; the medium by which they report and interpret what they see.

Columbia University, where he taught and is today in the news headlines for its police crackdown on student dissent for their pro-Palestinian protest, is one of those elite cultural institutions, a place Mills was never comfortable at and whose colleagues looked at him askance for his critique of the power elite’s warfare state.

Columbia, with its racist history as it saw its elite status threatened by the growth of the neighboring black community in Harlem in the 1920s and 1930s, and Columbia’s further expansion into these neighborhoods since.

Columbia, like all elite cultural institutions, born in its own mind sui generis and raised to the heights in purity and innocence, but whose foundation is rotten with dirty money.

Yet, as Terry Eagleton recently wrote in the London Review of Books, “This is not the way culture generally likes to see itself. Like the Oedipal child, it tends to disavow its lowly parentage and fantasise that it sprang from its own loins, self-generating and self-fashioning.”  Like Columbia and all the elite universities of “higher learning” –  Harvard, Oxford, Yale, Princeton, Stanford, etc. – that serve as legitimating tools for the power elite and their mendaciousness, the museums and other well-known arts institutions exert an enormous influence, not only over culture in the high cultural sense, but over the transformation of society as a whole, often in ways that go unnoticed.  Eagleton again:

There’s an irony here, since few things bind art so closely to its material context as its claim to stand free of that context. This is because the work of art as autonomous and self-determining, an idea born sometime in the late 18th century, is the model of a version of the human subject that has been rapidly gaining ground in actual life. Men and women are now seen as authors of themselves . . .

The photo of the crucifix and the apse that precedes my words was recently taken in The Cloisters in upper Manhattan, New York City, where the ghosts of dead religious beliefs prowl about the rooms.  It is meant to present a “chapel-like gallery.”  The Cloisters is a museum owned by the Metropolitan Museum of Art and is now known as The Met Cloisters.  It, and the beautiful 67 acre Fort Tryon Park upon which it sits, was created and financed by John D. Rockefeller, Jr. who, according to The Met’s website was fascinated with the past.  “The expert artistry of medieval art as well as its innate spirituality strongly appealed to this philanthropist and collector,” we are told.

Spirituality from the Middle Ages, I will amend, that when it had been transported to the museum was devoid of its living context and could be presented as a gift from a Robber Baron family to the people of NYC who needed to be uplifted by the noblesse oblige kindness of the Rockefellers.  Dead spirits devoid of living inner religiousness who smuggle secret messages to a public hungry for meaning.

Like my friend who considered getting a cross, Rockefeller no doubt found the crucifix and apse that frames it quite beautiful and spiritually uplifting, but not the living spirituality of the criminal Jesus whose message about wealth never informed the Rockefellers’ ruthless exploitation of others on their rise to power.

In years long past, when I first visited The Cloisters, being a native Bronx New Yorker, it was known simply as The Cloisters, even though The Met owned it since its inception in the 1930s.  Before I visited it as a young man, I had the impression it had some religious significance, as the name cloister suggests (early 13c., cloystre, “a monastery or convent, a place of religious retirement or seclusion”).

But I was wrong; it is a museum, a beautiful museum build with stones from European monasteries, churches, and convents transported long ago across the Atlantic and reconstructed on the heights above the Hudson River.  It is filled with medieval art collected by Rockefeller, George Gray Barnard, and other wealthy art collectors.  For those so disposed to wondering what royalty prayed for in medieval days – was it to slaughter as many Muslims as possible in the Crusades? – one can view the tiny prayer book once owned by the Queen of France – and imagine.  Such imagining might cause one to realize how little things have changed and how little things mean a lot.  The trick is to notice them.

Political power needs cultural power to operate effectively.  The elites can’t just slam people around and expect no response.  They need to worm their ideological messages into the public consciousness in pleasing ways.  Writing of Edmund Burke, Eagleton says, “Instead, he recognises that culture in the anthropological sense is the place where power has to bed itself down if it is to be effective. If the political doesn’t find a home in the cultural, its sovereignty won’t take hold.”

Thus, for an example from Hollywood and the pop-cultural realm, we might notice how many movies and TV shows were secretly co-written by the Pentagon.

Another name for this is propaganda

Cultural messaging is where the power elite need to seduce regular people that power is being exercised for their own good and everyone is in bed together.  Soft power.  Nice power.  Power that is disguised as beneficial for all.  Beautiful power.  “Spiritual” power.

As I said, Fort Tryon Park (designed by the Olmsted brothers, sons of the designer of Central Park, Frederick Law Olmsted) and The Cloisters are spectacularly beautiful.  Walking through the park on a sunny spring day to reach the museum on its northern end – the flowers and cherry blossom trees dazzling and the Hudson River glistening below – one is overwhelmed by the beauty and grateful to its human gift giver – John D. Rockefeller, Jr.  It takes a little mental stretching to grasp the paradox or the delusional dream of such thankfulness.  But it cuts to the heart of the power of the cultural complex and the ways it works to soften the ruthlessness of its ultra-rich capitalistic controllers.

First they rob you, then they gift you with a walk in the park.

And when you step inside their institutions, you are provided with opportunities to think within controlled parameters, while also getting a whiff of the theatrical nature of your experience.  The whiff is as important as the thinking, for it is a reminder to keep your mouth shut and you too will flourish.  The fraudulence of the cultural entertainment-educational complex can dawn on some who have been invited into the inner sanctums of power and prestige, as it has done presently for many college students (and some faculty) whose consciences do not allow them to sit still while Palestinians are slaughtered.  But if you dare to act upon your sense of being taken for a ride, watch out!   You will be banned from the pleasures that are offered for your acquiescence, as these students are now finding out.

They have rejected that part of the learning experience that George Orwell called Crimestop:

. . . [it] means the faculty of stopping short, as though by instinct, at the threshold of any dangerous thought.  It includes the power of not grasping analogies, of failing to perceive logical errors, of misunderstanding the simplest arguments if they are inimical to Ingsoc, and of being bored or repelled by any train of thought which is capable of leading in a heretical direction. Crimestop, in short, means protective stupidity.

Sometimes real thinking and conscience win the day, for the power of the elite’s cultural institutions is not omnipotent.  Everyone is not for sale, even those invited into the banquet.  Teach people to think and meditate on history and they just might think outside the cage of your expectations.

While the genocide of the Palestinians is transparent for everyone to see, the leaders of these elite universities, unlike the rebellious students, turn a blind eye to the obvious.  They follow the script they were handed when they accepted their prestigious positions of power, living up to Julian Benda’s famous appellation – The Treason of the Intellectuals.

But “beautiful” power becomes the iron fist when the plebes get too uppity and actually take seriously their studies and rebel as human beings with consciences.  This is the flip side to the hidden messages of the elite cultural institutions.

This two-sided process of hidden and obvious messages operates also in the media complex (see this).   While the so-called liberal and conservative media – all stenographers for the intelligence agencies – pour forth the most blatant propaganda about Palestine, Israel, Russia and Ukraine, etc. that is so conspicuous that it is comedic if it weren’t so dangerous, the self-depicted cognoscenti also ingest subtler messages, often from the alternative media and from people they consider dissidents.  They are like little seeds slipped in as if no one will notice; they work their magic nearly unconsciously.  Few notice them, for they are often imperceptible.  But they have their effects and are cumulative and are far more powerful over time than blatant statements that will turn people off, especially those who think propaganda doesn’t work on them.  This is the power of successful propaganda, whether purposeful  or not.  It particularly works well on “intellectual” and highly-schooled people.

Some people think that if you see more than is apparent when visiting sites such as The Cloisters in Fort Tryon Park, you are incapable of enjoying the beauty of these “gifts.”  This is not true.  They are not mutually exclusive.  The great African-American scholar W. E. B. DuBois coined a term double-consciousness which I think can be used in this context to describe some people’s experience, not just that of African-Americans.  They see at least two truths simultaneously.  Their unreconciled double-consciousness prevents them from single vision when visiting the power elite’s beautiful creations.  William Blake’s words – “May God us keep from single vision and Newton’s sleep! – inform their perspective.

On the same trip to The Cloisters, my wife and I walked extensively through Central Park, surely one of the most beautiful parks in the world.  It was spectacularly aflame with Cherry Blossom trees and people from all over the world enjoying its pleasures, as did we. I, however, when entering and exiting this paradise, couldn’t help thinking that this park was caged in by the massive apartment complexes of the super-rich elite class, as if to say to the park’s visitors: you can visit but not stay.  We oversee your pleasures.

Max Weber said it well a century ago:

No one knows who will live in this cage in the future, or at the end of this tremendous development entirely new prophets will arise, or there will be a great rebirth of old ideas and ideals, or, if neither, mechanized petrification, embellished with a sort of convulsive self-importance. For of the last stage of this cultural development, it might be said: “Specialists without spirit, sensualists without heart; this nullity imagines that it has attained a level of civilization never before achieved.”

Reprinted with the author’s permission.

The post The Hidden Messages of the Power Elite’s Cultural Apparatus appeared first on LewRockwell.

Response to the “antisemitism awareness act of 2023”

What is happening on college campuses and what is being pushed through the Congress

The passage of the “Antisemitism Awareness Act” on May 1, the traditional day for celebrating the contributions of labor, by the House of Representatives, represents a dangerous effort to weaponize the laws and regulations established over the last 150 years to protect citizens against racial discrimination and to use them now to justify the absolute power of a corrupt government, doing the bidding of multinational banks and corporations, to punish anyone speaking out against the horrific actions taking place in Gaza. But the bill is not ultimately about Gaza, or about Israel. It is about giving the government the authority absent from the Constitution to punish citizens for speaking the truth about the illegal and unconstitutional actions of the government, or other governments around the world’.

The current dry run on the campuses of American universities of protests against the Gaza killings was intentionally watered down. It featured students wearing masks, backing corrupt Democratic Party “progressives,” who did not go far in their criticism of the state. It also had the university and the police who had been given instructions not to attack with the brutality that they are capable of in other actions.

The very fact that the campus protests were widely discussed on NPR, a controlled mouthpiece of the multinational banks which entirely ignores all spontaneous actions by citizens, tells us that these student protests were used as cover for passing this bill.

Once the “Antisemitism Awareness Law” is in place and can used to justify massive shifts in the Department of Education, and by extension American elementary schools, middle schools, high schools, colleges and graduate programs, we can be certain that the true steel fist in the velvet glove will get to work shutting down all questions about the special relationship of the United States with Israel not only in terms of protests, but in terms of the content of courses, the text books assigned, and, by extension, in the media as a whole.

And it will not stop there. Once the precedent is in place, all criticism of just about anything can be outlawed, or subject to onerous punishments.

Moreover, there can be no doubt that this law is accompanied by the extension of the secret and top-secret classification system throughout the Department of Education, much as has been done in the Department of Energy and Department of the Treasury over the last few years. In other words, multinational financial entities will be able to give orders for education policy in the US that will be secret, for which it will be a crime (subject to massive fines and jail time) to reveal to the public.

Let us take a look at a few key passages in the Antisemitism Awareness Act.

“An act to provide for the consideration of a definition of antisemitism set forth by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance for the enforcement of Federal antidiscrimination laws concerning education programs or activities, and for other purposes”

[a justification of Federal interference in education at all levels justified by the interpretation of the term “antisemitism” to mean “Zionism” or “Israeli policy.” It is important to note that many of the Republican advocates of these polices embrace the “Great Replacement Theory” that postulates that it is the Jews, and not the rich, who are using immigration to destroy the lives of working Americans. This devious antisemitic political movement is popular among precisely those who are suggesting that attacks on Israel are by their nature “antisemitic.” The term “antisemitic” is but a trial term, a placeholder, for what will be eventually the replaced by the term “anti-American”]

“It is the policy of the United States to enforce such title against prohibited forms of discrimination rooted in antisemitism as vigorously as against all other forms of discrimination prohibited by such title”

[There is no need for a new law against antisemitism. The topic is already addressed extensively in Federal law. The only point is to authorize the use of the term “antisemitism” to suppress free speech]

“(A) increase awareness and understanding of antisemitism, including its threat to America;

[the use of the term “threat to America” expands the definition of “antisemitism” from a civil rights issue to a “national security” issue, and thus justifies the use of secret/top secret classification, and the extended role of Homeland Security, and even intelligence and defense agencies in domestic and international operations against “antisemitism” activities by citizens]

(B) improve safety and security for Jewish communities;

[This phrase is clearly intended to justify new Homeland Security operations and provides authorization for police to do most anything to stop “antisemitism]

(C) reverse the normalization of antisemitism and counter antisemitic discrimination;

[This is a justification for further “anti-disinformation” operations through Homeland Security that can be farmed out to private intelligence, think tanks, and public relations firms]

(D) expand communication and collaboration between communities.”

[This harmless phrase is most likely referring to intelligence fusion centers that will be set up locally and internationally to track any “antisemitism” 24/7 under Homeland Security]

“Antisemitism is on the rise in the United States and is impacting Jewish students in K–12 schools, colleges, and universities.”

[This twisted reasoning implies that stopping antisemitism and protecting Jewish students permits the department of education to issue internal orders regarding teaching, the content of textbooks, the assignment of readings, and even discussion among students regarding Israel and its actions. As stated before, the ultimate goal goes far beyond criticism of Israel. The point is to use civil rights law to create a dictatorship in which criticism is not permitted. This state already exists in most of the corporate world, and government world. It is being extended to education, media, and eventually to all of civil society]

“On December 11, 2019, Executive Order 13899 extended protections against discrimination under the Civil Rights Act of 1964 to individuals subjected to antisemitism on college and university campuses and tasked Federal agencies to consider the IHRA Working Definition of Antisemitism”

[This executive order, of questionable constitutionality, empowers “Federal agencies” to take action against individuals and groups for their writings, expressions, or actions because they are “antisemitic]

“The White House released the first-ever United States National Strategy to Counter Antisemitism on May 25, 2023, making clear that the fight against this hate is a national, bipartisan priority that must be successfully conducted through a whole-of-government-and-society approach.”

[The term “National Strategy to Counter Antisemitism” shows the move away from civil rights and into the rhetoric of national security. Such a shift opens the floodgates for the active violation of freedom of speech]

Read the Whole Article

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This article was originally published at Birch Gold Group

World reserve status allows for amazing latitude in terms of monetary policy. The Federal Reserve understands that there is constant demand for dollars overseas as a means to more easily import and export goods. The dollar’s petro-status also makes it essential for trading oil globally. This means that the central bank of the US has been able to create fiat currency from thin air to a far higher degree than any other central bank on the planet while avoiding the immediate effects of hyperinflation.

Much of that cash as well as dollar denominated debt (physical and digital) ends up in the coffers of foreign central banks, international banks and investment firms where it is held as a hedge or used to adjust the exchange rates of other currencies for trade advantage. As much as one-half of the value of all U.S. currency is estimated to be circulating abroad.

World reserve status along with various debt instruments allowed the US government and the Fed to create tens of trillions of dollars in new currency after the 2008 credit crash, all while keeping inflation under control (sort of). The problem is that this system of stowing dollars overseas only lasts so long and eventually the consequences of overprinting come home to roost.

The Bretton Woods Agreement of 1944 established the framework for the rise of the US dollar and while the benefits are obvious, especially for the banks, there are numerous costs involved. Think of world reserve status as a “deal with the devil” – You get the fame, you get the fortune, you get the hot girlfriend and the sweet car, but one day the devil is coming to collect and when he does he’s going to take EVERYTHING, including your soul.

Unfortunately, I suspect the time is coming soon for the US and it may be in the form of a brand new Bretton Woods-like system that removes the dollar as world reserve and replaces it with a new digital basket structure. Global banks are essentially admitting to the plan for a complete overhaul of the dollar-based financial world and the creation of a CBDC-centric system built on “unified ledgers.”

There have been three recent developments all announced in succession that suggest the dollar’s replacement is imminent (before this decade is over).

The IMF’s XC Model – A Centralized Policy For CBDCs

The IMF’s XC platform was released as a theoretical model in November of 2022 and matches closely with their long discussed concept of a global Special Drawing Rights basket, only in this case it would tie together all CBDCs under one umbrella along with “legacy currencies.”

It’s promoted as a policy structure to make cross-border payments in CBDCs “easier” and this model is focused primarily on currency exchanges between governments and central banks. Of course, it places the IMF as the middle-man in terms of controlling the flow of digital transactions. The IMF suggests that the XC platform would make the transition from legacy currencies to CBDCs less complicated for the various nations involved.

As the IMF noted in a discussion on centralized ledgers in 2023:

“We could end up in a world where we have connected entities to some degree, but some entities and some countries that are excluded. And as a global and multilateral institution, we’re sort of aiming to, you know, provide a basic connectivity, a basic set of rules and governance that is truly multilateral and inclusive. So, I think that is—the ambition is to aim for innovation that is compatible with policy goals and that is inclusive relative to the broad membership of, say, the IMF.”

To translate, decentralized systems are bad. “Inclusivity” (collectivism) is good. And the IMF wants to work in tandem with other globalist institutions to be the facilitators (controllers) of that economic collectivism.

Bank For International Settlements Unified Ledger

Not more than a day after the IMF announced their XC platform goals, the BIS announced their plans for a unified ledger for all CBDCs called the ‘BIS Universal Ledger.’ The BIS specifically notes that the project is meant to “inspire trust in central bank digital currencies” while “overcoming the fragmentation of current tokenization efforts.”

While the IMF is focused on international policy control, the BIS is pursuing the technical aspects for the globalization of CBDCs. They make it clear in their white papers that a cashless society is in fact the end game and that digital transactions need to be monitored by a centralized entity in order to keep money “secure.” As the BIS argues in their extensive overview of Unified Ledgers:

“Today, the monetary system stands at the cusp of another major leap. Following dematerialisation and digitalisation, the key development is tokenisation – the process of representing claims digitally on a programmable platform. This can be seen as the next logical step in digital recordkeeping and asset transfer.”

“…The blueprint envisages these elements being brought together in a new type of financial market infrastructure (FMI) – a “unified ledger”. The full benefits of tokenisation could be harnessed in a unified ledger due to the settlement finality that comes from central bank money residing in the same venue as other claims. Leveraging trust in the central bank, a shared venue of this kind has great potential to enhance the monetary and financial system.

There are three major assertions made by the BIS in their program – First, the digitization of money is unavoidable and cash is going to disappear primarily because it makes moving money easier. Second, decentralized payment methods are unacceptable because they are “risky” and only central banks are qualified and “trustworthy” enough to mediate the exchange of money. Third, the use of Unified Ledgers is largely designed to track and trace and even investigate all CBDC transactions, for the public good, of course.

The BIS system deals far more in the realm of private transactions than the IMF example. It is the technical foundation for the centralization of all CBDCs, governed in part by the BIS and the IMF, and it is scheduled to go into wider use in the next two years. There are already multiple nations testing the BIS ledger today. It’s important to understand that whoever acts as the middle-man in the process of the global exchange of money is going to have all the power, over governments and over the populace.

If every movement of wealth is monitored, from the shift of billions between governments to the payment of a few dollars from an individual to a retailer, then every aspect of trade can be throttled on the whims of the observer.

SWIFT Cross Border Project – Another Way To Control The Behavior Of Countries

As we’ve seen with the attempt to use the SWIFT payment network as a bludgeon against Russia, there is an ulterior motive for globalists to have a high speed large scale monetary transaction hub. Again, this is all about centralization, and whoever controls the hub has the means to control trade…to a point.

Locking Russia out of SWIFT has done minimal damage to their economy exactly because there are alternative methods for transferring money to keep the flow of trade running. However, under a CBDC based global monetary umbrella, it would be impossible for any country to work outside the boundaries. It’s not only about the ease of shutting a nation out of the network, it’s also about having the power to immediately block the transfer of funds on the receiving end of the exchange.

Meaning, any funds from any Russian source could be tracked and cut off before they are allowed to get into the hands of, say, a recipient in China or India. Once all governments are completely under the thumb of a centralized monetary system, a centralized ledger and a centralized exchange hub, they will never be able to rebel and this control will trickle down to the general population.

I would also remind readers that the majority of nations are going right along with this program. China is most eager to join the global currency scheme. Russia is still part of the BIS, but their involvement in CBDCs is still unclear. The point is, don’t expect the BRICS to counteract the new monetary order, it’s not going to happen.

CBDCs Automatically Require The End Of The Dollar As World Reserve

So what do all these globalist projects with CBDCs have to do with the dollar and its venerated position as the world reserve currency? The bottom line is this: A unified CBDC system completely excludes the need or use-case for a world reserve currency. The Unified Ledger model takes all CBDCs and homogenizes them into a puddle of liquidity, each CBDC growing similar in characteristics over a short period of time.

The advantages of using the dollar disappear in this scenario and the value of currencies becomes relative to the middle-man. In other words, the IMF, BIS and other related institutions dictate the properties of CBDCs and thus there is no distinguishing aspect of any CBDC that makes one more valuable than the others.

Sure, some countries might be able to separate their currency to a point with superior production or superior technology, but the old model of having a big military as a way to ensure Forex and trade favors is dead. Eventually the globalists will make two predictable arguments:

1) “A world reserve currency under the control of one nation is unfair and we as global bankers need to make the system “more equal.””

2) “Why have a reserve currency at all when all transactions are moderated under our ledger anyway? The dollar is no longer any more easy to use for international trade than any other CBDC, right?”

Finally, the dollar has to die because it’s an integral part of the “old world” of material exchange. The globalists desire a cashless society because it is an easily controlled society. Think of the covid lockdowns and the attempts at vaccine passports – If they had a cashless system in place at that time, they would have gotten everything they wanted. Refuse to take the experimental vaccine? We’ll just shut off your digital accounts and you will starve.

This was even partially attempted (think Canadian trucker protests), but with physical cash there’s always a way around a digital embargo.  Without physical cash you have no other options unless you plan to live completely off the land and barter goods and services (a way of life most people in the first world need a lot of time to get used to).

I believe that a sizable percentage of the American populace will go to war before they accept a cashless society, but in the meantime, there is still the inevitability of a dollar crash to deal with. Globalist organizations are pushing CBDCs to go active VERY quickly, and as this happens along with the centralized ledgers the traditional dollar will swiftly lose favor. This means that those trillions in greenbacks held overseas will start flooding back into America all at once causing an inflationary disaster well beyond what we are witnessing today.

As much as the economy has benefited from world reserve status in the past it will suffer equally as the dollar fades, only to be replaced by a framework even worse than fiat. That is, unless there’s a dramatic upheaval that removes the globalist order from the equation entirely…

Reprinted with permission from Alt-Market.us.

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“Resentful childless harpies unconsciously longing for domination. Why else worship at the altar of Hamas? Why else would it be so overwhelmingly female?” — Dr. Jordan Peterson

Wasn’t it cute how the youngsters who “occupied” Columbia U’s Hamilton Hall — and were busy smashing things up inside — demanded restaurant-grade meals sent in to avert “starvation and dehydration” amongst their dauntless ranks? You could imagine a colossal mommy breast with three hundred nipples descending from the sky over upper Manhattan to nourish them back to action. “Feed me. . . !”

It turns out, actually, that at least half the troops inside were not students at all, but rather semi-pro activists paid up to $7,000 each by George Soros’s Open Society Institute and other overtly insurrection-themed orgs, so you’d think that the troops could afford to load-up their ever-ready backpacks with Clif bars and bottles of Smart Water. The order-in food and beverage gambit suggests we should understand that this is not so much politics as the acting out of a game — which is exactly what you might expect of people who spend more time on video screens than in the real world — in which something like a half-time intermission for refreshments is de rigueur.

Alas, they were not obliged with DoorDash servings of Alitcha (“Ensemble of potatoes, carrots, collard greens, and cabbage baked in turmeric,” $22.30) from the nearby Massawa Ethiopian bistro, or Firecracker Chicken from Junzi Kitchen over on Broadway and 113th Street. And then, when the cops came to roust them out into the big buses now used as paddy-wagons for such events, the occupiers were heard to whine, “I have finals and I need to go home!” You’ve got to wonder how they’ll make out when “Joe Biden” drafts their ass to go fight the Russians out on the Ukrainian buzzard flats, about which the White House is just now sending out early signals.

It has been observed that a clear majority of the pro-Hamas activists are young women — which makes sense considering that they are the largest demographic evincing mental illness on America’s social landscape these days. Thus, they are marching in support of a sect that specializes in the rape, mutilation, and murder of young women like themselves, or at least treats them as chattels, hidden under black bag-like garments. The group psychology on display has more occult angles than any movie by the Wachowski sisters.

Among the marching Columbia students who are not paid outside activists, a few are apparently Jewish, such as spokesperson Johannah King-Slutzky (actual name, hat-tip Alex Berenson, who ID’d her), the winsome creature who complained about the lack of order-in meals at Hamilton Hall. Another observer on “X” who styles himself @J9_ATX identified the syndrome in play as “oppression envy,” among women seeking compensatory validation for occupying such a privileged niche on Planet Earth as a cushy Ivy League college — featuring international cuisine stations in the dining halls — while their third world sisters trudge through the burning sands of Al-Kufra carrying water-jugs on their heads as they dodge the odious “wind scorpions” of the region.

Higher Ed in the USA was already chugging down the suicide track before this spring’s eruption of pro-Hamas fury. The college loan racket (government-backed) had the perverse effect of pumping up tuition costs beyond what even many pretty well-off families could afford, while loading up young people with life-wrecking obligations (debt which “Joe Biden” is now shifting onto the creditors, US tax-payers). Decades of DEI have filled the faculties with incompetents and assorted malcontents teaching fantasy curricula with no real-life value, and burdened the schools with cadres of overpaid diversity busybodies and thought-police. Diversity college presidents are very publicly failing to cope. The whole rotten train is going off the rails.

I’m not at all sanguine that the society we are becoming will need this vast infrastructure for babysitting young adults who could otherwise make themselves useful and productive on-the-ground in lines of work that actually keep civilized life going. This is too self-evident now to belabor, though there is an awful lot of confusion about what kind of society we might become.

I doubt that it is to be the utopia of robots, A-I, and non-stop sexual titillation that the techno-narcissists dream of. Rather, it will be a society struggling to keep too much complex stuff running with insufficient energy resources and capital — that is, a society falling apart, losing knowledge, technical know-how, comfort, and convenience while having a hard time feeding itself.

The campus Hamas zealots ironically (and tragically) represent exactly the sort of rough medievalism that the citizens of Western Civ countries would be chary of sliding into. You’d have to sadly conclude that many young people really can’t take much more Modernity, and are now pretty avid to opt out of it, even as they gaze into the magic, glowing pixels of their iPhone screens.

Reprinted with permission from Kunstler.com.

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Independent presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. announced he will file a lawsuit challenging the federal government’s April 24 TikTok ban, on First Amendment  grounds.

“This decision is a catastrophe for free speech and a disaster for the thousands of young people who love TikTok and even make their living there,” Kennedy said. He continued, “They say it’s about China harvesting your data. That is a smokescreen. Because you know what? The intelligence agencies from lots of countries, especially ours, are harvesting your data from everywhere, all the time.”

Kennedy added, “TikTok users shouldn’t have to wait until I’m president to keep using TikTok.”

Kennedy’s announcement came shortly after President Biden signed the controversial ban into law. In its initial form, the legislation was passed by the House in March, as reported by The Kennedy Beacon. Under the terms of the newly-signed legislation, the earliest the TikTok ban could start is January 2025, so the platform will be live through the November election.

What is the TikTok ban?

This new law forces the divestiture of the US assets and operational control of TikTok by the Chinese based, Cayman Island-registered company ByteDance. Should the company refuse to divest, TikTok will be shut down in the US. Although the bill cites “TikTok” and “ByteDance” it could be applied against any company “controlled by a foreign adversary” operating a social media app with at least 100,000 users.

According to Demand Sage, TikTok has 1.56 billion monthly users globally and is the fifth most popular social media platform, with roughly 170 million users in the US. Nearly 70% of TikTok users are between the ages 18 – 34.

The new law is both vague and broad in its definition of the terms “controlled” and “foreign adversary.” While short on specifics, it targets any “foreign person” with a 20% or greater stake in a tech company, even if the company is incorporated in the US or majority-owned by Americans. A company could be forced to divest if an American executive at the company is subject to decisional control by a foreign person deemed to be from an adversarial country. The law also applies to companies owned outright by a “foreign adversary,” although the legislation does not provide a list of which nations are considered adversarial for the purposes of future bans.

Public companies and most large private companies have  international stakeholders, thus the law could subject most tech companies to a forced divestiture.

It could also be enforced against people  and entities from beyond China, Iran, Cuba, North Korea, Russia and Venezuela, the six countries officially named by the State Department as adversaries. This of course does not stop trade between China and the US – the two largest trading partners in the world.

Making the passage of the bill all the more puzzling is the fact that there is a long existing enforcement mechanism that the government can take against allegedly maleficent foreign investment via the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS). In 2022, there were calls to stop Elon Musk’s acquisition of Twitter using CFIUS, due to Musk relying on investors from Saudi Arabia, Qatar and China, a strategy President Biden agreed was “worth being looked at,” as reported by CBS News.

Why replicate existing federal powers? Unlike CFIUS which relies on intricate inter-agency cooperation, the new law gives virtually untethered discretion to the president regarding the enforcement of corporate bans. This is why Representative Thomas Massie called the legislation a “trojan horse.”

Read the Whole Article

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The US Congress has become an extension of the Israeli government. We don’t need a president. We have the Israel Lobby.

The US House of Representatives just passed a bill that means prison for any Christian or anyone for that matter who quotes the Bible that says Jesus was handed over by Jews to Pontius Pilate to be scourged and crucified by the Romans.

The bill, which passed 320-91, criminalizes all criticisms of Israel and Jews as anti-semitism. If the Senate passes this bill, I suppose it will end up in book-burning of many works of literature including Shakespeare.

Clearly the majority of the House of Representatives is so much in thrall to the Israel Lobby that there is no hesitancy about normalizing genocide and setting the scene for the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse.

This bill is such an obvious violation of Constitutionally-protected free speech that it tells us that Congress will not come to the aid of free speech as it is closed down everywhere. Will the Supreme Court be too fearful of its own destruction to rule against the bill’s violations of free speech and the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment? See this and this.

Glenn Greenwald’s report is very important. Protest has become a criminal act. Freedom in America is dead. The US is a police state, and the police, presstitutes, Christian Zionists, and House of Representatives are very proud of it. See here.

You have to wait through an ad twice before you have the option to cancel ad, and you have to wait for the program to begin. It is a mistake for Greenwald and Rumble to delay his program in this way.

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In the first few weeks following the start of Israel’s genocidal war against Gaza, I brought three messages on the subject. Those three messages are on ONE DVD, which is entitled End-Time Israel.

The three messages on this DVD are:

1. Is The Hamas/Israeli War Fulfilling Bible Prophecy?
2. The Wars Of The Jews
3. Jerusalem Was Ground To Powder Once: Could It Happen Again?

I immediately thought of this message trilogy, and especially the third message, as I watched an interview by Nima Alkhorshid with former U.S. Marine Corps Intelligence Officer and U.N. Chief Weapons Inspector Scott Ritter.

What Scott said blew me away.

I know nothing of Ritter’s faith, and I’m sure he has never heard of Chuck Baldwin, but his analysis of the Middle East situation, specifically regarding the future of Israel, was surreal: It was as if he was watching my online sermons.

In that third message listed above, I speculated the possibility that God could be in the process of giving Benjamin Netanyahu over to the same spirit of hate and self-destruction that God gave to the Egyptian Pharaoh at the time of the Exodus.

Of course, most evangelicals erroneously believe that the Zionist state in Palestine is a resurrected Israel of the Bible and is, therefore, permanently and forever the “home” of the “Jews” as a prophetic fulfillment for the return of Christ.

As expected, Mr. Christian Zionist, John Hagee, is beside himself with enthusiasm for an anticipated major war between Israel and Iran.

Pastor John Hagee, founder of the Christians United for Israel lobbying group, said Sunday that Iran’s retaliatory attack on Israel was the start of the “Gog and Magog war” from the Bible and said he’s going to lobby Congress not to “deescalate” tensions and instead support Israel’s war.

“Pastor John Hagee this am says Iran’s missiles are the prophetic start of the ‘Gog and Magog’ war from the Bible (that ends w/ Jesus returning and Jews killed or converted),” Lee Fang commented. “Says he will travel to DC to lobby lawmakers not to ‘deescalate’ and support Israel. Asks for money.”

Fang is right. The whole concept of Scofield’s convoluted concoction known as Christian Zionism/Scofield Futurism/Premillennial Dispensationalism, etc., and its “support for Israel” fascination is in reality a prescription for the introduction of a Jewish Holocaust that would dwarf any and all genocides of human history combined.

According to Christian Zionism, all of this talk of war with Persia and the Arab states is a precursor for the supposed appearance of “Antichrist,” whose plan is to destroy the vast majority of Jews—and only then can Jesus return. Of course, Hagee and his fellow deluded evangelicals are going to be “raptured” to heaven before all of this takes place. Convenient, yes?

But, as I have shown in my Israel and Prophecy messages, Christ’s New Covenant has completely abolished the Old Covenant made with Biblical Israel; in fact, the remnant of Biblical Israel in Jerusalem and Judea was completely destroyed in 70 AD by the Roman army in fulfillment of both Old and New Testament prophecies.

Zionist Israel is a complete counterfeit, and the modern city of Jerusalem is NOT the Jerusalem of the Bible. Under Christ’s New Covenant, the “Jews” are NOT God’s chosen people. God’s elect are people of every race who come to faith in Christ.

Therefore, it is absolutely untrue that modern Israel is promised any sort of “blessing,” “protection” or “perpetuity” in Holy Scripture. Israel is just another pagan antichrist state that opposes Jesus Christ, Christian people and everything the New Covenant stands for. As such, it sits under the judgment and condemnation of Almighty God.

I challenge people to read again the books of the Major Prophets: Isaiah, Jeremiah and Ezekiel. The vast majority of what they wrote pronounced God’s judgment and destruction upon the wicked, apostate nations of Israel and Judah—prophecies which ALL came true.

The Assyrian Empire completely destroyed Israel (the ten northern tribes) in 721 BC, as prophesied by God’s prophets. The Babylonians destroyed Judah (the two southern tribes), including the city of Jerusalem and the temple, in 586 BC, as prophesied by God’s prophets.

The remnant of the Judahites was completely annihilated by the Romans in 70 AD, as prophesied by God’s prophets, the New Testament apostles, John the Baptist and Jesus Himself.

Bottom line: The covenant with national Israel has been abolished for 2,000 years. There are no more prophecies for Old Covenant Israel. There are no “Jewish signs” portending Christ’s Second Coming. And the Roman city of “Jerusalem” in Palestine today (originally named Aelia Capitolina, meaning “The City of Hadrian and Jupiter,” in 135 AD) has nothing whatsoever to do with the Bible, prophecy or the return of Christ. NOTHING.

Again, Israel has no promise of perpetuity, no more than any other nation. How many countries have ceased to exist over the centuries? Here is a very short list of countries or empires (out of hundreds) that no longer exist:

*Austrian Empire
*Czechoslovakia
*East Germany
*German Empire
*Irish Republic
*Kingdom of Bavaria
*Kingdom of Hungary
*Kingdom of Greece
*Ottoman Empire
*Prussia
*Rhodesia
*Roman Empire
*Russian Republic
*Soviet Union
*Tibet
*United Arab Republic
*Yugoslavia

Question: Did any or all of these countries have a “right” to exist? The answer is a resounding NO! No nation has a “right” to exist.

Rights are gifts from God to individuals. Countries have no such God-ordained rights. Countries have jurisdictional duties and obligations to the individuals they govern (“to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men,” Thomas Jefferson, Declaration of Independence), but not rights given by God. All the rights listed in our Bill of Rights are for the American people—NOT the state.

Notice the rights (or freedoms) God gives to His people in His Holy Word: “Go ye into all the world and preach the gospel to every creature.” (Mark 16:15). Here we see the right of free speech, the freedom of worship and the right of travel. “But if any provide not for his own, and specially for those of his own house, he hath denied the faith, and is worse than an infidel.” (I Timothy 5:8) Here we see the right to work, the right to own property, the right to privacy, the freedom of parental authority, the right to self-defense, etc. We could go on and on.

Nations are raised and destroyed by God—as a blessing or a curse.

Jeremiah 18:5 I think Israel’s fin– 10: Then the word of the LORD came to me, saying,  O house of Israel, cannot I do with you as this potter? saith the LORD. Behold, as the clay is in the potter’s hand, so are ye in mine hand, O house of Israel. At what instant I shall speak concerning a nation, and concerning a kingdom, to pluck up, and to pull down, and to destroy it; If that nation, against whom I have pronounced, turn from their evil, I will repent of the evil that I thought to do unto them. And at what instant I shall speak concerning a nation, and concerning a kingdom, to build and to plant it; If it do evil in my sight, that it obey not my voice, then I will repent of the good, wherewith I said I would benefit them.

As the prophet said, nations are “plucked up” and “pulled down” by God at His Will. The rights given by God to people are NOT given to governments.

So, to the heart of this column: Could Israel cease to exist as a nation-state in the near future, and, if it did, what would happen to the evangelical church?

Here is a portion of Scott Ritter’s analysis in the interview referenced at the beginning of this column:

I think Israel’s finished as a nation-state. I think that they have created the conditions for their own demise.

Israel will never recover from this. And the global isolation will stay forever, because Israel will continue to resist the creation of a Palestinian State.

And so, what’s going to happen is, life in Israel is going to become unlivable. And all these American Jews and all these European Jews that flew to Israel to live in their high rise, to live the nice life, and sip their coffee, and eat their kabob, or whatever they do, Israel’s not going to be able to sustain that lifestyle anymore. So, they’re going to flee by the millions, going back home. And what’s going to be left is the pathetic few, who have nowhere to go. And, therefore, the only route of survival is to be absorbed by a singular Palestinian national entity.

That’s the future of Israel. They did it to themselves. They did it to themselves. Their arrogance, their murderous genocidal policies against the Palestinians has caught up with them.

Israel’s finished. It’s over for Israel. I mean, they haven’t been counted out yet, but there’s no way Israel’s going to survive this struggle. That’s the genius of what Hamas did on October 7. Nobody wants to talk about that genius, but everybody knows that there’s an October 6 reality, and there’s a post-October 7 reality. The post-October 7 reality is: Israel’s finished.

The Israelis today, the political Zionists today who reside in Israel, believe in Amalek! That’s why the prime minister can say it and stay in power! That’s why Israeli soldiers sit there and sing about annihilating the seed of Amalek. It’s their biggest mitzvah. That’s their path to glory; that’s their directive from God: to kill the Palestinian people! That’s why over 60% of them support what’s going on in Gaza. Because they’re all genocidal sick maniacs. And they will continue to be genocidal sick maniacs as long as they have a nation-state that sustains that mentality. A nation-state grounded in the artificial construct of Jewish Supremacy.

There’s no such thing as Jewish Supremacy. They are not the Chosen People of God. They’re humans, just like everybody else. And until the Jews realize that in order to survive, they have to be part of the human race; they have to learn to get along with everybody as equals, not as superiors.

The Jewish people are their own worst enemies. Both those who articulate in favor of Amalek in Palestine and those who are silent as this genocide takes place. If you’re a Jew out there, the best thing you can do right now is stand up against Israel and stop this nonsense. Because otherwise, Israel is going to be the seed of your destruction.

If you have already watched my trilogy of messages on the End-Time Israel DVD—especially the third message—you must have said, “WOW!” as you read Ritter’s analysis.

Will Ritter’s prediction come to pass? Is Israel finished? Will it soon cease to exist as a nation-state? Only God knows.

But suppose for a minute that it IS true, and it really DOES happen. The 64-million-dollar question is, what would happen to the evangelical church?

Who in their right mind would ever again listen to a word of what John Hagee, Robert Jeffress, Franklin Graham, Jack Graham, Kenneth Copeland, Greg Laurie and the rest of these Christian Zionist preachers had to say?

If one day the world woke up and the State of Israel had disappeared—in the same way that the Soviet Union disappeared almost overnight from the list of nations—what would evangelicals do? Without the Israeli state, millions of evangelicals would have no faith. Virtually everything they believe about the Bible depends on that little Zionist State in Palestine. Virtually every doctrine, every teaching, every Bible lesson is intertwined with Zionist Israel.

What would they do? What would they believe? What would happen to their faith?

Think of the books, magazines, Sunday School lessons, sermons, seminary lectures, radio programs, television broadcasts and trips to Israel. Think of all the “prophetic signs” that have consumed millions of hours of discussion and elucidation that would suddenly mean absolutely NOTHING. Think of the “convictions” they have about the “rapture,” the “seven-year tribulation,” the “Antichrist” and even the Second Coming of Christ itself: Everything they have been taught, everything they have believed, everything they have confidently proclaimed to be true would come crashing down on their heads.

What would they do?

Some of them would lose their faith entirely because their faith was a false faith to begin with. Many of Christ’s followers only followed Him because of His miracles; they were never His true disciples. Likewise, many evangelicals have put their faith in the hocus pocus “signs” and “miracles” and “prophetic” euphoria associated with Premillennial Dispensationalism, NOT in the “take up [your] cross and follow me” Christ of the New Covenant.

But I believe that in such a scenario, many millions of evangelicals—after having seen the foolish fallacy of ALL THINGS Christian Zionism—would begin flocking to the true New Covenant Gospel and to the brave preachers who understand and teach it.

If that did happen, it would portend America’s Third Great Awakening. And who knows what would happen after that?

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I have just been immersed in an extraordinary experience: a mini-tour of conferences in Brazil encompassing four key cities – Sao Paulo, Rio, Salvador, Belo Horizonte. Full houses, sharp questions, fabulously warm people, divine gastronomy – a deep dive into the 8th largest economy in the world and major BRICS+ node.

As much as I was trying to impress the finer points of the long and winding road to multipolarity and the multiple instances of frontal clash between NATOstan and the Global Majority, I was learning non-stop from an array of generous Brazilians about the current inner contradictions of a society of astonishing complexity.

It’s as if I was immersed in a psychedelic journey conducted by Os Mutantes, the iconic trio of the late 1960s Tropicalia movement: from the business front in Sao Paulo – with its world-class restaurants and frantic deal-making – to the blinding beauty of Rio; from Salvador – the capital of Brazilian Africa – to Belo Horizonte, the capital of the third-wealthiest state in the Federation, Minas Gerais, a powerhouse of iron ore, uranium and niobium exports.

Chancay-Shanghai

I learned about how China chose the state of Bahia as arguably its key node in Brazil, where Chinese investment is everywhere – even if Brazil is not yet a formal member of the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI).

In Rio, I was presented with an astonishing work on Stoics Zeno and Cleanthes by essayist Ciro Moroni – delving among other issues into the equivalences between Stoic theogony/theology and the Hindu Vedanta – the tradition of culture, religion and sacred rituals in India up to the Buddha era.

And in a sort of psychedelic synchronicity, I felt like Zeno in the Agora as we debated the NATO proxy war against Russia in Ukraine at a lovely round pavillion – a mini-Agora – in fabled Liberty Square in Belo Horizonte, across the street from a fabulous exhibition of Treasures of Peruvian Art.

Much to my astonishment, a Peruvian, Carlos Ledesma, flew in from Lima especially for my conference and the exhibition; and then he told me about the Chancay port being built south of Lima, owned 70% by COSCO and the rest by private Peruvian capital; that will be a sister port of Shanghai.

Chancay-Shanghai: APEC in action across the Pacific. Next November, there will be three nearly simultaneous key events in South America: the G20 in Rio, the APEC summit in Lima, and the inauguration of Chancay.

Chancay will be boosted by no less than five rail corridors that may eventually be built – certainly with Chinese investment – from the agribusiness Valhalla in the Brazilian Center-West all the way to Peru.

Yes, China is all over the place in its largest trade partner in Latin America – much to the despair of a Hegemon sending lowly functionary Little Blinken to Beijing to hear the letter of the new law by Xi Jinping himself: it’s cooperation or confrontation, a “downward spiral”. Your downward spiral.

A river from Tibet to Xinjiang

At the Belo Horizonte conference, I shared the stage with remarkable Sebastien Kiwonghi Bizaru from Congo, who supervises PhD programs at the Candido Mendes University as well as being a Professor of International Law, after an extraordinary academic journey.

He is also the author of a ground-breaking book examining the highly debatable role of the UNSC in the conflicts of the Great Lakes – focusing on Rwanda, Burundi and the Democratic Republic of Congo.

With top researcher Natacha Rena, we pored over a map of China retracing her travels east to west last year all the way to the Xinjiang border – as she filled me in on the astonishing Honggqi River – or Red Flag River – Project, first proposed in 2017: no less than an attempt to divert water from Tibet to the dry lands and deserts of Xinjiang by building an enormous, over 6,000 km-long artificial river, including the branch canals.

The projected river will be slightly less longer than the Yangtze, diverting 60 billion cubic meters of water a year, more than the annual flow of the Yellow River. Predictably, ecologists in China are attacking the project, which may have already had an official go-ahead and is proceeding discreetly.

And then, as I was on the road between Rio and Minas Gerais, the BRICS 10 Ministers of Economy and heads of Central Banks met in Sao Paulo: and all of them hailed the drive towards “independent” payment settlement mechanisms. Russia is the 2024 president of this crucial group.

Russian Vice-Minister of Finance, Ivan Chebeskov, went straight to the point: “Most countries agree that payment in national currencies is what the BRICS need.” The Russian Ministry of Finance privileges the creation of a common digital platform congregating the BRICS Central Banks’ digital currencies and their national systems of transmitting financial messages.

Crucially, at this BRICS 10 meeting, most members stressed they are in favor of totally bypassing the U.S. dollar for trading.

Russian Minister of Finance Anton Siluanov was even bolder: he said that Russia is proposing to BRICS the creation of an independent and “de-politicized” global system of payments.

Siluanov hinted that the system may be based on blockchain – considering its low cost and minimal control exercised by the Hegemon.

BRICS map the new world in Sao Paulo

A day before the meeting in Sao Paulo, Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov in Moscow supported the development of these BRICS strategies, noting that “if we manage to develop independent financial mechanisms, that will seriously question the globalization mechanism currently led by the West.”

As over 100 nations are currently researching or embryonically implementing a digital currency in their Central Banks, a big breakthrough is imminent in Russia – a process I have been following in detail since last year.

In the end, it’s all about Sovereignty. That was the crux of the most serious debates I had this past week in Brazil, with academic players and on several podcasts related to the conferences. It’s the overarching theme hanging over the Lula government, as the President seems to cast the figure of a lonely fighter cornered by a vicious circle of 5th columnists and comprador elites.

In Belo Horizonte I was presented with yet another astonishing book by a former, brilliant government official, the late Celso Brant. After a sharp analysis of the modern history of Brazil and its interactions with imperialism, he reminds the reader of what stellar Mexican writer and poet Octavio Paz said in the 1980s about Brazil and China: “These will be the two great protagonists of the 21th century.”

When Paz rendered his verdict, every indicator favored Brazil, which since 1870 held the largest GDP growth in the world. Brazil exported more than China, and from 1952 to 1987 was growing at annual rate of 7.4%. Continuing the trend, Brazil would be the 4th largest economy in the world by now (it’s between 8th and 9th, side by side with Italy, and could be the 5th, were not for direct destabilization by the Empire starting in the 2010s, culminating with the Car Wash operation).

That’s exactly what Brant shows: how the Hegemon intervened to crash Brazilian development – and that started way before Car Wash. Kissinger was already saying in the 1970s that “the United States will not allow the birth of a new Japan under the Equator line.”

Hardcore neoliberalism was the privileged tool. While China under Little Helmsman Deng Xiaoping and then Jiang Zemin went Full Sovereign, Brazil was mired in neocolonial dependency. Lula tried – and is now trying it again, against all odds and surrounded on all sides, with Brazil branded as a “swing state” by U.S. Think Tankland and potential victim of new rounds of imperial Hybrid War.

Lula – and some solid academic elites away from power – know full well that as a neo-colony, Brazil will never fulfill its potential of being, side by side with China, as prophesized by Paz, the great protagonist of the 21st century.

That was the major takeaway of my psychedelic tour of Tropicalia: Sovereignty. Viktor Orban – accused by simpletons of being a member of a fuzz “Neofascist International” – nailed it with a simole formulation: “The inglorious period of Western civilization will be brought to an end this year, by replacing the world built on progressive-liberal hegemony with a Sovereigntist one.”

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

The post BRIC-o-Rama: on the Road in Brazil, With an Eye on Russia-China appeared first on LewRockwell.

“The physician’s highest and only calling is to restore the sick to health, to cure, as it is termed.”[1]

The reader could be forgiven for thinking that such an aphorism should be self-evident, but when the German physician Samuel Hahnemann wrote these words in 1810, he was asserting a radical departure from the medical practices of his day.

So radical, in fact, that his work would ultimately lead to a revolution in medical care that threatened the livelihoods (and intellectual sinecures) of the established conventional doctors, and a vituperative counter-assault that led to the founding of the American Medical Association (AMA).

When there was a free market for medicine in the United States, patients overwhelmingly chose homeopathy, a complete and principled form system of care, for themselves and their families. The disease, destruction, and death, that marks the state of so-called “public health” in the US now is a sad testament to the suppression of the medical marketplace.

This is not an article about homeopathy, but this debate contains the seeds of today’s crisis. The long-buried story is elucidated by Harris L. Coulter in his scholarly 1973 book, “Divided Legacy: The Conflict Between Homoeopathy and the American Medical Association.”[2]

American medicine was hijacked long before the infamous “Flexner Report” of 1910; without what happened in medicine in the 19th century, the AMA would never have succeeded in monopolizing the industry in the 20th.

Hahnemann attacked the allopaths for abusing and killing patients with ego-driven theorizing and speculative hackwork, and he proposed a alternative system of medicine based on empirical observation and rigorous principles.

The dominant medical view of the 18th and 19th centuries was that disease could be understood mechanistically and reasoned out inductively. George Washington’s famous death is a standard example of these views in practice. His doctors drained over a quart of blood, burned his skin with caustic plasters, induced vomiting, and who knows what else, before he finally succumbed.

The problem for the allopaths, (which was a term they adopted), was that the homeopaths were also highly-trained and respected physicians. The homeopaths were quick to criticize, publicly, the practices (and practitioners) of the day, and to speak directly to the consumer regarding the superiority of their own techniques.

The combination of household adoption of homeopathic treatments by mothers who were loathe to see their children brutalized with mercury (and elated to discover that such diseases as scarlet fever and pneumonia would readily submit to homeopathic approaches), and the unparalleled results of homeopathic physicians in the epidemic of Asiatic Cholera that swept through the country in the middle of the 19th century, led to its widespread adoption.[3] Allopathic physicians began to struggle financially as a result of the competition.

In 1847, they founded the AMA after several decades of attempting to suppress the competition locally; with the establishment of the national organization, the anti-homeopathy faction created a means of forcing the local societies to marginalize non-allopaths by prohibiting membership or even consultation with homeopaths under penalty of fines and expulsion.[4]

One of their main tools for reducing the competition, later supported by the Flexner Report, was to pressure the medical schools not to teach or acknowledge homeopaths, under the threat that their graduates would not be admitted into the society (or licensed). That their primary complaint was financial can be seen in the passage below:

“The dean of the University of Michigan medical department commented [that]…the real issue…was whether the education of homeopaths …was not ‘throwing discouragement in the path of the graduates in scientific medicine, and rendering the struggle for existence more arduous and unremunerative’”[5] (emphasis mine).

The story continues; there is more to be said about the rise of the role of the pharmaceutical companies, the successful influencing of legislatures, and the final concretizing of control that took place with the publication of the Flexner Report, as well as the later effects of government intrusion into medical care through direct finances and manipulation of the insurance market.

However, it is critical to understand that there has never been a time when the purveyors of “conventional, western” medicine were willing simply to allow the best form of medicine to take precedence. In fact, it was the express intention of the agents of the AMA that, “Medical education must function such that [alternatives] will vanish before the meridian sun of allopathy.’”[6]

(The allopaths were explicit; it was always about the money. In 1911, Dr. McCormack, of the AMA, said, “ we must admit that we have never fought the homeopath on matter of principle; we fought him because he came into the community and got the business.”)[7]

They decided they were “The Science,” and then it was just a question of acquiring and maintaining the power to force that onto the populace, regardless of the desires of the patients themselves. The market did decide, and the allopaths didn’t like the decision, so they fought it through politics. It’s a tale as old as time.

As Coulter points out in the introduction, “It is a truism that the practice of medicine is not a purely scientific endeavor. While scientific considerations play their role at all times, the physician is an economic unit competing with other economic units.”[8]

Understanding that the state-sanctioned institutions of medicine were always corrupted is the first step in taking back autonomy over your care. In what ways have we allowed ourselves to internalize the self-serving propaganda of this machine until it becomes our own? We must not be passive consumers.

We must be educated customers of the highest order. Peer-to-peer discussion and review, as well as insistence on access to information and honest debate, are how we begin to determine out what are choices truly are, and how we might heal, in a world where healthcare is governed by institutions with an incentive to keep us sick, as long as it keeps them rich.

The next time you hear a “respectable” professional refuse to debate, or to respond with only derision, because to do otherwise would be to “platform quackery,” ask yourself, “what are the incentives here? And do they line up with my goals?”

There is potential for a spectacularly bright and hope-filled future in healthcare, but we must discard our illusions and our prejudices, and our beliefs that medicine only went bad in 2020.

Our lives depend on it.

—

[1] Hahnemann, Samuel. 1893. Organon of Medicine, 5th and 6th edition, p.53.

[2] Coulter, Harris. 1973. Divided Legacy, The Conflict Between Homoeopathy and the American Medical Association. North Atlantic Books.

[3] https://homstudies.com/academy/some-history-of-the-treatment-of-epidemics-with-homeopathy-julian-winston/

[4] Coulter, ibid, p.181

[5] Coulter, ibid, p.120

[6] Coulter, ibid, p. 192

[7] Coulter, ibid, p. 435

[8] Coulter, ibid, p. ix

The post To Cure or Not To Cure appeared first on LewRockwell.

 

 

di David Stockman

Il tradimento sulla rettitudine fiscale da parte del presidente Johnson potrebbe rappresentare la campana a morto per il Partito repubblicano. Sta rischiando la sua carica di portavoce per $95 miliardi in aiuti esteri che lo Zio Sam non può neanche lontanamente permettersi, e che in realtà non forniscono alcun beneficio alla sicurezza interna dell'America.

Ciò che la Waterloo di Johnson significa, quindi, non è la prospettiva di un'altra battaglia di successione, ma che non ha alcun senso preservare una maggioranza repubblicana e un presidente repubblicano alla Camera, dato che il Partito repubblicano è stato talmente infettato da guerrafondai neoconservatori e politici carrieristi intenti a crogiolarsi in progetti imperiali che il meglio che il caucus repubblicano alla Camera ha potuto fare è stato espellere il precedente deep stater dalla sedia del Presidente.

Il Partito repubblicano è quindi veramente irredimibile. Come disse una volta JFK a proposito della CIA, la sua necessità è essere frantumata in mille pezzi e spazzata nella pattumiera della storia.

Infatti quando si osserva la disastrosa traiettoria fiscale incorporata nelle ultime prospettive fiscali trentennali del CBO, viene davvero da chiedersi cosa stiano realmente pensando le menti in miniatura come quelle del deputato Johnson. Vale a dire, l’ultima relazione del CBO e pubblicata a marzo presuppone che non ci sarà mai più un’altra recessione, né una riacutizzazione dell’inflazione, un’impennata dei tassi d'interesse, una crisi energetica mondiale, una guerra prolungata, o qualsiasi altra crisi immaginabile: solo una tranquilla navigazione economica per i prossimi 30 anni.

Eppure anche secondo i calcoli di questo scenario roseo sotto steroidi il debito pubblico raggiungerà un minimo di $140.000 miliardi entro il 2054. A sua volta ciò farebbe sì che i pagamenti degli interessi sul debito pubblico, con tassi solo 200 punti base più alti di quelli attuali, raggiungano i $10.000 miliardi all’anno.

Non sono necessari paragrafi, pagine e monografie meritevoli di analisi e amplificazioni per capire dove stiamo andando. Il bilancio della nazione è ora sul punto di finire nelle fauci di una macchina apocalittica.

Gli aiuti esteri del portavoce Johnson:

• Indo-Pacifico: $8,1 miliardi

• Israele: $26,4 miliardi

• Ucraina: $60,8 miliardi

• Totale: $95,3 miliardi

Johnson e una buona parte del Partito repubblicano hanno ceduto alla paranoia neoconservatrice, alla stupidità, alle bugie e alle vuote scuse per essere guerrafondai. Per dirla tutta, Putin non ha alcun interesse a molestare i polacchi, per non parlare di assaltare la Porta di Brandeburgo a Berlino. Certamente non è Gandhi, ma è più che intelligente da riconoscere che con un PIL di $2.200 miliardi e un budget di guerra da $80 miliardi non avrebbe senso entrare in guerra contro i $45.000 miliardi di PIL della NATO e i bilanci di guerra combinati superiori a $1.200 miliardi.

Allo stesso modo lo schema rosso di Ponzi cinese da $50.000 miliardi, gravato dal debito, crollerebbe in pochi mesi se il suo flusso di $3.500 miliardi di proventi dalle esportazioni venisse interrotto dopo aver tentato di portare la sua unica portaerei moderna sulla costa della California. E l’Iran non ha armi nucleari, missili a gittata intercontinentale e un PIL pari a 130 ore di produzione annua degli Stati Uniti.

Asse del male? Ma per favore!

Eppure questo è esattamente ciò che il Presidente ha detto di recente dopo aver partecipato a troppi briefing del Deep State ed essersi fatto tirare per la giacchetta. Le creature della Palude vedono sicuramente l'ingenuità e la sfacciata ignoranza del ragazzo come un dono per loro.

Il portavoce Mike Johnson: “Sosterremo la libertà e ci assicureremo che Putin non marci in Europa [...] siamo la più grande nazione del pianeta e dobbiamo comportarci di conseguenza.

Questo è un momento critico, un momento critico sulla scena mondiale. Posso prendere una decisione egoistica e fare qualcosa di diverso, ma qui sto facendo quello che credo sia la cosa giusta. Penso che fornire aiuti all’Ucraina in questo momento sia di fondamentale importanza. Davvero. Credo davvero alle informazioni e ai briefing che abbiamo ricevuto.

Credo che Xi, Vladimir Putin e l’Iran siano davvero l’Asse del male. Quindi penso che Vladimir Putin continuerebbe a marciare attraverso l’Europa se gli fosse permesso. I prossimi potrebbero essere i Balcani o una resa dei conti con la Polonia o con uno dei nostri alleati della NATO.

Per dirla senza mezzi termini, preferirei mandare proiettili in Ucraina piuttosto che i nostri ragazzi. Mio figlio inizierà l'Accademia Navale quest'autunno. Questo è un discorso delicato per me come lo è per tante famiglie americane. Non è un gioco”.

Speaker Mike Johnson: "We're going to stand for freedom and make sure that Putin doesn't march through Europe... we're the greatest Nation on the planet, and we have to act like it"

He confirms Trump supports him and the record-breaking Ukraine funding plan he just introduced pic.twitter.com/uTUjs7rRz2

— Michael Tracey (@mtracey) April 17, 2024

Inutile dire che il portavoce non distingue i Paesi “Baltici” dai “Balcani”, dove la Serbia e gli altri alleati della Russia non tremano riguardo a Putin.

In realtà non è difficile capire che la guerra civile e la disputa territoriale tra Kiev e Mosca sul Donbass e sulla sponda del Mar Nero, da Mariupol a Odessa, siano una questione regionale e che è stata ulteriormente alimentata dall’insensata spinta della NATO verso est fino alle porte della Russia.

Vale a dire, la guerra in Ucraina finirebbe domani senza un altro centesimo di aiuti da parte dei contribuenti statunitensi se Washington accettasse che il Paese deve essere porzionato: da un lato tra ciò che le mappe del 1917 mostravano come Novorossiya (Nuova Russia) a est e a sud, e dall'altro parti e pezzi di Polonia, Galizia-Austria e Hetmanati cosacchi al centro e a ovest; accettare di tenere la NATO fuori dai margini dell’Ucraina al centro e a ovest e poi tutto sarà finito.

Tuttavia la follia della russofobia che impedisce agli idioti come Johnson di avere una comprensione anche rudimentale della questione rivela un grosso problema sul perché la politica estera egemonica di Washington sia un tale disastro, la quale genera incessantemente pazzie come l’odierno spreco da $95 miliardi.

Vale a dire, incoraggia gli stati clientelisti e alleati dell’Impero ad assumere posizioni bellicose nei confronti dei rivali e nemici designati da Washington perché manda aiuti nelle loro casse, armi ai loro eserciti e prestigio/importanza personale ai loro politici e diplomatici.

Davvero i politici di destra polacchi continuerebbero ad abbaiare contro la Russia in assenza della sua adesione alla NATO e dello scudo militare e diplomatico fornito dagli Stati Uniti? Dubito che prenderebbero in giro l’orso russo, ma cercherebbero invece un accordo amichevole con un partner commerciale naturale.

Allo stesso modo la Germania. Quest’ultima era così pietrificata dalla Russia che solo nel 2019 ha speso la somma di appena $50 miliardi e l’1,3% del PIL nella difesa, alimentando logicamente la sua fiorente economia industriale e di esportazione con il gas russo a basso costo.

Ciò che è cambiato da allora non è neanche lontanamente la valutazione della Germania sulla minaccia russa, bensì la sua linea di politica in quanto stato clientelista. Il Partito dei Verdi è entrato nella coalizione di governo con i socialdemocratici che suonavano i tamburi di guerra perché vedevano nell’attacco alla Russia e al gas russo un modo per promuovere la loro orribile crociata contro i combustibili fossili – sapendo che lo scudo militare di Washington li proteggeva.

Per quanto riguarda Taiwan, la cosa è ancora più incredibile. Senza gli aiuti “nell'Indo-pacifico” i leader di Taiwan si recherebbero a Pechino per discutere di una sua transizione a “Hong Kong”. La sicurezza interna dell'America non verrebbe intaccata, anzi verrebbero risparmiati 100.000 militari in Estremo Oriente e il costo multimiliardario del pattugliamento del Pacifico.

Poi ovviamente arriviamo ai $26,4 miliardi per Israele. Si tratta di circa il 4,5% del suo PIL e dovrebbero provenire dalle tasse di guerra, non dalla carta di credito dello Zio Sam. La spesa per la difesa di Israele è costantemente crollata a meno del 5% del PIL, anche se il suo elettorato ha ripetutamente eletto governi bellicosi costituiti da guerrafondai di destra e fazioni religiose fanatiche.

Non solo questi governi di Netanyahu hanno costantemente minato una soluzione a due Stati al problema palestinese – inclusa la benedizione al trasferimento di miliardi di contanti ad Hamas al fine di indebolire l’Autorità Palestinese controllata da Fatah – ma hanno demonizzato l’Iran principalmente per scopi di politica interna. In assenza dello scudo della Marina e dell’Aeronautica americana nella regione, nessun governo israeliano avrebbe mai condotto infiniti raid su questo Paese o sabotato a Capitol Hill accordi costruttivi con l’Iran come l’accordo sul nucleare di Obama.

Israele – Spesa militare (% del PIL)

Infatti senza la donazione annuale di $4 miliardi da parte dello Zio Sam e uno scudo militare regionale ancora più prezioso, Netanyahu e le sue coalizioni estremiste sarebbero stati da tempo cacciati dall’elettorato israeliano.

In fin dei conti ciò di cui Washington ora ha bisogno è una disgregazione dell'Unipartito della guerra. Dopo tutto l'azione suicida di Johnson darà dei frutti. Non come intendeva, ma nel modo giusto di cui la democrazia americana ha disperatamente bisogno in questa difficile congiuntura. Infatti la terribile presa dell’Unipartito sulla politica di sicurezza nazionale ha prodotto pura follia in un unico pacchetto. Vale a dire:

• $95 miliardi in aiuti esteri sono uno spreco che non apporta alcun beneficio alla sicurezza interna dell'America;

• Un’estensione della sezione 702 della FISA che amplia arbitrariamente un affronto già eclatante al Quarto Emendamento;

• Il trasferimento illegale a Kiev di miliardi in asset rubati alla Russia;

• Un divieto in nome della sicurezza nazionale ai video di TikTok, visti in stragrande maggioranza da americani sotto i 30 anni le cui abitudini di visione non hanno alcun valore per i comunisti di Pechino.

Categorie di contenuti più popolari su TikTok in tutto il mondo a luglio 2020, per numero di visualizzazioni di hashtag (in miliardi) | Statista

È già abbastanza grave che non ci sia un briciolo di considerazione informata dietro tutto ciò, ma ciò che è davvero allarmante è che ogni singolo democratico alla Camera (210) ha votato a favore di $61 miliardi all'Ucraina. Ciò includeva un voto di 97 voti a favore tra i cosiddetti “progressisti” democratici, i quali hanno anche votato con un voto di 96 voti a favore per gli aiuti a Taiwan – il cui scopo non è sicuramente un vicinato più pacifico sulla costa del Pacifico.

Una volta i democratici erano il partito della pace. Ora non più.

Allo stesso tempo solo quattordici repubblicani hanno votato contro tutte e quattro le componenti di questo attacco su vasta scala alla libertà costituzionale e alla rettitudine fiscale. Come detto prima anche, l’America sta ora procedendo con il pilota automatico verso un debito pubblico da $140.000 miliardi entro la metà del secolo, ma la stragrande maggioranza dei repubblicani alla Camera sceglie di martellare l’economia americana con maggiore debito per finanziare inutili sprechi sotto forma di aiuti esteri.

In questo contesto è stato il prevedibile istrionismo dello stuolo di guerrafondai neoconservatori nel comitato editoriale del Wall Street Journal a giustificare l'interventismo militare cronico con menzogne e falsità. Vale a dire che la narrativa ufficiale nella Città Imperiale e tra i media generalisti della nazione è talmente sbagliata e moralmente ottusa che travisa completamente una linea di politica  davvero sensibile alla sicurezza nazionale.

Di conseguenza la cosiddetta teoria del “dominio”, residuo della Guerra fredda, dev'essere ripudiata una volta per tutte e sostituita con la dottrina Washington-Jefferson “nessuna alleanza vincolante”. Mi riferisco all'idea del tutto obsoleta secondo cui la sicurezza interna dell'America dipenda da un sistema mondiale di alleanze militari, basi e capacità di proiezione della potenza cinetica che consentono a Washington di funzionare come il grande egemone globale, pronto, disposto e in grado di intervenire in qualsiasi situazione militare che può scoppiare tra gli 8 miliardi di persone sul pianeta.

I quattordici del Partito repubblicano elencati di seguito hanno detto “No” a queste formulazioni pericolose, costose e risibili: né la Russia né la Cina rappresentano una minaccia militare per la patria americana, mentre le guerre per procura e le sanzioni economiche contro gli “avversari” demonizzati dal Deep State indeboliscono la libertà e la prosperità nazionale.

Non vi è alcuna ragione reale e plausibile affinché l’economia americana applichi sanzioni e restrizioni commerciali nei confronti di Cina, Iran o Russia; inoltre non esistono minacce alla sicurezza nel mondo oggi che giustifichino neanche lontanamente l’intrusione dello stato di sicurezza nazionale nei diritti e nella privacy dei cittadini americani.

Tuttavia gli pseudo-intellettuali del WSJ hanno tirato fuori Hitler, Tojo e l’epiteto “isolazionista” come se questi riferimenti provassero qualcosa, quando, in realtà, nessuno di essi ha una qualche rilevanza reale per il mondo di oggi. Non ci sono tiranni di stati industriali in marcia da nessuna parte, per non parlare delle reali realtà storiche della questione.

Il fatto è che Stalin e Hitler erano aberrazioni sui generis. Furono incidenti unici della storia derivanti dalla follia di Versailles e dalla pace punitiva dei vincitori resa possibile dall'inutile intervento di Woodrow Wilson in una guerra europea che altrimenti sarebbe finita in una situazione di stallo e nel reciproco esaurimento e bancarotta di tutti i combattenti.

Vale a dire, il DNA delle nazioni del mondo non è infetto da tendenze verso il totalitarismo e l’aggressività. Il mantenimento della pace globale e del commercio pacifico delle nazioni non dipende da un’alleanza di interventisti o da un egemone globale, pronto a far rispettare il suo mandato al minimo scoppio di liti e conflitti locali e regionali.

In fin dei conti il laissez faire è la strada verso la prosperità sia nell’economia che negli affari internazionali. Alleanze militari ed egemoni cadono sempre e comunque prigionieri dei mercanti d'armi che favoriscono.

Non sorprende, quindi, se l'albo d'onore della follia dell'Unipartito sia composto da soli 14 repubblicani alla Camera, velatamente accusati d'essere infami dai globalisti guerrafondai al Wall Street Journal:

Quattordici repubblicani hanno votato contro tutti e quattro i progetti di legge presentati alla Camera, compreso quello che imporrebbe ai cinesi la vendita di TikTok. Ecco l'elenco del disonore in ordine alfabetico: Andy Biggs (Ariz.), Lauren Boebert (Colo.), Andrew Clyde (Ga.), Elijah Crane (Ariz.), Matt Gaetz (Fla.), Bob Good (Va.), Paul Gosar (Ariz.), Marjorie Taylor Greene (Ga.), Andy Harris (Md.), Thomas Massie (Ky.), Troy Nehls (Texas), Ralph Norman (SC), Matt Rosendale (Mont.), Chip Roy (Texas).

Il significato inevitabile dei loro voti è che questi membri non credono che gli Stati Uniti dovrebbero sostenere gli alleati minacciati dagli autoritari in marcia. Come i repubblicani degli anni ’30 che dormivano mentre Hitler e Tojo avanzavano, questi repubblicani pensano che l’America possa resistere a queste battaglie isolandosi. Ma la storia suggerisce che, se prevarranno, i figli e le figlie degli americani finiranno per dover combattere. Meglio aiutare gli alleati che vogliono aiutare sé stessi.

Il caucus isolazionista ha perso a questa tornata, ma questa tendenza del Partito repubblicano è pericolosa. Altri 17 deputati hanno votato a favore delle armi per Israele ma non per Taiwan e l'Ucraina. Vogliono incoraggiare un’invasione cinese? Forse, se la Florida venisse attaccata, si renderebbero conto della realtà dei crescenti pericoli nel mondo.

No, la Florida non sta per essere attaccata da Putin, Xi o dagli Ayatollah. Questi sono solo spauracchi a cui nessun adulto ben informato dovrebbe credere.

Inutile dire che il più accanito neoconservatore e guerrafondaio repubblicano, il senatore Lindsay Graham, non è né ben informato né ha una mente da adulto. Il suo sfogo incoerente e sanguinario in realtà faceva sembrare dei fini pensatori gli editorialisti del WSJ.

“Ecco cosa vi dirò. Se date a Putin l’Ucraina, non si fermerà”, ha detto Graham durante un’intervista a Fox News Sunday. “Non si tratta di contenere la NATO e se gli date l’Ucraina, Taiwan sarà la prossima perché la Cina sta guardando per vedere cosa facciamo”.

“Voglio sapere cosa faremo laggiù prima che ci uccidano qui. E se si fermano gli aiuti, trasformeremo la guerra in un crimine", ha detto Graham. “Stiamo parlando di persone che ci ucciderebbero tutti se potessero arrivare qui. Quando si intercettano informazioni da uno straniero all’estero che parla dell’America, voglio sapere di cosa sta parlando”.

“L’esercito ucraino, con il nostro aiuto, ha ucciso circa il 50% della potenza di combattimento dei russi”, ha detto Graham. “Questo è l’anno per fare di più. Avranno più armi, ma vogliamo anche che ne abbiano di nuove”.

Né il Partito repubblicano alla Camera è stato da meno rispetto agli slanci bellicosi del senatore Graham. Il deputato Ken Buck ha fatto sapere che se uno dice che la sicurezza interna dell'America non è in alcun modo rafforzata dalla fuorviante guerra per procura di Washington contro la Russia, come la deputata Marjorie Greene, allora si è sicuramente un traditore al soldo dello stesso Putin:

“Bene, la Marjorie ha raggiunto un nuovo fondo”, ha detto Buck della sua ex-collega. “Sta solo dando voce alla propaganda russa e, nel farlo, danneggia la politica estera americana. Si sta comportando in modo del tutto irresponsabile. E quando la storia guarderà indietro a questo periodo, la Russia avrà invaso l’Ucraina; quest'ultima sta combattendo per la sua libertà e noi dovremmo supportare chi combatte per la libertà”.

Naturalmente la follia di $200 miliardi di fondi NATO è già uno spreco; centinaia di migliaia di morti; milioni di persone in fuga dal Paese per evitare il caos della guerra e la crudeltà di essere arruolati come carne da cannone per servire il piacere perverso di guerrieri da poltrona a Washington; e le infrastrutture civili di uno dei Paesi più grandi d'Europa nel caos. Tutto ciò non ha nulla a che fare con “chi combatte per la libertà”.

Il fatto innegabile è che in Ucraina non c’è nulla in gioco per cui valga la pena lottare che assomigli neanche lontanamente alla virtù democratica. È stato un pozzo nero di enorme corruzione sin dalla caduta della Cortina di ferro nel 1991 e di recente ha persino necessitato di una visita da parte del capo della CIA affinché dicesse a Zelensky e ai suoi compagni ladri di “smetterla” sul fronte della corruzione.

Come ha affermato il venerabile scrittore William Astore, il vero scopo della puntata ucraina nel giocco della Guerra Infinita è l’arricchimento dei mercanti di morte che hanno preso le leve del potere a Washington:

Naturalmente questo è l’ennesimo trionfo per il MICIMATT: il complesso militare-industriale-congressuale-intelligence- media-accademico-think tank. Il suo potere e la sua avidità sono quasi irresistibili. Aggiungetelo all’AIPAC, alla minaccia dell’inflazione e all’allarmismo e avremo una forza inarrestabile... almeno finché l’impero americano non crollerà definitivamente sotto il peso della sua stessa follia.

Eppure tutta l’insensata bellicosità degli interventisti a Washington non è semplicemente un’assurdità ridicola da un punto di vista empirico. L’attuale consenso neocon/interventista a Washington ripudia palesemente il saggio consiglio di George Washington e Thomas Jefferson di oltre 220 anni fa. Insieme articolarono una teoria della politica estera che non era affatto “isolazionista”, ma realistica e basata sull’evidenza.

Cioè, i Padri fondatori ritenevano che la politica estera dovesse basarsi sui fatti e sulle circostanze per l'interesse nazionale in un dato momento, e che quando i fatti cambiano e le alleanze diventano obsolete, dovrebbero essere abbandonate.

Dal discorso di commiato di George Washington: “La grande regola di condotta per noi, nei confronti delle nazioni straniere, è estendere le nostre relazioni commerciali, per avere con loro il minor legame politico possibile. L’Europa ha una serie di interessi primari che per noi non ha alcun valore, o ne ha uno molto remoto. Essa deve quindi essere coinvolta in frequenti controversie le cui cause sono essenzialmente estranee alle nostre preoccupazioni. Quindi non è saggio da parte nostra implicarci, con legami artificiali, nelle vicissitudini ordinarie della sua linea di politica, o nelle combinazioni e collisioni ordinarie delle sue amicizie o inimicizie [...] la nostra vera linea di politica dev'essere quella di evitare alleanze permanenti con qualsiasi parte del mondo estero [...]”.

Come ulteriormente sottolineato da Jefferson nel suo discorso inaugurale del 1801, questa dottrina realista considerava le alleanze militari estere come accordi di convenienza e dovevano essere liberamente abbandonate o invertite come indicato dalle mutevoli esigenze dell’interesse nazionale. Citando il discorso di commiato di Washington come sua ispirazione, Jefferson descrisse tale dottrina come: “Pace, commercio e amicizia onesta con tutte le nazioni, senza alleanze con nessuna di esse”.

Questa famosa frase è proprio la pietra angolare della linea di politica che si adatta alla realtà odierna. La sicurezza interna dell’America non richiede alleanze o i mezzi per saccheggiare militarmente in tutto il mondo, perché non ci sono potenze militari, industriali e tecnologiche che possano minacciare la sua sicurezza.

Di conseguenza istituzioni come la NATO potrebbero aver servito l’interesse nazionale 70 anni fa rispetto alla Russia stalinista e alle sue capacità e intenzioni militari nei confronti dei suoi ex-alleati in tempo di guerra in Occidente. Ma anche qui gli archivi desecretati da entrambi i lati della Guerra fredda gettano notevoli dubbi sul fatto che Stalin e il comunismo mondiale fossero effettivamente in marcia o avessero l’intenzione o la capacità militare di schiavizzare l’Europa occidentale, per non parlare della patria americana.

Infatti l'ala pacifica e accomodante di Henry Wallace potrebbe essere stata più vicina alla verità delle cricche di Henry Stimson, James Forrestal, Dean Acheson e degli abominevoli fratelli Dulles, i fautori delle linee di politica della Guerra fredda durante quell'epoca.

Ma la questione fu risolta una volta per tutte nel 1991, quando l’Unione Sovietica scomparve nella pattumiera della storia, e non a causa della NATO o addirittura della minaccia di Reagan. La vera ragione è che il comunismo non funziona: né per le persone che sfrutta e opprime, né per le élite al potere e i compagni con potere statale che potrebbero avere manie di grandezza sulla sostenibilità del proprio governo, per non parlare di estendendolo ai popoli oltre i loro confini.

Anche se la vera lezione del crollo del comunismo sovietico ha attraversato le pagine della storia dopo il 1991, il radicato apparato militare-industriale non era disposto a rinunciare al proprio potere, ai propri bilanci e ai propri vantaggi, proprio come Eisenhower aveva avvertito nel 1961. Di fatto la NATO si è trasformata in qualcosa di molto più odioso di un'alleanza che aveva compiuto la sua missione ed era destinata al pensionamento anticipato secondo la dottrina Washington-Jefferson.

Il residuo russo dell’Unione Sovietica ha oggi un PIL di soli $2.200 miliardi rispetto ai $28.000 miliardi di PIL degli Stati Uniti e ai $46.000 miliardi di tutti i 32 Paesi della NATO messi insieme. E la Russia ha un budget militare pari ad appena il 6% dei $1.250 miliardi di spese complessive per la difesa della NATO e una sola portaerei.

Inoltre quest’ultima è una reliquia del XX secolo che è stata riparata in un bacino di carenaggio sin dal 2017 e non è dotata né di un’armata di navi di scorta e aerei da guerra né di un equipaggio. L’esercito russo, quindi, non ha modo di sbarcare sulle coste del New Jersey e nemmeno di entrare attraverso la Porta di Brandeburgo a Berlino. Né Putin è così stupido da invadere la Polonia, la quale non offre altro che secoli di animosità verso tutto ciò che è russo.

D’altra parte se la Polonia credesse davvero a tutta la retorica anti-Putin lanciata dal suo governo di destra, nel 2024 spenderebbe per la difesa molto di più di $30 miliardi e il 3,1% del PIL per la difesa; né si offrirebbe di ospitare le armi nucleari della NATO accanto all’Orso russo, come ha fatto il suo presidente di recente.

“Se i nostri alleati decidono di schierare armi nucleari sul nostro territorio come parte della condivisione nucleare, e per rafforzare il fianco orientale della NATO, siamo pronti a farlo”, ha detto il presidente polacco Andrzej Duda in un'intervista pubblicata oggi dal quotidiano Fakt.

In verità l’offerta di Duda è solo un altro caso di linea di politica di uno stato cliente impazzito. Liberata la scena dall'intricata alleanza di Washington con le reliquie della NATO, gli elettori polacchi si metterebbero alla ricerca di un nuovo governo e lo farebbero spedendo i propri leader a Mosca per cercare un accordo reciproco nelle relazioni commerciali.

Il fatto è che 33 anni dopo il crollo dell’Unione Sovietica, la NATO non è semplicemente un’inutile reliquia obsoleta, si è trasformata nella più grande organizzazione di marketing e vendita di armamenti nella storia dell’umanità. L'unico vantaggio derivante dal tradire la promessa di Bush padre a Gorbaciov, secondo cui la NATO non si sarebbe espansa di un solo centimetro verso est, è andato agli appaltatori della difesa, in particolare i mercanti di guerra con sede negli Stati Uniti.

Quando l’alleanza NATO si è estesa da 16 nazioni agli attuali 32 Paesi, ognuno dei nuovi membri ha dovuto conformare i propri sistemi d’arma e munizioni agli standard NATO. Non sorprende se Lockheed, Boeing, Northrup Grumman, Raytheon, General Dynamics e United Technologies abbiano prosperato enormemente, anche se di fatto vagavano per le sale del Congresso diffondendo le stesse bugie del pesso sopra del Wall Street Journal e la presunta essenzialità di obsolete alleanze globali.

Inoltre il comunismo cinese, anche nella veste sottilmente velata di “capitalismo rosso”, non è affatto più praticabile o sostenibile della versione sovietica.

In fin dei conti se non ci sono mercati liberi, proprietà e diritti personali di espressione e di riunione tutelati costituzionalmente e onesti tribunali fallimentari per smaltire le scommesse economiche fallite, non si ha un’economia sostenibile o una prosperità in costante aumento. Punto.

Al contrario, la Cina è un vasto castello di carte economico e di malignità stataliste sostenuto da $50.000 miliardi di debito impagabile contratto in appena due decenni.

Di conseguenza dipende totalmente dai guadagni in valuta forte provenienti da $3.500 miliardi di esportazioni annuali, principalmente verso l’Occidente, per evitare che il suo eccesso di infrastrutture e investimenti immobiliari rovesci l’intero castello di carte. In caso di guerra questa ancora di salvezza verrebbe tagliata, facendo crollare altresì l'intera economia cinese.

Quindi non invaderà nessuno, probabilmente nemmeno Taiwan. Il presidente Xi e il suo gruppo di governanti possono amare citare Mao e colorarsi di rosso ideologicamente, ma sanno anche che ciò che si frappone tra loro e una rivolta degli 1,5 miliardi di abitanti oppressi della Cina è un livello costante e ragionevolmente crescente di prosperità interna.

Ciò esclude un’armata cinese di navi dirette verso la costa della California. Infatti anche la Marina che hanno oggi è composta da due portaerei dell’era sovietica e da una nuova capacità navale molto meno formidabile e letale rispetto alle attuali portaerei di classe Gerald Ford di Washington. E le altre 400 navi della Marina sono costituite in gran parte da pattugliatori costieri che probabilmente non riuscirebbero a raggiungere le coste della California tutte intere.

In termini di potenza di fuoco letale, la Marina statunitense dispone di 4,6 milioni di tonnellate di dislocamento, con una media di 15.000 tonnellate per nave. Al contrario la Marina cinese ha solo 2 milioni di tonnellate di dislocamento, con una media di sole 5.000 tonnellate per imbarcazione. La Marina cinese è totalmente visibile, valutabile e tracciabile, e non ha nemmeno lontanamente le dimensioni e la letalità che renderebbero remotamente plausibile un’invasione dell’America.

Infine la principale capacità militare necessaria per la sicurezza nazionale nel mondo attuale è la triade di deterrenza strategica americana che comprende 3.800 testate nucleari. In qualsiasi momento possono essere lanciate:

• lungo i fondali oceanici tra 16 sottomarini della classe Ohio, ciascuno dotato di 80 testate puntabili in modo indipendente;

• dallo spazio aereo da una flotta di 66 bombardieri pesanti B-2 e B-52;

• da silos sotterranei rinforzati e contenenti più di 1.000 testate ICBM.

Questa impressionante forza di ritorsione non può essere rilevata o neutralizzata al 100% da un potenziale ricattatore nucleare.

Si dà il caso che suddetta triade costi circa $65 miliardi all’anno secondo una recente analisi del CBO e la protezione completa delle coste degli Stati Uniti e dello spazio aereo, grazie anche ai grandi fossati oceanici, potrebbe portare la cifra totale della difesa nazionale a $400 miliardi all’anno... al massimo.

Gli altri $500 miliardi di oggi rappresentano le conquiste di bilancio del complesso militare-industriale che si guadagnano da vivere venendo pagati dal Dipartimento della difesa, dal Dipartimento di Stato, dall’AID, dal NED, ecc. e dalla produzione di minacce spropositate e da storie spaventose su spauracchi stranieri.

Di conseguenza esiste una sola cura: una forza potente proveniente dall’esterno della Beltway deve frantumare l’Unipartito in mille pezzi.

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

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The ideal of individual liberty is perennially under attack not only from socialists, as one might logically expect, but also from conservatives who regard individualism as a form of selfishness. The ordinary meaning of selfishness is “caring only about what you want or need without any thought for the needs or wishes of other people,” and many conservatives see this as a major contributing factor in social decline. The conservative British journalist Nick Timothy attributes many social ills to selfishness, arguing that “our society has become more about ‘me’ than ‘we’,” leading to higher rates of crime, antisocial behavior, and a ballooning welfare state as selfish people try to take as much as possible from the public purse while contributing little or nothing to it.

This school of conservative thought regards “excessive individualism” or “hyperindividualism” as a cause of social decay. Its proponents fear that the me-me-me society is partly to blame for the decline of Western civilization and therefore argue that defending individual liberty will only fuel further societal breakdown. As the family continues to be undermined by public policy, books like #MeFirst! A Manifesto for Female Selfishness, which promote “self-worship” and advise women not to have children, are seen as the logical result of individualism. Individualism is often referred to in this context as “rampant individualism” or “atomistic individualism,” which is associated with unhappy outcomes such as increasing loneliness and depression.

Attributing social dysfunction to individualism explains much of the hostility with which many conservatives regard Ayn Rand’s attempt to extol the virtues of what she called selfishness. A review of Nick Timothy’s Rebuilding One Nation offers an example: “Eighties libertarianism has been left sulking on the margins of conservative policymaking for important reasons, and Timothy is ruthless in pointing out its deficiencies: its reputation for selfish individualism (reading Ayn Rand, Timothy tells us, left him ‘cold’) . . . Timothy ventures that individualism has shallow historical roots.”

Being thus opposed to individualism, these conservatives promote communitarian values or various forms of social democracy. They seek to inculcate in citizens a sense of social responsibility by arguing that society matters more than the individual. This form of conservatism ultimately subordinates the individual to the state. This is clear from Timothy’s suggestion that “we are becoming a selfish society. It is the government’s job to tackle that,” which gives a primary role to government interventions designed to counter selfishness. Timothy suggests that “the family should be put at the heart of both welfare and tax policy,” “tax evasion should be countered, and tax havens closed down,” and “workplace rights and consumer protections [should be] enforced.” He argues that “the call of community is part of the conservative philosophy of paradoxes.”

There’s No Such Thing as Society

Margaret Thatcher is often wrongly depicted by communitarian conservatives, including the so-called libertarian conservative prime minister Boris Johnson when he locked down the United Kingdom in 2020, as a “market fundamentalist” who believed that there’s no such thing as society. As Victoria Hewson observes, “Mrs. Thatcher was not arguing that society does not exist,” a point often overlooked even by conservatives:

One might expect the quote to be taken out of context and used as a political weapon by opponents of the Conservative Party. But it is surprising that it has been mischaracterized by our Prime Minister [Boris Johnson], who would be well versed on the statement in full. “There is no such thing as society,” Mrs. Thatcher said. “There is [a] living tapestry of men and women and people and the beauty of that tapestry and the quality of our lives will depend upon how much each of us is prepared to take responsibility for ourselves and each of us prepared to turn round and help by our own efforts those who are unfortunate.”

In his book In Defense of Freedom: A Conservative Credo, Frank S. Meyer acknowledges that many such conservatives, whom he refers to as “New Conservatives,” appeal to communitarian values because they see individualism as a threat to social cohesion, but he insists that it is only through defending individual liberty that free societies can prosper. He argues:

It is true, of course, that there would be no political or social institutions, nor any meaning to political inquiry, if men lived as single isolated individuals. To insist, as I do, that the individual is the criterion by which institutions and political theories should be judged is not to deny the immediate and obvious meaning of the phrase, “man is a social animal,” that is, that each man has a multifarious set of relationships with other men.

The error made by New Conservatives, as Meyer explains it, lies in hypostatizing the “multifarious set of relationships” between individuals into an entity, society, which itself becomes the subject of rights and obligations owed by individuals to society or owed to the state as the embodiment of society. Meyer criticizes this form of conservativism for overlooking the importance of individual liberty. He describes the New Conservatives as collectivists, explaining that “their position is characterized by an organic view of society; by a subordination of the individual person to society.”

The New Conservatives forget that society only has meaning as a basis for interaction between individuals, and it is through these individual interactions that free societies flourish. As Ludwig von Mises writes: “The concept of freedom always refers to social relations between men. . . . Society is essentially the mutual exchange of services.” Mises depicts individualism as the idea of individual liberty, meaning that the individual is free from state coercion:

The distinctive principle of Western social philosophy is individualism. It aims at the creation of a sphere in which the individual is free to think, to choose, and to act without being restrained by the interference of the social apparatus of coercion and oppression, the State. All the spiritual and material achievements of Western civilization were the result of the operation of this idea of liberty.

Similarly, Friedrich von Hayek observed in “Individualism: True and False” that there is a right and wrong way to understand the meaning of “individualism” and that because rights vest in individuals, the defense of human liberty is always a defense of individual liberty and individual rights. It is important to defend individualism, correctly understood, because without a concept of individualism, it is all but impossible to express the importance of individual liberty.

Meyer is right to warn conservatives that if the individual is subordinated to society, the individual becomes “a secondary being, whose dignity and rights become dependent upon the gift and grace of society or the state.” Attempting to subordinate individual rights to defend society ends up promoting statism, which in turn is a threat to liberty itself. As Meyer argues, “The proper end of political thought and action is the establishment and preservation of freedom.” Collectivism and statism do not preserve freedom but on the contrary undermine it. Timothy thinks that undermining freedom would somehow paradoxically lead to more freedom, as he argues that “by accepting constraints on our freedom, we end up freer and happier.” Here, Timothy falls into the error identified by Meyer, namely that collectivist conservatives fail to recognize that freedom cannot be attained through constraint and state coercion:

They would not or could not see the correlative to their fundamental philosophical position: acceptance of the moral authority derived from transcendent criteria of truth and good must be voluntary if it is to have meaning; if it is coerced by human force, it is meaningless. They were willing, if only the right standards were upheld, to accept an authoritarian structure of state and society. They were, at best, indifferent to freedom in the body politic at the worst, its enemies.

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

The post Defending Individual Liberty appeared first on LewRockwell.

Last January, humanity’s elite gathered again in Davos, Switzerland, to plan out the rest of our lives. World Economic Forum (WEF) honchos are morally superior because they are devoted to destroying your freedom to save the Earth, or at least to safeguard plant habitat.

Sixty heads of government from around the world attended, as did endless Lear Jet–loads of multilateral officials. Ursula von der Leyen, president of the European Commission, out-blathered President Biden: “The world is not at a single inflection point; it is at multi-inflection points.” (Biden drags “inflection points” into almost every speech.)

UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres told the WEF crowd that  “deep reforms to global governance” were needed. And who better to deepen governance than the United Nations, the supreme tyrants’ club in the solar system?

Kristalina Georgieva, managing director of the International Monetary Fund, declared, “We have a responsibility to be stewards of our beautiful, small planet’s future. There is something that leaders need to embrace, and it is the responsibility to act, even if it’s not popular.” This spiel perfectly captured the prevailing disdain for democracy — or at least of any populace that fails to vote themselves into ever-greater subjection to their self-proclaimed-expert saviors. WEF Founder Klaus Schwab whooped up the Davos attendees as “trustees of the future.”

No wonder that Australian senator Alex Antic warned in the Australian Parliament: “The WEF is steeped in authoritarianism and Marxist ideology. It’s an ideology which is creeping into governments across the world.”

A world of censorship

The WEF had two big goals this year: “restore trust” and “crush dissent.” Okay, that last one is a paraphrase. Instead, the WEF is proclaiming that the greatest peril humanity now faces is “misinformation and disinformation.” And it knows this because its own truths are self-evident.

The WEF officials have complained bitterly that it is “misinformation” to assert that they are power-crazed maniacs. But consider its June 2020 call for a Great Reset for humanity:

To achieve a better outcome, the world must act jointly and swiftly to revamp all aspects of our societies and economies, from education to social contracts and working conditions. Every country, from the United States to China, must participate, and every industry, from oil and gas to tech, must be transformed. In short, we need a “Great Reset” of capitalism.

“Misinformation” seems to include any facts which obstruct WEF cronies from ruling the earth. The WEF’s latest Global Risks Report warns, “Some governments and platforms … may fail to act to effectively curb falsified information and harmful content, making the definition of ‘truth’ increasingly contentious across societies.” In other words, governments must suppress “falsified” information to save truth. The WEF presumes governments are founts of truth — regardless of “politician” being a term of derision going back thousands of years. Or maybe the WEF considers “truth” the same type of luxury nowadays as eating meat.

The destruction of private property

We are barely two thousand days away from the halcyon time — the year 2030 — when the WEF has promised, “you will own nothing and be happy.” (Davos attendees are exempt from that lofty edict.) Recent political reforms in many nations have furthered the first promise, ravaging private-property rights and subverting individual independence. Australian senator Malcolm Roberts warned:

The plan of the Great Reset is that you will die with nothing. Klaus Schwab’s ‘life by subscription’ is really serfdom. It’s slavery. Billionaire, globalist corporations will own everything — homes, factories, farms, cars, furniture — and everyday citizens will rent what they need, if their social credit score allows.

The world’s kingpins will need to tighten all the mental thumbscrews for propertyless serfs to “be happy.” Public euphoria could be in especially short supply considering other policies championed at the WEF.

Mass surveillance 

“Individual carbon footprint trackers” are a popular panacea at Davos, and the WEF has proposed the “setting of acceptable limits for personal emissions.” How many burps will it take to get sent to reeducation camp?

Footprint trackers will be useless without imposing universal “digital identification,” another WEF pet project. How can government “serve” people unless it can find and accost them at any moment, day or night? Vaccine passports are also a cause célèbres for this crowd. Count on the master wizards to exert far more effort to compel injections than to ensure vaccines actually provide the protection they promise.

Environmental tyranny 

One of the wackiest shows at Davos was performed by British environmental activist Jojo Mehta, the chief of “Stop Ecocide Now.” She hectored Davos attendees to recognize that people making money from farming or fishing could be as guilty as people committing “mass murder and genocide.” But if the elites succeed in stopping farmers from farming and fishermen from fishing, future Swiss shindigs may run short of caviar.

“Climate change” is probably the WEF’s best short-term hope to put a halo over tyranny. This is a topic which requires boundless censorship in order to keep peasants in their place. Cartoonists have long ridiculed all the private jets that fly in for the WEF conference, but such details need to be suppressed on “world security grounds” or some such crap. The same is true for the appalling failure of green energy schemes such as windmills to provide energy at reasonable prices. But those pratfalls did not deter Jane Goodall, an officially designated United Nations Messenger of Peace: “We know exactly what we ought to be doing to slow down and eventually reverse climate change and loss of biodiversity … if only various countries lived up to promises they made about reducing emissions.”

Chrystia Freeland, Canada’s deputy prime minister and a member of the WEF Board of Trustees, recently prattled as if glaciers should have veto power over elections: “Our shrinking glaciers, and our warming oceans, are asking us wordlessly but emphatically, if democratic societies can rise to the existential challenge of climate change.” (A Canadian court recently condemned the Trudeau-Freeland government for tyrannizing truck drivers and other protestors against their COVID policies.)

Davos provided a cosseting atmosphere that encouraged some supposedly objective observers to reveal their fervent dogmas. New York Times climate correspondent David Gelles gave a speech in which he said:

implored a room full of CEOs, diplomats and NGO leaders to step up their urgency and begin considering truly radical political and economic interventions…. The hour is late, and it’s incumbent on those with the capital and the clout to start deploying the whole of their resources toward the climate crisis.

To boost confidence in the all-electric future, government censors will need to be extra vigilant during harsh winter weather so that people are not warned that their Tesla becomes a useless block of metal during cold snaps.

But the point of the “climate change” hysteria is not to protect either the environment or humanity. It is to provide a pretext for perpetual, boundless subjugation by the elites. According to Christine Anderson, a member of the European Parliament from Germany, “The green agenda is just part of [the overall globalist agenda], which is to erect a totalitarian regime, in which people are under complete control.” If Davos folks were meeting in the woods and subsisting on nuts and berries, they would have more credibility to lecture everyone else on their diets.

Monetary control 

The WEF is also gung-ho on Central Bank Digital Currencies (CBDC). The U.S. dollar has lost 97 percent of its value since the Federal Reserve was created in 1913, but politicians deserve more arbitrary power over the currency, right? Never forget: “cash is printed freedom.” But CBDCs have powerful appeal to would-be financial tyrants. Saule Omarova, Biden’s nominee for Comptroller of the Currency, proposed in 2021 to give government total control over every person’s finances: “There will be no more private bank accounts, and all of the deposit accounts will be held directly at the Fed.” And you will be happy or you will be relocated to Fargo.

A 2023 WEF analysis declared, “CBDCs offer potential benefits for financial inclusion, but…. Governments and central banks need to be transparent and honest about the potential advantages and risks of digital currencies in order to build public trust in CBDCs.” To expect central banks to be honest and transparent is worse than believing in the tooth fairy. This is not how political machinations to depreciate a currency happen.

The WEF states that “CBDCs would allow for the creation of digital records and traces, and this could make it easier to stop money laundering and flows of money used to finance terrorism.” Even better — CBDCs could enable government officials to prohibit citizens from spending anything on unapproved items — or maybe to financially destroy anyone who complained about central banks. As Mark Seilor observed, “CBDCs are a totalitarian’s wet dream, and would enable governments to centrally enforce tyrannical policies on an industrial scale — at the flick of a switch — without the need for human enforcement agents.”

The swagger of the Davos crowd is beyond parody. WEF president Borge Brende promised: “We will make sure that we bring together the right people … to see how we can solve this very challenging world.” But how can they have the right people when neither you nor I were invited?

Paeans to democracy

The WEF offers platitudes for democracy while championing iron-fisted paternalist policies. This is why pervasive censorship is vital to carry out WEF-favored schemes to force common people to stop bothering the environment. Government policies will be propelled by alarmist pronouncements which private citizens could debunk.

With WEF-sanctioned censorship, self-government could be replaced by “one person, one vote, one time.” Whoever wins a national election will take control of the censorship regime and exploit it to insulate and perpetuate their power. We already saw that in this nation. Censorship helped Biden win the 2020 election, and his administration proceeded to carry out potentially “the most massive attack against free speech in United States history,” according to Federal Judge Terry Doughty. (The Supreme Court will settle that censorship controversy.)

The specter of libertarianism

But there is a specter haunting the Davos crowd. WEF Chairman  Klaus Schwab recently practically echoed Marx’s Communist Manifesto, warning of a new specter haunting the world.  Schwab derided  “an anti-System which is called Libertarianism, which means to tear down everything which creates some kind of influence of government into private lives.” But it is not libertarians’ fault that Schwab’s standard for “some kind of influence of government” is eerily similar to medieval serfdom. Schwab also warned of the rising danger of individuals become “ego centric.” And we all know that the worst form of selfishness is refusal to submit to your superiors.

The most effective rebuttal at Davos of the WEF sirens of subjugation came from the newly elected president of Argentina. Javier Milei exhorted the friends of freedom around the globe: “Do not be intimidated either by the political class or the parasites who live off of the State. The State is the problem itself.” Milei’s scoff at people “motivated by the wish to belong to a privileged caste” was perhaps the ultimate face slap for the self-proclaimed saviors in Switzerland.

Boneheaded delusions

So many of the follies championed at Davos arise from the boneheaded delusion that political power is irredeemably benevolent. We should not trust elitists who portray “truth” as the same type of despicable luxury as eating meat or owning your own automobile. And we should not trust those who seek to convert officialdom into a priesthood with the right to blindfold people, to muzzle them, and to slash their living standards.

Luckily, people still have freedom to scoff on social media (thanks in large part to Elon Musk). Maybe the next Davos confab will convince critics to cease referring to the “World Enslavement Forum.” It would help if WEF ceased fearing “runaway skepticism” with the same dread that old southern plantation owners viewed runaway slaves.

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

The post The World Economic Forum Is Still Conspiring Against Your Freedom appeared first on LewRockwell.

Executive summary

An Epoch Times story released today revealed that the CDC deliberately lied to the public about the safety of the COVID vaccines. When asked about the deaths, the CDC lied to the public and falsely claimed that they had no evidence that the COVID vaccines have killed anyone.

The CDC lied. People died.

The evidence is crystal clear that the COVID vaccines are causing massive damage to people’s hearts and brains.

In this article, I’ll show you the evidence for afib and aortic aneurysms which are two important side effects that are obviously caused by the COVID vaccine and, just like death, are being ignored by the CDC.

The key part of the story

“U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) officials found evidence that the Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna COVID-19 vaccines caused multiple deaths before claiming that there was no evidence linking the vaccines to any deaths, The Epoch Times has learned.

CDC employees worked to track down information on reported post-vaccination deaths and learned that myocarditis—or heart inflammation, a confirmed side effect of the vaccines—was listed on death certificates and in autopsies for some of the deaths, according to an internal file obtained by The Epoch Times.

…

Despite the findings, most of which were made by the end of 2021, the CDC claimed that it had seen no signs linking the Moderna and Pfizer messenger RNA (mRNA) vaccines to any deaths reported to the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS).”

Wow. “Seen no signs.”

Are they blind?

In other words… if they don’t agree with the evidence, they simply claim it does not exist

The CDC had evidence the vaccines were killing people but they convinced themselves that these were just coincidences and not related to the vaccine.

So, in the CDC’s view, when young healthy people simply drop dead unexpectedly in their sleep within 24 hours after getting the COVID shot, that would not be considered to be any evidence that the vaccine might have killed them.

It’s fair to say that their statements about not having any evidence were simply false and misleading.

They should have said “We have evidence that hundreds of people have died from the vaccine, but we don’t believe any of it” which would at least be more accurate.

I spoke to the Epoch Times reporter who wrote the story. He was never able to speak with anyone at the CDC live. It was all via email. These people are all afraid of a live interview.

The death of the son of a prominent physician

VAERS recently started an investigation into this death which was first reported to VAERS 3 years ago (and re-reported because the original never appeared in the system).

His father is a very prominent and capable physician at one of the top medical schools in the country. His father is 100% certain the COVID vaccine killed his son, but he’s not speaking out publicly about it.

I was on the phone with a VAERS investigator who was investigating this “high priority” report that was filed 3 years ago.

She admitted they are understaffed but “catching up.”

OK, so they’re basically 3 years behind in investigating the highest priority deaths to determine whether they were caused by a vaccine or not.

This particular death was a perfectly healthy 52-year man with no comorbidities who died in his sleep just 5 days after his first dose.

He got a first dose of Pfizer, felt horrible, had a heart attack on the day of the shot and was sicker than a dog after that. He died 5 days later from an aortic aneurysm.

From the VAERS report:

“The HCP explained that 3 months after his father got injured from the vaccine, the son of doctor 2, who was young and healthy, decided to get the vaccine despite his dad having cardiac issues and then he had a heart attack that day and died five days later.”

His father had afib right after his first shot. He had an ablation to fix the afib. He was urged to get a second shot and developed afib immediately after the second shot.

Do you see a pattern here? Shot—> afib, Shot —> afib.

The CDC doesn’t see a connection. They think this is just a coincidence.

Bottom line: This death was caused by the COVID vaccine, but the father and mother won’t speak publicly about it.

Read the Whole Article

The post The CDC Lied; People Died appeared first on LewRockwell.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has responded to the International Criminal Court’s rumored plans to indict Israeli officials for war crimes by claiming that for the ICC to do so would be an “antisemitic hate crime”.

Yes, you read that correctly.

“If this does happen, it will be an indelible stain on humanity. It would be an unprecedented antisemitic hate crime that would add fuel to the antisemitic incitement that is already raging in the world,” said Netanyahu this past Tuesday.

So, to be absolutely clear, Israel’s top government official has announced that charges against himself and other Israeli leaders for obvious war crimes like intentionally bombing and starving civilians would be both “antisemitic” and a “hate crime”.

So, to make things even clearer, when a supporter of the state of Israel claims to be sincerely super duper worried about “antisemitism”, this is the kind of thing they are talking about. This is what the label “antisemitism” has come to mean. It means literally any opposition to, criticism of, or consequences for a nuclear-armed genocidal apartheid ethnostate which is backed by the most powerful empire that has ever existed.

I need you to understand that when an Israel supporter claims to be very sincerely concerned about “antisemitism”, this is the “antisemitism” they’re talking about: pic.twitter.com/kx7TlfHXnq

— Caitlin Johnstone (@caitoz) May 2, 2024

Keeping that in mind, let’s turn now to the bill that just passed in the US House of Representatives which can be used to suppress entirely legitimate political speech critical of Israel as “antisemitic”.

Antiwar’s Dave DeCamp reports:

“The House on Wednesday overwhelmingly passed a bill that conflates criticism of the modern state of Israel with antisemitism and will mandate that definition be used by the Department of Education when enforcing federal anti-discrimination laws.

“The bill could be used to crack down on pro-Palestine protesters at college campuses across the country, who have been falsely labeled ‘antisemitic’ despite Jewish students participating in the protests.

“The legislation adopts the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s (IHRA) definition of antisemitism, which lists ‘drawing comparisons of contemporary Israeli policy to that of the Nazis’ as an example of antisemitism.

“The IHRA also defines antisemitism as applying ‘double standards’ to Israel by ‘requiring of it a behavior not expected or demanded of any other democratic nation’ and ‘denying the Jewish people their right to self-determination’ by ‘claiming that the existence of a State of Israel is a racist endeavor.’”

House Passes Bill That Conflates Criticism of Israel With Antisemitism
The legislation adopts a definition of antisemitism that could be used by the Dept of Education to crackdown on college protests
by Dave DeCamp@DecampDave #Gaza #Israel #censorship https://t.co/glebgTsFsY pic.twitter.com/ulsf3PfQOK

— Antiwar.com (@Antiwarcom) May 1, 2024

This comes as House Democrat Richie Torres teams up with Republican Mike Lawler to advance a bill which would create “antisemitism monitors” on university campuses which receive federal funding, which means the US government is actively working to police political speech in response to criticisms of US government policies. Perfectly normal thing to happen in a healthy liberal democracy.

And again, this is happening within a political climate in which the Israeli government publicly announces that “antisemitism” includes charging Israeli war criminals for extensively documented war crimes.

The thing about conflating support for Israel with Judaism and criticism of Israel with anti-semitism is that it necessarily asserts that there’s a religion which holds as an article of faith that your tax dollars must be used to murder foreigners in the middle east, and that any objection to this on your part therefore amounts to religious persecution. Anyone who makes this conflation is saying, “Judaism is a religion which believes your tax dollars need to go toward support for the military adventurism of the state of Israel, and if you don’t like it then you’re basically a Nazi.”

Bipartisan Bill Would Create ‘Antisemitism Monitors’ at College Campuses
Pro-Palestine protests have been falsely labeled as ‘antisemitic’ even though many Jewish students are involved
by Dave DeCamp@DecampDave #Gaza #campusProtests #FreedomOfSpeech https://t.co/AzO355K7Md pic.twitter.com/PlqBQAb8Cg

— Antiwar.com (@Antiwarcom) April 29, 2024

Which is as self-evidently ridiculous as any position could possibly be, from any angle you could possibly look at it. Obviously the religion of Judaism itself does not say that western governments should be backing nonstop mass military slaughter in the Palestinian Territories and in Israel’s neighboring countries, which is why many Jews do not hold the position that this should be happening. And even if that was a fundamental tenet of the Jewish faith, a religion which asserts that a foreign country has a right to immensely consequential support from your country’s government would need to be criticized aggressively and relentlessly.

You don’t get to claim that criticism of any part a powerful country’s foreign policy is not allowed because such criticism is against your religion or religiously persecutes you. That’s not a thing.

The “antisemitism” moral panic has officially jumped the shark. It has long been absurd, but now it’s a parody of itself. Things are only going to get dumber and more insulting to your intelligence from here.

___________________

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. Go here to find video versions of my articles. Go here to buy paperback editions of my writings from month to month. 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. The best way to make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list on Substack, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. All works co-authored with my husband Tim Foley.

The post The ‘Antisemitism’ Moral Panic Has Officially Jumped the Shark appeared first on LewRockwell.

Two years ago, David Tait, CEO of the World Gold Council announced an initiative to introduce blockchain technology to ensure that gold bars have been responsibly sourced and to establish a chain of custody, digitising the entire supply chain of gold bar production. There is no doubt that between them, the WGC and LBMA have been bringing considerable pressure to bear on refiners, markets, and miners in Switzerland, Japan, North America, Australia, and South Africa — some of which have signed up to the initiative.

At the launch of this “gold bar integrity programme” Sakhilla Mirza, LBMA’s General Council reckoned that the pilot scheme would take about three months (to mid-2022). Yet it was only this March that aXedras, a Swiss-based software business funded by the WGC was appointed the service provider for the gold bar database. The drawn-out timescale is likely evidence of participants dragging their feet.

This initiative is driven by environmental concerns that the mining and processing of gold bars should be ESG compliant. The pilot project run by aXedras involved 8 mines, 9 refiners, 4 logistic companies, and 10 banks & dealers. Now that the company has been appointed to run the Gold Bar Integrity Database, we will probably hear more about this in the coming months.

Why are the WGC/LBMA doing this?

There is no doubt that the mining industry is coming under political pressure to reduce its carbon footprint and attend to wider environmental concerns. The World Gold Council is a mining industry backed organisation, so it in turn has to demonstrate the industry’s ESG credentials. That it has chosen the blockchain route to identify compliant gold bars seems hard to justify on the basis that it adds nothing to ESG compliance, except perhaps for new gold mined, sourced, and processed by LBMA members. Annual gold output globally is about 3,000 tonnes, which is only 1.5% of above-ground stocks. It only makes sense if existing bars amounting to about 80,000 tonnes are grandfathered in (most of the rest are classified as jewellery), which would be a considerably more difficult project.

Notable by their absence are Asian interests. This is particularly important because according to the LBMA presentation in 2022 announcing this joint initiative, the blockchain project commences with the one-kilo 9999 bars, and not the LBMA’s 400-ouncers. The LBMA’s CEO claimed that these non-deliverable bars (to the London market) represent the bigger risk and gives the greater reward on the project.

When we look at global mine output, that which evades the London market and therefore this initiative could be over half the 3,000 tonne annual total, considering Russia, China, and many other Asian miners, refiners, and buyers are not in the scheme. Indeed, according to Ruth Crowell, LBMA’s CEO, only 41% of global refinery output has signed up to the pilot.

To justify the project, the WGC commissioned an opinion survey, which has been presented at a number of promotional conferences. This is illustrated below, in this case given by Ruth Crowell, the LBMA’s CEO.

The WGC survey is of the retail market, which has limited relevance other perhaps than for the WGC’s public relations. The retail market invests almost entirely in regulated ETFs and coin, very few taking delivery of bars. Furthermore, surveys of this sort offer a preselected list of clipboard options, which are often unrelated to the true reasons for not investing. Followers of this Substack will know that the reason retail investors don’t buy gold is because they don’t actually understand it.

However, there can be little doubt that the WGC intends that all regulated businesses, particularly ETFs, will require newly mined gold to be delivered with a blockchain certificate. Unless a refiner can self-certify bars to put onto a blockchain, which defeats the ESG and supply chain integrity concerns, the amount of gold going onto this blockchain is severely limited. Given the small quantities involved, could this develop a premium for blockchained gold?

It would be a mistake to rule it out. If ETFs are only permitted to buy blockchained gold, just imagine the chaos if (or rather when) Joe Public suddenly decides to buy gold ETFs en masse. A situation is bound to develop whereby ETF trustees and custodians would have to suspend share creation for lack of blockchained bullion. But given that the project doesn’t involve LBMA deliverable bars, at least initially, that will be a problem deferred, even if this project gets beyond its pilot scheme.

It is doubly difficult to see, other than political correctness what this scheme delivers. Gold bars taken into vaults are already tested, and subject to frequent metal audits. The existence of a separate electronic identity is simply superfluous. It is possession of the bar which matters, not an electronic identity, a fact which seems to have been lost on the planners.

Will central banks subscribe to this scheme?

The largest category of recorded holders is central banks, which according to the WGC collectively own 35,976 tonnes. Some nations, such as the US and UK, hold their gold in their treasury ministries which politicises their holdings and makes it difficult to imagine them agreeing to any blockchain identification, even for gold held earmarked for other nations’ holdings. And there is the problem identified by analyst Frank Veneroso twenty years ago: gold out on lease or swapped is not actually in possession.

In 2002, Veneroso put this at between 10,000—14,000 tonnes, the latter figure being half global central bank holdings at that time. He claimed that much of this gold had been sold into the market and turned into jewellery. In addition, the US is known to have indulged in price suppression schemes, which probably explains why gold earmarked for Germany was not immediately available when Germany requested the repatriation of a minor part of her holdings at the New York Fed.

If there is one thing central banks and their governments will agree on, it is that their holdings are secret and must not be identified other than in official statistical releases. Nor, even more importantly, should the hidden reserves held in sovereign wealth funds and elsewhere be identified.

HNW family offices and individuals will not comply

The whole point about owning gold bars is they are a hidden, hoarded stash of real money, held by high net worth individuals and their family offices with a common purpose: to protect their wealth from governments and their fiat currencies. With this in mind, they are not about to divulge anything. Just imagine the response to this form of meddling, which they would certainly view as the means by which government authorities could track their ownership of bars.

Nor would they take delivery of “compliant gold”. It would be a simple matter for bullion dealers in, say, Dubai to detach gold bars from the blockchain, destroying the latter’s integrity. And if the blockchain is taken as evidence of ownership (otherwise, why have it?) then the bar’s identity could possibly be passed on to an unsuspecting buyer in lieu of the bar itself.

Conclusion

It is understandable that in a world where the bureaucrats are increasingly in charge of markets this sort of scheme can arise. To be fair to the WGC and LBMA, for political reasons they probably have little alternative to going down this route. That said, statistical abuse by the WGC in the form of a retail survey to justify this should be recognised for what it is.

The impracticality and unacceptability of it may or may not be reflected in the building of aXedras’s gold bar database. It should be noted that the scheme does not involve the largest gold exchange dealing in 9999 one-kilo bars — the Shanghai Gold Exchange. Nor does it involve the Eurasian exchanges linked to it, such as the Moscow exchange and Dubai.

Reprinted with permission from MacleodFinance Substack.

The post Putting Gold on a Blockchain appeared first on LewRockwell.

If we believe history, which is becoming more and more of a skeptics allusive magic trick, the Minoan society, a highly advanced peaceful society, was wiped out by the Myceneans’ because they didn’t like them.  The Galatians from the Bible disappeared from existence because the Romans – didn’t like them.  The Aztecs disappeared – and no ‘expert historian’ knows why.  The Anasazi disappeared – the civilization on Easter Island gone – Mayans gone –  and despite these civilizations being advanced some reaching into 1400 AD – there is no explanation.  Only guesses.

WHY do historians guess?   How can historians give a detailed account of Pliny The Elders bathroom habits dating from 2,000 years ago – but can’t give any explanation regarding what happened to entire civilizations having gone extinct?   How can we be sure they ever existed?

THE BIG PICTURE:  The CoVid Vax has been determined to be a bioweapon utilized by our own Pharma companies to ‘depopulate’ as in kill.   The World Economic Forum routinely espouses that the solution to the world’s problems is to kill ¾ of humans.  Christians, are calling for the culling of 2 million Palestinians.  Politicians have called for the murder of all MAGAs.  MAGA’s who supported the January 6th prisoners are calling for the culling of university students – teens.  Blacks want to wipe out whites.  Elites want to kill all those who are not of ‘likemindedness’.

And suddenly you realize that humanity pointing the finger at all other humans is a justification. Where are the good guys?   Where are the ones who don’t believe The Solution to our ills is death?

Everywhere you look our global culture is built on death and destruction.  Art no longer exists.  Philosophy is nonexistent.  When I was attending a Bible oriented church there was a small contingent of divorcees and windows and single women who I came to realize needed help – like me.  I sought to organize a ministry utilizing the large group of high school and college talent to become helpers.  For example – a woman in need of lawn mowing or climbing a ladder to fix a smoke alarm – could access help from another Christian capable of the task voluntarily.  My church scrapped my desire, my ministry, because.   Simply because.

Too often, church leaders fall into the egocentricity of power.  In their circle, they see themselves as ‘elite’.  As someone having greater quality understanding than – everyone else.  Typically, they don’t realize their own spiral until the church empties.

Elites claim their eliteness comes from their Money.  Elite:  superior in quality, rank, skill, achievement, education…  The vast majority of ‘elites’ can’t even brush their own teeth.   They mask achievement in fake philanthropy that never achieves the stated purpose.  Poverty is not eradicated. Cancer is not cured.   The Elite have brought nothing of value to planet earth.  Nothing.

People are praising police who use violence against protesters like a crowd at a public hanging.  Only to learn that the agitators are paid nonstudent activist/provocateurs.  As though this has never happened before.  But it did occur for the entire four years of Trump’s presidency.  Yet, they fell for it – again and demanded ALL students be expelled, labeled for life, jailed, forced into welfare.  What happened to humanity?   Ask the Minoans.

Because Putin’s war strategy was not to carpet bomb Ukraine of all civilians, intel and pundits claim Putin has lost the war.   Death and casualties is the measurement of winning a war…  The more civilians, the greater the victory.  Because ‘depopulation’ is the killing field of psychology.

“Poland calls on EU for rule on Ukraine draft dodgers”.  Not enough Ukrainians are dead – and the killer is Zelenskyy via his Handlers.  Of the 4.3 million Ukrainians living abroad, just 860,000 are conscription age men.  That’s all that are left to take care of the 3.5 million women and children.

Poland wants them to be killed in war.  The EU agrees.

Despite the media portraying millennials as ignorant twits living in mommy’s basement, every millennial I know (quite a few) are not only educated via college, but seem to have a better grasp pf the economic ramifications of America and the globe.  They don’t want war.   They want to live their lives and prosper.  They understand who is behind the Curtain running the show and that America is on the verge of collapse.  They are NOT happy with the current government structure.

This population demographic is likely the least racist, least judgmental, and highest educated.  But they are not tolerant – of illegals, campsites, homelessness, and leftist policy agendas.  When the Zionists meet their ‘maker’, millennials will eradicate the corrupt system that enjoys a peasant class/Elite class society in favor of a more modern future.   A RESET where the power is returned to the people.  Listening to them they are not afraid of hard work – living off the grid – and waiting for the time when they can rebuild.

The Israeli War Mentality that runs Western nations is built on an abject hatred of everyone non-Ashkenazi.   Including Sephardic Jews.  The leaders of Israel and the west are aging. The strategies of these ancients are cancerous tumors destroying their own.   According to every protocol – the youth market is mandatory in order to win.  According to the World Economic Forum they have indoctrinated 1400 Young Global Leaders.  Not nearly enough to gain order of The Globe.  Especially a globe under infinite wars.

As the boomers fade, a new culture, a new society, is rising.  Perhaps more in line with the Minoans who simply wanted to trade and prosper as a unified nationalist civilization.

Reprinted with permission from Helena-The Nationalist Voice.

The post Western Humanity Wherein Killing Is the Solution appeared first on LewRockwell.

That this level of incendiary outrage has seeped into the mainstream media tells us that the bill for America’s gluttony of inequality is long overdue.

Two primary trends may be reversing: wage earners–labor–may be finally starting to regain some of the share of Gross Domestic Income (GDI) lost to capital over the past 54 years, and economic class identity that collapsed in favor of individual identity–enabling the siphoning of $149 trillion in GDI from labor to capital since 1970–may be reviving.

The two trends are intertwined: the cultural dominance of identity politics came at the expense of economic class identity, which effectively blinded us as a nation to the multi-decade transfer of wealth from wage earners to owners / managers of capital.

If we are wondering how the bottom 90% have lost ground, we can start with the social-cultural blindness to the collapse of class identity which enabled the dominance of capital politically, economically and socially, as manifested in the rise of globalization and financialization, the tools used to transfer income from labor to capital.

Capital’s increasing share of domestic income was not pre-ordained; it was the result of specific policy decisions, starting with globalization’s downward pressure on domestic wages. The fancy term for forcing American workers to compete with other workers around the world whose cost of living is a fraction of ours is global wage arbitrage: capital shifted jobs to low-wage regions at will to increase profits at the expense of domestic wages.

This is the fundamental advantage capital has over labor: capital is globally mobile, labor is grounded in a particular place. Yes, workers can move around the world, too, but there are restrictions, both legal and in cost / sacrifice, as the effort and expense required to move from one country to another are significant.

Capital doesn’t care about a place or community; that’s up to the residents. If capital shifts overseas to lower costs / increase profits, well folks, make do with what’s left.

Financialization amplified capital’s dominance of the economy, for capital gained tremendous power as credit and leverage expanded capital’s scale and reach at the expense of domestic workers and communities.

It’s equally important to note that the corporate dominance generated by globalization and financialization also gutted small business and the local enterprises that provide the bulk of the jobs and cohesion in communities.

Read the Whole Article

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